Thursday, 12 September 2024

The Smart and the Dumb by Vishal Vasanthakumar – Book Review

 


Publisher’s write-up:

‘Education achieves many things- it pulls people out of poverty, enables socio-economic mobility and promises a route to dignity. But what does education mean to different people, what does it do and whose needs are being met by education?

Even as globalization and format education have established themselves as unquestionable truths, only a privileged few have cornered the benefits. In this process, education is being reconceived and its promises are being rewritten. Today, there clearly is more to education than going to school, getting credentials and securing a job.

This book is an attempt to capture what this ‘more’ is, by exploring education’s connections to caste, class and gender and understanding how they affect the promise of education. Among other stories, it covers the fractured realities of children in Manipur who want guns for Christmas, describes how a ban on toddy-tapping is affecting educational choices in Tamil Nadu and explains why a grandmother chose to get her fifteen-year-old granddaughter married to a seventeen-year-old truck driver in rural Rajasthan. The book deftly paints a portrait of the political and cultural processes that impact education in modern India.’

The Smart and the Dumb is a book on how society and politics impact education and policies around it in India, by the Cambridge and Harvard educated sociologist, Vishal Vasanthakumar. The book is centred around the author’s travelling across India – particularly the states of Rajasthan in the north-west of India (borders Pakistan), Manipur in the north-east (borders Myanmar), and the author’s own home state in Southern India, Tamil Nadu. It not only features the new insights gained by the author in interacting with people in different places, but also the author’s own personal experiences in going through an elite private education in Chennai, Tamil Nadu – and the impact of privilege that he himself has had – be it the author being English-speaking or caste hierarchies.

The book is split into seven chapters – the first is about a community in Kotdi village in Rajasthan that follows a tradition of marrying girls in their family at a young age (below 18, which on paper, is illegal in India) in order to ‘protect them’ and getting girls educated is seen as being less important than their marriage. The author shows both – the ones who resigned to the system and those who tried to fight against it. It then moves to Manipur – in the midst of ethnic tensions and constant conflict between the dominant Meitei community (mainly Hindu) in the valley and the Kuki and Naga community in the hills (predominantly Christian). The author touched on how active conflict – between insurgent groups and the Indian group affected the civilian population, including children’s education and teachers, and the choice of gifts the children wanted for a festival.

The book then talks of the private coaching that happens in India outside of the school system – to prepare 16 and 17 year olds for competitive entrance exams to engineering schools; particularly in the town of Kota, Rajasthan – where the local economy is entirely based on students coming there to study and the challenges that they face.

The angle the book introduced on privilege and the perceptions of the dominant group was interesting; on the government of Tamil Nadu’s ban on toddy – a palm based liquor native to Tamil Nadu, which severely affected income levels of palmyra tree climbers, including affecting educational choices of their children. Interestingly, Tamil Nadu is not a state under prohibition, but toddy is not perceived well by the policy makers but those brewed in distilleries were very much permitted.

The chapter the author had on a ‘culture olympics’ between elite private schools in the south-eastern Indian city of Chennai was highly relatable for me personally. The author touches upon privilege, caste hierarchies and what is considered as art worthy of recognition. It largely serves children of similar backgrounds – upper caste, English speaking and the events too, largely favour arts appreciated in these communities – for instance, a hip-hop Tamil performance or a very humorous speech in Tamil would not be accepted by the schools or the judges. Having studied in such a school in Chennai, and having been to these ‘culture olympics’ as one of the ‘delegates’ for my school, I totally understand the privileged circles I was in, right now, in hindsight, but I was completely oblivious to it back then and did not hesitate to make a snide remark on someone’s fluency in English without knowing the circumstances that enable a teenager to be fluent in India. Much as this chapter focused on Chennai, I have studied in six other similar private schools across India and the author is right to suggest that these events are often a symbol of retaining the privilege than trying to use education to distribute the benefits of education to the wider population.

While that chapter was personally very relatable to me, I feel that this event is perhaps particular to the city of Chennai, whereas, it is not a phenomenon in other cities. That said, maybe the publisher did not choose the best of captions for the book – while the author has travelled in the east, north and south of India, this book certainly is about politics of education in some parts of India, but could have had more impact if there were more inputs from certain other parts of the country (as situation varies widely from state to state in India).

I feel this book is important given the current political climate in India, with the overreach of the current Indian government led by a prime minister with far-right leanings; often with the support of the privileged elite of the country, such as the extended families of the author and even that of myself. The last chapter written by the author demonstrated it very well, where a school principal did not appreciate the mention of Jawaharlal Nehru and Manmohan Singh by the author, both former Indian prime ministers from the Indian National Congress – the current opposition party against the Hindu nationalist politics of the present government.

This book – given it is written in English, should at least be read by those in India who come from such privileged English speaking backgrounds, many of whom are oblivious to the privilege that they have had (I myself was ignorant of it till I was 19 and travelled around the country). I personally enjoyed reading the book and also appreciated the conclusions derived by the author – based on all the research and travelling that the author has done for this book. The author does discuss the exploitation of the term ‘middle class’, everyone, including those within the top 2% of the country when it comes to income levels, identify themselves under this class and this book could help them get out of that bubble.

On that note, I award the book a rating of eight on ten.

Rating – 8/10

Have a nice day,
Andy

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