Author: shreyasoc

DATED 4th AUGUST 2019

SHREYA CHATTERJEE

MPHIL RESEARCH SCHOLAR

TEACHING FACULTY IN AMITY UNIVERSITY,NOIDA

VARANASI

ABSTRACT– Teachers are the building blocks of individuals in the society and education is its basement. Education no doubt is a very important phenomenon which not only shapes the individual but also the society.  The Kothari Commission set up by the Government of India to examine all aspects of the education sector in India righteously quoted , “Destiny of India is shaped in its classroom”.  But as  every coin has two sides , in the same way as we have been blessed by several skillful teachers in this century , on the other hand there are several factors which also serves as a challenge to teachers education which inversely effects the quality education in this 21^st century. The intent of my paper is to focus on the Challenges that surounds the teachers education in this 21^st century which should be  implemented to enhance quality of  educations and  the institution as well.

KEY WORDS:  Teachers,  Destiny  , Education,  Quality, Challenges

INTRODUCTION –   Education has been globalized and has underwent a paradigm shift in teacher’s education to a vast extent. The globalization of education not only shaped our lifestyle but it has also shaped the personality of individuals as well as building blocks of society. But nowadays there are several emerging issues which are not only causing an hindrance to the quality education in our society but also caters to the challenges in teacher’s education in this modern era. Some of the major factors which serves as a challenge to quality education in teachers recruitment process are political pressure in selection, inadequate time period of teacher’s training period, inadequate practical teaching experiences, non teaching duties and inappropriate academic background for taking teacher’s training. These are some of the major challenges which has been increasing rapidly in teaching careers and calls for strict implementations.

CHALLENGES OF TEACHER’S EDUCATION IN THIS MODERN ERA:

Some of the major factors that challenges teacher’s education in this century have been sighted as   below : 

1. PROBLEM IN SELECTION PROCESS-   The first and foremost factor that hinders the selection of quality teachers in institutions is Political influence. An individual with strong political influence secures the teaching   job  inspite of having inadequate qualifications.   This not only leads to degradation of quality education in the life of individuals but directly or indirectly effects the quality of that institute and in the wider society as well. Thus , it serves as a challenge in teachers education. Secondly,  Test of language skill and subject knowledge is very much necessary in shaping quality development in students but nowadays even it has been observed that in hardcore English medium schools , classes are not conducted in full fledged English , therefore in wider spectrum individuals faces several communicative problems.  Subject knowledge is equally important as teachers are the building blocks of individual’s destiny not only in academics but also in wider community level. Thirdly, even after examining all the above criteria in selection of teachers  ,the teacher should be given a fair and transparent guidelines about the ambience of the  institute so that  he can execute his duties well and impart quality knowledge to students. 

• NON – TEACHING  DUTIES  –   Teachers in several institutes and schools are basically recruited for teaching but they also tend to employ these teachers in non teaching duties such as  invigilators in examination halls and election duties specially in rural India. This results into travelling to far off  places from the school premises, as a result of which it leads to Absentism in the work place and indirectly hinders quality education.

• INADEQUATE TIME PERIOD OF TRAINING LEADS TO NERVOUS ATTITUDES OF TEACHERS IN CLASSROOM –   In India ,the formal teacher training program is approximately of one year with 8-9 months of practical sessions of teachings. This time period is not likely to be sufficient to become a full fledged trained professional in teaching, therefore this leads to nervous attitudes in the teachers which creates a adverse effect on quality education of students.

• INADEQUATE ACADEMIC BACKGROUND FOR TEACHER’S TRAINING – Some individuals lack adequate academic qualifications to take up teacher’s training in any institute which leads to inadequate skill to impart knowledge even if one is recruited through well known political sources or some other means.

• INCOMPETENCY BETWEEN STUDENT AND TEACHER – A Teacher’s Training is a formal training given, it is never possible that through training an individual could be introduced to the environment of any school around us as it is not possible to be aware of the ambience of every institute , but at the same time institute ambiences shapes imparting of knowledge to a great extent. Apart from this certain personal attitudes of teachers like less sincere towards teaching , being partial towards students leads to incompetency and deteriorates quality education in today’s era.

SUGGESTIONS

• Non teaching duties should be given to ad hoc workers and clericals in educational institutes and not the teachers , because it leads to absenteeism of teachers from the workplace which leads to incompletion of syllabus leading to inadequate knowledge.

• Subject knowledge based on specific subjects should be an integral part of teacher’s training in institutes.

• Strict Implementation of practical field teaching sessions should be held regularly in every teacher training colleges to make individuals comfortable in a teaching ambience of classroom which will curtail nervousness in their teaching careers later in long run.
• Strict laws should be implemented to ensure quality assurance in every teacher training colleges and institutes and heavy penalties should be payed subject to imprisonment if political influence is encouraged  any recruiter in any institute as it leads to a playing with children’s and nations future upliftment.

CONCLUSION :

Teacher’s Education is basically a process to equip individuals with skills , knowledge and ability which are required to carry out teaching task in school, Society and in wider community. Teacher’s Education though is a significant aspect of shaping individual’s life and development of nations yet there are several factors which leads to deterioration of quality education in institutes This aspect should not be ignored and paid attention to rectify such emerging issues as teacher’s education calls for a revolutionary change even in this modern era.

REFERENCES :

• Bartell, C.A. (1995). Shaping teacher induction policy in California. Teacher Education Quaterly.
•  MacMohan, B. (2006). The newly qualified teacher. Marino Institute of Education, 8(8),20.
• National policy on Education (1986) Government of India
• NUEPA (2006) Elementary Education in India- Where do we stand
• OECD (2004) Internationalization and trade in higher education : Opportunities and Challenges ,Paris.

DATED 25TH JULY 2019

1. As we approach the one hundred and fiftieth birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore, it is necessary to re-define and reiterate the far-sightedness and comprehensiveness of his work on our own terms. If the Nobel Prize carried his words beyond Indian shores as early as the second decade of the twentieth century, the cinema as a visual medium popularised in the later decades, was instrumental to a large extent in exposing him at various international forums. In this essay, I will attempt an exposition through the meeting point of the two men—India’s first Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and her only life-time Oscar winner, Satyajit Ray. Andrew Robinson, writing of the link between the two says, ‘Tagore and Ray are indissolubly bound. If non-Bengalis know Tagore at all today, it is mainly by virtue of Ray’s interpretations of him on film.
    
2. The question to be raised in this essay is how do these two geniuses Tagore and Ray, complement (or confront?) each other in the exploration of the status of women in the upper class society of Bengal? The changing status of women, a product of the social reform movements of the nineteenth century, must be viewed against the emergence of the monotheistic Brahmo Samaj, its protest against Hindu polytheism, orthodoxy and the concomitant social evils like the caste system, the victimisation of women in a patriarchy through the practices of sati (immolation of a widow on the husband’s funeral pyre), child marriage and kulin polygyny.
    
3. I have deliberately posed the question of confrontation because the intertextuality of fiction and film, of translating the written word onto the cinema screen, is at best problematic. Robert Stam, in an introductory essay on The Theory and Practice of Adaptation, says, ‘The conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that cinema has somehow done a disservice to literature.Stam goes on to say that one of the sources of hostility to adaptation is iconophobia, the fear of exposing the subtle symbolism of the written word to the more explicit iconography employed by the cinematographer. While this essay will delve into the possible ramifications of this fear in the context of the two, its primary connotation emerges in the cinema’s handling of the works of a literary figure who is Bengal’s most revered icon, who, even today enjoys bardic status, even when the maker of that adaptation is no less a figure than Satyajit Ray. It is further problematic because the subject under consideration here is Tagore’s analysis of the emergence of the New Woman (nabeena), battling the confines of prescribed space within the andar mahal/antahpur (inner domain) of the home in a patriarchal society in a pre-colonial context. How does Ray, paying his centennial tribute to Tagore in the 1960’s and thereafter, present this to a more permissive post-colonial generation for whom the stained glass windows of the andar mahal of Victorian mansions had long since collapsed. Talking of just such a dilemma of depicting Charulata’s barely-controlled extra-marital passion for her brother-in-law Amal in Tagore’s short story Nastanirh, on which Ray made a film he called Charulata, Andrew Robinson comments, ‘Like so much that Tagore did, Nastanirh attracted adverse criticism from Bengalis at the time. The story gave the foundations of family life a shake, which many people resented. He (Ray) found people still sensitive to the issue sixty years later, ‘A lot of people seemed to think it was a very risky subject because of the illicit relationship. I never had any such doubts at all. I made the film and it was proved that I was right, because it was very widely accepted.The contentious issue of repressed sexuality of the new woman vis à vis the old, will be examined in this essay with particular reference to two of Tagore’s works, his novel, Ghare Baire (The Home and the World) and his short story Nastanirh (The Destroyed Nest) both of which were made into powerful movies by Ray.
    
4. Any discussion on the changing status of women must be viewed as earlier noted in this essay, against the socio-religious background of the Brahmo Samaj and the resultant reform movement of the Bengal Renaissance. With the spread of Western education and the availability of Western texts, the bi-lingual upper-class élite in Bengali society was deeply influenced by Western philosophy and the histories of social revolution and religious reform in Europe. Raja Rammohan Roy (credited with being instrumental in the abolition of sati) and Dwarkanath Tagore (Tagore’s grandfather), established the monotheistic Brahmo Samaj.The Samaj was at the forefront of the social reform movements of the time. It was more egalitarian in worship than the Hindu religious order, allowed free mixing of the sexes in the prayer meetings, called for female education, widow re-marriage and the advancement of the age of marriage for girls. It benefitted not only the members of the Samaj, but brought about the winds of change through the Bengal Renaissance of which humanists like Tagore, the novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee,educationist Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and the religious leader Swami Vivekananda, were at the forefront. Incidentally, Satyajit Ray was also a member of the Samaj. However, this socio-religious movement of the Samaj, also caused a deep divide within Bengali society between those committed to reform and those entrenched in Hindu orthodoxy—a divide nowhere more evident than in the plight of the occupants of the andar mahal and that of their more liberated counterparts. Partha Chatterjee calls it the spiritual/material dichotomy.
    
5. The andar mahal was a sacrosanct domain within which upper class women were contained and confined by a patriarchal society, unseen by men beyond the immediate family and to which even husbands had access only at night. The nineteenth century re-invented this domain as a sort of sanctum sanctorum of Indian spirituality and heritage in what Partha Chatterjee calls the last frontier of uncolonised space where no encroachments by the coloniser could be permitted by Indian men who were themselves exposed to Western culture and education and adhering to the Western value system in public life. The victim of this male desire for preservation of tradition was the woman, stereotyped as chaste wife (pativrata stree), willing womb or repressed widow. The ideals of womanhood in orthodox Hindu society were re-enforced by allusions to mythical and epical references to female chastity, thus introducing a religious dimension to the worship (Tagore uses the word bhakti at the beginning of Ghare Baire) and care of the husband. The emergence of the New Woman towards the end of the nineteenth century, educated, liberated, dressed differently from her more traditional counterparts and exposed to the ‘provocations’ of ‘literacy and literature’, yet confined to the andar mahal, precipitated a serious clash of personalities. It is this clash that Tagore exteriorises through the study of repressed female sexuality and Ray through a series of symbols signifying the dramatic turmoil within women like Charu in Charulata and Bimola in Ghare Baire. These are portraits of lonely, sensitive, dissatisfied women locked away in ornate affluence in enormous Victorian mansions. These women are counterpoised in both Tagore and Ray against their more traditional counterparts (pracheena). Instances of the latter are seen in Manda (Charu’s brother’s wife, and one of a large retinue of dependants thriving on her husband’s largesse) and Bimola’s widowed sister-in-law, also dependant on the generosity of Nikhilesh, Bimola’s zamindar husband in Ghare Baire. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, in a serious critique of the dichotomy between the progressive woman and the orthodox in his essay Pracheena and Nabeena, decries the loss of a traditional value system, which included chastity, respect for and care of the husband, disciplined domestic labour and philanthropy as a religious observance. The nabeena he says, with her insufficient learning, has lost the values and the dharma of her traditional counterpart and not benefited from the values to be inculcated from modern education. Laziness and excessive leisure is at the root of all domestic ills.
    

Both Charu and Bimola fail the first requirement of patriarchal stereotyping, they are empty-wombed. Though they do not suffer the social stigma attached to the same owing to pride of position, their childlessness certainly generates the sexual crisis which later brings about their downfall and which motherhood might well have averted. The question whether they remain childless due to their husbands’ treatment of them as if they are fragile commodities to be handled with care and reverence, remains unanswered. Their husbands are kind, gentle, affectionate and without any addiction to the typical upper-class vices of wine and women. Women like Charu and Bimola (as also Monimalika in Tagore’s Monihara, filmed by Ray as part of his trilogy on Tagore’s women characters), apparently have everything; large Victorian mansions scattered with expensive European bric-a-brac, (among them gilded, ornamental mirrors, whose significance will be discussed later in the essay) a retinue of servants, leisure, privacy and encouragement to pursue their literary hobbies far from the prying eyes of the large number of dependants who were an inevitable part of such households. These were privileges unknown to many of their less fortunate peers.
In Monihara, the husband showers jewellery sets upon his avaricious wife Monimalika (the name literally means a string of gems) in an effort to buy her love. Ironically the same jewels lead to her death, when she elopes with her cousin dressed from head to foot in her jewellery, in an effort to safeguard them from the husband she has never loved and grossly misunderstood. Both Nikhilesh and Bhupati are seen as Renaissance men who have inculcated reformist values with varying degrees of success. But while Tagore’s novella Nastanirh, was written as a critique of men who called themselves reformers but were unsuccessful in implementing those reforms within their own homes, Nikhilesh in Ghare Baire, conducts a daring social experiment of exposing his wife before his friend and pays the penalty.The ideal of a more progressive marriage based on companionship which challenged female stereotyping, made impossible demands on these women in transition as Nikhilesh ultimately realises, ‘In moulding the sahadharmini (a wife who shares her husband’s vision), we corrupt the wife.
 

• Yet these women continue to be dissatisfied and unfulfilled. Their peers who still remained confined within the category of the pracheena might have been overwhelmed with such bounty and devoted themselves to their service-unto-death vow to their lord and master. The attitude of willing self sacrifice which the pativrata traditionally practiced is described both by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in his essay and Tagore at the beginning of Ghare Baire, as leading to a submergence of the ego, which was its own spiritual reward. In the novel, which follows the structure of a diary, Bimola in an introspective flashback, talks of the dangers of negotiating the chasm between the pracheena and the nabeena. She is initially eager to practice the rituals of service demanded of a pativrata, much to the distress of her educated husband who prides himself on his liberated views. She is unable to handle the freedom of choice her husband so generously grants her. At the end of the novel, Bimola returns to the bhakti and worship which is part of the dharma of the pativrata, but at this point she has to earn the right to offer that worship which she has lost in the intervening period. Tagore’s novel focuses on both these aspects of her character because it begins with a flashback. In the film however, Ray shows a Bimola (enacted by Swatilekha Chatterjee) who grows increasingly arrogant and narcissistic taking her husband’s affection and generosity as her birthright. The scene of the changing of jackets before the mirror is a prelude to that. The reconciliation with her husband at the end in the film is executed through a passionate kiss rather than any offer of bhakti. Charu (refreshingly portrayed by Madhobi Mukherjee, Ray’s most sensitive actress) on the other hand, remains unaware of the growing demands of her blossoming body and the consequent restlessness as she flits bored and impatient from one inane task to the other, with time hanging heavy on her hands and no one to make demands on her. With the nabeena’s periphery still in transition, these generous, considerate husbands, by not being ‘demanding,’ left unsatisfied the feminine desire ‘to give’ in a marital relationship. This desire was rooted in the traditional ‘dharma’ of womanhood with near-religious fervour. Tagore, analysing this chasm between the old and the new, says in Monihara, ‘Traditionally, women like raw (sour) mangoes, hot chillies and stern husbands.The implication is that if a man does not make demands on his wife, he is considered to be weak, lacking in masculinity and does not command respect from his wife.
   
• Into such a scenario enters the third of the love triangle. The arrival of Charu’s young brother-in-law (played by the brilliant actor and matinee idol, Soumitra Chatterjee) is heralded by a storm in Ray’s film, in which shutters bang, the birdcage swings violently and the room is in turmoil. In the film Ghare Baire, the demagogue Sandip (also played by Soumitra Chatterjee) arrives on the shoulders of his saffron-clad followers with shouts of ‘Vande Mataram‘ rending the air against the background of the swadeshi movement triggered off by Lord Curzon’s attempts to partition Bengal in 1905–06. Bimola watches along with other womenfolk from behind the purdah of a bamboo curtain and at one point, mesmerised by his rousing speech, she unconsciously parts the curtain and their eyes meet. Bimola’s diary records her introspective comments in the novel: ‘Was I the bride of the palace? At that moment I was the sole representative of Bengal’s womanhood—and he, the manhood/icon of the bravery of Bengal.The enhancement of her own image to identify with the Motherland/Mother Goddess concept is part of her growing narcissism which leads to her downfall.
• Another aspect of repressed female sexuality which finds expression in Ghare Baire is that of young childless widows. Forced into a life of severe abstinence and prayer, widows were often deprived of their rights to their property and abandoned in dire poverty in the holy city of Varanasi. Deepa Mehta gives powerful expression to their plight and their enforced prostitution in her Oscar-nominated film Water. The question of inheritance and financial support from Nikhilesh to the widows of his elder brothers and Bimola’s resentment towards his generosity towards them haunts Ghare Baire as well. Ray uses colour contrasts to give powerful expression to a widow’s life. The pallor of Bimola’s sister-in-law, the stark whiteness of her unadorned widow’s weeds are initially contrasted with the rich colours of the ornate interiors of the mansion, the extravagant toiletry of Bimola’s dressing table. Ray’s camera includes in a single frame the rather dark and plain Bimola changing her expensive and colorful velvet jackets one after another before the dressing table mirror and the reflection of the beautiful sister-in-law in the cruel, irrevocable whiteness of her saree and chemise. The sister-in-law makes an overt comment on Nikhilesh’s obsessive love for his wife. She calls it an addiction and contrasts it to her own marriage which remained unconsummated due to her husband’s sexual indulgence with courtesans as was customary for the zamindars of the time. However, the same sister-in-law has her lips reddened by the betel juice forbidden to her, a sign of her inability to accept in totality the sexual abstinence and denial that widowhood forcibly imposes upon her.[She repeatedly contrasts herself with the eldest sister-in-law committed to obligatory ritualistic worship (she worships Nandagopal, a child image of Lord Krishna, which may be interpreted as a childless widow’s wish fulfillment through religious observances dedicated to a child god). She sings snatches of lyrics suggestive of extra-marital love. She listens to lewd songs from folk theatre being emitted rather shrilly by a cranked up gramophone and gossips with her maids rather than restrict herself to the life of prayers and elaborate ritualism. Her relationship with her younger brother-in-law Nikhilesh carries sweet memories of an intimacy built up since the day she entered the gilded prison of the zamindar’s mansion as a child bride of nine, but it is a relationship of which Bimola is instinctively jealous. Nikhilesh, at the end of the novel realises how this unfortunate woman, deprived by fate of husband and child, had nurtured this one relationship with all the stored up nectar of her heart. It brings him great solace amidst the domestic storm that ruins his life. It is one which could teeter dangerously on the sexual given the proximity of age and the shared experience of growing up together in an andar mahal environment which was certainly hostile for a child bride where the only sympathetic ear was that of the husband’s younger brother.
   
• Female sexuality and extra-marital relationships were, and continue to be a sensitive issue in Bengali films despite portrayals in later films, including Ray’s own in a film like Pikoo. Perhaps these issues become more sensitive to the audience given the period under consideration in the two films and the crossing and re-crossing of the peripheries of the andar mahal and its significant social connotations, as earlier discussed in the essay. In my opinion, the development of the theme is more convincing in the texts, particularly in Ghare Baire. This brings us back to the question of ‘confrontation’ raised in the introduction. Virginia Woolf raised the bogey of a novel’s complexly nuanced idea of love in the pages of a novel being reduced to a kiss on the screen.Is the kiss really clumsily executed without adequate build-up in Ray? In Ghare Baire he has indeed used subtly suggestive devices like the strains of a Tagore song (Rabindrasangeet), recurring motifs and the device of analepsis and prolepsis to match Tagore’s use of the diary method of introspection (in the same novel) to develop the effect of sexual repression on a woman and the ensuing confusion, frustration, despair and overwhelming sense of guilt on those traversing the dangerous periphery between the inner and outer chambers. Of Charulata, Supriya Chaudhuri in her essay, ‘Space, Interiority and Affect in Charulata and Ghare Baire,’ talks of the structure of strict parallels in Nastanirh which Ray does not attempt to reproduce, just as there is no parallel in the novella for the densely allusive literary conversation between Amal and Charu in Ray’s film turning on Bankim’s distinction between the traditional and contemporary woman, the prachina and the nabina  which builds up a secret kinship leading up to Charu’s sexual attraction for her young brother-in-law. If the response of the Western audience was not unanimously favourable, we have to remember the many contentious issues that Ray had to wrestle with in his adaptation of these texts.

DATED- 24 JULY 2019

At first sight, the topic might seem to be weird for this modern century where  pre-marital sex and living relationships are raging at an alarming rate , and every men and women in India is living their wet dreams. But quite contrary to the anticipation, sexuality in Indian society still remains with a hidden pathology of desperateness inside them. The situations be like hearts are raging volcano of sexual frustrations and playboy magazines and patriarchal pornography provide nothing to quench the thirst that they are possessing in their mind and soul rather underneath their undergarments. India is still a country where men don’t have enough women for themselves and living a life of ultimate drought, where parents still feel hesitated to open up and have a word with their children about sexuality which makes children more curious about it and gradually their involvements in unprotected sex rise with serious consequences and yet some of our learned intellectuals in their books stated that India is Independent ,it’s a free India and sex is a basic human need.  Sexuality is not only confined to the walls of intercourse but it has a profound effect on society’s other realm as well. Indian politicians are vocal in extending malice towards the people who freely express themselves or refuse to be dictated about their clothes and lifestyle. But why, if our constitution has provided us with all sorts of fundamental rights of speech and right to freedom, then why even reaching this modern century we cannot express our personal views openly without dispute? Till date it has been acknowledged that every year on 14^th February which signifies the Valentine’s day , the day of lovers , the couples are beaten up by the police if they are expressing love in public, closing of night clubs and bars and chastising women who dress-up as indecent  are on peak!  

    These repression is having a serious impact on the crime diary of India. Urges towards knowing the unknown is increasing, increasing rates of sexual crimes are taking place gradually in the nation .India currently  occupies the third largest position of HIV infected population, among which more than 85% are having unprotected sex. The underlying cause behind the fact that our daily newspapers are full of inhuman stories of rape cases of minors is ‘the thin line between sexuality and repression.  There was a inexplicably beautiful movie named ‘Masan’ which had a famous dialogue that compared life to a Condom. I think life cannot have such accurate definition to itself in any of the writings of great authors which explains that life is a temporary affair that lasts only in pursuit of that one moment of overwhelming happiness. Yet its very sad that being the crowd of this century keeps being dutiful towards false morality and tend to ignore sex as a basic emotional, psychological and physical need of the society. 

On one hand ,the stretching list of Gang rapes across the nation has enraged people immensely. Previously, in 2012 when Nirbhaya was brutally gang raped in a moving bus in Delhi which shook many people’s conscience is unfortunately not a full stop punctuated in the society. The sad part is nothing has changed after so many promises and right after we acknowledge the Kathua girl case who was just 8 years old , Manipur girl was raped and set on fire at the age of 11 and the list goes on and on. But on the other side of the mirror we see an orthodox society preaching morality and ethics that represses sex and its practices, where girls are made conscious about their attire and their exposure just because of the fear of getting sexually exploited , where women masturbation, orgasm, and talk about sex in a way often restricted.  This contradictory scenario of the society has a simple answer to it– “repression increases the urge of knowing the cause behind being repressed”. Hence, it is very important to liberate sex in every corner of India and is a very sensitive issue to be pondered upon with deep understanding.

SHREYA CHATTERJEE

RESEARCH SCHOLAR (SOCIOLOGY)

VARANASI.

EMAIL ID- jhum0990@gmail.com

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