This article was published was published in the HINDU on 2nd february 2016 but it was truncated and its import got diluted . The link is http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/open-page-bias-from-her-perspective/article8180006.ece
A
little Girl’s Reflections on her School Books
Why
can’t I be the judge in the play? Because I am a girl! Well, this is what my
class 3 NCERT Hindi text book says!! In that chapter which contains the play on
the parable in which the monkey is the judge between two cats fighting for a
bread, the stage directions so clearly say – ‘7-8 baras ka ladka
bandar ban sakta hai aur 5-6 baras ki ladkiyaan billi ban sakti hain.’ (a
boy of 7-8 years of age can become the monkey and girls of 5-6 years can play
the parts of the cats). Even the
dress has been so precisely prescribed for the boy-monkey and the quarreling cats.
And, at the end of the play, how I hate when we two girls, acting the cats,
chant -“aapas mein jhagdaa kar baithin,
buddhi apni khoti…” (we fought among ourselves as our minds are weak). As
if it’s only girls who fight for small things!
Doesn’t my brother, many a times, fight with me for that last piece of
pizza?
Yes, I am only a 10 year old small girl and might not be so
knowledgeable but, even then, some of it is so obviously unfair. Just look at
the picture of the three kids playing basketball, in the chapter ‘Teamwork’ in my
class5 English book. It shows the lone girl’s feet on the ground and the ball
beyond her reach, while the two boys are shown high up in the air putting the
ball in the basket. I really feel bad because I can beat any boy in my class in
racing, football and basketball.
I love
playing all sorts of outdoor games and my favourite game is cricket. In the
illustrations in my text books through all my classes, however, I have seen
only boys playing cricket while the girls have dolls in their hands. How much
have I always disliked playing with dolls!!
My aunt is a doctor but I have yet
to see a picture of a lady doctor in a book. In that picture of a doctor
administering vaccine to a child, we see a male doctor, a nurse and a queue of
mothers carrying their children. My experience is so different. I love to go
along with my Papa to the doctor and he makes me feel so brave that I don’t even
fear the injections. Oh! How I pity those boys who are so frightened of
injections.
It’s not only about the doctors. If
you see my EVS book you will see that the pictures in the chapter ‘Organizations that help us’, depict only men
doing all the important jobs. There are five different pictures of various
professionals- the police, doctor, army personnel, workers in a post office-
and none of them has a woman. Even in my younger brother’s book who is in class
2, there are pictures of 12 professionals in the chapter, ‘We Need Them’, and
none of them is of a woman. And you know what? The only picture of woman in his
book is in the part ‘People who entertain us’ and, that is of her as a dancer.
Even in my book the chapter ‘Our Heritage’ has women in all its pictures- the pictures being of various dances in our
country. Hey! Everybody, even a kid, knows that women are performing duties in
every field. My father showed me in the newspaper the other day that they were
the lady scientists who made the Indian Mars mission so successful.
I
have heard so much of a lady Arunima Sinha who reached the top of Mount Everest
even though she had lost her foot in an incident; but I can’t understand why my
text book has the picture of only men as mountaineers. Don’t these writers of
the text books read newspapers?
And
it’s not only about the outside world. Even the description at some places of
the household chores make me think them to be so odd! Just sample this from a
chapter ‘Drop by Drop’ in my NCERT EVS book - ‘His
mother and sister have to walk a longer distance to fetch water… While walking
on the hot sand their feet burn and blisters just cannot be avoided. When the train
carrying water comes they are very happy. Madho’s father goes to fetch water in
his camel-cart’. Is it all right that
while the women travel on foot, the man does it on a cart? To my little girl’s
mind it somehow doesn’t feel all that nice.
I don’t know if
I am a bit weird and that all of the above seems strange to me only or,
something’s really amiss in our books. If it’s so, somebody please do something
as what we learn in our childhood stays with us forever and makes us what we
are in our adulthood. Why do they think that it’s only boys who can jump high,
love cricket and football or, do jobs like flying a plane or working in a steel
plant? I hope people writing the books start believing that even boys weep and
the girls love to play boisterously.
Dr Skand Shukla
(An
Officer of the Provincial Education Services and was a visiting Fellow to the
Arizona State University, U.S.A)
