Many of us have faced the disciplinary technique of punishment to extract our obedience by teachers in school. We learnt early in life, to err is human, to punish, divine. I have faced the wrath of the wooden scale on my knuckles, legs, hands and shoulders, and sometimes, if the teacher lost her balance along with her temper, even on my face. I have bent my knees, knelt down, stood outside the classroom, and run with the bag on my head for coming late. I have been slapped on occasions. On all these occasions, who am I did not matter, but what I did, or failed to do.
There is a dose of embarrassment, even humiliation, involved in receiving punishment as a student. We negotiate with the complex range of feelings during such unsavoury moments by rationalising an informally established juridical code that a teacher has the right to inflict a certain degree of verbal censure and physical pain. Teachers represent a formal authority that trains us into becoming socially responsible adults. Students must learn to obey and bear their temper and methods. I have recently heard old schoolmates accept the logic of punishment in retrospect as a justifiable part of education. It is a dangerous acknowledgement that believes children can’t be taught morality and responsibility with love and persuasion.
In the backdrop of this overbearing disciplinary institutional culture, a middle-aged, female teacher in a school in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh, made students in a classroom slap a Muslim boy for failing to memorise the multiplication table of five. The older excuse to punish a child for not learning his lessons becomes an excuse (even alibi) to institute the principle of an un-secular punishment. As the boy was being hit, the teacher nonchalantly spoke about Muslim students in pejorative terms, marking out a community. When the teacher noticed some students were not executing her order ruthlessly, not hitting the boy hard enough, she urged them to slap harder.
The brutal theatre was captured on mobile camera by the boy’s cousin who was there by chance. He was an accidental witness to the agonising scene, showing remarkable poise to balance his feelings on his hands. His camera gives us an idea how the teacher was introducing a fascistic sport to children in a classroom.
The teacher’s act broke the normative codes of punishment imparted in schools. We trust schoolteachers and agree on their authority as part of a contract, the basis of which lies in our modern social imaginary: teachers are expected to follow secular and egalitarian principles, treat students equally, and without prejudice. This code is of course never strictly followed. Students who are not considered bright, or who come from economically poor backgrounds, are often ignored, or treated badly.
Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty
The teacher in Muzaffarnagar unleashed two disturbing psycho-social consequences at the same time: she made the Muslim boy feel his self-respect is in jeopardy because of who he is. His being Muslim was enough provocation for others to rob him off his sovereignty, his pride and his wellbeing. On the other hand, the teacher made other students feel triumphant about their social identity and encouraged them to collectively humiliate the student who did not belong to their community.
The students who were ordered to slap the Muslim boy had no institutional or moral right to do so. Yet, the teacher empowered them to turn into punishers in the classroom. Their reluctance to hit the boy hard was proof of their conscience. The teacher wanted them to lose their ethical hesitancy in order to fulfil her perverse wish of singling out someone from a minority community for harsh treatment.
In all this, being a student took a back seat. In that inhumane hour, the children in the classroom were made to forget their primary identity of being students. They were divided along religious lines by a devious command that separated their worth and power according to their communal identity. The classroom was transformed into an amphitheatre of communal vigilantism.
The teacher’s act will have ironic and unintended consequences. The scars of the incident that violated his presence in the world will haunt the Muslim boy at least for some time. It is through incidents like these that vulnerable people experience the real test, and limits, of being human. The boy is made to realise the pain of being human through the lack, or loss, of the teacher’s humanity that leads her to practise humiliation. Dehumanisation provokes, but also, paradoxically, restores our shocked humanity. Being human is never easy, often realised through painful experiences. A sense of humanity is realised in such grim moments of awareness when you face the inhumane. Socially administered victimhood is the most acute condition that marks the relational predicaments of being human.
What the teacher also failed to anticipate is that her favoured children – the ones she used as little pawns for her hate-game – may end up losing their human sensibility if they take her game seriously. She was damaging the children she was empowering.
Collective hate corrodes the conscience of each individual who participates in it. If young students are encouraged to gang up against fellow students in the name of religious difference, they will soon feel they are above the moral law that runs a secular institution. They may get tempted to take this game into the streets. The feeling of being a powerful herd can inspire them to also one day topple the authority of the teacher. That day the moral breakdown of an institution and a society will be complete.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is an author. His latest book is Nehru and the Spirit of India.
