Priti David

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The forest enters the classroom at Vidyodaya School, Gudalur, when ‘Shanthi Teacher’ starts the mathematics session. Adivasi children, mostly nine-year-olds in this class, scurry outside, climbing trees and scouring the forest floor for long sticks. Later, they will mark these into metre lengths and measure the walls of their homes. Lessons on simple measurement begin this way.

Much of the curriculum at this school in Gudalur taluk of Tamil Nadu’s Nilgiris district incorporates the forests and the Adivasi way of life. Morning assembly has tribal songs and dances. Afternoons are spent learning tribal crafts. Regular ‘nature’ walks in the forest, sometimes led by one of the parents, teach the students about plants, pathways, observation and the importance of silence.

A Vidyodaya textbook called The Food Book has exercises that draw on the hunting, fishing, culture and cultivation traditions of local tribes. In library class, a student can pick up Kilina Penga (Sister of the Parrots), a book of short stories of the Paniyan tribe, curated by the school. Parents often visit, sometimes as guest lecturers on tribal customs. “We want to ensure that schooling nurtures Adivasi culture and does not alienate tribal children from their parents,” says Rama Sastry, former principal and main architect of the school’s inclusive curriculum.  Having Adivasi teachers, sympathetic and committed to these aims, helps. As Janaki Karpagam, a senior teacher and Paniyan Adivasi herself, puts it: “If our culture is taught in schools, there is no shame and children will never forget.”

Vidyodaya was started in the early 1990s
as an informal primary school. In 1996, the Adivasi Munnetra Sangam, a
representative body of tribals in Gudalur, approached Vidyodaya, asking that it
become a model school. “The tribals had been led to believe that they were
‘uneducatable’, but when they saw the few tribal children in our school
flourishing, they were convinced that it was the system and not the children at
fault,” says B. Ramdas, managing trustee of the Viswa Bharathi Vidyodaya Trust,
which manages the school. He ran the school with his wife Rama, the principal, in their home.

Parents came and built a mud and thatch
room to get them going, extending from the home-school. Later, to increase enrolment, grandparents were signed
up as escorts – travelling up to five kilometres, rounding up the young ones
and bringing them to school with stories and songs to keep them engaged on the
journey. They were paid a ‘tea allowance’ of Rs. 350 per month by the school,
as they sat in the tea shops waiting for the return journey!

Now Shanthi Kunjan, 42, a Paniyan
Adivasi, heads this free primary school in the Nilgiris district. Both teachers
and students are Adivasis, mostly Paniyan. The rest are Betta Kurumba, Kattunayakan and Mullu Kurumba. The Census of
India 2011 counts 10,134 Paniyans, only 48.3 per cent of them literate. That’s
10 per cent lower than the average for all Scheduled Tribes, and way below the
national literacy rate of 72.99 per cent.  

With a BA in History, Shanthi defies
the statistics of her tribe. At her home in Valayavayal hamlet near Devala town,
17 kilometres away, the shelves of the sitting room are filled with story cards
and small story books that the neighbourhood children help themselves to. The
calendar is circled with exam dates for her school-going son and her daughter’s
post graduate books are neatly stacked. Learning and academics vie for space
with a television set and the jumble of everyday life.

Schooling was not seen as a priority
for a young Adivasi girl living in the forests of the Nilgiris. The eldest of
eight children, Shanthi spent most of her childhood playing and caring for her
younger siblings under the watchful eye of her grandparents. Her parents were
daily wage labourers – her father scouring the forests to procure the prized
leaf kuvaillai
used in packing fish, and her mother working on the tea estates of this area. At
age six, she joined the Government Tribal Residential (GTR) school in nearby Devala.  

There are 25 GTRs spread over the Nilgiris
district, meant to serve tribal children – with free tuition, food and board. But
most teachers are from the plains, rarely show up, and wait to be transferred,
says Mullukurumba Gangadharan Payan, 57, a former  GTR educator.  “The classroom and hostel are all just one
room. The facilities are poor, so children don’t stay overnight. Computers and
books exist but are locked up.”

“I learnt nothing,” says Shanthi,
speaking for the many Paniyan children with her. She only spoke Paniyan and
understood little as the medium of instruction was Tamil. The lessons are all
about rote learning. Incidentally, India’s Constitution (Article 350 A) exhorts
every state “to provide adequate facilities for instruction in the
mother-tongue at the primary stage of education to children belonging to
linguistic minority groups...”

Today,
as an experienced teacher, she sees the flaws clearly. “If the children in the
school can’t communicate, they become scared and prefer to stay away. That is
how fear begins.”

Most children at the GTRs are first
generation learners, whose parents and grandparents cannot help them with
school. So attendance is poor, learning negligible and dropping out common. All
of Shanthi’s siblings went to GTRs, and all but one dropped out. This is not
unusual, as Census data shows: between Class 1 and 10, the dropout rate for Adivasi
communities is 70.9 per cent. For other social groups, it is 49 per cent. 

Shanthi’s education took a turn for the
better when missionary sisters urged her parents to send Shanthi with them to
their school in Periyakodiveri village near Sathyamangalam
town in Erode district, five hours away by
road. She would stay there for the next five years, completing her Secondary
School Leaving Certificate (Class 10) and then returning home to marry Kunjan,
a Paniyan boy and unskilled labourer. 

Once
back in Devala, many wanted to recruit Shanthi; she was the most highly educated
Adivasi in the area. She turned down nursing job offers. But when a team from ACCORD,
a Gudalur-based non-governmental organisation, came calling for educated Adivasis
to join a two-year teacher training programme, she was ready.  “I always wanted to be a teacher, the kind
that wields a large stick and bosses others around,” she says, laughing.

Her husband Kunjan, who has a few years
of formal schooling, was supportive and they even moved house to be close to
the training centre. Her mother and sisters would drop in to help with the
housework and care for her infant daughter. Her course mates were 14 other
young Adivasis and they were given a monthly stipend of Rs. 800. The course ran
from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day, and on Saturdays there were visits to tribal
villages to assess the challenges they would soon be up against. Despite Shanthi’s determination and her
family’s support, it was tough to juggle roles. Some of her batch mates gave up,
but she stayed: “I was very interested to learn. I had a chance to try science
experiments – something I had never done.” 
The lessons on tribal history made her look at herself and her community
differently. She completed her training and went on to study further, earning a
Bachelor’s degree in History through Madras University’s Distance Education
Programme.

Shanthi joined Vidyodya 15 years ago
and is proud of the fact that today all young Paniyan children in her
neighbourhood attend one of the over 100 schools registered in Gudalur taluk.
But  areas like Muchikundu, where she
lived before an elephant tore down her house, are quite remote and enrolment is
still a challenge. “I want to reduce dropout rates by talking to parents,” she
says.

Many of the parents are wage labourers earning
Rs. 150 a day and they worry about money for fees, uniforms, books and
transport, which could range from Rs. 8,000 to Rs. 25,000 annually, depending on
the kind of school – government or private. Travel costs especially from the
more remote areas can be high too. Vidyodaya charges no fees and subsidises
transport, each child having to pay Rs 350 per year, and only if they can.

Meanwhile, back in school, the bell has
rung and children begin to sweep their classroom, and put away books, files and
craftwork. Shanthi is checking the register and signing out. The local jeep-taxi
is waiting and she gets in along with some of the children from her neighbourhood,
the youngest ones vying for her lap on the 45-minute journey home through the
forests and towns of the Nilgiris. It’s just another day at school for her and
her Adivasi colleagues and students.

The forest in Shanthi Teacher’s classroom

جنگل میں شانتی ٹیچر کا کلاس روم

ശാന്തി ടീച്ചറിന്റെ ക്ലാസ്സുമുറിയിലെ കാട്

ஷாந்தியின் வகுப்பறையில் ஒரு கானகம்

অরণ্য বসত করে শান্তি দিদিমণির ক্লাসে

ଶିକ୍ଷା ପାଇଁ ଉତ୍ସର୍ଗୀକୃତ ଶାନ୍ତି ଗୁରୁମା

शांती टीचरच्या वर्गातलं वन

 Gudalur

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The forest in Shanthi Teacher’s classroom

Only 0.9 per cent of rural Adivasi women have a graduate degree. Shanthi Kunjan, a primary school teacher in Gudalur, has one. She wants education for tribal students to be relevant and accessible

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