Mumbai’s intelligentsia and academics are up in arms against the speedy decision of University of Mumbai vice chancellor Dr. Rajan Welukar to drop Rohinton Mistry’s Booker-nominated novel Such a Long Journey (1991) from the second year BA English literature syllabus of its 670 affiliated colleges. Over 1,080 academics, civil society activists and intellectuals signed an online petition dated October 25, addressed to the Maharashtra governor and ex-officio chancellor of the university Kateekal Sankaranarayan, demanding an inquiry into the procedure Welukar followed to withdraw this book which has been on the BA Eng lit syllabus for the past three years, following a threat by the Bharatiya Vidyarthi Sena (BVS), the youth wing of Mumbai’s notorious right wing subnationalist political party, the Shiv Sena.
BVS and particularly Aditya Thackeray (20) — grandson of Shiv Sena supremo Balasaheb Thackeray and son of executive president Uddhav Thackeray — raised an objection to Such a Long Journey being included in the English syllabus on the ground that the novel contained derogatory references to the Shiv Sena, Mumbai’s dabbawalas, the Marathi manoos and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, utilising “extremely obscene and vulgar lang-uage in its text”. On September 14, BVS activists ritually burnt copies of the novel at the university’s Fort campus and asked Welukar to withdraw it from the syllabus within 24 hours. The very next day, Welukar obligingly re-convened the university’s Board of Studies (whose five-year term had lapsed on August 30) and with its concurrence under s.14 (7) of the Maharashtra Universities Act, 1994, which empowers the vice chancellor to take “immediate action if s/he deems the university is in any danger”, eliminated the novel from the varsity syllabus on September 15, just a fortnight prior to the scheduled second year BA exams.
Unsurprisingly, the abject capitulation of the vice chancellor of this 153-year-old university to the threats of a callow youth and the Sena has outraged the intelligentsia and academic opinion in Mumbai. Accusing the university’s resuscitated Board of Studies and vice chancellor Welukar of providing “deluxe service via express delivery, making the book disappear the very next day”, in a message from Canada, Mistry said that “Mumbai University has come perilously close to institutionalising the ugly notion of self-censorship”.
Aditya Thackeray, whose tender sensibilities were offended by some passages of Such a Long Journey, is unfazed. “We have no issues with the book being available in the market, but it is being forced upon us by being included in the syllabus,” he says.
Meanwhile with Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan justifying the book ban by the state government-funded Mumbai University, the spotlight has focused on vice chancellor Welukar, appointed to head this university in July this year. An obscure Nagpur-based statistician who has never attained the rank of professor or college principal — prerequisites of a vice chancellor under the Maharashtra Universities Act, 1994 — Welukar’s appointment has been challenged by a PIL (public interest litigation) writ filed in the Bombay high court on September 15. How was Welukar appointed vice chancellor, by whom and why, queries the petition.
Moreover other conundrums are being posed. Given the Shiv Sena’s aversion to English medium education, how did young Aditya Thackeray make the grade for admission into St. Xavier’s College where cut-off percentages are sky high?
Good questions all, but don’t expect any answers soon.
Swati Roy (Mumbai)
Continuous confusion
In a show of support to the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) which became operational on April 1, the Congress-NCP government of the western seaboard state of Maharashtra (pop: 99 million) decreed the abolition of terminal and semester exams in schools statewide and their substitution by a continuous and comprehensive evaluation (CCE) regime. A notification to this effect was issued by the state government on May 10, identifying August 20 as D-day for introduction of CCE statewide. But since then the process of implementing this student-friendly initiative has stalled. For instance in Pune district, 24,500 teachers of 3,617 primary and 1,200 secondary schools are yet to be trained in implementing CCE.
Shridhar Salunkhe, officiating director of the Maharashtra State Council of Educational Research and Training (MSCERT), attributes the delay in implementing the CCE system to consultations involving academics, parents, and political organisations following misgivings being voiced about not rigorously evaluating primary students for eight years (class I-VIII). “The role of teachers is very important as they are the vital component in the implementation of CCE which replaces the well-entrenched unit and semester exams evaluation system. CCE also requires teachers to provide supplem-entary guidance to help students overcome learning difficulties. Therefore they need to be thoroughly trained to implement the new system,” says Salunkhe.
But with primary and secondary schools in Pune now half-way through the first semester of the academic year 2010-11, there’s pervasive confusion about whether to continue with the traditional unit tests and exams or to follow available CCE guidelines. “Since none of the teachers from our school have been called for training, we have persisted with the semester exam system. The government resolution should have been issued at the beginning of the academic year in June rather than on August 20. It may be too late now to deploy teachers for training because the second half of the year is a time of preparation for the final examination,” says the principal of a reputed K-12 school in the city who preferred to remain unidentified.
Although Salunkhe admits that the state government’s programme to brief K-12 teachers to implement CCE has been slow off the starting block, he is adamant that the process has begun. “It’s not true that training sessions haven’t begun. Our agenda is to train 4.5 lakh teachers in more than 1.03 lakh primary and secondary schools across Maharashtra. Hence the delay,” he says. Meanwhile MSCERT has uploaded a teacher guide book on its website (www.mscert.org.in) which, however, has attracted some flak. “It is only in Marathi which not every teacher in the state can understand. It should have been uploaded in English as well,” says Vinita Pereira, who teaches chemistry to class VII-VIII students at the privately-funded Holy Cross School, Pune.
Educationists in Pune (pop: 5 million), which boasts 150-plus colleges and higher education institutes and 80 K-12 schools, aren’t surprised by the delay in implementing the CCE system. They are well aware of the propensity of politicians to announce populist schemes without bothering about implementation details. “Replacing stressful term and semester exams with CCE is a very enlightened proposal as it will spare students examination stress in their primary years. But CCE needs to be implemented carefully so that it will enhance, rather than reduce learning outcomes. Therefore if there’s a delay because of teacher preparation, it is justified,” says Fr. Bhausaheb Sansare, director of Pune’s highly-respected St. Joseph’s Technical Institute.
Meanwhile, the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Secon-dary Education has given schools in the state the go-ahead to conduct exams as scheduled, but under the new evaluation system the marks cards of students will not be conveyed to parents. Instead, the progress of each student will be conveyed verbally with suggestions on how to improve their child’s academic performance. The board has invited views from principals, teachers, parents, and students to assess the feasibility of this new proposal.
Huned Contractor (Pune)