“Empowerment Should Be Collective”: Four “Truth-Tales”

Abstract

We know that a teacher’s job is to teach and a student’s is to learn. The objective of learning is what creates a relationship between the teacher and the student in the context of a classroom. However, in the extract from Suketu Mehta’s book above, we realize that a teacher’s job at Mayur Mahal, a school in Mumbai, is teaching the student, in this case Mehta himself, a lesson in what not to do as a learner, as a student: not to not do your homework, even if that homework was an “exercise in repetition or ‘learning by heart’ or ‘rote-learning.’”¹ In other words, a student must do exactly what her teacher tells her to do because when she doesn’t, she must pay for it. The teacher shames the student into regretting an act of rebellion: forgetting to do homework. This is how a teacher exercises her power as a teacher in the relationship—a power that is coercive in that it seeks to discipline the most docile of bodies through a technique of public shaming within the context of a pedagogical institution. Public shaming as a mode of disciplining bodies (not just the one that is to be disciplined but also its spectators) in the institutional space called the school has a striking resemblance to the beheading of a recalcitrant subject as a public spectacle in medieval times. Public beheading was a spectacle precisely because this was how a sovereign performed and also spatialized his power (that being a sovereign meant controlling not only physical territories but also physical bodies, even destroying them in the service of sovereignty).

There was one ingenious punishment in which the teachers excelled. It was a simple piece of white cardboard, with a string around it, bearing the inscription, in large letters readable across a room, I HAVE NOT DONE MY HOMEWORK. When this was the case, you had to wear it for public display. One day, I did not do my homework, and the teacher garlanded me with the board. As she did so, I wondered why there were black streaks running down the white cardboard. I soon found out … they were tears of all previous wearers of the board, and I added my own to them. Wearing the sign, I was instructed to stand not only in front of my own class but also all the other classrooms on the floor. The door of the next classroom would be opened and I would walk in unsteadily and go to the head of the class. There I would turn, face forty of my fellow students, and stand silently. Children love nothing so much as to see other children in pain, especially at Mayur Mahal, where pain was so prevalent it formed a part of the masonry. My humiliation was a relief from their own, so the room erupted in a chorus of mocking laughter, hooting, and jokes … After I had finished all of them, I would have to stand in the passage outside the classrooms, standing and shifting against the wall, desperately trying to keep my advertised shame from the eyes of those who passed by.

—Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, 2004: p. 473–474

My contention is that the collective exists only when you have a common struggle. Otherwise, what you eat I don’t really taste, and it doesn’t inform my body. So knowledge is also something that is personal. In the final analysis, you knowing something doesn’t benefit me. Unless we are working from a common cause, then education does not come in handy. The moral of the story, therefore, is that women’s struggle should be constantly diversified.

One of the sahyoginis I knew in Banda started her work with Bhaiji’s organization. There she lived and worked in complete fear. She used to be so affected by that space. She always remained tentative about her own abilities. After becoming a sahyogini in MS, some of her hidden potential was realized. She became more articulate. She wanted to learn English. Then she wanted to learn the computer. But it was mostly an individual struggle and later became a personal journey, rather than a collective one. She didn’t say that until her sisters moved on, she wouldn’t also. But I would say that it is sad that all the groups who were working for women had very specific, individual-based agendas. Collectivizing was no longer a goal.

—SJ, feminist academic and NGO owner, from an interview conducted in Jaipur, Rajasthan, in 2002