Birth of a patriot

At the time of Don David Hewavitharne (Anagarika Dharmapala)’s birth 150 years ago, there were no Buddhist places of worship in Colombo. Devout Buddhists had to go to the Kelaniya Viharaya 10 miles north of the city on full-moon poya days for their religious observances; the only other viharaya was at Ratmalana, 7 miles south of Colombo, where the learned Buddhist monk Walane Nahimi (Nahimi=Chief Monk) lived. Neither were there any schools for the education of Buddhist children; there were only a few schools even for the secular education of the Sinhala speaking children; Buddhists’ attempts to establish schools for their children were discouraged on various pretexts. This is mentioned in the Anagarika’s short autobiography in English ‘My Life Story’ (edited and completed from the author’s diaries and other writings by Lakshman Jayawardane, Media Advisor, Maha Bodhi Society of Sri Lanka, in 2013). The deplorable situation of the Buddhist Sinhalese in the capital city of their native land was indicative of the almost total sweeping away of the traditional Sinhalese Buddhist culture of the country by the successive tsunamis of Portuguese, Dutch and British invasions. Fortunately today this is not more than a bitter memory in our national consciousness, which, however, will remain indelible for a long time to come.

Let bygones be bygones, some people may murmur. True, generally we must. But certain past injustices in the form of racial and religious discrimination that we suffered under foreign occupation are worth remembering for properly appreciating the freedoms we Sri Lankans of diverse ethnicities, religions, and cultures enjoy today without discrimination in this common homeland of ours; recalling the sordid iniquities we were subjected to by foreign intruders, and the commemoration of the visionary leaders who made emancipation from them a reality, are as cogently necessary for preventing new forms of barbarism from destroying our freedom and wellbeing again.

Under the earlier Dutch rulers, Buddhists had been compelled to declare themselves as Christians. The British enforced the same law for 70 years until they were compelled to abrogate it in 1884.The American colonel Henry Steel Olcott had it repealed by making representations to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in London on behalf of the Buddhists of Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Children born of Buddhist parents in Colombo at that time had to be taken to a Christian church for the minister there to record the names of the parents, and the dates of birth of the babies who were given Christian names by him. In territories under European occupation including Colombo most Sinhalese were given an English Christian name and a Portuguese surname if they were Catholic ‘converts’ or an English Christian name and a Sinhalese surname if they were ‘converted’ to Anglicanism. The majority of the Sinhalese in these areas were ashamed or afraid to own themselves to be Buddhists. Only those in the interior villages were relatively free to observe the religion of their forefathers without hindrance. Even there they were not free from the attacks of thousands of catechists who went about disparaging and disgracing the Buddhist faith for twenty rupees a month. Buddhist boys and girls were peremptorily taught bible tracts and subliminally influenced to turn against their own religion.

In these bleak circumstances, the members of the Sangha also degenerated spiritually and intellectually. But there were a few notable exceptions who were devout, disciplined, and learned and who somehow managed to keep the weakly flickering flame of the Buddha Dhamma alive. It was some of these bhikkhus who did much to save the day for the Buddhists. In 1873, in response to hostile Christian activism against Buddhists in the form of proselytizing activities through the school system and the publication and distribution of books and pamphlets in the vernaculars among the non-Christians, one of these monks, Ven. Mohottiwatte/Migettuwatte Gunananda Thera, challenged the Christians to defend their faith at a debate. This challenge was accepted by the Christian clergy. The debate took place as arranged by mutual consent. It concluded with a decisive victory to the Buddhist monk. The debate received wide coverage in the press, and it was news of this that attracted here theosophists Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky who were instrumental in initiating a long overdue re-awakening of Buddhist education in the country. The young Dharmapala was a lad of 15 when they arrived in Colombo in 1880, and he accompanied them as their translator on their travels across the island.

The imperialists made every attempt to teach the children to be ashamed of and disown their own race, religion, language, culture, and the colour of their skin. In the case of Don Hewavitharne, he had to be admitted to the Pettah Roman Catholic School (also known as St Mary’s School), where he remained from age 6 to 10 years. The reason for this was that around 1870 the government closed all Buddhist Temple schools in the country because children attending these places of instruction were found by a government-appointed commission “to be too loyal to the traditions of old Ceylon” (which most probably meant that they were difficult to convert). After 1870, therefore, Sinhalese Buddhist children were denied an opportunity to receive any religious instruction in a school unless they got it at home. Chances of their getting any secular education were also few, because the government said that they had not enough money to establish schools for Sinhalese children. Meanwhile the Christian missionaries opened their schools throughout the island. Their real motives were candidly revealed later to David by Warden Miller of St Thomas’ College in Colombo which he attended after receiving his primary education in the Roman Catholic school mentioned above, when he told him: “We don’t come to teach you English, but we come to Ceylon to convert you”. His parents, meanwhile, saw to it that he had a normal Buddhist training at home. Even as a child he knew that he owed no allegiance to the Christian religion. When the Catholic Bishop Hilarian Sillani visited the school, the young David was asked to kneel to kiss the ring on the clergyman’s finger as the other children were required to do; but he refused to obey.

Buddhist parents in Colombo at that time had no choice but to be content with either a government or a missionary school for their children. David’s parents chose the second for him. It was as a result of this that he was admitted, at age six, to the Pettah Roman Catholic School (St Mary’s School). At this school he became a favourite with the padres (fathers) because of his good behavior and his studious disposition. He used to take flowers from his father’s garden to the school to decorate the altars there on feast days and he also took part in the church services. The padres treated the Buddhist children kindly, but they also constantly ridiculed and insulted the Buddhist religion which was their proud heritage, saying such things as “Look at your mud image. You are worshipping clay”. Some impressionable young boys, thus humiliated, got converted to Christianity, but David never turned away from the Buddhist training he had had at home. After leaving St Mary’s School at ten, he passed through a number other schools, first in a Sinhalese medium school learning Sinhalese and then in St Benedict’s Institute, submitting himself to further instruction in Christianity. In 1879, when he was 15, he found admission to ‘St. Thomas Collegiate’ (as he calls it), where he remained until 1883. It was during this time that David Hewavitharne came in touch with Buddhist bhikkhus (there were not many in Colombo then) and eventually with theosophists Colonel Olcott and Madame Blavatsky mentioned above.

David Hewavitharne had to leave St. Thomas’ College in 1883, even before passing the London Matriculation examination because his father didn’t want his son to go to a Christian school after the Catholic riots of March 1883: some fanatical Catholics attacked a peaceful Buddhist procession that was passing St Lucia’s Church in Kotahena. Ven. Migettuwatte Thera who had taken part in the Panadura Debate was living at a temple in Kotahena at that time, but this had no connection with the incident.

Anagarika Dharmapala began his career of selfless service to his people and religion in these circumstances. He was not a Buddhist fanatic or a Sinhalese racist, but a patriot who bravely stood up to defend his people and their religion from religious fanatics and foreign racists. The Temperance Movement he initiated around the turn of the last century later metamorphosed into an eventually successful national agitation for independence drawing into its ranks many patriots that his example had inspired. (First published in The Island on 20th September 2014; slightly edited)

"Who is Malala?"

The man was wearing a peaked cap and had a handkerchief over his nose and mouth as if he had flu. He looked like a college student. Then he swung himself onto the tailboard at the back and leaned in right over us. ‘Who is Malala?’ he demanded No one said anything, but several of the girls looked at me. I was the only girl with my face not covered. That’s when he lifted up a black pistol. I later learned it was a Colt 45. Some of the girls screamed. Moniba tells me I squeezed her hand My friends say he fired three shots, one after another. The first went through my left eye socket and out under my left shoulder. I slumped forward onto Moniba, blood coming from my left ear, so the other two bullets hit the girls next to me. One bullet went into Shazia’s left hand. The third went through her left shoulder and into the upper right arm of Kainat Riaz. My friends later told me the gunman’s hand was shaking as he fired. (From the Prologue to ‘I AM MALALA’)

‘I AM MALALA – The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban’ (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2013) is the autobiography of the brave Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai written in collaboration with British journalist Christina Lamb. The book is dedicated ‘To all the girls who have faced injustice and been silenced. Together we will be heard.’ It was released a year ago in October 2013. Malala was shot by a cowardly Taliban gunman on 09 October 2012 when she was just 15. It is two years since then. Today Malala is 17 and is in the forefront of world attention as an intrepid campaigner for education for girls, human rights for women, and tolerance in a male-dominated society and culture. Sadly but not surprisingly, she is still being targeted by the Taliban. It would be opportune to have a brief look at the story of her life and work to date, though it is early in what looks like the evolving career of a burgeoning female politician who shows great promise of making an immense contribution towards creating a Pakistan where women are truly emancipated and where their human potential is realized to the fullest for the benefit of the whole society, thereby setting an example for the rest of the world.

Malala was born to parents Ziauddin Yousafzai and Tor Pekai in Mingora, the biggest town and the only city (as she describes it) in the Swat district of Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province on June 12, 1997. Swat is a place steeped in cultural history. It had been conquered by Alexander the Great in 327 BCE; Buddhism arrived there in the second century CE, and Islam in the 11th . Their house was in Gulkada (‘place of flowers’), but earlier it had been called ‘Butkara’ ‘the place of the Buddhist statues’. Now the Swat valley is strewn with the ruins of some 1,400 Buddhist monasteries, which had stood along the river Swat according to the records of ancient Chinese travelers. Malala is proud of her native place. It is paradise on earth, she says, a place of beauty, peace and tranquility that even the Buddha visited according to many stories and there is a giant stupa in the valley where some of his ashes are enshrined. (Swat was a Buddhist kingdom before its ancient culture was wiped out by invaders.) She studied in a private school founded by her father, registered under the name Khushal School. But the society she was born into did not normally set great store by an educated womanhood. Malala understood this from her own mother Tor Pekai’s experience. Pekai had started going to school at age six with the apparent approval of her family including her father and brothers. But she was the only girl in a school for boys. Tor Pekai’s sisters had no interest in going to school. They stayed home and played while she was at school. Tor Pekai envied them. She stopped going to school even before the first term was over. Her father didn’t seem to have taken any notice of it. That was the level of his interest in his daughter’s education! Where Malala was born it was customary to hold a woma celebration at the end of one week after the birth of a child, to which friends and neighbours were invited to share the family’s joy at the arrival of the new baby. (‘Woma’ means seventh, Malala explains.) Her parents didn’t have the money to buy the goat and rice they needed for the feast. Her grandfather (‘baba’, her father’s father) didn’t help them out because Malala was only a girl, not a boy! So they didn’t have a woma for her. But when Malala’s brother was born next to her, the old man wanted to give her father money to hold the woma, but he flatly refused to accept it. Ziauddin, Malala’s father, is a Pakistani activist who wants to promote democracy in his country, eliminate discrimination against women, and improve educational opportunities for all. So, naturally he is a critic of the Taliban.

Maulana Fazlullah (b. 1974), aka Mullah Radio or Radio Mullah, was the leader of the Taliban in the Swat valley. He wanted to enforce Sharia in Pakistan with the help of some 4500 militants he commanded by late 2007. Fazlullah exploited the earthquake on October 8, 2005 that left Mingora largely unaffected but devastated neighbouring Kashmir and the northern parts of Pakistan to drive fear into the poor people who listened to him saying that it was due to the wrath of God over their sins. Malala asked her father: ‘Is he right, Aba?’ ‘No, Jani’, he replied. ‘He is just fooling people’. (‘Jani’ means ‘dear one’.)

Fazlullah set up a ‘parallel government’ in some villages in the Swat valley, and tried to enforce Sharia law by establishing Islamic courts. He also launched an illegal local FM radio channel (hence his nickname) to broadcast his message. Initially people supported him both morally and materially. Fazlullah had his men attack music shops for the ‘eradication of sins’; he opposed the anti-polio the vaccination program in his area arguing that the aid workers were engaged in proselytizing Muslims in the region under cover of social work; he also opposed female franchise and education.

On behalf of the Swat Council of Elders Malala’s father Ziauddin, at seminars and on the media, daily challenged Maulana Fazlullah: ‘What are you doing? He would ask. ‘You are playing havoc with our lives and our culture’. He told his daughter: ‘If you have a headache and tell the doctor you have a stomach ache, how can the doctor help? You must speak the truth. The truth will abolish fear’.

In 2008, the Taliban had started attacking girls’ schools in the Swat valley. The young Malala (only 11 then) went with her father and his friend Fazal Maula with his daughter to Peshawar for a BBC Urdu talk show, where Muslim Khan was due to represent the Taliban. But Muslim Khan was not there in person in the studio. Malala challenged: ‘How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?’ There was no response from the Taliban representative because his phone interview had been pre-recorded. Later Ziauddin laughed and said to his daughter that she should go into politics. ‘Even as a toddler you talked like a politician’, he teased her. Malala writes: ‘Our words were like the eucalyptus blossoms of spring tossed away on the wind. The destruction of schools continued.’ On the night of October 7, 2008 the Sangota Convent School for girls and the Excelsior School for boys were blown up using IEDs (improvised explosive devices); fortunately, the two schools had been evacuated as they had received threats earlier. Through these and other atrocities ‘The Taliban bulldozed our Pashtun values and the values of Islam’.

Malala tried to distract herself ‘by reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which answered big questions such as how the universe began and whether time could run backwards. I was only eleven years old and already I wished it could.’

It was on January 3, 2009 that the first entry of her ‘The Diary of Gul Makai’ under the title ‘I AM AFRAID’ appeared on the BBC Urdu website. (‘Gul Makai’ or ‘Grief-stricken’ was her pen name.) Once she wrote about the burqa: ‘When you are very young, you love the burqa because it’s great for dressing up. But when you are made to wear it, that’s a different matter. Also it makes walking difficult’. Referring to an incident involving her wearing a burqa while shopping with her mother and a cousin in the Cheena Bazaar, she wrote: ‘When we entered the shop we were going to, the shopkeeper laughed and told us he got scared thinking we might be suicide bombers as many suicide bombers wore the burqa’.

People often warned them that the Taliban might kill Ziauddin, but not his daughter saying, ‘even Taliban don’t kill children’. This is what Malala also believed, although they had issued a death threat against her. She, in fact, feared for the life of her father because of his anti-Taliban activism. Yet, they all had misjudged the character of the Taliban terrorists. They were proved wrong in crediting them with enough humanity not to kill children for their macabre cause. At the time of Malala’s shooting, ironically, her mother was crossing the doorway into her school for her first lesson since she had left school at age six on a newly started adult education programme.

Usman the driver of the school van drove it with the injured girls at top speed to the Swat Central Hospital. From there the critically injured Malala was flown by helicopter to a military hospital. A CT scan showed one bullet lodged very close to her brain. So it had been a close shave for her. She was put into an induced coma. While she was thus fighting for life the Taliban issued a statement admitting responsibility for the attack: Ehsanullah Ehsan the Taliban spokesman said: ‘Malala has been targeted because of her pioneer role in preaching secularism … She was young but she was promoting Western culture in Pashtun areas. She was pro-West; she was speaking against the Taliban; she was calling President Obama her idol’. This was a reference to something Malala had said in one of the many TV interviews she had done before. Fazlullah had ordered the attack on the girl two months earlier. ‘Anyone who sides with the government against us will die at our hands…’ He said they had used local Swati men to gather information on my movements between home and school, and they had chosen a place near an army checkpoint to show they could strike anywhere.

From the army hospital Malala was flown to Birmingham for further treatment. There, after being taken out of her medically induced coma, she was subjected to multiple surgeries in one of which a facial nerve had to be repaired in order to cure a paralysis of the left side of her face. There was no severe brain damage. She woke up on October 16, one week after the shooting. Arrangements were made for Malala’s family to be brought to UK where they are resident now. After recovery, she was admitted to a school in Birmingham in 2013. She gave a speech at the United Nations on June 12th the same year , her 16th birthday (which is available on the You Tube). When she addressed the UN Assembly there were only 400 people sitting around her, she writes: ‘… but when I looked out I imagined millions more.’ She told herself: ‘This is your chance Malala’. She says she didn’t write the speech only with the UN delegates in mind. ‘I wrote it for every person around the world who could make a difference. I wanted to reach all people living in poverty, those children forced to work and those who suffer from terrorism or lack of education. Deep in my heart I hoped to reach every child who could take courage from my words and stand up for his or her rights.’ Malala was wearing one of Benazir Bhutto’s white shawls over her favourite pink shalwar kamiz and called on the world leaders to ‘provide free education to every child in the world’. ‘Let’s pick up our books and our pens’, she said, ‘They are our most powerful weapons. One child, one teacher, one book, and one pen can change the world’. The audience gave her a standing ovation.

On October 10, 2013, in recognition of her work the European Parliament awarded her the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2013, but she didn’t get it. Last year the prize was awarded to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) for their work in Syria. Malala was again nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for this year for ‘her tireless commitment to education, women’s rights and tolerance. And she got it this time. She is the youngest person to win the prize in its history.

At present Malala is living and attending school in England. She has set up her organization ‘The Malala Fund’: ‘My mission, our mission, demands that we act decisively to educate girls and empower them to change their lives and communities’.

'Dilip Kumar - The Substance and the Shadow': the life story of a living legend

‘DILIP KUMAR – The Substance and the Shadow’ (2014) published about three months ago by Hay House India is the autobiography of legendary Hindi cinema actor Dilip Kumar (born Yusuf Khan) who is approaching his 92nd birth day. The book entered the Amazon best seller list within two weeks of its publication. Award winning film journalist Udayatara Nayar, a close friend of Dilip Kumar and his wife actress Saira Banu, has put into book form the actor’s life story as related to her by him. It is an authentic account of his long journey in life from his unremarkable childhood as the fourth in a large family of twelve children (six boys and six girls) to dizzying heights of achievement and fame as a film actor.

As Udayatara says in her introduction to the book, the idea of writing the biography was conceived in 2004. One warm afternoon in Mumbai’s midsummer that year, she was helping Saira to arrange the books in the bookshelf in her bedroom. This bookshelf contained a good stock of books of fiction and works of poetry in English and Urdu. Dilip is known to be an avid reader. Picking up a book written by an author who claimed to have known him better than any one else, Dilip told Saira, “This is supposed to be my biography and it is full of distortions and misinformation”. Saira seized the opportunity to repeat her frequent suggestion to her husband that he write his own biography as “India’s first ever superstar and one of the world’s greatest actors”. “All right, I will narrate my story”, Dilip said in reply, “It has to be compiled by someone who is enlightened and ready to put in the hard work that goes into anything I do and it should be someone who knows us really well”. Then Saira said, pointing to Udayatara, “She is right here”. That’s how Ms Nayar was assigned the exacting task of compiling Dilip Kumar’s autobiography.

The assignment was a rare opportunity for Udayatara to realize a lifelong dream. Dilip Kumar is an extremely private person who is “not always comfortable talking about himself and his unequalled achievements”. It was an achievement for her to be invited to write his biography. She thinks it was a dream come true. Her introduction concludes with a retrospective reference to some encouraging words about her that “Dilip Sahab” spoke to S.S. Pillai, editor of the cinema magazine ‘Screen’, after she wrote a long analytical article about him early in her career as a film journalist. (I learnt from the Wikipedia, that S.S. Pillai was Udaya Tara’s paternal uncle, though she doesn’t mention this fact in the book.) Dilip had said to him: “Groom her, make her work hard and she will go places. She has the potential to become a biographer someday”. After nearly half a century of her association with the star couple, Udayatara believes that his words have proved prophetic.

The book comprises twenty-five chapters plus a separate section for ‘Reminiscences’ which accounts for about a quarter of the volume in length. There are forty-three ‘Reminiscences’ which are from a wide range of admirers including such idols of the film world as Amitabh Bacchan, Dharmendra, Amir Khan, Nimmi, Waheeda Rehman, Lata Mangeshkar, Vyjayanthimala and Sharmila Tagore, and Dilip’s nephews and nieces, and their children, and even from his longtime personal dhobi (washer -man) Pyarelal, who all express genuinely felt admiration of the iconic personality of Dilip.

Dilip dedicates the book to “Amma and Aghagi”. What strikes the reader in the opening chapters is his great love for and strong attachment to his mother, Ayesha Begum, and his awe and admiration of his father Mohammad Sarwar Khan who, apparently, with his impressive physique was a commanding presence in his childhood and youth. But he was a loving kindhearted man. He writes on p. 169: “I loved Amma deeply. She was the fountainhead of all the merits and virtues we – her children – possessed. She dealt with all the exigencies of life with a quiet poise and calmness of mind”. But it was the authoritarian matriarch, his paternal grandmother, he calls ‘Dadi’, who ruled the large household in his childhood. She doted on him, adored him, in spite of the fact that he was not a single grandson, but just one of six. Dilip was exceptionally good-looking as a child.

(On reading these first few pages, I found what looked like a certain obsessive preoccupation with his own looks, and began to suspect that he is as narcissistic as his friend Dev Anand obviously is in his self-written autobiography ‘Romancing with Life’. But reading on convinced me that I was mistaken in my conjecture. His attractive physical features are undeniably there, and it is a fact he humbly mentions; it is a gift of nature that was an asset in his profession. Apart from mere good looks, there definitely is enough ‘substance’ in Yusuf Khan that justifies the larger than life celluloid ‘shadow’ by which Dilip Kumar is known to the world.)

‘Dadi’ treated him as an extraordinary child because the night (11th of wintry December) that “Ayesha’s handsome son Yousuf arrived” it was freezing cold, but on the same night there was a huge fire in the Kissa Khwani Bazaar (in Peshawar), his birth place, that gutted the goldsmiths’ workshops. On top of this, one day a wandering fakir who came to their house seeking alms, fixed his eyes on the cherubic Yusuf and told the old woman that he was born for unparalleled achievements and great fame, and that he would be handsome even in his old age, and that he should be protected from the world’s evil eye; for this he recommended that he be disfigured with black soot! So the superstitious grandmother shaved Yusuf’s head and defaced him with soot as recommended by the fakir before he was sent to school. Yusuf had to endure being made fun of by his schoolmates. It took some time and great persuasion by other elders including his Amma to save the little Yusuf from this daily humiliation that was brought on him by his doting but domineering Dadi.

Dilip’s Amma was a beautiful woman according to him; she was fair, frail and petite. She was very kind and loving. She did all the cooking for the large family and looked after all their needs in spite of there being servants. But towards the end of her life she suffered from severe attacks of asthma. Little Yusuf used to trail his mother all the time, sometimes unknown to her. There is the story of how, once while stalking his mother thus, he accidentally got shut up in a room alone with the corpse of a murdered neighbour.

From Peshawar in the North Western Frontier Province Mohammad Sarwar Khan moved to the hilly station of Deolali (180 km from Mumbai in Maharashtra) with his large young family in the mid 1930’s (This was pre-partition India) because the prospects for his business were better there. As the children were growing up Mohammad Sarwar was able to provide for the family with ease, but later life became difficult. It seems that of the boys only Yusuf proved to be of some help to the parents. Dilip had a good school education at Deolali and in Bombay. After leaving school, he found employment in an army canteen in Pune, where he earned some extra money through a sandwich business. It was by accident that he was spotted by Devika Rani, an actress and wife of Himanshu Rai, owner of the film company Bombay Talkies, who introduced him to the industry.

But his survival and success in the industry were not left to chance. Perfection, ceaseless hard work, and commitment to his profession have been characteristic of Dilip Kumar since the beginning. He is the most conscientious, most socially conscious, most professional cine artiste I have read about. Readers of ‘The Substance and the Shadow’, I am sure, will make a similar assessment of him as an entertainer par excellence who is acutely aware of a moral responsibility to the society. And he has been socially engaged all along, despite his having had to contend with a certain amount of prejudice, which is not unusual in a large country like India. By being equally celebrated in his native India and in the neighbouring country Pakistan, he is a symbol of Indo-Pak solidarity: he is the superstar that both countries jointly claim. The major portion of the book deals with the professional side of the actor’s life.

Dilip Kumar’s private life is much less glamorous than his professional life. Though he is the fourth child in the family, he had to assume the role of a single parent for his siblings after the death of his mother and father. He provided them with the means to obtain their education in India and abroad as they wanted. He married off the sisters. He himself put off his marriage because of his desire to see all his sisters settled before him. Many people raised their eye brows when he married Saira Banu in 1966 who was half his age (he was 44, and she only 22). But when we read the details of the story, it strikes us as natural as it is interesting.

It appears that they were born for each other. For many fans of Dilip and Saira, their marriage was something they never looked forward to. The celebrated Madhubala-Dilip romance was still fresh in their minds. When we read the special chapter on Madhubala (Chapter 13, p. 166-171), we understand why they had to break up; both lovers emerge as innocent victims of Madhubala’s despotic as well as mercenary father Ataullah’s scheming. It is clear that Saira looked at that past of Dilip’s life with understanding and kindness. Soon after their marriage in 1966, Dilip got a call from Madhubala for an urgent meeting with her at her home. By that time she was ill and bed-ridden. He told Saira about this. Saira at once insisted that he should go to see her because it had to be something that distressed her. So Dilip went to Madhubala’s house. It was some personal problem she wanted him to advise her on. He says she seemed satisfied with what he said in response. She looked frail and weak. She managed her “magnificent, impish smile” with an effort. Madhubala was happy to see Dilip. She said, “Our prince has got his princess, I am very happy!” (p.261). Apart from Madhubala’s unquestioning submission to her father’s wishes all the time which “had an adverse impact on her professional reputation but also on her health needlessly”, he had observed a certain fickleness in her romantic alliances: “she certainly would have been drawn to other colleagues in the profession” (p.168). This is something confirmed by Nimmi in her ‘Reminiscences’ (p.413-416). Nimmi,( who is familiar to us Sri Lankans as playing the female lead in the Hindi film ‘Angulimala’ (1960) against Bharat Bhushan the hero), co-starred with Dilip and Madhubala in ‘Amar’ (1954). She says that their break-up was imminent by the end of shooting of ‘Amar’; her suspicion was that Dilip probably came to know about Premnath and Madhubala being more than just friendly co-stars.

Incidentally, Nimmi, in her reminiscences, talks about the premiere of Aan in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) which she attended with Dilip, presumably in 1952. They were co-stars in Aan (1952) which she says was India’s first Technicolor film. The Lankan premiere of the film was one of the biggest according to her. Massive crowds lined the streets from the airport to the hotel where they were accommodated. They were all Dilip Kumar fans; there was mass hysteria, Nimmi remembers. The crowds broke all cordons at the airport and even ignored security restrictions at the hotel to see him. Nimmi says she had never seen anything so maddening.

A star in love

The poet saw

Beauty

The sculptor carved her Image

They named her Venus

We call her Madhubala

- Advertisement for Sharabi (1964), the last of Madhubala’s films to be released in her lifetime, quoted by Khatija Akbar in her book about the late actress

Madhubala (14 February 1933-23 February 1969), was “… the most beautiful of all the heroines in the fairyland of films, with her natural looks, always as fresh as morning dew, sans heavy make-up, false eyelashes, contact lenses or scanty dresses fashioned by designers to impart artificial glamour that would titillate male curiosity…” in the words of the late Dev Anand, Indian cinema’s ‘ever green’ hero in his autobiography ‘Romancing with Life’. She is still hailed as the most ravishing beauty ever to have graced Indian cinema. Born into a conservative Pathan Muslim family in Delhi she was named Mumtaz Jehan Begum Dehlavi at birth. ‘Madhubala’ was the screen name given her by the film industry. Her birth on St. Valentine’s day is often remarked on by those who cherish her memory as symbolic of her life both on screen and in the real world because her ‘heart’ played an abnormally decisive role in it. Khatija Akbar, in her biography of the star ‘I Want to Live’-The Story of Madhubala, (the main source for this article) writes: “Her very birth - on St. Valentine’s day, with a congenital heart disease – lends a mystical touch to the image of a woman who was always a victim of her heart”.

As a versatile actor she was the leading lady in most of the seventy-two films she starred in (in sixty-six of them in fact), some of them based on romances that see no happy ending like Mughal-e-Azam, some celebrating dreamland love sagas where the lovers finally make it after overcoming all obstacles like Barsaat-ki-Raat, and some committed to hilarious comedy like Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi; it seems that in her off-screen life, however, her moments of happiness were far less frequent than those of unhappiness, for she was dogged by ill health all her life, and her real life romance with legendary actor Dilip Kumar (Yusuf Khan) ended in heartbreak coupled with unwarranted ignominy. She was suffering from a heart disorder known as a ‘hole in the heart’ (ventricular septal defect) for which there was no known medical remedy then; her trips to Russia and England in this connection were in vain. Her marriage to eccentric singer actor Kishore Kumar subsequent to her estrangement with Dilip Kumar was a loveless one and a source of much suffering for her. Commenting on her own life, she revealed to a Filmfare journalist assigned to do a feature on her (as quoted by Khatija Akbar):

The sum total of my life is bitter experience which is coiled tight like a spring within my heart and when released hurts excruciatingly. It is true that one learns something from every experience but when the experience is evil, the shock is so great that one feels as though one can never recover from it. I am very emotional. I have always lived my life with my heart. For that I have suffered more than is necessary. I have been hurt.

Nevertheless, the Madhubala-Dilip Kumar affair, though carried on discreetly, out of the limelight, without disturbing too much the actress’s conservative, extremely strict disciplinarian father Ataullah Khan who always made sure that he himself or one or two of her sisters chaperoned her into and out of the studios, was in itself a fascinating story of love. Reminiscing about the affair between Madhubala and Dilip Kumar, Madhur Bhushan, Madhubala’s youngest sister born in 1950 says: “They were made for each other”. But the affair came to an acrimonious end in 1956-7. There was apparently no important reason for the breakup other than, perhaps, that the three characters involved – Dilip, Madhubala, and her father – were Pathans, who, in popular tradition, are credited with an unbending nature.

Strangely, this most famous star couple of the Indian silver screen co-starred in only four films (out of the seventy-two Madhubala acted in): Tarana (1951), Sangdil (1952), Amar (1954), and Mughal-e-Azam (1960).The first has a happy ending while the other three end in different forms of tragedy. The making of the last film took almost ten years. The four movies together, in effect, span the whole of the period of her adult acting career except for Mahal (1949). The inexorable movement from exquisite happiness to abject misery depicted in the dreamworld of cinema through these four films parallels a similar succession of events in her personal life dominated by her romantic relationship with Dilip Kumar. Mahal, which she did at just sixteen with thirty-eight year old veteran actor Ashok Kumar made her a star overnight, but the later Tarana (she did sixteen other films as heroine between Mahal and Tarana) marked the beginning of her masterful portrayal of a love-struck heroine. In the latter movie Madhubala, who was eighteen, was cast against Dilip Kumar, full ten years her senior in age. However, in their affair, it was Madhubala who took the initiative. While on the sets of Tarana she sent her hair-dresser with a rose for Dilip Kumar telling the woman to ask him to accept the flower only if he loved her. Dilip Kumar, amused by such a gesture from his young co-star, accepted the rose as if in play.

It was the case that young Madhubala used to play occasional pranks on her work colleagues. But she was not playing this time; she was actually falling in love with the man. A vivacious young woman who got on well with her fellow artistes she was a bit of a flirt, but her flirtation was meant as innocent fun. She was just a child among her senior colleagues, except Dilip Kumar. Out of the studios, Ashok Kumar said, he always treated her as a ‘kid’. Initially, Madhubala showed some interest in Premnath, but her real love was for Dilip Kumar alone. From her Tarana days up to her death, she loved no man but Dilip Kumar, according to Kaneez Fatima, another of Madhubala’s sisters.

In Tarana, a plane, in which a doctor returning to India after studies in England is travelling, crash-lands in a remote rural area. The doctor (Moti, played by Dilip Kumar) finds shelter in the house of a villager, a blind widower who lives alone with his beautiful young daughter (Tarana, played by Madhubala), who was an unsophisticated but uninhibited village beauty. A discrete affair starts between Moti and Tarana. Moti is able to restore the old man’s sight through surgery. A clandestine meeting between the two lovers unexpectedly leads to a misunderstanding and Moti is beaten up and left for dead. He is found by his family and taken back home. Later, however, after the usual denouement in such a story, he comes back and claims his love. It is a simple love story without any serious message. Madhubala was still establishing her reputation as a talented actor whose performance was natural without a trace of overacting. The experience of actually falling in love with her hero probably made her kind of natural acting even more realistic.

Sangdil tells a different type of story. It is a rough adaptation of Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre. Shankar and Kamla (in the film Dilip Kumar and Madhubala respectively) are childhood lovers who get separated and reunite later as young adults in different circumstances, Kamla as a pujaaran (priestess) and Shankar as a thakur. But when they finally meet for a permanent union,Shankar is blind, having lost his sight in a fire, and Kamla becomes his partner. Her role in the film represented the ideal Indian woman of the time, demure, modest and dutiful, which in her own life, in a way, interfered with her ability to maintain a sufficiently independent relationship with Dilip Kumar. Madhubala had a natural love of acting, singing and dancing. She started her career as a child actor at age nine in 1942 in Basant which became an immediate hit. Her headstrong, hot- tempered father having lost his job in the Imperial Tobacco Company in Delhi had to daily accompany his daughter to the studio instead of finding work for himself. Very soon the little girl assumed the role of the main breadwinner of her large family including her five sisters and father and mother. The conservative disciplinarian Ataullah Khan strictly regulated her career and life. He objected to her affair with Yusuf (Dilip Kumar), and ultimately contributed to their final parting of ways. Madhubala was devoted to her father and family. Her refusal to give up seeing her father any longer as Dilip demanded as a condition of marriage was largely instrumental in putting an end to their relationship. The late Shammi Kapoor who knew Madhubala and her circumstances well, and was fond of her as a friend, also believed that she had to leave her family some day; her not doing so had tragic consequences. But perhaps she was only playing the role of the normal Indian woman.

As she became older and more experienced she understood the value of a more self-assertive and independent attitude as a woman. In a Filmfare feature years later Madhubala said: “As times change, values also appear to alter. Hugging the old values to my heart and unable to adapt myself to people and conditions around me, I have given cause for resentment to many and I myself have experienced much pain.” Amar, which critics thought was clearly ahead of its times in terms of its central theme, gave Madhubala a chance to portray the most complicated role of a mature woman in love that she had had to handle up to that point in her career. Here she is caught up in a tripartite relationship that eventually leads her to a painful sacrifice. Amarnath (Dilip Kumar) is a successful, highly regarded advocate who is involved in an affair with an educated, socially conscious young woman called Anju (Madhubala) who lives with her father in a palatial house. Sonia (Nimmi) is a poor young village girl, a milkmaid, whom Amarnath rapes, succumbing to a momentary impulse. The girl gets pregnant and the disgraced family wants to kill her. When at the end Amarnath confesses to having molested the milkmaid, and accepts responsibility for the crime, Anju leaves her penitent lover allowing him to marry in recompense the woman he had wronged.

In real life, however, when her relationship with Dilip Kumar broke up, Madhubala found it difficult to deal with the devastating frustration she experienced with the same sense of equanimity and courage she portrayed in that film. Khatija Akbar writes: “While Dilip Kumar appeared to emerge relatively unscathed, for Madhubala it was the beginning of the end; the festering wounds she carried never healed. Emotional to a fault, guileless in the bargain, she was not equipped to deal with the shock of the break-up.”

It was in Mughal-e-Azam, her magnum opus, that her screen life almost totally overlapped her real life experience of her romantic entanglement with Dilip Kumar. The film was done after the rift between them. They fulfilled their contract on the film as estranged former lovers. Like Anarkali in the film she found herself stranded between two strong-willed men. The legend of Anarkali is probably not history, but fiction. However, it is good material for creative treatment. It had already been the subject of a number of films by the time director K. Asif decided to make yet another film on it. Prince Salim, son of Akbar the Great, who later succeeded his father as Jahangir Khan, falls in love with the most beautiful dancing girl in the imperial court. Naturally , the Emperor opposes the young prince’s affair with a slave girl. As a result the young man even goes to war against his father. Later, Akbar defeats him in battle and passes the death sentence on him for rebellion. Anarkali, hearing this, emerges from hiding and offers herself for punishment in order to save the prince. Salim is saved, and Anarkali is sentenced to be walled to death (but in this film, Akbar secretly lets her go away to live in another territory). Commentators have said that Madhubala, while playing Anarkali, was living her own real life on the screen. Her superb performance has been unanimously praised by the viewers. In one scene Prince Salim is required to give Anarkali a slap on the cheek. Dilip Kumar delivered this slap with more force than necessary as if in real anger. Madhubala left the set in a huff. The director tried to pacify her saying “This shows that he still loves you”. When Madhubala participated in the memorable love scenes in Mughal-e-Azam with Dilip Kumar, she was not in speaking terms with him, following the breakup. The excellence of her performance, despite apparent lack of personal warmth towards her co-star, is testimony to her professionalism.

Madhubala’s inimitable realism and Dilip Kumar’s passionate intensity in the movies they did together were, no doubt, partly due to their real life experience as lovers. It is as if their private interactions which they tried to keep under wraps from public gaze were played out on the big screen for all the world to see. Anarkali’s bold and defiant public expression of her love for the prince before the Emperor after her release from the dungeon in the dance song “Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya” in Mughal-e-Azam, which is its theme song, comes to mind.

Considering the staid way that the affair progressed over six or seven years, the way it all ended was a shock indeed. Publicity and scandal had been carefully avoided. Madhubala had to endure some troublous attention from film journalists, perhaps a bit more than her fair share of it as a popular star, mainly on account of her stern father who prevented them, quite rightfully, from barging in on her sets while she was at work , which made them murderously angry with her. But this had nothing to with the affair. The fact that despite her father’s opposition the lovers carried on within discrete limits shows that he did not grudge her some privacy and independence as a young woman. It seems, however, that he had no intention of allowing her to marry Dilip Kumar.

On her part, Madhubala had been determined (before the breakup) to marry no other man than Yusuf (Dilip). In an interview with Filmfare she was bold enough to declare: “Nobody in the world has any right to interfere with one’s choice of a husband. I would marry only the man with whom I am very much in love”. Probably she was sure that her father would relent for the sake of her happiness. This was in 1955, and she was only twenty-two. The tragic irony is that the end of her relationship came barely a year later.

Dilip Kumar too had responded positively to Madhubala’s new independent spirit. He got his elder sister to go to Ataullah Khan and ask him to allow Madhubala to marry him, but he refused. When Madhubala had to withdraw from Naya Daur, where earlier she had been signed on to co-star Dilip, because her father objected to his daughter being taken for outdoor shooting in a distant location which he thought was not safe for her, Vyjayanthimala was made to replace her on the film by the producer. Still Dilip wanted to marry Madhubala. He even decided to give all the profits of the film Ganga Jamuna which he produced to Ataullah Khan so that he could marry Madhubala and she could stop working. This proposal was also rejected. Then, Dilip Kumar repeatedly urged Madhubala, in the presence of their senior friend Om Prakash as witness, to marry him that very day in his house where a qazi was waiting to perform the nuptials; but he insisted on one condition: she was to leave her father and not see him again! He said if she didn’t agree to this, he would leave her and never come back again. Madhubala’s reply was that leaving her father was impossible. So Dilip walked out of her life. Though Madhubala later made overtures through a friend to revive the relationship, Dilip Kumar didn’t change his decision.

The Naya Daur case, in 1956, made a revival of the relationship impossible. Ataullah Khan took his daughter away from the film, but refused to return the Rs 30000 B.R. Chopra the producer had initially paid her as advance. Chopra filed a criminal case against father and daughter for breach of contract and cheating, which in fact was thoroughly unfair. When the case was taken up the prosecution was heard to the utter humiliation of the accused. Dilip Kumar gave evidence against them. In the course of being cross examined, he said, “I love Madhubala and will continue to love until the day she dies”, cruelly reversing the conventional lover’s pledge. Meanwhile the accused had a good defence, which they were hopeful of presenting in the next session. Unfortunately, Chopra unilaterally withdrew the case before it was taken up for hearing again, because his film Naya Daur which he did with Dilip and Vyjayanthimala in the lead turned out to be a huge success, and he was no longer interested in recovering the money he lost on account of Madhubala’s father not returning the 30,000 rupees he had paid at the beginning. Madhubala and her father came to an empty courtroom on the day set for the second hearing. Denied a chance to redeem her honour by giving her side of the story, she wept. Her father taunted her: “You say he (Dilip Kumar) loves you. Is this love?”

About ten years after this, in 1966, Madhubala recovered enough of her health to almost complete a new film called Chaalaak , which Raj Kapoor was directing. When Dilip went to see her, she asked for his advice on some matter. She said to him “Would you do another picture with me if I get alright”. Feeling extremely sorry for her, he replied, “Of course, I will do a picture with you. You are going to be alright, you are perfectly alright…”.

For a few days before her death, Madhubala was heard murmuring “God, I don’t want to die. God, let me live…”. But finally, she died. The day she died (23 February 1969) Dilip Kumar was shooting in Madras for A. Bhim Sen’s Gopi. He had felt restless the whole day that day. He heard the news about her death on arriving in Bombay in the evening. When he went to pay his last respects to the woman he had loved and most probably still loved, the funeral was over.

Making the General English Paper Compulsory for A/L Students

Making the General English Paper Compulsory for A/L Students (Previously published in The Island/Sri Lanka) The Higher Education Minister’s decision to make the General English Paper compulsory from this year onwards for all A/L students seeking admission to universities should be hailed as a good initial step in the right direction, i.e., towards ensuring that all our university students whose mother tongue is Sinhala or Tamil acquire a good command of English as a second language to enable them to access the ever expanding reservoir of global human knowledge and culture. Yet, the move is bound to be a controversial one because such a decision is most likely to affect the rural students who are at present faced with a severe scarcity of resources for learning English including teachers. But, according to newspaper reports, the Secretary to the Ministry has offered (what should be considered) a temporary solution: candidates who have been deprived of a chance to learn English can mention that fact in the paper (though it is not clear to me how this information is going to be relevant); and, poor performance at the English test will not affect their prospects of admission to the university. Such concessions are meant to initially prevent students from being put at a disadvantage on account of their lack of English. But before long the compulsoriness of general English language proficiency for all university entrants must be asserted in earnest, for that is what is important. (Since a key concept in this essay is what is known as “a second language” it would be appropriate to offer a widely accepted definition of the term: “A language which is not a person’s mother tongue, but which is learned in order to meet a communicative need…” – David Crystal, The Penguin Dictionary of Language, 1998. We have our extremely well developed indigenous languages for all our communicative needs within the country. However, in the highly globalized world of today we need to be able to communicate with the rest of the world in almost all possible scenarios: education, work, business, science and technology, media, culture and entertainment, diplomacy, and what not. Relevance of English for us is foremost in education. In our particular context, with our historical background, we find English to be the easiest and most useful medium available for global communication. Mastery of English as a second language gives us the ability to function in all the above spheres as well, or nearly as well, as we can in our first language. This is what the patriotic pioneers of language reforms envisaged fifty-five years ago.) The ministerial decision to make the General English Paper compulsory for the A/L is a welcome move because it is predicated on the acknowledgement of the vital importance of English for higher education and global communication in the modern world, which provides a meaningful reason for the students to undertake the ‘hassle’ (as at least some of our students seem to view it) of learning English. To present English in a strictly utilitarian role will make it meaningful to the widest proportion of our student population. Although much English is in evidence in the country – in the media, education, business, banking, science and technology, sports, entertainment industry, and every other sphere of national activity – English as a fully fledged medium of communication is still limited to a small proportion of the population. English words may be freely sprinkled in the conversation of even the remotest village dwellers; in fact, this has been the situation for as long as I can remember, that is, for over fifty years at least, such ‘use’ of English cannot be taken as reflecting a widely prevalent general knowledge of English among the public. This means, in the opinion of many, that English is not so widely used as to assume national status; but the recognition of the fact will not detract from its real importance for us: its importance as a second language. The Higher Education Ministry’s move seems to envisage such a role for English, and this will go down well with the students and their parents from both linguistic communities. With the restoration of Sinhala and Tamil to their due level of prominence (to the status of official languages), English which had been usurping that position was rendered less important for them; not that it had been of very great significance to the majority of the population until then as it was something inaccessible. The change of medium of education from English to the national languages greatly benefited them. Among other things it made a good education attainable to many children regardless of their social class, who had been deprived of that opportunity before. Prior to the introduction of free education, the only kind of education which was of any value was English medium education. But under colonial rule this was restricted to a minuscule privileged class for imperial purposes. Through the central school system that the pioneers of free education initiated, a small proportion of talented rural youth were able to enjoy such an education. Still, English continued to privilege a small minority, and disadvantage the majority of the country’s population. Free education through the English medium for all the children of the country was unthinkable for many reasons. Sinhalese and Tamils with several millennia old sophisticated, highly evolved, and still vibrant literary traditions couldn’t be expected to abandon their own linguistic heritage in favour of an utterly alien language like English even in the course of a few centuries. Although the Higher Education Minister’s decision might smack of a degree of arbitrariness, it will prove beneficial in the long run. The success of the move will, however, depend on its acceptance by the principal stakeholders, the students themselves. It is impossible to believe that they don’t know the value of English. Why is it then necessary to force them to appear for an English test as a minimum requirement at the higher education stage? In fact they have had over ten years of instruction in English at school. Even in the remotest rural schools the students don’t totally lack facilities to learn the language. The failure of students to gain at least an elementary knowledge of English is mainly due to lack of motivation among other causes. Making the subject compulsory is a good way to motivate them. Then the teachers’ work will also be easy. The most effective way to teach any subject including English is to make the learners responsible for their own learning. Students must be made aware of the fact that there is much English around them: TV and radio have English language programmes; there are English language newspapers; there are billboards, posters, banners advertising things or announcing events, etc. Teachers and parents should encourage children to use these resources, without depending too much on school teaching. Learners of English need not entirely depend on books these days because the Internet offers rich resources for learning and practicing English. Therefore, a knowledge of English as a second language is, contrary to popular belief, something well within easy reach of all our students from the kindergarten onwards provided an essential attitudinal change is brought about. Unfortunately, this is not generally recognized. Making English compulsory will push the learners towards an appreciation of this fact. It must be made a compulsory subject from Grade 3 upwards. But we cannot forget the fact that, given our colonial history in which English was associated with power and privilege on the one hand, and oppression and deprivation on the other, it is difficult even today to extricate it from politics. The advantages that accrued to the masses when indigenous languages were promoted as the mediums of instruction can again be nullified by the reintroduction of the English medium, and only an already privileged minority will stand to gain from this. The alleged JVP objections to university students learning English may be due to the threat of a return of the English that had privileged a small minority at the expense of the majority. This should not be ignored by the policy makers. If they can convince the students that this time English is being promoted not with a view to bringing back privilege and attendant injustice, but to make it an equaliser. English becomes a means as well as a mark of privilege and rank when it is allowed to be possessed by only a minority. When it becomes common property, the special advantages that it conferred on some disappear. If all students have gained a good knowledge of English as a second language by the time they reach the A/L, it will enable them to continue their higher education in English as the authorities have decided, especially in subject areas such as science, engineering, medicine, etc where English offers better resources for mastering those subjects than the native tongues. But this should never mean a substitution of English for our native languages.

Is the Spoken English Initiative a Failure?

Is the Spoken English Initiative a Failure? (First published in The Island/Sri Lanka on Friday 11th March 2011) Nearly two weeks ago, I watched for myself what was being achieved in a non-urban school under the English as a Life Skill programme launched by the Presidential Task Force for English and IT. The purpose of this short write-up is to offer the interested readers some comments (for what they are worth) about the initiative based on what I observed on that occasion. It should be admitted that my decision to take a peek at what was possibly happening was not without some misgivings. Scepticism was foremost in my mind: How could such success as is usually claimed by those involved in the project be achieved with just a single period of spoken English per week taken by one teacher with at least some forty boisterous youngsters in a class? My live contact of about two hours with the school community left me convinced otherwise. For me this was a demonstration of the validity of the commonsense view that what matters in language instruction is not how long an activity lasts, but how creative it is, or in other words, how effective it is in stimulating further language learning. The visit took place on a Monday. It was made at short notice; except for the head of the school and the teacher in charge of the subject, it was a surprise to all others involved. I was lucky because on Mondays the morning assembly is conducted entirely in English by the children. After the assembly I was given the opportunity to chat with the children of two classes (Grades 9 and 13), which I used to test the authenticity of the English language skills that they had shown before. I regret that I was unable to spare more time for this encounter. It is a mixed school in a village setting, though not very far from the biggest town in the region. Few children who attend this school can be said to be from well-to-do families. Had their parents been economically and socially of a higher status, most of them would have succumbed to the popular myth that town schools necessarily provide better education, and admitted them to those schools. While some teachers and senior prefects were discretely and inconspicuously doing the little they had to do to maintain discipline, two girls from Grade Nine jointly announced each event in English, adding comments extempore, as appropriate. They started the programme with religious observances. This was followed by the singing of the school song, with the school band playing. A number of English items followed. One student presented a fairly detailed weather forecast for the day while another assisted her by holding up a large hand-drawn map of the island marked in English. The proceedings ended with the singing of the National Anthem, in which everybody took part. As could be expected, some prior preparation must have gone into this. But the children’s performance sounded spontaneous and natural. The teacher responsible told me that different sets of students manage the assembly each week. Later I saw the two Grade Nine students who conducted the meeting that day. I found that they were actually capable of doing any programme like that impromptu. Their classmates showed themselves to be equally confident of performing in English in a similar situation. Something that struck me, amidst all this prattle about ‘broken English’ being promoted through an inordinate insistence on speaking English ‘our way’, was that these students all used ‘good’ English; the few ‘errors’ they committed did not affect communication, and could have been easily and unobtrusively corrected by a conscientious teacher in a suitable context. My experience with the students of Grade 13 was similar, but slightly less reassuring. In any case, I felt that they are generally better motivated and also more confident about speaking in English and learning English than their predecessors. My impression was that as the English as a life skill project gathers momentum the successive generations of students will be more and more receptive to English as a normal practical part of education. Enthusiasm about English will catch on among the students, when they realise its easy accessibility and its potential as an indispensable resource for education. If such a high degree of success is possible in this particular school where I see no other special circumstances that could have contributed to that success than what I am setting forth below, a couple of paragraphs down, then we can easily hold out the hope that the project should fare equally well in any village school with minimum facilities available. This kind of broad assessment will not be objected to much, I hope, because speaking English is a skill that is easily and informally demonstrable. What strikes me more than this level of success is the implicit attitudinal change that the programme has brought about among the children, parents, and teachers towards the learning of English. (I don’t think that it has anything to do with speaking English ‘our way’ though, because it makes no sense to the learners, nor even to many of the present day teachers. Have the (numerically small) general mass of Sri Lankans who are proficient in English ever spoken the language in any other way, except perhaps an ill informed minority among them who might have hankered after an imaginary posh accent? Why should the average young teachers of today who themselves lack, for no fault of theirs, any very advanced knowledge of English be burdened with standards and varieties over much? It goes without saying that it is useless to discuss different ‘forms’ of English in the hearing of the young Sinhalese- or Tamil-speaking children who are just approaching English because their teachers and parents want them to. Let them just pick up the English that is around them – the neutral English that permeates the whole English speaking world, for that’s the only English that matters to them for education, for work, and for intelligent interaction with the outside world.) The often criticised restriction of spoken English to one timetable period a week is because of the need to be in keeping with the existing rules and regulations. As I tend to believe, changes will be introduced in the future when it gets established as a compulsory part of the English syllabus. The success of any project depends on the proper coordination of three essential elements: an ideology, a plan of work based on it, and actual implementation of the plan. The English speaking programme also has these three aspects. To explain the achievement level that the school I visited has attained I will need to refer to all of them.But here I am only focusing on an instance where the third element is being realised in specific circumstances. That English was the possession of an exploitative minority of the population which oppressed the masses is too well known to need reiteration. Some sought English as a mark of privilege and status. Those times are now fast disappearing. Today we need English as a tool, as a resource. New vistas are opening before us in which our forging ahead is hampered by lack of English. What we need is a practical knowledge of English involving all the four basic skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. In the past, we used to put a premium on reading and writing English in our examination based education culture. The ability to communicate in English in many live situations, especially in education and work, is being emphasized in Sri Lanka as it is in many other countries of the world. We value English as a communication tool, rather than as a mere badge of privilege. Using a tool is a skill. The mastery of a skill comes from constant practice of the skill, not from storing factual information about it in one’s memory. According to the second language learning ideology implicit in the programme, learning (knowledge) is apparently viewed as socially created; it isn’t supposed to be acquired through individual cramming in isolation; students practice speaking with their colleagues in classroom contexts devoid of anxiety. This is a kind of constructivist approach. And learning is not expected to be confined to the classroom. Students are encouraged to reinforce their learning by drawing on outside sources as much as possible. In the school I visited the teacher in charge of the spoken English lesson is deeply committed to her work. She has organized an abundance of interesting activities for her pupils to practice their English. The activities and materials used are specifically designed for the pupils of her school with their social background and their attainment level in English in mind in terms of the ‘Hydrabad methodology’ (that the teachers are trained in during the initial 10-day workshop that is conducted). She coordinates her work with the work of the other English teachers. There is no doubt that the spoken English teacher’s work both supports and supplements their work which is more exam-oriented. The principal of the school is exceptionally dedicated to the cause of promoting the language skills of the students. He focuses on all the three languages. He told me that he has in Grade 13 a number of Sinhala students who can carry on a conversation in Tamil quite fluently. Where English is concerned, he told me, though he is not himself a teacher of English, he used to organize, with the encouragement of the regional director of English and with the help of his own English teachers, special activities to promote the language skills of the students even before this new initiative was introduced. He has made it compulsory for all the students to exchange a few words in English with their English teachers; he has asked the English teachers not to respond if any student speaks to them in Sinhala contrary to his advice. He needs all other teachers to speak in English with the English teachers. He encourages the English teachers to speak to him in English. It was obvious to me that the enthusiasm and the active involvement of the school head is making a great contribution to the success of the English as a Life Skill programme in this school. It is no surprise that the other teachers and parents wholeheartedly welcome this initiative. The bright prospects for success that the Spoken English initiative demonstrates in this school, in my opinion, are due to the committed involvement of the students, teachers, school authorities, regional education officers, and parents in combination with the features of the English as a Life Skill that make it attractive to these different stakeholders. However, it should be added that for work well begun like this to continue to maintain its excellence usually calls for supportive supervision as well as recognition not only from the school and regional authorities, but also from the national educational hierarchy.

Education and Teacher Dispositions

Education and Teacher Dispositions
(First published in The Island/Sri Lanka)
Taking a fairly long walk has become an essential part of my daily routine for some time now. From the beginning I saw to it that my calf muscles start aching before I stop walking. Through experience I have determined the distance that should be covered, and the time it should take to produce that amount of fatigue in my legs in the particular terrain where I daily perform this exercise. Occasionally, circumstances intervene, and I am required to curtail my walk before I reach my ‘saturation point’, which leaves me with a sense of having cheated myself. Once I pondered over why I get this feeling, and traced its origin to these words of a favourite teacher of ours: “Don’t think that you have done an honest piece of work, be it in sports or studies, unless you feel a little exhausted after doing it”. He taught us a subject known as General Science at that time some fifty years ago, and sometimes doubled as our PT master. He was a strict disciplinarian and a committed teacher. We used to await his arrival for lessons with trepidation as well as expectation. If I am confident enough to make any claim to at least a modest degree of professionalism in whatever work I undertake, I believe I owe that confidence to what I learned from teachers like him.
Many of us have recollections like these about our favourite teachers. Often we do not remember them for the subject knowledge they imparted. We remember them for the influence they exercised on our lives through their dispositions or perceptions or attitudes as revealed through their behaviours towards us their students. Teacher dispositions are vitally important for long-term as well as short-term student success in terms of academic achievement and personality development. That is why some of our old school teachers seem to reach out to us over many decades from the past.
The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) in the USA, a national organisation that helps establish the preparation of high quality teachers, specialists, and administrators by conferring accreditation to schools, colleges, and departments of education describes teacher dispositions as “Professional attitudes, values, beliefs demonstrated through both verbal and non-verbal behaviours as educators interact with students, families, colleagues, and communities” (as quoted by Maura Kate Hallam in ‘The Language Educator’, January 2009).
A key factor that is essential for academic success is student engagement. Engaged students are those who involve themselves in educational activities out of intrinsic motivation; they are self-reliant; they make themselves responsible for their own learning. There is a second equally important factor which contributes to student achievement: students’ perception of their own academic competence (which means positive feelings about one’s ability to be succeed academically). Students’ active involvement in the educational endeavour and their perception of academic competence are both important attitudes that play a central role in student success. These attitudes flourish in an atmosphere in which students have a sense of autonomy, and feel confident in their own capacity for success in future academic pursuits. Two factors are vital for stimulating such attitudes: supportive teachers and high behavioural expectations.
Desirable student attitudes are formed as a result of learning experiences in an educational context dominated by these elements. Social stimulation through examples and opinions of teachers, parents and peers also play a part. Canadian Professor Albert Bandura is often considered the father of the cognitivist movement (as opposed to B.F. Skinner’s behaviourism). According to his observational learning (or social learning) theory, a model’s behaviour can cause an observer’s behaviour to change either positively or negatively through the positive or negative consequences (vicarious reinforcement or vicarious punishment) of a model’s behaviour. He looked at personality as an interactive relationship among three elements: a person’s environment, behaviour, and psychological processes. Teacher dispositions affects the formation of learner attitudes.
Educators need to possess positive dispositions in addition to subject knowledge and pedagogical (i.e. teaching) skills. The NCATE mentioned above expects schools of education to assess their candidates on the principles of fairness, and the belief that all students can learn. Some researchers regard commonsense notions about teacher perceptions to be too ‘soft’ to serve as real research, insisting on quantifiable data. Mark Wasicsko, Director of the National Network for the Study of Educator Dispositions (NNSED) does not agree. He explains, on the organisation’s website, that effective teacher dispositions can be grouped into four ‘measurable’ domains as suggested below:
1. Most effective teachers perceive themselves as such. They are competent, and have confidence in their own ability. Capable teachers are usually outgoing in social interaction; they can identify with a broad range of diverse people.
2. Effective teachers believe that all students can learn.
3. Their frame of reference is broad. They relate what they do to a larger purpose. Teaching for them involves creating a disposition for learning.
4. Such teachers take cognizance of the human element.
Teacher dispositions are important in any educational setup, but they are particularly so in the English language classroom, which I wish to use here as an example to demonstrate teacher dispositions. For effective language learning to take place, as much communicative interaction among the learners as possible through English should be provided. Their ‘affective filter’ has to be lowered by making them feel comfortable, confident, and uninhibited. [“Affective filter” refers to an impediment to learning brought on by ‘affective’ (i.e. emotional) responses to one’s environment in terms of a hypothesis first proposed by Stephen Krashen in the 1970’s.] The teacher’s attitude determines much of the general atmosphere of the classroom and can either lower or raise the learners’ affective filters.
Of course, the English classrooms in Sri Lanka are not what they used to be in the past. Teachers seem to have a more inclusive attitude than before: for a long time there was a widely held notion, especially in rural areas, that only some students had the ability to learn English; many lost interest in learning it, and turned their attention to something else; even teachers gave up on them. But today English is being taught on the basis that it can be learned by all students; exclusivity associated with English in this sense is a thing of the past (No allusion is intended here to exclusivity based on class consciousness which, to all appearances, is a thing of the past as well). Different pedagogies are being tried out. The students have ample opportunity to relate the English they learn to their experience of the wider world through technology-mediated communication. In this context, teacher attitudes assume unprecedented importance.
Because learning has become learner-centred and autonomous more than ever before with the emergence of revolutionary new information and communications technologies, the teacher’s value as a mere conduit for the transfer of subject matter knowledge has substantially decreased. While teaching or instruction in the traditional sense has not become totally irrelevant, the stage manager role of the teaching professional has become more pronounced (To stage-manage in the formal educational context means to prepare the environment and plan the range of activities that the learners must perform both autonomously and in collaboration with colleagues for the achievement of a predetermined outcome through managing the interrelationships between the school setting, student attitudes and behaviour, and student achievement). In the final analysis, teacher dispositions are about bringing out the individual best in each student in the short term as well as in the long term (irrespective of the calibre of that ‘individual best’).
Sources consulted:
Maura Kate Hallam: The Language Educator, January 2009
Theresa M. Akey, PhD: “Student Context, Student Attitudes and Behaviour, and Academic Achievement” (Paper), 2005