Devil's Advocate | Faiz or no Faiz, poetry in schools needs an overhaul in its method of instruction and evaluation

Devil’s Advocate is a rolling column that sees the world differently and argues for unpopular opinions of the day. This column, the writer acknowledges, can also be viewed as a race to get yourself cancelled. But like pineapple on pizza, he is willing to see the lighter side of it.

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Poetry is that strange beast that everyone talks about but rarely understands. It is everywhere, and yet is believed to be nowhere in terms of specificity.

In a country obsessed with the certainties of structure, careers, and familial lives, poetry is an outlier, an out-of-syllabus specimen that we have been coached to pretend belongs in the curriculum of our education. Maybe it does and maybe it does not, for not everything we study is applicable in life, and not everything applicable we are being asked to study. Education, at least from the point of view of setting curriculums is as incomplete in India, as it meanderingly finds its way to some sort of wider relevance.

The removal of Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems from the curriculum of the 10th class syllabus of the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has expectedly met criticism, largely from people who read and therefore believe in the importance of poetry in the world. But more than the shape of its roster or list of contents, it is perhaps more damaging and infuriating how poetry is generally taught as a subject in our schools.

Schools are, by design, meant to institutionalise and enshrine in the brains of young men and women, respect for rules and regulations. Yes, they ought to inspire children to question, but usually not authority, at least not at the expense of discipline. You can therefore sense where this is coming from even if you disagree with it.

More than the syllabus, however, it is generic teaching methods that undermine subjects as asymmetrical and fluid as poetry. Frankly, this step might only make Faiz’s poetry more relevant to the very students it will now be denied access to. Foremost because poetry in general is so lazily interpreted, so naively caged by rehearsed interpretations that it is a disservice really to have poetry be taught in the classroom by teachers who half-ass their way through history and heritage as if on a museum tour for the 100th time.

My interest in poetry ignited fairly early, as a 10-year-old, but syllabus-prescribed verses and their rudimentarily boring readings practically thwarted my interest until I escaped the clutches of the Indian educational system. Firstly, the curation of poems that are part of the 10th class syllabus has no base in sound, geo-political rationale. For a country, though young, but rich in terms of its own Anglophone poetic history, there is next to no representation from Indian poets.

It is an abomination that people have to discover the likes of Vikram Seth, Arun Kolatkar, the Bombay and Bengali poets on their own on the outside. Second, these poems are waved in your face without the supporting presence of socio-political context. It is what complicates Faiz’s poetry beyond the obvious lyrical, moving quality of his work. It is what makes Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, as The Paris Review once suggested, “the most misread poem."

Even though classic English literature, like dust in our air, has permeated everyday canons, there is in Indian context at least, a frightening lack of critically engagement with poets or poems. In fact, the school is probably the first and the last time most children encounter poetry because it has been turned into a subject that must be ‘passed.’ Understandably, to most young readers, poems become this abrasive, elusive text that must be understood the right way rather than their own way.

Poetry must yield to interpretation but the education system has turned it into a cumbersome process of rote learning and rehashing everything that precedes your own reading of one. Further, without the establishing the socio-political context, a poem is as rootless as it might seem fragile and free.

It is threatened more by this mechanical repetition of teaching methods than by the nature of its political content, which until illuminated by context, is like the rock that can kiss the sea but never know what it actually feels to be part of one.  

It is hard to quantify the outcome of poetry, but in terms of cerebral development, it perhaps only helps widen the brain’s canvas. Of course, there are entire degrees and careers built around structured courses but in essence, what poetry should be attempting to accomplish is denied by formalisation as some sort of equation that must be solved. Maybe its formal study can be retained for those who intend to dive deeper, but to young kids in school, at least poetry should become an ally in the few things that liberates them from curriculum, syllabus, and regimental study.

Maybe poetry does not even have to be a subject, so children can actually embrace it without being intimidated by its obscurity. Growing up, my understanding of poetry was the higher application of English vocabulary, whereas it is simply the application of music to imagery, of imagination to memory and reality. Somewhere in between, the essence has been forsaken for the numerical qualifier of marks, the cynical act of passing rather than romanticism of both learning and unlearning. To which effect poetry ails not from what is considered poetic but how it is taught, or worse, imposed upon, the uninitiated.  

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.

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