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A Visit to Nanritam’s “Filix School of Education”

The first time I espied Nanritam’s “Filix School of Education” was on the evening I arrived at
the site with Sri Dilip Ghosh and Sri Asokendu Sengupta. We walked to the school entrance
through a sylvan tunnel of vines slivered over by a bulbous moon, with lamps dangling at
strategic points. Our weighted footfalls were intended to scare away the three-feet long
snakes on campus, mostly non-venomous, that we had been abundantly cautioned about.

Towards the opening in the tunnel that led to the school, we wondered aloud about the
etymology of the name “Filix”. A something set to blossom? Perhaps. As yet the building
was still under construction, a fragment set to grow into maturity one day.

The next morning, as we meandered through the empty classrooms, laboratories and hallways
on a Sunday, I was pleasantly surprised, particularly as a former specialist in the literature of
British Romanticism, to see a poster displaying a poem by two pupils. The poster
acknowledged a creative debt to William Wordsworth’s immortal line “Nature never did
betray/The heart that loved her” from “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”
What serendipitous link, I wondered, could the children have discovered between the Welsh
landscape of “sportive wood run wild” and notoriously arid red-soiled Purulia, tellingly
dotted by date palms just a few heads taller than every human?
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As I wandered through the corridors that Sunday and met the pupils on Monday, I realised
there was indeed a palpable link between lines written more than 200 years ago by a poet
quoted almost as often as Shakespeare, and the adaptation of that inventive spark by two
children, who were probably, like many of their peers at Filix, first-generation learners of
English. That link was—as current theoretical and business jargon would have it—the
binding element of the glocal—a portmanteau of the words “global” and “local.” Having
gone through Nanritam’s brochures, I knew that Bharati-di and Ranjana had visited
educational institutions in North America and Europe to learn about the teaching methods
usually practised there.
However, what caught my eye in the classrooms and laboratories in Filix was not the
smartboards that have become common to almost every decently-funded school in the West,
but the Western emphasis on hands-on learning in pre-school and primary classes that was
reflected, in the mathematics lab, within the abacuses and building blocks intended to teach
fractions. Compared to the sophisticated technology affordable in Western contexts, the
simple, low-cost methods in the lab boasted the advantage of letting the children see and
touch their learning content. This reflected, very possibly, the innovative methods of
mathematical and scientific education being currently developed for less prosperous countries
at institutes such as the “Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education” in Mumbai.
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Not that the children at Filix didn’t have access to some really impressive technology: the
computer lab shone with an array of sleek black Macs, although they were wisely offset by a
hardware station duly equipped with tools of all kinds—pliers, hammers and saws. Aided in
their efforts by both experienced teachers and fresh graduates, the pupils—all in years upto
Class VI--had also, in another lab, built miniature models of different kinds of levers, a set of
traffic lights, a simple electrical circuit, and a forest with wild animals of clay glaring at each
other. In another corner stood little replicas of houses suited to every climate on the earth—
igloos, mud huts with roofs of thatched straw, buildings of concrete and a house on bamboo
stilts that—the teachers told me—could even be lit up by a bulb within.

Yet, the many posters on the walls also made it clear that these representations of houses
around the world were more than a nod to a superficial global cosmopolitanism. I was struck
especially by a set of posters discussing the geographical features and population of the
Democratic Republic of Congo, where the child had drawn attention to the historical and
politicised nature of terms used for people around the earth, people they had perhaps only
encountered on TV: “Negroes is an archic (sic) term traditionally used to denote persons
considered to be of Negroid heritage”.
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The huge significance of building up such a global awareness, in a school population largely
comprised of underprivileged children, became clear to me only later when I saw, in a
classroom, a set of drawers indicating certain duties for the pupils. Certain children were to
be responsible for “pencil distribution,” and others for “eraser distribution” in a school where
stationery is usually handed out to the pupils. Yet others were to be responsible for intangible
yet important tasks such as “line monitor” and “teacher’s helping hand.” And one can hardly
underestimate the significance of readily available mineral water for children coming from
homes where such a facility would probably be unthinkable. Or the onus on teachers and
school helpers to toilet-train children of 6 or 7 years of age in well-equipped bathrooms,
which these children probably don’t know from their everyday lives at home.
Thus it was that when I met the children from Class V on Monday, they asked me if I had
ever visited China and eaten with chopsticks. My assent must have reassured them that the
ways that other people live must be worth exploring. Happily I found myself surrounded by a
gaggle of children who wanted me to demonstrate, with a pair of pencils, how to position
one’s fingers so as to be able to pick up a piece of chalk. On learning that I had been living in
Germany for the last few years and could speak some German, the children wanted to know
if the script is the same as that for English. To which I said yes, except that certain letters in
German don’t exist in English—the vowels with an umlaut for example. The children echoed
my mouthing of “ö” and “ü”: the letters reverberated across the classroom in a vocal
boomerang. And yet, it was also clear that the teachers had been making a concerted effort to
make the children aware of their national heritage: posters of the Indian mathematicians
Bhaskaracharya II, S. Ramanujan and D. R. Kaprekar were displayed prominently in the
mathematics lab. On the Monday morning as I entered Class III, the children saluted me with
a cheery “Good Morning Ma’am” and folded their hands in a “Namashkar”. I responded with
a similar gesture, wishing them a good morning as well. In that moment we were global,
Indian, and on relatively equal terms as teacher and students in our common humanity. On
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hearing that I had lived in a number of countries, the children asked me “Have you ever been
to the zoo?”. I thought wistfully of my 6-year old son, who has made sure I have been to the
zoo quite a number of times.
The fluidity of the different identities being cultivated by the schoolchildren came into focus
during the dance class I attended, to which I was heart-warmingly escorted by a pupil of
Class V, who grabbed my hand and led me to the lesson. The teacher, Krishnendu—a trained
Odissi dancer himself--was leading the children through a session of “Mayurbhanj Chhau,”
which, I came to know, was significantly different from the “Purulia Chhau” more familiar to
viewers in West Bengal. Both girls and boys ran around in patterned circles with flailed arms
in a martial stance, or imitated the action of putting fruit or fish into a basket. Their bare feet
thrummed on the floor: the rhythm they followed went “Deda-deda-dadin-deda-deda-dadin-
da.” This rhythm was so different from the various kinds of taal I had learnt myself in
Hindustani classical music lessons, and yet as complex.
Despite the challenge of having to co-ordinate their movements, the children were clearly
proud of their efforts, smiling through their performance as they enacted Radha and Krishna
in respective pairs of a girl and a boy each. Indeed, the movements of Radha and Krishna
became increasingly hard to tell apart. A frenetic transgendered identity appeared to descend
upon the dancers as they synchronised themselves at times to background music, and at
others to beats mouthed by Krishnendu. I had promised the children to watch the dance class
for 5 minutes, and ended up being entranced by the entire class-period. It was then that one of
the most exacting questions put forth by the children in Class III made perfect sense: “If you
have been living in Germany, why have you come back to India?” “Because I want to do
something for my country,” I had said. But before I’d had a chance to do that something, my
country had already brought me back to life.
Something of that spirit combining play and pluckiness had infused, I think, the volley of
questions that the children had fired at me after I had been introduced to them in the
classrooms. Which was the first centre in India to conduct research on nuclear physics? How
many centimetres make an inch? Rather undiplomatically, I tried to fob off such questions
and redirect them to Sri Asokendu Sengupta, who had formerly taught university-level
physics, adding that I was better equipped to answer questions related to literature and
languages. As Sri Sengupta solved a sudoku puzzle designed by one pupil, I responded to
another’s query as to why the Bengali alphabet has two “Bo”s, and mentally thanked British
scholar of Bengali William Radice for his book Teach Yourself Bengali, which had taught me
the answer to that tricky question. Shortly afterwards, as some of the pupils went outside into
the searing Purulia sun for their games period, others stayed behind in the classroom for what
was purportedly a “vernacular” class, but also a time for free exploration. One of the pupils
intently discovered and copied the calligraphic beauty of Sukumar Ray’s Abol Tabol, and two
others drew a cartoon on the blackboard I cannot help but reproduce here, given especially
the sharp-eyed vision of the artists for worldly realities such as a policeman indulging himself
with a bribe.
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Others engaged themselves in activities of a more esoteric cast: a couple of children showed
me the poems they had written for a poster entitled “Our Poetree.” Another proudly displayed
his model of the “Life Cycle of a Silk Worm”. The silk worm itself was so lifelike that I
ended up asking him if he had captured a real one. But no, it turned out to be an airy thing of
thermocol painted over cleverly, looking like it would wriggle into existence very soon.

That evening I strolled through the campus grounds, lit up by the halo of a slow, sad sunset.
The dying sun had brightened the plastic sheets in the farming area behind the “Krishi
Kendra”. The sheets were helping to conserve water, preserving what looked like a
succession of roses in pale pink and crimson. Amidst the forked silhouettes of royal
poinciana, surrounded by showers of petals in flaming orange and yellow, swung a magpie on
an electrical wire. Suddenly, the quietness of the landscape was broken by a sharp movement
near the campus fence, at least five or six heads taller than a human and topped by successive
rows of barbed wire. One of the teenage boys from the village picked up a football close to
the fence. The football must have been kicked in by mistake. The gangly boy scampered up
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the fence in all sure-footed confidence, and crossed over in a swift and graceful swing of his
legs. I wondered if the schoolchildren at Filix were growing up to become like that—a little
intent on bending the rules, yet quickly and quietly learning what was most important to learn
about life.
Malini Roy
roym26@gmail.com