Postcard from Mumbai
Roy Blatchford
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What once was Bombay is now Mumbai. Poona has become Pune, Madras is now Chennai. There’s chatter of India being recast as Hindustan. For his readers E.M. Forster characterised the country as a place of confusions and paradox. Vikram Seth captured its colour, aromas and family intrigues, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala its heat and its dust. Yet no fictional account can begin to evoke the fascinating variety and teeming action that is India.
To survive on India’s roads the adage runs: good horn, good brakes, good driver and very good luck. During Mumbai’s monsoon season signs urge ‘Drive carefully – someone is waiting for you’. And the truth is that everyone does hurtle along with extraordinary care, horns blaring excessively yet somehow purposefully.
No rush-hour in New York, London or Sydney can match the frantic, steaming chaos that Mumbai displays. Unimaginable loads are being pulled, pushed and carried by men, women and children. Auto-ricks, yoked oxen, horses, battered buses, packed baby-taxis and improbably laden cars miss each other miraculously in this restless city of 20 million souls.
In Juhu, Marine Drive and Malabar Hill lies some of the most expensive and glitzy real-estate on the planet. The price of lunch at the Oberoi Hotel is a month’s wages for those who serve it. The Raj and its gentlemen’s clubs linger in places. HSBC, Kodak and Nokia jostle with Tata and Mittal for brand supremacy. This is an amazing urban spread, divided by caste.
‘Slum Dwellers International’ proclaims a hoarding on a new building site sweeping away a tented village. Walk along the pavements around Crawford Market and whole families live beneath blue tarpaulin strung out between trees, their bathroom the drains, their cooker an open fire, their belongings scant – and all under the relentless, August monsoon rain.
The closer you look, the more people you glimpse: resilient and peaceful millions eke out an existence in a city that is changing at a helter-skelter pace. And from shacks and shanty towns all over Mumbai, early each morning millions of children appear impeccably dressed for school, their clothes washed and ‘pressed’ each evening. They are India’s wonderfully bright and optimistic future, valuing an education that they and their parents know will deliver them from their current grinding poverty.
It’s not just the children who are starry-eyed about their futures. Teachers I’ve been working with are equally intent on revolutionising the state of India’s education system. Increasing numbers of young teachers are challenging the status quo, setting up their own low fee-paying schools to bring literacy to the ‘untouchables’.
Currently, individual class sizes can hit over 80, with 50+ the average in many government schools. In this context, differentiation can mean little: rote learning is a prevailing and effective survival tool for teachers. Chalk and talk permeate. Books are dated, well-worn but scrupulously cared for. Homework satchels abound, and rarely do homework diaries go missing.
One classroom I enter is in fact a former chapel, housing over 90 twelve year-olds, with two teachers battling each other’s voices in the gloom. The three-language framework means Hindi and Maharastran are the languages of the playground and the corridors. English is the medium of learning. Boys and girls alike write with a consistent accuracy and fluency that would shame a quarter of primary children in the UK.
On Independence Day (August 15), schools are closed for normal business; children assemble in lines, perform their drills, and the flag is raised. Gandhi’s legacy is everywhere, not least in the national curriculum’s celebration of peace as an integral way of Indians being and doing. Our own flirtations with peace studies are put firmly in the shade.
I visit one school which houses weekly boarders, boys from the poorest of families. At 8.30am – unsupervised – they have packed away their floor-bedding into lockers, washed and dressed, and commenced private study. Their great good humour and quiet determination to succeed and support one another strike any visitor.
Beyond Mumbai to the east lies the city of Pune and its surrounding green and lush hills. Property prices are booming. In the countryside seven-room primary schools are being built by local social entrepreneurs wishing to transform the life chances of tribal and nomadic children. There are few books, bare walls, basic furniture and poor sanitation. But there are dedicated trainee teachers and support staff with a will to bring literacy, numeracy and the arts to eager young minds.
There is a ubiquitous pride in and valuing of education which the West is slowly losing, has lost some would argue. To visit just a small corner of India today is to witness a great nation on the march. Whether it can modernise without westernising, the next few decades will tell.
What many, many educators are doing today with India’s children is at once captivating and humbling.
Roy Blatchford (NET Founding Director) has been training School Leaders India in Mumbai and Pune, with acknowledgements to ARK.
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