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| Mihir S Sharma: Our creamy layer |
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| Mihir S Sharma / April 14, 2012, 0:18 IST | | |
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 India
is the most elitist, exclusive, unequal and stratified country in the
world, and we don’t even know it. The Indian elite – which smugly calls
itself the “middle class”, since it alone benchmarks itself globally –
has constructed walls of privilege for itself that are
all the more powerful for being invisible to many eyes. And if not
invisible, then concealed behind other words — “culture” and “merit”,
for example.
Three pieces of recent news have helped make these mental and
metaphorical walls a little more visible. The first was the Supreme
Court’s upholding of the Right to Education (RTE) Act’s requirement that
all private schools reserve free seats for students from the
neighbourhood who can’t afford to pay tuition fees. Yes, this will raise
costs and be difficult to implement. But it is an essential step
towards breaking the first social wall elite Indians experience: the
walls keeping other classes, castes and creeds out of their
unimpeachably upper-crust schools. The “best” schools are also literally
exclusive — and thence begins the life-long confusion of unearned
advantage and “merit” that so defines our lumpenelite.
The Court’s pronouncement follows a decade of effort. Many elite
schools ignored outright an earlier judicial directive to admit poorer
students free of charge — as they’d promised to when they were given
land free or highly subsidised. That’s right, people: most of the
schools you’re so proud of attending or sending your kids to are founded
on a broken contract. Talk about a moral education, eh?
When the RTE was passed, some of these very schools went to court to protect their walls. Last year, The Wall Street Journal interviewed
parents and teachers at one of them, Shri Ram School in New Delhi.
People spat fire at having to share space at parent-teacher meetings
with people who they seemed more comfortable seeing clean their floors.
They demanded the poorer students be “segregated”. Of course.
After all, who in our obscenely comfortable elite thinks of servants
as being anything like them? It is a feudal relationship, not a
contractual one. As another recent piece of news brought home
horrifyingly, we can leave for foreign vacations after locking up the
little girl who cleans our floors. Of course, most of us don’t behave
like that; but try suggesting to anyone that they pay their servants
what they’re worth to you, rather than the most that they can demand,
and the arguments you hear will reveal how important power and dominance
is in the relationship. “They’ll get ideas,” I was told. I’ve seen
foreigners or NRIs suggest it on email groups or at parties, only to be
attacked by oddly holier-than-thou desis for introducing their destabilising foreign “ethics” into our nice, stable, comfortable society.
The Indian elite confuses its tiny, mediocre, incestuous world of
networks and inherited advantage with true merit, the merit that comes
from striving upwards in the night when circumstances are unfavourable.
India’s privileged children go to schools where their social assumptions
are unchallenged, to colleges where their parents went before them and
that most of the country can’t afford, and to jobs where the networks
fostered in the exclusivity of those institutions support and nourish
them.
And they live in homes that they inherit; the third piece of relevant news was a Bloomberg study
this week that showed that owning Mumbai real estate would take an
average resident of the city 300 years. This was an outlier on the
global charts; even in famously expensive Manhattan, it would take 50
years.
Other countries, too, have these networks. But they have correctives.
In egalitarian Europe, your child will study with your plumber’s child.
In Brazil or in North America, your child will idolise pop-culture
icons and follow movies and music that aren’t of, by and for the middle
class. In post-liberalisation India, that isn’t true at all. Our elite
dominates our cultural production, as well, helping it dehumanise
everyone else.
Yes, it will be tough for schools to adapt teaching to students with
varied backgrounds. But that will force us to question the unstated
elitist assumptions and knowledge that underlie what we mistake for
learning and for merit. And young upper class Indians will be forced to
deal, on nominally equal terms, with people they’d never otherwise
acknowledge. When I moved from Bombay to Calcutta (as they then were) as
a boy, I moved also from one of the most snobby schools in the country –
it was in Fort, that’s all I’ll say – to one where children from
one-room apartments mingled with those who were chauffeur-driven to
school.
There’s no question in my mind as to which was better for me. My
friends in Calcutta included working-class Muslim boys, giving me a
clearer idea, now, as to how resentments against the Indian state can be
entirely justified. We learnt to appreciate the unmatched cool of even
impoverished Anglo-Indians, allowing us to mentally disconnect money
from social power.
In all our discussions of quotas and reservations and affirmative
action, we need to remember that they aren’t just for the disadvantaged.
They’re for all of us. The American notion that diversity is itself an
irreplaceable facet of the educational experience is something that we
need to internalise here. It doesn’t matter if implementing it is
unfair, or difficult. Our hideously smug, stratified society cannot be
allowed to endure as it is. It is a blemish on the modern world.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in
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