CSII - The Feel of the First Alphabet

The Feel

The joy of writing and identifying the first letter is celebrated with much pomp and grandiosity where I come from- Kerala, where a child turning three has to go through the ordeal of a ritual called ‘Ezhuthiniruth’. The kid has to go through the process of purifying themselves in the body and go to some role model that the parents deem that the child will grow up to be like in a sacred space- the surroundings of a temple or at an event that is tailor made for the purpose of a child starting their educational journey. Prominent Malayalam Newspapers has an array of specialists- writers, bureaucrats, singers, businessmen, scientists- the range of variety of professionals for the tiny tot to have a holding hand as they embark upon their adventure of learning is multifarious.

The child is made to sit in the lap of the elder cum facilitator who will pave the way for the child’s future by making them write their first word. First, a golden ring is dipped in honey and the ring is used to write the word ‘Harisree’ on the tongue of the child, so that they can know the sweet taste of the joy of letters. Then, the palm of the child is taken inside the inner palm of the Elder to write the first phrase- “Om Hari Sree Ganapateya Namah, Avignamastu Sree Gurubyo Namah”- in a plate filled with grains of rice. The words are formulated with the child’s pointing finger moulded in the palm of the elder as the elder directs the unlearned finger. After this, the child is considered eligible for learning and acquiring education. While the process of learning alphabets is absolutely normal as inhalation and exhalation for the children born to parents who can send their children to temples and events where the simple joy of writing the first letter is blown out of proportion through the elaborate ritual of inscribing the magic of words into the consciousness of the child often through force-some of the pictures of this process shows children’s faces convoluted in different poses of grief and protest as their tongues and hands are used against their will- with parents overlooking concernedly, but pacifying themselves with the classic statements like, ‘it may hurt them now, but it is for their better future’.

The Alphabet

The joy of learning alphabets is devoid of all celebrities in our modest night school in Berwai, but the ecstasy of the first word being given birth to remains the same. The Women’s Night School is run by the Centre for Socal Innovation and Impact in collaboration with Manthan Sanstha Kotri for the women from Kalbeliya community in Berwai, from 7 pm to 10 pm in a community hall. The students range from Bhanudevi, 19, who has just given birth, and Ladoodi, 68 who has seen the developments in her community right from the time they were moving from village to village in a camel cart to settling in a place where they have water in a water tank and a pucca house. What didn’t change for them, despite possessing the knowledge of the tunes of the sarpera song and the moves of the sarpera dance, was the fact that they faced a significant obstacle in the process of literacy.

The Literacy

According to Etymonline, the adjective literate has the meaning “educated, instructed, having knowledge of letters”, and the word entered the English language through Latin literatus/ literatus which meant “educated, leaned, who knows the letters. Until Gutenberg came along with his printing press and made the word accessible to everyone, the process of knowing words was a difficult journey for the common man. For the women of the Kalbeliya community, words ooze an aura of enigma, an enigma that had eluded them for all the constant migrations that they have to undertake, shifting from village to village in search of a means to earn some money for their sustenance. Even with their cultural knowledge, they fall back in the system of formal education. The current generation of children are enrolled in Government schools, but most of them drop out because the syllabus is not designed keeping their interests in mind, and they are not interested in the process of rote learning which will not yield any immediate results.

The Requirement

If the children have the problem of an existing system that doesn’t consider their needs, their mothers face the problem of lacking an opportunity to learn the things that a society would consider absolutely out of place in a formal education system- in a workshop that combined the Theatre of Oppressed methods to build the syllabus for the Women’s Night School, what the women stated as they wanted to study was- to learn to sign, to fill forms in a bank, to know about Government Welfare Schemes and the process of applying for it, to say something to their companions while in a mode of transport about the place they are travelling through, to learn to read the signboards of a place, to learn to use the virtual keyboard in the phones they are using( the only symbols in the keyboard that they understand are emojis). For these women, who have done nothing but ensure that their family gets fed by making food for them, being in a space where they are encouraged to learn enables them to have faith in themselves and respect in the eyes of others in the society who sideline them as ‘gawars’(illiterate).

The Disconnect

To set them on the journey of reading and writing words, the first letter taught to them by the Night School Teachers Suman and Balak was the letter ‘Ma’- the first letter that is eagerly awaited to hear from a baby, because ‘Maa’(with matras) means mother in the Hindi language. The teachers use the innovative method of using what the learners already know to create a knowledge of what they don’t know. Here, the students are Women who knows how to run a family and have the oral knowledge of the Hindi language- the disconnect that they feel when they step out of their homes is how their knowledge of the language is presented to them- in the visual way through the signboards and forms that they are required to fill- where they are required to imitate the visual letters through their memory and write it with their hands.

The Bridge

To bridge this gap, the learner’s drive the curriculum of letters by suggesting the teachers the words they know, and the teachers coach the learners by selecting letters from the words that they suggest and spending effort in making sure that the students identify the word in whatever form they are presented it with, and uncovering in them the confidence to reproduce the letter when needed. In this process of back learning, the women are discovering the joy of letters. For Pachudi, who is 60, taking a marker and writing ‘ka’ , ‘ma’, ‘ra’ on a white board is a first in her life. For all these years, she had been using these letters orally in her songs and stories, without knowing how it looked like. Now, she has experienced the joy of her first alphabet, and she will identify it any surface- be it as a painted sign on a tank, a printed sign on a banner or a written sign on a paper.