Happy Birthday, India

Aug 15 - India's 62nd Independence Day, the 63rd year of independence begins. I no longer live there but I do think of the country often as my parents and close friends still live there. Contrary to what one would think, most of my generation did not leave India and the majority of my school and college friends still live there (they do travel extensively, though).

I am so glad, though, that I came here in the 1990s and not before. When I came to the United States, my identity as Indian had already been solidified. The India I grew up in was a simple place of often brutal contrasts, but I felt no embarrassment about it as Tunku Varadarajan may have done (I don't know his bio, so I don't know if he was raised in India or overseas). This was because my generation of Indians felt *Indian*, not reluctant members of an uneasy coalition of different ethnicities and religions, as perhaps the earlier emigrants did. Some of this sense of comfortableness may have come about through the inevitable process of nation-building but I like to think that at least part of this new self-confidence came from a thorough overhaul of the education system.

When I try to dredge up the memories of my school years and of the subjects I liked (English, History), I remember a vague disjuncture in the curriculum right around the age of 7. There are memories of something called Radiant Reader, with glossy pages and colors, full of stories about devotion and pluckiness in a land far away called England. There was the story of Greyfriars Bobby, the dog who stood guard over his dead master's grave until his own death. And then there was Grace Darling, the heroine of the Longstone Lighthouse who risked her own life in a maritime rescue in 1838. There was also George Macdonald's poem, "Baby". All nice, unobjectionable texts, but limited in both their geography and their themes. And very Victorian.

Fast forward to Class X (tenth grade to my American readers). The national curriculum had been overhauled and to my delight, I was reading extracts from the South African author Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country (available at Google Books) and short stories by H. H. Munro "Saki" who took apart Edwardian society as well as poems by the Indian Nissim Ezekiel and the American Odgen Nash. The pages of the books had deteriorated from glossy to full-blown socialist shabby. But I can never say that I found the subject matter boring, at least not in the CBSE English syllabus. Similarly in the Hindi curriculum, the new syllabus taught us a range of Hindi literature - the verses of the mystic poets Meerabai and Kabir and Surdas (which of us has not made jokes about "Meera key pad", punning on "pad" which in different contexts means either "verse" or "fart"), the poetry of the modernists like Harivansh Rai Bacchan and the prose of romantics like Mahadevi Verma.

Exposure at an early age to a wide variety of literary styles and approaches helped shape me and those of my friends who shared my interests into confident *Indians*, neither western wannabes nor chest-thumping traditionalists. We just were...Indian. And because we carried this serenity to our new lives in the west, I like to think that we adjusted well here too. We are neither compliant "model minorities" nor defiantly segregationist (well, most of us, anyway). We love the west and love the east, without being rootless in any context. We are the new globalists, anchored and optimistic without being pollyanna-ish about the country we left behind, nor disdaining where we are right now.

Recently, the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has put many of its textbooks online. I am delighted to see that Indian students of CBSE curriculum are still being exposed to some interesting literature from around the world. How many American students have read poems by the Australian Robin Klein or extracts from the Scottish naturalist Gavin Maxwell and his otter, Mijbil, or even poems by the American John Berryman? Truth be told, I did not know John Berryman or Robin Klein till I read recently the Class X NCERT English textbook online. Even if most of the students reading these texts take up engineering or science later, the few who wish to remain in the humanities have, through these sort of readers, a solid grounding in literature both varied, interesing and challenging.

So happy Independence Day, India. 1947 was not only a day of political freedom but it was also the first day in the process of crafting a new Indian.