I have been monitoring, even if peripherally, the rise and rise of the new genre of so-called ‘swamiji’ schools for quite sometime while setting about attaining the prime objective of this publication, which is to build the pressure of public opinion to make education the No.1 item on the national agenda. But recently while listening to a book reading in Bangalore by Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul, I experienced a Pauline revelation that the emergence from obscurity of a large and growing number of culturally rooted swamiji schools and institutions of learning within the education sector is a culturally confident assertion of identity phenomenon. For centuries, perhaps millennia, thousands of ancient religious maths or trusts governed by holy men and seers steeped in the learning of ancient India and its carefully preserved cultural and spiritual traditions, have been unobtrusively providing a modicum of education and spiritual solace to the neglected majority in rural India. But with yoga, ayurveda, meditation and Indian spiritualism and cuisine beginning to be acknowledged and appreciated around the fast-globalising new world, the modest seers and saints who manage the maths and trusts have felt sufficiently confident to offer their unique blend of eastern spiritualism and philosophies and tried and tested western pedagogies to urban Indians and children of the Indian diaspora.
Reared in a boarding school promoting soft Christianity and in the Nehruvian tradition of disdain for organised religion, writing this cover story has offered me valuable new insights. For one it has forced me to reappraise the Nehruvian definition of secularism of strict separation of church and state, in favour of the propagation of anti-communalism. I have newly learned that tolerance — perhaps even celebration — of religious and communal diversity rather than deracinated Nehruvian secularism, is the spiritual and cultural tradition of India’s ancient civilisation which has endured the thousand unnatural shocks and invasions it has suffered in the past millennia. Therefore the emergence of the new genre of soft hindutva or swamiji education institutions which project the acceptable liberal face of Hinduism is perhaps the best antidote to the communal poison which is being spread by the lunatic fringe of militant Hinduism.
Meanwhile being at the receiving end of a thousand unnatural shocks and injustices also seems to be the natural and inalterable condition of women citizens and the girl child in this democratic, socialist, secular and unwarrantedly self-righteous republic. But our won’t-be-put-down Lucknow-based correspondent Puja Rawat’s special report indicates that some new initiatives in women’s education offer a sliver of hope of a better future for the nation’s grievously short-changed women citizens.
 |
| - |