Eye witness & Hearsay 2

My Father’s school

My father went to a four anna school. I use the term evocatively; I do not really know how much my grandfather paid for my father’s school education he had a large family and his pay as a Station Master could not have been too much. I remember paying a monthly subscription of four annas for my membership in the Juvenile section of the local public library in 1955 so perhaps four annas per month in 1931 is not too far out.

 The school was founded by a local “Zamindar” a “Bourgeoise” and Merchant Prince who donated land and money to start the school in the 1880’s. Despite politicians who have made a rather comfortable living out of claiming rapacity of the moneyed class the fact was quite opposite. Such benevolence was quite common and India is dotted with such schools by their thousands. The school was naturally enough, named after the benefactor but he, with becoming modesty, added the name of the locality to his own rather long name whose initials itself ran into four letters. This resulted in the General Public shortened the name to just “Bantra School” Bantra being the name of the local Police Thana. In fact, if you referred to the school by its full and formal name the locals would look at you with the same askance as if you had asked for a cup Thea Sinensis instead of a cup of tea.

The school building as I saw it in the1950s was red brick with white trim very sensibly –and- substantially- built with deep Verandahs, pillars- stairways leading left and right from the landing to large classrooms with large windows and beams and rafters holding up the roof. There was a large yard in front of the school with shade trees and brick laid pathways and the whole was enclosed by a fence comprising of iron rods with pointed spear point tops of the kind one sees in British parks. The latter perhaps was to retain those reluctant scholars who would have otherwise made a break for freedom during the tiffin recess. The design of the building was a very good translation of indigenous architectural patterns into brick and mortar. The furniture was also very sturdy which was an act of prescience because during “tiffin” break the young boys would jump from one desktop to another. This was known as “Jomp Mara” i.e. to do the jumps. “Jomp Mara” would probably be banned today as dangerous because the desks had sloping tops. Bruises, yes, but as far as is known none of the young gentlemen broke their necks during these “tiffin time” antics.  My Father’s class friend, Thako Hari Datta , was the champion ”Jomp Master” of his class though I knew him as a family friend, a quiet widower, and after his graduation, a clerk in a small company,  who seemed to live only for his young son, Swapan. He never remarried, always quietly saying “If I was to have a spouse, she would have lived”

Like most such “four Anna” schools my fathers was almost totally locally governed. The teachers were local people, the students were local and the school board was constituted from the local pillars of society. I do not know how much grants the then British Government gave to such schools –it could not have been much because the British were interested only in producing carbon copies of Macaulay’s clerk but in a way, it was a blessing in disguise.  Government interference in education was not on a day-to-day basis and did not attract the vultures that now drain way the proverbial 85% of the relatively massive funds we have spent on education.

Everyone went or had gone to Bantra School. The small-town equivalent of “Duke’s son, cook’s son, sons of belted earls’- The big business men who had the town roads named after their ancestors, Government officials’ sons, the Magistrate’s sons, the sons of local “Loha katas” literally “ïron cutters” by which we meant people who owned small machine shops and managed to earn a very decent living thereby, rich and poor all went to the Bantra School. Not everyone passed out of course- disinterest, poverty, the early death of the father or the sole earning member of the family-one of my childhood friends had that misfortune- or the family business needing an extra hand were all causes for discontinuing. This everyone going to the local school had its amusing spillovers. I once saw a driver-our town was too unsophisticated to have “chauffeurs”- telling his employer, in English, “You shut up” and his employer grinning at his driver’s annoyance; They had both gone to the same school and indeed were class mates, one had done well in business and in life the other not quite so well but the old school ties had not frayed and had held.   

What kind of people did the school turn out. I believe there was one Ambassador designate to The Netherlands but he died before he could take up his posting so I do not know whether you will count him in but there were a number of civil servants including Haridhanda my father’s senior at school who did his BCS (Bengal Civil Service) and was the District Magistrate personified even when I saw him post retirement. There were a number of Lawyers and Doctors including my Father’s class mate Sanyasi who was an Ophthalmologist and also a professor at one of the Medical Colleges and who from time to time checked up my weak eyes for free. The rest were quite run of the mill. Most completed Bantra School with a sense of relief and then would join up in one of the many small businesses, my Town being quite a thriving business place, becoming iron founders or clerks in foundries or running Laundries or electrical machine repair shops or corn Chandlers; getting jobs was not a problem if you were not too fussy about working hard or did not join with a sense of being sucked dry of your blood-that came later, ironically by politicians who had themselves never earned a day’s living with the sweat of their brows .

 Of my Father and his brothers only his elder GouriShankar and my Father himself were very good at studies both passing out with a first division with what were then called “Letter marks” Gouri Shankar in Maths and English and Father bettering him by collecting a “Letter” in Sanskrit as well.  The peculiar phrase “Letter Marks” apparently comes from the time when the Governor General himself would write letters of congratulations to those candidates who had distinguished themselves in the Exams. The practice had long fallen into disuse but the phrase “Letter Marks” continued even into the early “fifties. Certainly, I do not think Governor Jackson or Willingdon ever wrote any congratulatory notes to my father.

My father’s subsequent career after passing the school is interesting in terms of “Learning Teaching Outcomes” as the phrase seem to be the fashion nowadays. He did I.Sc from St. Xavier’s Calcutta – the fees there was fifteen rupees a month- again passing out with a First Division followed by a Bachelor of Commerce in 1935 which was taught only at the University as it was a new subject and indeed there was some confusion in my grandfather’s mind if his son was actually doing a Graduate course!  Again, very boringly by now, my father passed with a First Division. Unfortunately, Grand Father died rather suddenly of a cerebral stroke leaving my father, at the age of twenty-one, as de facto the head of a family of seven. After about two years of doing various jobs supplemented with coaching young students- he was reputedly good in studies -he got a job with an American Oil Company, the Standard Vacuum Oil Company the producer of Mobil and did well thereafter.

I will write about his career experience at someplace else but here I want to point out some aspects which intrigue me. My father went to an inexpensive affordable school where everything, including English, was taught in Bengali. English was taught and taught painstakingly, from class 1, When he went to St. Xavier’s Calcutta, the good Jesuits there taught in English or more accurately English spoken in Belgian and for his B.Com he had to learn French  and finally he worked in an American Company where the spoke of “colour” as Color. Language agility I can grant, father being a good student but what I marvel at are two features; Is language the seed bed of all learning? Should we emphasise the learning of languages very painstakingly? The other was that the schooling and curricula, despite being as competitive as today did not stamp out his curiosity or love of learning. He was steeped in Rabindranath Thakur (Tagore) and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhya not to mention Jibabanda and Jasimuddin and at the same time was familiar with obscure English poets such as Coventry Patmore. I will not say that the school was responsible for all this as my father was a kind man and the works mentioned above would have touched him naturally but those teachers of his, though they would not know of the oppression of peasants in Columbia or Chile or were politically active, did pass on their love and reverence for learning and the enjoyment of it, to him.

My Jethamoshai , i.e. My Father’s elder (step ) brother, Gouri Shankar had an even more interesting story to tell. Seeing his talent for Mathematics his Class Ten teacher asked him to come for extra tuitions in the subject three months before he sat for his Matriculation. So for three months Gouri Shankar would be up at dawn, walk to Shibpur which was about four miles away from his house, have a bathe in the Ganga as his Master had required and then be coached in Mathematics free of charge for two hours. The master’s effort paid off and he passed with letter marks for which a box of Sandesh and a touching of the Master’s feet and expressions of gratitude were all that was expected or given though my Jethamoshai would talk about it with wonder and affection even when he was in his eighties. I now wonder whether this free coaching was all a confirmation or in conformance with our ancient Indian tradition that teaching and learning should not be be commercialized but seen as a sacred labour of love between the giver and the seeker. The bathing in the Ganges before each session was perhaps instinctively a part of the ritual to emphasize the sanctity of learning and my Jethamoshai’s steady compliance-it was the cold season-was also a confirmation of the reverence India has associated with Learning and the acquisition of knowledge.

I never went to my father’s school a fact I sometimes now reflect with a sense of loss and wonder so I will not be able to give a very detailed account of the teachers, matters not being helped by the fact that my childhood friends were wont to hiss “Head-saar” or “Omuk-babu” as the case would be and we would disappear into the nearest by-lane. Precipitate flight does not make for observation. If caught in flagrante, we would, myself included, sheepishly duck our heads, like the mice carolers in The Wind in the Willows, until the deity had passed before giggling at our escape without damage or reprimand. The only teacher I did get to see was of course Dinu Babu, a good-looking man with an abstracted air, a tall Brahmin who lived with his beautiful and gentle wife and daughter in genteel modesty in his apartment quite near to us. His wife could have been a model for Agnes in David Copperfield but typically Bengali Beautiful and his daughter again classical beautiful and was somewhat older than us I remember because once she cooked quite masterfully using purloined spices and oils, a dish of googly (sort of fresh water whelks) we had gathered from the local ponds.

Of course, I am being an old reactionary but I will close by raising some questions. Is our present education wasteful and soul destroying and finally gives the seeker of knowledge a sense of guilt? It was Warren Hastings who observed that it was a wonder that though the madarsaas and pathsalas did not seem to teach much beyond languages and mathematics the Indians were able to expertly handle any job given to them. Noteworthy also is the comment by Oscar Wilde who said that it is true that an Education is wonderful but the things truly worth learning cannot be taught.  Is education, like all other post-independence welfare schemes, merely being used by our politicians to lay their hands on the funds? Can a genius be produced? Is our teaching Inspiring?  You will notice most of the famous IITians for example are all doing well but working in areas that have nothing to do with their field of study but this need not be. I know of an IIT Teacher who taught Engineering design and that year twenty-two of the class out of forty-eight opted to stay in India and work in Design.