Keya Sarkar: Casualties in education

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I relocated to Santiniketan from Mumbai to settle into the home that my maternal grandfather had built and I inherited. While the silence and the green all around the house did not take me any time to get used to, what did were the doors. Having for years gotten used to pulling my front door behind me to secure the apartment, it took me quite a while to get accustomed to closing nine doors before I could step out.

The house also, of course, has windows which live up to standards set by the doors. And thanks to Santiniketan being a termite-prone zone (they love wood but actually eat anything, even cement walls!), this meant opening and examining each door and window on a daily basis. Having learnt many lessons from Gujaratis during my long stay in Mumbai, I realised this activity of opening and closing doors somehow had to be made remunerative.

That is when the idea of starting a home stay first struck me. If I occasionally rented out the extra rooms to tourists to Santiniketan, it would make all the work worth it. Since that decision, we have had many tourists from India and abroad who have heard of us solely through word of mouth and have come to spend a few days.

Recently there was a professor of art from the US who had come to deliver a lecture to students of the art department at Viswa Bharati University and chose to stay with us for the one night that she was in Santiniketan.

Over dinner, we heard many stories from our guest who was a print maker by profession. She hailed from New Orleans and the recent storm and her experiences through it dominated the conversation. Afterwards we exchanged notes on our work. She shared her recent catalogue of work and I showed her the work I was doing in textiles in the context of what was available in Birbhum. Later, I asked her how her lecture had been received.

"I don't really know," she said, looking a little unhappy, "because no one asked any questions." Suddenly I felt a little responsible for the students sitting in on her lecture in particular and Indian students in general, and went into a long explanation about hierarchy in the classroom and the normal acceptance of the professor's word to ensure that she did not take the slight personally or think that her lecture was bad or unintelligible.

At the end of my explanation, she looked a little less unhappy and as the conversation veered to other things, her disappointment at not having had an interactive session was already behind her. I didn't realised then that I would hear more on the subject.

Viswa Bharati University offers a course named "foreign casual course" in many disciplines meant for those who make Santiniketan their abode for short durations. While the concept is brilliant in fostering interaction among students from across the globe, in reality it has come to be misused by many a foreign student. Enrolment to a university course is an easy means to obtain a long-term visa. There are many instances of the same student enrolling for art classes, singing lessons and language classes in order to stay on year after year.

I was relating this incident of the American professor to one such student of a casual course. I described how I had tried to console her by saying that the tradition in India was to take the teacher's word unquestioningly and how, therefore, a culture of debate and interaction had not developed. And while this may be changing in the metros, it was still true of the smaller towns.

This student kept nodding sagely. But it was what she said at the end that completed the picture for me: "Actually they come so seldom to the class that when they do, everyone listens." This left me in no doubt on how "casual" these courses were.