telugu caduv'atanna telikaga jucu
t'aangla pathalsalal'andu galadu.

That's how it is, they take Telugu lightly
In all those English schools.

~ Chellapilla Venkata Sastry
When all of his contemporaries were quoting Shelley, Keats, and Eliot, Vishwanadha Satyanarayana garu spoke of Indian aesthetics of rasa, aucitya, vakrokti and dhvani and quoted from Abhinvagupta, Mammata, etc., in defiance of every modern literary convention.
Sanjay Subramanyam describes how by the turn of the 20th century, the life of a Telugu teacher became miserable. "His general image was of a fossilized, unimaginative individual who somehow had instant access to old books, but lacked the intelligence to study any modern subject."
Interestingly, the Telugu pandit lost the status at a time when Telugu was being extolled as a great language and the Telugu middle class agitated for a distinct identity from Tamils, says Sanjay Subrahmanyan.
Marginalization of Sanskrit and Telugu, argues Subrahmanyam, created a new class of intellectuals who thought that the old texts belonged to an age of ignorance. Instead, they started a practice of quoting such texts with a sprinkle of English from their orientalist translations.
Satyanarayan garu met the criticism of his contemporaries with his formidable scholarship, mixed with monumental imagination. He even argued that it was the English education, that had made Telugu poets and intellectuals lose their heritage and traditional excellence.
This is what Satyanarayana garu wrote to answer his critics who had questioned him on writing his six-volume Ramayana Kalpavrkshamu (Ramayana, The Heavenly Tree).
Vishwanadha Satyanarayana, writes Sanjay Subrahmanyam, was too modern to be outdated and too outdated to be modern. For a half-century, he walked the Telugu literacy scene like a four-hundred-pound gorilla in the living room who could not be ignored.

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More from @Anuraag_Shukla

23 Jul
The leaders of HSRA circulated a manifesto at the Lahore Congress session in December 1929. The manifesto contained blistering attacks against the 'compromising policy' of Gandhi and the Congress leadership.
"Mahatma Gandhi is great and we mean no disrespect to him if we express our emphatic disapproval of the methods advocated by him for our country's emancipation. To us, the Mahatma is an impossible visionary."
"Non-violence may be a noble ideal, but it is a thing of the morrow. We can be situated as we are, never hope to win freedom by mere non-violence.

All talk of peace may be sincere, but we, of the slave nation, cannot, and must not, be led away by such false ideology."
Read 8 tweets
22 Jul
The Marxist historians in the history writing projects (as a statist exercise) ensured that work by historians like Radha Kumud Mookerji was either delegitimized (by labeling them as nationalists) or their memory completely obliterated (by dropping their work from the syllabus).
As a historian of Ancient India, Radha Kumud Mookerji started his career by joining the newly established National Council of Education, while teaching at the Bengal National College. After 1915, he embarked on a series of tenures at universities in Benares, Mysore, and Lucknow.
His work not only received unequivocal praise from his academic fraternity, for being so detailed despite the vastness of the subject but was also equally popular among students who were then studying in the central/state government-run universities.
Read 5 tweets
21 Jul
~ Sri Aurobindo and Educating the Mind
The instrument of the educationist is the mind or antaḥkaraṇa, which consists of 4 layers. The reservoir of past mental impressions, the citta or storehouse of memory, which must be distinguished from the specific act of memory, is the foundation on which other layers stand.
The passive memory or citta needs no training, it is automatic and naturally sufficient to its task; there is not the slightest object of knowledge coming within its field which is not secured, placed, and faultlessly preserved in that admirable receptacle.
Read 10 tweets
19 Jul
"Within hours of arriving at the school, Dzabahe was told not to speak her own Navajo language. The leather skirt her mother had sewn for her and the beaded moccasins were taken away and bundled in plastic, like garbage."

nytimes.com/2021/07/19/us/…
"She was given a dress to wear and her long hair was cut- something that is taboo in Navajo culture.

Before she was sent to the dormitory, one more thing was taken: her name. Image
But for many Indigenous people in Canada and the United States, the nightmare was never forgotten. Instead, the discoveries are a reminder of how many living Native Americans were products of an experiment in forcibly removing children from their families and culture. Image
Read 9 tweets
11 Jul
~ Colonial India in Children’s Literature

In Rudyard Kipling’s “The Undertakers” (1895), a mugger (crocodile) proudly recounts to a crane and a jackal how his reputation as “murderer, man-eater, & local fetish” was established among the local population of an Indian
village.
However, the Mugger of Mugger-Ghat acknowledges that his reputation as “the demon of the ford” had taken a severe beating once a railway bridge had been built across the river by the British.
He was unable to prey on people crossing the river by boat because most of them now used the gleaming new bridge. As Mugger says: “Since the railway bridge was built my people at my village have ceased to love me, and that is breaking my heart”.
Read 8 tweets
10 Jul
~ Sri Aurobindo on Teaching ~

A very remarkable feature of modern training is its practice of teaching by snippets.

Much of the shallowness, discursive lightness, and fickle mutability of the average modern mind is due to the vicious principle of teaching by snippets.
The first attention of the teacher must be given to the medium and the instruments, and, until these are perfected, to multiply subjects of regular instruction is to waste time and energy.
~ child as a pedagogy ~

Every child is a lover of interesting narratives, a hero-worshipper, and a patriot. Appeal to these qualities in her and through them, let her master the knowledge.
Read 10 tweets

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