after India

Just two observations about our students as we lose the lights of India:

 

1)      My family and I went to Kathikali performances on successive nights and by unlikely (so the director at the second performance assured me) coincidence happened to see the same scene performed by two different companies.  Both were astonishing—the form belies everything I’ve tended to assume about drama, in spite of my having received good, relevant tutelage by folks who know better, and I’ll need to start over, in a way, now—so that the most apparent difference was between the two audiences.  Our students, confronted with something new and, to most of our eyes, very strange, with all kinds of baffling cues about gender, language, and bodily movement, both behaved well and clearly got it.  The next night, a crowd of French adults whistled and hooted and misbehaved and clearly hadn’t a clue what they were seeing. 

2)      Tonight the usual post-port “reflection” was a bit different from the usual: we had an hour beforehand in which students and faculty presented work they’d done in India, and then the usual “sharing” that happens on most such nights at 8 PM was replaced by small group discussion.  The students were very impressive at both—none more so, clearly, than the “gap year” student who (I’ll not name her here because I haven’t asked her permission) under the auspices of a Presidential scholarship is doing research on women’s issues in the various reports and gave a powerful talk about her interviews in India with victims of sex trafficking. It was the kind of serious undergraduate work one would hope would go on in a program like this.

 

At the end of the first session there was a splendid exchange between two members of our faculty, John Downing and Chandra Ranade, about the value of “anecdotes”—which are, after all, the best we sometimes muster, any of us, students or faculty, during these short visits—and about how they can lead, under the best of circumstances, to further research.  We none of us, those of us (like I) who stayed in Kerala and others who traveled far, saw much of India.  But we all saw enough to bring something back, to bring something to bear.  The headline in Wednesday’s Hindu, reporting on a new census, reads, “Half of India’s homes have cellphones, not toilets.”  How do these things happen?  How do they get undone, improved?  One way, I suppose, is that someone says, “This is so,” and some others then say—John Downing talked about Naipaul and the million mutinies—“This must change.”  And a long time after, maybe, something different this way comes.  One way to hear the “This is so” would be to ask a student.  It’s best when it comes from them.