Status update as teaching assistant

What do fictional subtitles for Godard movie shots, Burka Avenger , Harry Potter , Premchand, and Inedible India graphic/memes have in common? Hold your breath… all of them are crowdsourced for classroom teaching from Facebook.

During a recent discussion with a friend, we concurred how a general feeling of pessimism permeated most issues about academia these days, especially following the tragic suicide of the Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula in January in Hyderabad Central University, to the current crackdown in JNU and HCU.

I must apologise for this detour while setting out to explain how as a creative writing instructor I source my material and ideas from social networks and other non-traditional media. But teaching is a political act too. Hence, non-traditional.

The term crowdsourcing came to my dictionary only recently, and its need arose rather urgently. Other than creative writing, I had to teach within the short span of a semester, some challenging and highly engaging courses, namely, ‘Construct of Body Image in Pop Culture and Creative Texts’ and ‘From Books to Screen and Back’.

I was delighted to find some of my favourite writers and poets honourably involved in crowdsourcing. No other term seemed more promising in Facebook democracy.

In this, poet Kazim Ali became my main inspiration. The creative writing director of Oberlin College generously shares his reading lists on Facebook and invites additions from time to time. The aesthetic of the range is highly rewarding. So I took courage from Ali to trek for my own treasure. After all, Anais Nin’s pithy quote said it all: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

The methodology is simple. Once I write a Facebook status, such as “Hey all, so I will be teaching a course on how books/texts/scripts become movies or pictures or images or visual concepts… Tips and resource suggestions are highly appreciated”, within an hour the comment thread fills up, as do my inbox and email. The suggestions range from Premchand’s The Chess Players ( Shatranj Ke Khiladi ) to How to Kill a Mockingbird to Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhayay’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Road) to the immensely popular Harry Potter series. The best haul appears to be a student project on Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh , with its unique geopolitical narrative — an underclass film assignment on YouTube.

Saikat Majumdar of Stanford University has been teaching The Chess Players for his Modern Indian Literature class. In our Facebook interaction, Majumdar shares his thrill: “I begin by pointing out how close — even, in some ways, interchangeable — Hindi and Urdu were to Premchand.”

We revel in the master’s effortless prose, free of the religious associations that have been thrust on Hindi and Urdu later.

“The story itself is quite a stunner for students… The decadence of the world is morally troubling and yet most students find it aesthetically captivating, and this gulf between the moral and the aesthetic is an endlessly intriguing space and offers great teaching moments,” writes Majumdar.

One couldn’t agree more.

The poetry class doesn’t depend on textbooks alone. My ‘Timeline’ is abuzz the minute I post Toru Dutt’s sonnet (excerpted):

But nothing can be lovelier than the ranges

Of bamboos to the eastward, when the moon

Looks through their gaps, and the white lotus changes

Into a cup of silver. One might swoon

Drunken with beauty then, or gaze and gaze

On a primeval Eden, in amaze.

Comments on the poet’s use of the sonnet form to show an idealised Eden as the pristine homeland quickly leads to translations. Maaz Bin Bilal, who teaches in Ashoka University, Delhi, and is a Ghalib translator, pitches in with his experience of realising the ghazal form in English. Ghalib, to the undergraduates, becomes a cool dude.

It must be divulged here, without compromising any secrecy, that typically, for each semester and the courses opted, my students create a ‘closed’ Facebook group to exchange ideas, thus adding an element of freshness to the teaching and sharing.

Going back to the context of student politics, it was on Facebook that Vemula’s suicide note went viral before news publications picked it up. The study-abroad students from the US who I teach have been deeply swayed by it. This is poetry, said many, not of anguish but of clarity. Vemula’s imagination of man as stardust and not a number, thing, or vote, coupled with his deep reflections on nature, love and politics is what the students understand and imbibe.

During my crowdsourcing, Arpita Ghosh, assistant professor at Ramananda Centenary College, Purulia, West Bengal, was delightfully quick with her suggestions, especially when it came to my Construct of Body Image course. Telling students about the rather skewed subtext of masculinity and nationalism in the well-known Indian history and mythology comic-book series Amar Chitra Katha became livelier with her suggestions of reading Ketu Katrak ( Politics of the Female Body ) and Caroline Knapp ( Appetites ); Ghosh’s witty recommendations on fan fiction were helpful in holding fort for my high-energy classes.

Speaking of high energy, Rajesh Rajamani’s memes are a spin-off of classical Indian art to drive home points on feminism, postmodern angst, caste bigotry, as well as visual subversion. And now that Rajamani’s comics has been cited as one of the recent best works in the country, I know why it made sense to crowdsource it for my class.

As social media is a lot of YouTube, the more sensuous visual representation of Michael Ondaatje’s poem ‘The Cinnamon Peeler’ gathered similar suggestions in the comments section such as Andy Garcia reading ‘Tonight I can write the saddest lines (Pablo Neruda)’, ‘Nina’s Blues (Cornelius Eady)’, and Prahlad Singh Tipaniya singing Kabir. In this context, where the text/screen interdisciplinary mode plays in beautiful layers, one cannot help but remember Susan Sontag on beauty:

“The responses to beauty in art and to beauty in nature are interdependent… Beauty regains its solidity, its inevitability, as a judgment needed to make sense of a large portion of one’s energies, affinities, and admirations; and the usurping notions appear ludicrous.

“Imagine saying, ‘That sunset is interesting.’”

For a poet and writer, what is handier than such quotes that abound in the social media?

Nabina Das is a poet and fiction writer currently living in Hyderabad and teaching creative writing

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