Should a Classroom Comfort Its Students or Leave Them Nowhere to Hide?

The Exit in the Syllabus

Should education comfort students or unsettle them? The usual answer is to say it should do a little of both. The harder question is what happens when an institution has to choose and whether it will admit that it chose.

A Distant Injustice in Place of a Near One Mini

Krishnan's essay in The Hindu offers one example. By her account, a 2009 Calicut University textbook carried Padma Sachdev's Dogri poem on dividing the moon, in Karan Singh's translation, along with verses from Namdeo Dhasal.

She reports that students liked the poem and teachers did not. In the next round of prescriptions, that book gave way to one whose excerpt on injustice came from Uncle Tom's Cabin. Krishnan reads the swap as slavery viewed from a safe distance.

This is one writer's account of one syllabus and no board's reasoning is on record here. But the pattern she names is easy to recognise. A student can condemn slavery in another country without once looking at her own town.

The lesson on injustice has been delivered and nobody in the room has been implicated.

Translation Crosses the Same Distance Differently

Translation also moves a text across distance, but for the opposite purpose. Bama's Karukku was published in Tamil in 1992 and reached English readers in 2000 through Lakshmi Holmström, in an edition Krishnan herself edited.

The publisher records that the Tamil publishing industry had first rejected Bama's language. A reader in Lucknow or Guwahati who cannot read Tamil can still meet that life and no state programme could have delivered that encounter as a slogan.

India has built institutions for this work. The Sahitya Akademi works in 24 languages and has given a translation prize since 1989. NEP 2020 commits to expanding translation and interpretation. Yet access does not guarantee entry.

In August 2021, Delhi University's Oversight Committee removed works by Bama and Sukirtharani from the English honours syllabus, along with Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi. Academic Council members objected that statutory bodies had been bypassed, while the registrar called the criticism misplaced and the syllabus inclusive.

Translation had carried two Tamil writers into an English course, but it could not keep them there.

What the Comparison Shows Put the

two cases side by side and the usual assumption, that near texts unsettle and far ones comfort, does not hold. In 1873, Jotirao Phule dedicated Gulamgiri, his attack on caste, to the Americans who had opposed slavery. American slavery was his way into the Indian question, not his way out of it.

And a Tamil Dalit memoir read in a Delhi seminar can become as safely foreign as Stowe's America. So distance is not a property of the text. It depends on whether the reader is allowed to stay outside.

TAN's position is this: empathy cannot be mandated and any syllabus that promises it is overreaching. What an institution can do is decline to provide the exit. It can teach Stowe beside Dhasal and ask the question that a single text allows students to avoid: where is this happening around you? Choosing what to read cannot create empathy, but it can make avoiding the question much harder.