Educational Hiccups

My Mirror column:

Hichki talks of schools being places of learning not just for students, but for teachers and parents as well. This is a lesson we aren’t ready to accept in practice.

Schools are revealing places. They are institutionalised locales in which a modern-day society passes down the norms and values it wishes its younger generations to absorb. The task of socialising children into adulthood, which in smaller-scale pre-modern social units was carried out by the family and the community, is something that now takes place in the structured but often more anonymous setting of the school.

Some of this is at the formal, pedagogical level – through textbooks, syllabi, rules of eligibility for students and codes of conduct binding on both teachers and students. At the more informal level, the classroom is a social laboratory: a place in which the biases, hierarchies and faultlines that exist in the adult world outside can either be allowed to perpetuate themselves unhindered, or be called out for their divisiveness and illogicality.

The recent Hichki, starring Rani Mukherjee as a teacher who attempts to do the latter, is a somewhat unusual film for Bollywood. Popular Hindi cinema has traditionally dealt with social questions by telling a story about how they impinge on one particular individual, the heroine or hero, while Hichki, set in a fictitious 'posh' Mumbai school called St. Notker's, places a class full of teenagers centrestage, allowing a fine ensemble cast to get its space in the sun.

There have, of course, been precedents for this sort of narrative: as far back as the team of convicts in V Shantaram's Do Aankhen Barah Haath (1957) and as recent as the women's hockey team in Chak De India. Like Hichki, those films balance the screen-time afforded to the group with an equal focus on a guru-like protagonist who has made their progress a personal goal – Shantaram as the reform-oriented prison warden, or Shahrukh Khan as the national hockey coach. And the guru has problems of his own: if Chak De's Kabir Khan had an unjust corruption charge hanging over his head, Mukherjee's character Naina Mathur is an overqualified teacher who's been rejected by every school she's applied at because she has Tourette's Syndrome: an untreatable condition that results in her making involuntary disruptive sounds during many of her social interactions: sounds that most people find impossible to get beyond.

When Naina finally lands a job, it's because no-one else wants it. The Hindi-speaking working class teens she is brought in to instruct are not the usual St. Notker's kids. They are government school kids who've been admitted to the private elite school under legal duress when the government school was shut and its land turned into a playground for the St. Notker's (the metaphorical implications of this plotline are astounding). Described alternately as “bastiwale bachche” and “municipal garbage”, Hichki's “Class 9F” is a broadstrokes fictional stand-in for the real life underprivileged kids brought into elite schools across the country by the Right to Education Act of 2009, which ensures that a specific number of seats in government-aided private schools are left open for children from a lower income bracket.
The 'F for Failure' implication in the name 9F is a little sledgehammer, as is much of the film. But Hichki is a rare attempt in popular cinema to engage with a legislation that needs a great deal of political will to implement – but that might determine whether our best-equipped schools are going to be part of the social revolutions we need, or only zealously guard their privilege (like Neeraj Kabi does as the dedicated but classist teacher in Hichki).


If one way to think of mainstream Hindi cinema is as a barometer of the popular, then Hichki has an uncanny finger on the pulse of the nation: the film released on March 23, 2018, featuring a leaked exam paper as part of the climactic plot, and by end-March, a national scandal had erupted around the leaking of the CBSE's Class X Maths and Economics papers.


Finally, I have nothing against a script that wants to educate Indian audiences about a little-understood condition that probably afflicts a huge number of people. But it's worth pointing out that the equivalence the film suggests – between Naina's physical disability and the socio-economic disability that 9F students are battling – is one more example of the class-based spoonfeeding Bollywood now does so much of. I think here of two fine films that have dealt with class in the schoolroom – Stanley ka Dabba and Hindi Medium. Stanley is based on the subliminal premise that the sympathy of a middle-class, primarily English-speaking audience can only be gained by a child character who goes to a good convent and recites English poems: only then might we care if he turns out to be a child labourer. In Hindi Medium, we apparently need Irrfan Khan and his upper middle class family to playact at poverty as our route to Deepak Dobriyal's real travails and hopes for his child's education.


It appears then that for Indian multiplex audiences, even the poor child seeking an education becomes worth assisting only when some upper middle class person makes it a life goal.

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 29 Apr 2018.