Honoured for a day, tyrannised for 364: What we learnt this Teachers' Day

By Debaditya Bhattacharya Teachers have always been the stuff that heroes are made of. They range in our imagination from being the matrons of an untrained generation to the muses of our inspired after-years. Give us a stage and a microphone, and we can wax eloquent about how teachers have changed our lives and ways — and also occasionally lapse into how the age-old fable of their selflessness has now been punctured by salary-greedy work-‘striking’ lazy professionals. We can easily trade in our household nostalgias for surrogate mother-figures and dhoti-clad Byron-chanters (who apparently preferred echoes of their own baritone voices over those of their dying wives at home). Or better still, give us a day seeped in the aura of Radhakrishnans and Abdul Kalams, and we shall manufacture televisual spectacles of a Prime Minister lecturing school-children or a Chief Minister handing out medals to prostrating college teachers. [caption id=“attachment_2422370” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption] We are a nation that boasts of the haloed guru-shishya parampara, and we still hold fast to a feudal ethic of gurudakshina whether in cash or sexual kind (refer to recent instances from a premier Delhi University college to relatively remote schools in Mathura or Rajasthan or Andhra). Yet, do give us a day to languish in our bhakti, to nurse our fondest myths of ‘simple living’ and ‘great thinking’, to rue the death of a glorious past of ‘greatness’, and then to soak our souls in the wealth of a customary lip-service to the ‘privileged’ profession of teaching. All hail Teachers’ Day! And then, when the cameras recede, the microphones switch off and a certain day of subtropical warmth has spent itself in floral or rhetorical excess, let us knock on the doors of all those teachers who have dared to unsettle our beliefs, and let us settle scores with a few bullets. Let us hush the horrors of an MM Kalburgi or a Perumal Murugan or a GN Saibaba with an annual offering to the superhuman ‘soul-force’ of the teacher-leaders of our nation. And spice it up later with Pay Commission promises that have been tailored unto the exact needs of a silent conscience. Because, you see, we are a nation of respectful guru-bhakts! We do not care about whether primary school teachers are paid their salaries or not. We do not care about whether teachers of private and public-funded schools receive as much as daily minimum wages for toilet-training our kids. Oh! But many of their workplaces don’t even have toilets, let alone a healthy working environment or classroom equipment. We do not care if state-aided colleges or universities have withheld teachers’ salaries for months and yet insist on their ‘inner’ spiritual urge for social service. We do not care if teaching posts in colleges are being increasingly contractualised and those working against them are forced into looking for alternative sources of income. We do not care if the contracted faculty is treated with dignity enough to retain a proverbial sense of their higher moral responsibility towards society. We do not care if specially-designed illegalities and hierarchies are put in place for these contractual teachers (ranging from distinctly unequal divisions of labour to bureaucratic injunctions to work on vacation), to remind them at every moment of how dispensable they are. We do not care if part-time teachers are being arm-twisted by university administrations into gross workload-disparities, denial of leave benefits and medical claims. We do not care if their maternity leaves count for service-breaks and render them ineligible for professional entitlements. We do not care if teachers are not guaranteed pay-protection on transfer and deserved increments are being deliberately stalled. We do not care if their promotions have been delayed for years and their careers jeopardised, because intellectual labour — our culture cautions us — cannot be quantified in wages and hours. We do not care if half of Delhi University’s teaching workforce is employed on a four-month ad hoc contract, terminable at any moment with a day’s notice and treated as a floating migrant community of labour running from college to college for interviews every four months. We do not care if that same Central university (bleeding young teachers right through the heart of the nation’s capital) has effectively made ad hoc-ism into a greater guarantee of accountability by exploiting the vulnerable. We do not care if vice-chancellors of Central universities treat teachers as if they were their personal assistants (or, as one among them said: as “ghodas” and “ghod-sawaars”). We just want our children to grow into non-protesting laathi-chargeable ‘well-behaved’ submissive citizen-subjects. Employable in the corporate sector and eloquent enough in the English language to rattle off a sentiment-seeped Teachers’ Day speech. Or even better, a Republic Day speech garnished with the choicest of patriotic jargon. And in the meantime, our vice-chancellors can return to their spine-bending acrobatics in front of ministers, politicians and TV cameras. Or they can issue show-cause notices to teachers protesting forcefully-implemented ‘reforms’ that aim at selling off higher education in the country. Our ministers can safely keep planting party-stooges within academic institutions. Our Chauhans can multiply in numbers, while teachers are handed down memos and pay-cuts. Campuses across the country can be militarised, and study groups can be shut down by force. Recruitments can be stalled and sanctioned posts can remain vacant for decades, unless political connections are discovered as evidence of extraordinary qualification. Teachers once lured by false promises can retire into the safe havens of private capital, and teachers-to-be can start looking for more lucrative options in a ‘Shining’ Swachh Bharat. We will by then have fed our ‘collective conscience’ with deaths and threats to those who dissented, and an annual medal to the one who silently bowed. Debaditya Bhattacharya has taught for nearly five years at Central and state universities in Delhi, Bihar and Kolkata. He continues to teach literature at a Calcutta University college, works on continental philosophy, and occasionally writes on issues of contemporary political interest.