18.03.2020 Pallavi teaches courses around Gandhian education and Gandhian alternatives at Azim Premji University. Her courses are called, Nai Talim for Today and Tomorrow, Living Utopias, and India's Futures. Her current interests include hands on environment education, curating stories of Gandhian alternatives around the world and exploring identity through the theme of Food.
So tell me about the work you do.
We (my now retired colleague, Sujit Sinha and I) are very influenced by Gandhi’s (and Tagore's) idea of a good life and how the two visionaries envisaged alternatives in every aspect - be it politics, culture, economics, technology and designed their educational ideas to promote an alternative way of life that keeps respect for nature at its core.
Therefore we are constantly on a lookout to learn about initiatives that are akin to Gandhi and Tagore's vision of living well on a finite planet. The context in 1937 ( when Gandhi first formulated his education ideas in the form of Nai Talim) was certainly different. Nobody talked about limits. We were (and continue to be) intoxicated with the idea of quick and rapid material growth. In another 10 years India would achieve independence and so takers for the Gandhian vision of frugality and simplicity and self sufficiency and his Nai Talim to promote such a vision were few. But now when the various crises are sitting at our door- it is our belief that more and more people are exploring and are willing to explore alternatives in all spheres of living. What better time than now to understand Gandhi beyond peace and non violence and Tagore beyond his poetry to see if they had some vision to overcome these dark times of today?
We start our classes by asking people to acknowledge that there is a global crisis today in almost every sphere and topping it all is the scary realisation that we have crossed many planetary boundaries. The dominant vision of a good life led by material growth has led all of us down the hill especially where our environment is concerned. World over there is interest in alternative ways of living and learning and both Gandhi and Tagore represent the Oriental in academia. Any yet they are not well represented and we are trying to bring focus on to their work and their degrowth vision. The main thing about them was that they actually practiced whatever they were proposing and their ideas have a clear practical basis.
Apart from the university teaching, I also explore how school education can be more Gandhian in nature and I use a very live and potent theme. The theme of food. From a Gandhian lens it is all about taking control of your food and your health and nutrition- the idea of self sufficiency -by learning the skills of growing, eating , cooking and processing food.And while doing so, learning other subjects too . My question that informs my action research is what should school curriculum be, what do you need to learn to be self sufficient in food. I have worked with a school in Banglore to grow Ragi with the children. https://theragiproject.weebly.com/ This site has lesson plans which were developed and used by teachers corelating the work of growing, cooking, processing of Food and food waste with elementary school curriculum. This is an example of reinventing productive work as part of school curriculum.
I also have great fun exploring Food and identity –I started with my diverse MA development classroom space in the university and asked each of them to come up with a memory around food that ended us exploring gender, caste, class, community identity and we came up with this body of work: https://memorycookbook.weebly.com/. Over time I have offered this workshop in many spaces. It has also become a key component of my Living Utopias short course that we offer twice a year to anyone who is interested.
How difficult is it to talk about Gandhi’s ideas in today’s context, considering his views on development and progress? There does need to be some amount of deschooling before we can begin to engage with these ideas. My reading of Gandhi's education ideas is that towards the end of his writings Gandhi was pushing for a deschooled society, My colleague is attempting to set up open learning centres and I help him to design processes where we encourage the community to take charge of their own education. We question the notion of who can teach – why does one only have to learn from the teacher? what should be the curriculum? should the village decide what its children should learn or let the government decide?
Where do you think Gandhi is today? In this capitalistic environment, how does one begin to speak of Gandhi? Our starting point is that as the various crises mount, people will be more accepting to explore change and understand that business as usual is not going to work. And then they will explore alternatives to the current system. Therefore we have to keep these lighthouses alive -who were and are singing a different tune. Share their stories. Amplify their voice. For example, there is a fresh wave of interest in reviving vernacular architecture. I meet several young people in my course of work who have trained or are offering courses related to natural building material. See the work by Thannal (http://thannal.com/) for instance. To me this is very Gandhian as it talks of promoting local, contextual, ecological, democratic , technology that Gandhi always advocated for and imparts skills without a reliance of a university or technical college,. To me this is the New- nai talim!
An equally outstanding contribution to the conference was Dr. Zakir Hussain's thoughtful address on the place of work in education. "Work has its own ideals," he said. "It is not an amusement or a sport, it is activity quickened by a purpose. There must be in it a desire to do full justice to that purpose, and therefore a willingness to submit to the natural discipline of materials, methods and tools. It demands self-criticism that is unsparing, but it holds out the promise of a joy that none other can excel.
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