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Literary Review
Ahead of her times
C.S. LAKSHMI
L.S. Saraswathi: making education relevant.
IT is not everyday that one meets a person who has thought deeply about combining traditional knowledge systems, everyday life, and education for both adults and children. Meeting L.S. Saraswathi was such a rare experience. One would assume that such a person would be in some high position planning the educational policy of the country. But Saraswathi lives a quiet life with an aged mother in the heart of T. Nagar, Chennai, in an old fashioned house with a traditional swing in the inner hall. Her eyes sparkle when she speaks about her ideas of education and when she talks about how she arrived at these ideas. Within moments of her beginning to talk, you begin to feel the excitement of the journey she has taken.
Saraswathi grew up in a joint family in Big Street in Triplicane, Chennai, with some 15 children and 20 to 30 adults. She remembers that she was considered an extremely docile and undemanding child. Her grandmother used to tell her mother, when Saraswathi was a child, to remember to remove the milk bottle from her mouth once she had drunk the milk for Saraswathi could lie down for hours with an empty milk bottle at her mouth making absolutely no sounds of discomfort. When she was 11, Saraswathi, along with the rest of the family, went to attend the funeral ceremonies of her grandmother. When she was in the backyard helping a cousin fetch a bucket of water, Saraswathi stepped on a long pin that went right into her foot. She finished whatever she was doing and went looking for her mother who was sitting with others. Her mother noticed that she had left a track of blood where she had walked and realised how seriously she was hurt. Seeing that she was not crying or saying that she was in pain, her mother told her doctor husband to find out if something was mentally wrong with the girl. Any other child would have brought the house down but Saraswathi quietly bore her pain. Nobody would have expected such a girl to make any kind of demands in her life, leave alone the demand for education and the choice to remain single. But all of this happened in Saraswathi's life and she made them happen in her own quiet but determined manner.
In Saraswathi's family, girls were not generally sent for higher education. Her elder sister had not gone to college. Only one of her paternal cousins had gone to college. Except her father, nobody wanted her to go to college. Finally Saraswathi joined Queen Mary's College, not because everyone suddenly changed their minds about higher education for girls but because it was discovered that according to her horoscope she couldn't be married for four years! After her intermediate, in which she scored very high marks, she got admission in Stanley Medical College. But her father wanted them to give her admission in Madras Medical College and that was not possible. So he told her to give up medicine and do her B.Sc. Home Science. Saraswathi quietly agreed. She thought she would enjoy studying Bacteriology, Nutrition and Applied Chemistry, which were part of the subjects taught in the Home Science course. But she was not so quiet when a marriage offer came her way. The family just informed her to get ready to be "seen" by the boy's family. Saraswathi told her mother she did not want to marry and if they forced her she would leave the house. Her mother did not take her seriously but Saraswathi walked out of the house. Her shocked mother went and brought her back and her parents could not believe that she could behave that way. Saraswathi quietly told them, "I think that if I am forced against my will to do something, I may behave this way in future also." Her incredulous parents dropped all plans for marriage and let her continue her education. Two jobs followed after her graduation and later she went to M.S University, Baroda, to do her post-graduation in Extension Education. And in 1965 she went to Iowa University to do her doctorate in Community Education. The elders in the family, at this point, only worried about who would oil her hair in the United States.
Saraswathi's ideas about education were well thought out and clear during the time she worked after her return from the U.S. But it was when she joined the State Resource Centre in the Research and Evaluation Department in 1975 that Saraswathi had the opportunity to test out many of her ideas while planning the National Adult Education Programme. Ten-day village camps were planned and programmes with people were arranged. "But nobody asked the people if they wanted these programmes," Saraswathi said. These were programmes where literates, semi-literates and illiterates were to participate. Saraswathi went to Thirukkoshtiyur, which was the first village chosen. A primer was to be prepared based on the needs of the village. Lessons in the primer had to be based on whatever problems the community faced, like caste-discrimination etc. The people in the village were told to do role-playing sessions elaborating their problems, which they did excellently with no "education" whatsoever. Saraswathi began to wonder what they should be "taught" and how, to make them "literate". They seemed to have a fund of information on economics. She felt that education was useless unless all that was taken into consideration. In the primer that was prepared, spoken language was taken into consideration and the people there learnt to read and write in six months.
It was here that Saraswathi learnt the most important and unique lesson of her career in education: that of being willing to listen to people and not imposing anything on them. She remembers a very interesting incident. While she was talking to the people and trying to work out a primer, an old man who was watching all this, told her that he would tell her something interesting. In the evening all of them gathered at a place and the old man came out with brilliant mathematical riddles. He was illiterate but these were riddles he had learnt orally. This set Saraswathi thinking about day-to-day life and the kind of arithmetic calculations people make to carry on their business. Saraswathi tried to make her ideas a part of the National Literacy Campaign but soon realised that there was no place for original ideas and real needs of the people there. What was more important was statistical proof and power play. Someone at Delhi who had heard about her problems offered to get her to Delhi. "But that is not the way to solve problems!" Saraswathi told that person. Removing a particular person will not solve a problem that had to do with the literacy campaign. That problem will remain. Unlike the person who made her the offer, Saraswathi realised that the problem had nothing to do with persons but with perceptions. She quit the State Resource Centre and took up the project on Maths for the people independently. And an entire new world of Maths opened before her.
Saraswathi found out that the body is an important unit in measurement where the people were concerned and they had combined it extremely well with the British units of measurement. For example, when the fingers are stretched, from the thumb to the small finger, including the palm is called a chaan and two chaans make one hand measurement till the elbow called a muzham. And two muzhams make a yard. The body measurements combined very well with British units of measurement. But metric units needed paper for calculations and hence they were not related to everyday life. Saraswathi was also amazed at the notion of measurement in everyday life. Precision was not the basis of these measurements. If a woman is asked to explain how big the mouth of the firewood-oven should be, her reply would be that it should be big enough to be able to take two sticks of firewood or that it should be the width of four fingers. Objects of everyday use like the rope for the well or the rope to harness an animal were not measured. People would just go to the shop and ask for a rope for the well or a rope to harness. A mat-weaver would say that she was weaving a mat for two persons to sit on or two persons to sleep on and not give the exact measurement of the mat. People would look at the grinding mortar kept outside the house for preparing dough for dosai and calculate how much it had rained depending on how much water had filled in the centre hole of the mortar. Saraswathi met a person who used to sit cutting and bundling the straw for weaving mats and every time she went past him she would ask him the time even though she had a watch on her and his answer would be exact. He told her he did it by measuring her shadow. And when she casually asked him if cutting and bundling the straw involved any calculations, he told her, "But everything is calculation!" and proceeded to explain at what angle he has to hold his knife so that the straw is cut exactly in a way that the size of each straw piece will remain the same and how many pieces of straw exactly went into one bundle and how many bundles it took to make a mat for two persons to sit on and two persons to sleep on. All the calculations people made were deeply linked to their everyday life and their own bodies.
Saraswathi completed her project and a few of her papers were well received and published. But they remained as research papers. Recently, 18 years after she had made all these efforts, Saraswathi was called to a workshop where they were trying to deconstruct primers and reference was made to dialects and standard language in terms of preparing primers and the only one who could say something on the subject was Saraswathi. She mentions it with a smile not feeling bitter or defeated in any way. May be that immense patience and resilience she showed to bear the pain of that pin which went into her foot at the age of 11, has seen her through the obstacles and disappointments in her career. But as I got out of her house on to the busy Usman road, I could not help thinking how much knowledge has remained unused in all these years.
C.S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Researches on Women).
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