Professing English On Two Continents

By Brijraj Singh

Teaching matters. In Professing English on Two Continents Professor Brijraj Singh, who spent forty years teaching English at the college and university level in some of the major institutions both of India and the United States, describes the growth of a teacher’s mind and and shows the relevance of teaching lives. In this teaching autobiography he shows the way in which his experiences of teaching English in different situations and to different students helped not only to shape methodologies for teaching but also contributed to the evolution of a vision and set of values with which to go through life, and how they, in turn, fed into his teaching. Thus the book is about what the author learned about teaching and about life from teaching English. As such, it reaffirms the values for living implicit in the act of teaching and offers a triumphant justification for the pursuit of this profession.
Simply but elegantly and clearly written, this is the first book to deal in a comparative and evaluative manner with English teaching in both India and the U.S. It has many features which will make it of value to
• students and teachers of English in Indian colleges and universities
• their counterparts in the community colleges of the United States
• all interested in the educational history of India
• all interested in the nature, purpose, education and success or otherwise of community colleges in the United States
• all interested in making higher education accessible to less privileged communities, whether in India or the U.S.
• Professional educators interested in issues of pedagogy, discipline, assessment, and other related concerns.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zorba Books
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9789385020636

Brijraj Singh

Brijraj Singh was educated at St. John’s College, Agra, Lincoln College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and Yale University, where he went for a Ph.D. on a Fulbright fellowship. He taught in his alma mater in Agra, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, North-Eastern Hill University, Delhi University, and Hostos Community College of the City University of New York. He is the author of four books and nearly fifty scholarly essays, articles and reviews. He has presented papers at numerous conferences, and is a past president of the East-Central American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies.

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INTRODUCTION

I wrote this book in 2009, three years after my retirement. Then, following Horace’s advice to keep the piece seven years, I let it lie in my hard drive; in fact, I forgot all about it till recently, when I read it again. I found that it still holds water. Time has not rendered anything I say here obsolete except for a few minor facts, which are easily updated. I stand by all my ideas still. So here it is.

Had this been a scholarly or academic book, I should have sought a university press or a reputed commercial publisher for it as I have done for my other publications. But because this is more in the nature of a personal narrative, what I might describe as the growth of an English teacher’s mind, I have chosen to self-publish, though I hope that it will offer material of interest to those interested in English literature, in pedagogy, and in education both in India and the United States.

The titles of my chapters are fragments of literary quotations or titles of well-known works. Students of English will have no difficulty identifying them, but for others I provide the following key:

Chapter I

FAIR SEEDTIME

I retired ten years ago after teaching English at college and university levels for forty years, twenty in India and twenty in the United States. In writing down here some recollections of, and comments on, my experiences, I have several purposes in mind. Teachers’ memoirs hold an interest for other teachers and for students who have teaching ambitions, because seeing how one’s colleagues (or people one hopes eventually to replace) have acted, provides pleasure as well as some instruction. I hope that my experiences will also provide the reader with a sense of the similarities and differences between pursuing a profession in two vastly different cultural contexts, the Indian and the American. Indian scholars who want to study or teach English in the US, and the smaller number of Americans who are looking to research or teach in India, may find my experiences relevant. Others may find historical value in hearing from a practitioner about what it was like to become a member of the teaching profession in India fifty years ago, or cultural value in hearing about teaching English to poor, disadvantaged or non-English speaking immigrants in the U.S. Above all, I am writing this essay for myself in the hope that it will help me to understand better, at the end of my career, what it is that I have tried to do in my professional life, the extent to which I may have succeeded, and where I have failed, the reasons for that failure. How my vision of an English teacher’s role evolved, the experiences and circumstances that helped me develop the techniques that helped me realize this vision—and the extent to which it was realized—are questions that I hope to answer here. What I have learned about teaching and about life from teaching English forms a major theme of this book.

Since this is meant to be a teaching autobiography, I do not discuss any part of my personal life or any of my experiences as a student except insofar as they are related to my work as a teacher. There have been, as I hope there will be, other opportunities for me to discuss those aspects of my life, but here I talk only about my career as a college and university teacher. So anyone turning to this book to know me as a person is likely to be disappointed. I know that this limitation I have set upon myself is likely to render the present work less revealing or interesting than it might otherwise have been. But since I have defined myself all my working life as a teacher rather than as a son or husband or father or friend or traveler or inquirer (though I have been all these things and more), I have chosen to tell the story of a man, placed perhaps in rather unusual situations, who has performed his vocation, or better still, answered his calling, in a certain way. Indirectly I reveal, as is inevitable, something of the kind of life I have led, but discussing my life is not the purpose of this book.

College teaching was a goal that I settled on somewhat late in my student career. My early ambition was to major in political science and then become a diplomat. But when I was doing a B.A. from St. John’s College, Agra, I came under the influence of two charismatic English teachers, Mr. G. I. David and Mr. Renu Bhushan Banerjee, and decided to study English for a Master’s. Both were compelling figures and they had much in common, though they were also rivals, and each was so keen to be regarded as the best English teacher in the college that they would have been the last people to admit to any similarities. Both were fine sportsmen and played an excellent game of tennis; Mr. David also played a hockey match once a year on the side of his hostel team against the rest of the college and always scored a goal. Mr. Banerjee was a wily spinner, and could occasionally bowl a cutter which kept low and totally confused the batsman. He had a slow, graceful run up, and it was not so much in the power of his arm but the movement of his wrist and suppleness of fingers that his true danger as a bowler lay. Both had wonderful voices and sang ghazals soulfully, though the less charitable remarked how Mr. David’s Urdu was spoken with an Indo-British accent and Mr. Banerjee tried perhaps a little too hard to sound like Talat. Both dressed with style and were willing to spend quite a lot on clothes. Both had an extensive personal collection of books which they loaned generously to students. Both were bachelors, both had a fine eye for women, and both were worshipped by a handful of female students. Each was associated with a particular female student or students every year, though this association existed more in the minds of people for whom the duo was a source of perpetual interest than in actual fact. Both were spell-binding lecturers and could hold students’ undivided attention for an hour or more. They had different styles of teaching. Mr. David was impassioned while Mr. Banerjee had a dry sense of humor and could give his voice ironical inflections. Mr. David would be rapt as he quoted Shelley or Hamlet, his eyes shut, his mind soaring in an empyrean which he tried hard, through his passion, to make us see. Mr. Banerjee read the prose of Emily Bronte or Thomas Hardy with feeling, but it was in the social mores of fiction that he was most at home, and even as he made us see through Becky Sharp, he could make us fall in love with her wiles and worldliness.

Above all, both Mr. David and Mr. Banerjee were devoted to students, and we idolized them. Mr. David would have us over to his rooms where he brewed lopchu tea for us in the hope that he was instilling in us a sense of the finer things of life, and recited Shelley. Mr. Banerjee would invite us out to the only coffee house in town where he helped us develop not only a taste for good, strong, aromatic coffee but also for éclairs such as I have never eaten before or since; he would also generously foot the bill as he talked eloquently about Turgenev or Dostoevsky or Flaubert and le mot juste. He loved long walks to the Taj Mahal and we often kept him company, while Mr. David would take us in winter months through green fields of wheat and yellow fields of mustard to the banks of the Jamuna to see the sunset against which he would encourage us to recite Shelley or Keats or the shorter lyrics of Byron; sometimes he would speak of Plato and his notion of this corporeal world as but a shadow. Mr. Banerjee, on the other hand, would read from Peter Bell the Third or Don Juan and make us envy the poets’ control of tone, inflection and diction. Both were passionate about literature, both hated hypocrisy and deceit, and both taught us to value the good and beautiful and gave us the notion that there was more to life than just getting on and getting ahead.

With teachers such as these, my friends and I had, in a sense, no choice but to opt for a Master’s in English. Even so, I remained determined to take the Civil Services exam, and for this purpose enrolled in the Law Faculty of Delhi University after my M.A. because it was the received wisdom then that living in Jubilee Hall and studying for a law degree in Delhi was excellent preparation for the Services. But I found law uninteresting and badly taught and began to wonder whether teaching English wouldn’t be more worthwhile. Listening to my law lectures I would construct in my mind alternative models of how I would get the matter across if I were on the podium, and I began to think that I would quite enjoy reading Shelley out loud before a class or initiating a discussion on E.M. Forster’s remark in his essay Two Cheers for Democracy that if a choice were forced on him, he would rather betray his country than his friend. After a while I began to cut classes and spend time in the coffee house engaging English M.A. students in discussions, sometimes on authors and their works but more frequently on what for us teenagers appeared to be major questions, such as those of political involvement, nation building, and the meaning of life, not to mention sex. And I developed a fancy that wearing a dusty tweed jacket and baggy pants and smoking a pipe, which is how I liked to portray my ideal professor, would quite suit me.

Therefore I was glad when the Principal of St. John’s, Mr. P.T. Chandi, wrote to say that a number of vacancies in the English department had developed unexpectedly and asked whether I could delay my legal studies for a year to help my alma mater out in a desperate situation. A year’s teaching could be a useful experience and it would not substantially set back my plans for a civil service career. I turned to my father for guidance, he sided with Mr. Chandi, and so in September 1959, a month before I turned twenty, I found myself willingly back in a classroom in Agra, only this time on the other side of the teacher’s desk.

Before going any further, I must say something about Mr. Chandi. He was of that generation of Christian educationists from Kerala—V.V. John and Samuel Mathai were two others—who served all their lives in north India and had a real impact on Indian education in the 50s and 60s. An astronomer with degrees in Mathematics from Madras and London, and one of the most outstanding principals of his generation, Mr. Chandi was a deeply religious man, modest and simple in his habits, committed to his calling, and one who sought fulfillment in the performance of his duties in such a way that God would say of him on the Day of Judgment, as he said of Abdiel in Milton’s Paradise Lost: Servant of God, well done. He is the subject of a biography called The Man without Guile by an American author, Paul Gauby. It makes for instructive reading, but is not totally accurate, for this I can say: Mr. Chandi was not entirely without guile. He could not be, given that he had to deal with crusty, wily old professors who had been on the staff of the college for thirty years and more. Quite a few of them had made staff politics rather than teaching and scholarship the main focus of their working lives and would assemble in the Staff Club every evening to play tennis, gossip, drink tea, plot and scheme. Yet Mr. Chandi had their respect, as he did that of his counterparts in Agra’s two other colleges, Agra College and Balwant Rajput College, whom he met regularly at university meetings, and of the politicians in the city and in Lucknow with whom he had to deal on a variety of personnel and financial issues. Surely he could not have managed this without some understanding of the baser human instincts, some political shrewdness and guile.

But in his personal life and professional dealings with students and junior teachers he was always a model of rectitude and honesty. He genuinely believed that each human being, no matter how corrupt, was capable of some goodness, that each person, no matter how wretched, had something of godhead in him or her, and that each creature was a unique creation of God and therefore deserving of full respect for his or her being and individuality. These were lessons he inculcated daily at the morning assembly which was St. John’s College’s oldest and proudest tradition. Every morning at 9.30, students would gather in the large college hall while the staff assembled outside under the domed roof. At exactly 9.35, Mr. Chandi would lead them into the hall where they took up the first row of seats and he went up to the dais. Everyone would stand, and he would read two prayers which were essentially Christian but contained no mention of Christ and were therefore such that students of other creeds could pray along. Then everyone would sit down and Mr. Chandi would make announcements and usually preach a short homily which started off with a little joke or story but soon acquired a moral purpose.

These homilies had a tremendous impact on me. I had taken to sitting in the last row of students together with a friend of mine, but Mr. Chandi knew how to make his voice project to the back of the hall in spite of the bad acoustics. One of his stories was about a young eagle who was taught to realize that he was an eagle and not just an ordinary bird, and I can still see Mr. Chandi’s black eyes gleaming with light and looking for all the world like a keen eagle’s, as his piercing glance bored into us though we were sitting a hundred feet away.

Mr. Chandi was a significant influence on my life, and not only as Principal of my college. In my first year as an M.A. student, his son Ravi, who had been a student in Delhi, joined the M.A. Mathematics class at St. John’s, and we became good friends. Ravi would sometimes have us over to his house where we interacted with Mr. Chandi in a much more social and informal way, and where we got to see him as a family man, not simply as our Principal. Therefore it was with pleasure that I returned to be under his tutelage again as the most junior member of the teaching staff.

I was told that I would be paid the starting salary for a lecturer, which in Agra University then was ` 200.00 per month. Individual colleges were allowed to pay, in addition, a small dearness allowance and our sister institution Agra College paid an allowance of fifteen rupees a month to each of its teachers. But Mr. Chandi resolutely turned down all requests to follow suit, quoting the Scriptures every time this request was made, to the effect that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.

Two hundred rupees today would be an utterly, impossibly low salary, and even in 1959 it was not high. Many of my colleagues found it just enough to provide them their daily bread but certainly not enough to enable them to contemplate, without any thought for the morrow, the word of God. In American terms it translated to about $40.00 a month at a time when my American counterparts probably made twelve to fifteen times as much. But then it was drilled into us by our seniors and by society at large that a teacher’s life was, if not a life of poverty, then certainly a life of some financial care. The example of Sudama, the poor Brahmin scholar who had been Krishna’s classmate and whom Krishna went to visit in later years, was sometimes brought to our recollection when we grumbled about our pay. The most senior professor at my college made six hundred rupees a month, and the Principal a thousand. To my inexperienced eyes these appeared to be large if not princely sums, but most of my contemporaries who knew better did not think so. They pointed out that a civil servant started at four hundred a month, not to mention allowances and perks, a figure which, given my annual increments of fifteen rupees a month, would take me well over ten years to reach, by which time the civil servant would be making close to fifteen hundred. Indeed, the great disparity of pay between academics and civil servants was one of the main reasons why the brightest students preferred a career as bureaucrats rather than opting for an academic life. My sister-in-law often reminded me that at my salary I would never be able to afford a family—the house rent alone would eat up more than half of it—and that I should therefore quit teaching as soon as possible and devote my days and nights to preparing for the civil service exam.

However, right then a family was far from my thoughts, and I found that my hundred and eighty five rupees a month (fifteen out of my two hundred was deducted as income tax) was enough to see me through the month, though it certainly did not allow for any indulgence in luxuries. The rent for my Spartan room in college and attached bath, which lacked a flush toilet or running water, was just over ten rupees, and vegetarian meals, which I ate in the student mess, though not particularly appetizing or nourishing, cost no more than about thirty a month, so I was left with about a hundred and fifty to spend as I wished. I could eat out frequently, go to films, buy the occasional book, and travel home for the holidays. I also managed to save a little every month, so that when I sailed for England three years later, I had enough to buy myself a berth on board ship for £ 100. The truth is that in Agra at that time there was not much by way of middle class luxuries to spend on.

A lifetime of experience has borne out for me the truth of the statement I used to hear so often in my earliest days as a teacher that teaching is not a career for those seeking to make money. Whether in Delhi in later years or in the United States, whether single or married and with a family, I have always found it necessary to live carefully. Very fortunately, however, professing English has never landed me in indigence. Some of my other colleagues have not been as lucky. When I started teaching, none of my married colleagues, all of whom were male, had a working wife. On a single income it was nearly impossible to bring up a family in comfort. In one case a friend went for years with only two shirts to his name while he put his two children through the best schools in town. I also knew people who had to take up private tutoring or accept more examinerships than they could handle, or write cheap cram books, to make ends meet. They were honorable and idealistic young men, not money-grubbing individuals. But their needs were genuine. Some had parents or sick children to take care of.

I am glad that things are different today. Teachers in India get paid better, and what is perhaps more significant, a social revolution has taken place, with the result that I can think of hardly any married teacher who does not have a working spouse. This fact does not confer riches upon them, but in India it makes them financially independent while in the US it pushes them into the top ten percent of Americans as far as income is concerned. I