Notes 2 Page 2

As Braj Kachru (Kachru 1998) argues, English not only provides social status, it also gives access to attitudinally and materially desirable domains of power and knowledge, creating a new caste system. Access to this perennial resource called 'English' is not equally distributed among the people, thus creating a cleavage between the English-educated elite and all the others, especially from the regional language stream who have 'failed to make it'. Thus, government-sponsored institutions of higher education owe it to the large majority of people who have been blithely bypassed by the system to offer credible courses, which meet market demands. This implies that English teaching programmes ought to fulfill a communicative function by providing students with the requisite skills and competence in using English. Catering to market forces demands conformity to standards set by the unseen hands of the market. This situation has given rise to many questions regarding the legitimate goal of English teaching such as - "Are we not merely producing 'cyber coolies' who have to carry out the fiats of our neo-colonial masters?" I wish to argue that courses in English should necessarily equip our students with the basic skills of the notorious foursome LSRW, which make for communicative competence in the language. This could justifiably be viewed as mindless enslavement to market forces if English teaching stopped at this. An equally imperative role that English has to play in our context is to counter the effect of its complicity in spawning an unequal power structure by enabling students to think critically and self-consciously about their situation, about important issues of public life in the 'largest democracy in the world'. It is, therefore, imperative at this stage in our history that the enabling potential of critical thinking which can fashion a cultural critique of globalization should be explored with commitment in the English curriculum at the UG and PG levels if we want to transform an entrenched tradition of imparting training for mindless cultural and political conformity to a 'pedagogy of the oppressed'.

Using the new perspectives offered by Translation Studies, I wish to argue that translation - both as process and as product - offers a potent ground for teaching both communicative competence and 'critique-al' thinking. One proposal of how this potential can be realized using the process of translation has been demonstrated in my earlier article "Literary Translation: A Technique for Teaching English Literature in a Bi-literary Context" (Vishwanatha 1998: 170 -180). Now, I would like to outline a curricular innovation based on using the product of translation.

a) The Context: By way of illustration, I will describe a course on Modern Indian Literatures in Translation (MILT, from now on), a compulsory paper at the PG level, offered by the Department of English, Bangalore University from 1998 -2003.I wish to acknowledge the inspiring and untiring support and participation of my colleague Dr Ramdas Rao, Reader in English, Department of English, Bangalore University in shaping and teaching this course with me. MILT was one of the many new courses introduced at the time such as English for Literary Study, Women's Writing, Literature and Film, and Teaching English Language and Literature. The claim to innovation comes from the perception that the MILT course made for a certain opening out of the boundaries of the discipline, which brought a new energy, stoking fiery debate and dissent in our classroom.

b) The Choice of Texts: We wanted to focus not on ancient or medieval Indian literature or on Sanskrit literature in translation but solely on modern, bhasha (=vernacular) literatures in order to interrogate the constitutive categories of the notion of India. We selected texts from Kannada, Bengali and Malayalam in English translation keeping pragmatic considerations such as availability of translations, cost, length and accessibility to students. Please refer to Appendix A for details on texts and their organization. A section on the critical texts necessary to contextualize the debates in the study of Indian Literature was built into the course in order to historicize our reading of the texts.

c) The Critical Frame for Reading Texts: In evolving a mode of reading diverse literatures, we wanted to steer clear of two available models: on the one hand, the nationalist paradigm dominant in Commonwealth Writing, especially, Indian Writing in English, which sees literature as an authentic expression of a homogenous identity called 'the nation'; and on the other, the nativist paradigm that is largely evident in the Indian Comparative Literature and Indian Literatures scene (Kannada literature teaching, for example) in which texts are studied as regional - an essential expression of a specific language/culture/region complex, based on the ideology of cultural nationalism . As opposed to the homogenous identity of the nation, this model posits a harmonious, unproblematic plurality using the slogan 'unity in diversity'. Despite their rival claims, the nationalist as well as the nativist paradigms have both participated in the construction of a homogenous identity - that of the Indian nation, practicing the very same exclusions. The constituents of this identity are male, upper caste, middle class and Hindu. Using the cultural discourses on gender, caste and religion available within in Cultural Studies, we have attempted through the MILT course to unpack the ideology of the nation and the national-modern.

d) The Mode of Teaching: Typically, each category was introduced with an elaboration of the issues and debates that mark the territory, then moving on to the texts themselves to see how these issues are represented in the text, leading to a comprehensive discussion of all the three texts vis a vis the questions raised by the category/ies under discussion. Rather than reading the texts as literary texts, a bibliography of cultural and critical texts was put together for use by the teachers and student presenters for supporting our cultural analysis and discussion. Many workshops were conducted for the teachers teaching this paper in the three PG centres to facilitate a shift to an unfamiliar mode of reading these texts using the Cultural Studies model.

Instead of the usual teacher-fronted way of teaching, teachers and students in a team-teaching mode shared the agony and ecstasy of teaching. Students largely lead the discussions after making sure that the contours of the text were established in class. We productively made use of the film texts of Phaniamma and Agnisakshi, while the local theatre productions of Taledanda and Rudali provided an extra edge to the mediation of these texts in class.

e) The Mobilization of Resources: Our students who brought in their first-hand experience of the issues of caste, gender and religion constituted our most inspiring and dependable resource. An array of resource persons from across the disciplines of History, Sociology, Kannada Studies and Political Science, Malayalam and Bengali literatures were invited to fill in on the many aspects of the texts that we had no access to in the English department. Film critics and Cultural commentators made significant contributions to our programme.

f) The Evaluation Scheme: Experience has taught us that any innovation is best achieved by catching the tiger by its tail. So we had to ensure not only a new mode of teaching but also put in place an evaluation scheme that would reflect the thrust of the MILT course. See Appendix B for a copy of the question paper. Our aim in devising this kind of question paper was to make it student-friendly while still maintaining a degree of integrity to the founding principles of the course and retaining the intellectual challenge of the programme itself. There were three sections: a 15-mark General Section on the Critical Texts which framed the study of Indian Literatures; a 45-mark Comparative section in which the students had to answer any three out of four questions, discussing the various issues in comparison and contrast; and a Single-text Section of 40 marks consisting of short notes on any four texts, a format students are comfortable with. Thus we tried to ensure that the texts were read in earnest keeping the larger intent of the course intact.

Though the original impulse behind the course was to move away from a 'Literary Studies' to a 'Cultural Studies' model, because we based the teaching on an established literary form like the novel, we seem to have legitimized a pre-dominantly text-centric approach to the reading of only literary texts. Hence, we have currently brought in shorter and more varied texts both literary and non-literary, to gain the advantage of juxtaposition and contrast.We discovered that our choice of texts, which was based on pragmatic reasons of access and availability, ended up containing texts written only by 'upper caste' writers where the writing was marked by the brahminical ethos. This is as much a comment on the cultural politics of what texts and whose texts are being translated and marketed today. In our search for difference, we had come upon an uncanny 'centre', brahminical and patriarchal in character. 'A terrible unity' had been born. For instance, the female protagonists of all the three novels from regions as far apart as Karnataka, Kerala and West Bengal - M K Indira's Phaniamma, Lalitambika Anterjanam's Agnisakshi and Jyotirmoyee Devi's The River Churning - compulsively visit Kashi to purify themselves and for a sense of sanctity, indicative of their co-option by a brahminical patriarchy. We are now trying out a full-fledged, compulsory paper in Gender Studies where issues in/of gender are being discussed using diverse texts including marginalized narratives and genres that offer other utopias.Our assessment of the course is that both the communicative and critical thinking objectives were largely achieved through the course. There was even some carry over effect into other papers by way of questioning a purely aesthetic approach to literature. While the course positively impacted the listening, speaking, reading and thinking skills (many students reported just how confident they felt after the MILT class presentations to go out and face a class in real life when they launched out on a teaching career or when they had to face an interview for a job), their writing skill as evidenced in the final examination could not adequately express their complex understanding of the texts and issues. As the evaluation in the annual scheme was entirely based on the end-of-the-year written examination, the students often felt let down by the results, which did not match their own sense of involvement and interest in the course. Now, as we have changed over to a semester scheme with 25% marks in each paper earmarked for internal assessment, we will be able to do some justice to the students by valuing the work they put in through the term by way of oral presentations and group discussions.