This essay is part of Ananke’s 10th anniversary special edition which can be viewed here.
It often comes as a surprise to many people that it has been almost 12 years since I started teaching University students. Most people see me as an independent publisher and editor, and are unaware of this parallel track in my life, which has, over the past decade, become a vital part of my life. What is interesting is that when I first started teaching, I worked with MA students, and only later came to work with undergraduate students, almost in reverse of how it might happen for a career academic. But then, and unlike many others, I came to teaching as a practitioner, which suggested the exciting prospect of a blank slate which could be filled in with unique pedagogic practices, while it also translated into many anxious hours in the early years doing lecture prep wondering if I was getting it all wrong!
I began teaching UG students only in 2021, on a course called Introduction to Critical Thinking, a mandatory foundation course for all first-year UGs enrolled at the private liberal arts university where I teach, no matter what their future major might be. Fairly early on, I decided that what I could bring from my two decades of commissioning editor experience to such a course was to enable these out-of-high-school students to begin building their critical voice.
Indeed, voice, for me, lies at the very heart of critical thinking and writing. Voice does not merely refer to style or to ideas, but the very manner in which articulation has a distinctiveness which is unique to the person making the point. It is an idea we were encouraged to examine and explore and debate and discuss when I was a young editor being mentored by a couple of remarkable seniors in the publishing industry who remain lighthouses for me till this day. As editors, we were nudged towards understanding the intricacies of the author’s voice and to render the best possible version of it in our final edit. I want to add here that the edit at hand needed to be even more nuanced and carefully done, if the manuscript we were working on was that of a translation. It is no surprise then that one of the ways in which I routinely work on voice with the students is via a translation exercise.
In the exercise, the students have to get hold of a short 300-word extract which could be anything from an Op-Ed, to a literary extract, to poetry, etc. in their mother tongue or a language other than English that they are fluent in. The extract has to be related to the theme of the semester. The first time I assigned it, a couple of years ago, the semester theme was Flaneusing/Loitering in the City. I suggested the exercise tentatively, wondering how 18/19-year-old students would respond to it since many of them admitted they were not as fluent in their mother tongue as they would like. The submissions surprised me. About eight students had picked some random yet predictable Hindi film song (on the city and wandering about the city, favourites being Yeh hai Dilli meri jaan, Bambai Meri Jaan) for which they probably got the translation from Google, or perhaps they just took recourse to Google Translate with the original lyrics. However, another 10-12 students had really exercised themselves to do the assignment well, despite knowing that they would not be graded for the assignment; they just had to turn it in. One student found an essay on Delhi by the acclaimed Hindi author Krishna Sobti and translated a part of it. Another decided to have her grandmother reminisce to her in her mother tongue, Marwari, about how her city was once different; the student then translated what she had audio-recorded with her grandmother. I was blown away by the palimpsest of texts her interaction with her grandmother in their mother tongue had yielded. For the student too, it was a moment of discovery and elation. As she said to me later, she and her grandmother had never had a conversation of this kind before, almost compelling her to see her elder in an entirely different light. The text that she recorded was rich too because it was colloquial and conversational, and she applied herself with great enthusiasm to retain the original sense of lightness and love as she translated the conversation to English for the exercise. I began to realise that the thought of the exercise had struck a chord, and that the students were keen to explore their engagement, sometimes tenuous for some of them, with their mother tongue. What they were also doing in effect was bringing their ‘self’ to the theme of the semester, Flaneusing in the City, feeling closer to the theme in a way that no close reading exercise could have accomplished.
After this first rather tentative start to the assignment, I decided to make it a graded assignment. I made sure the students had more time to give thought to what they wanted to choose as their extract and I expressly forbade them from sending in random Bollywood songs! The theme the next semester –Reading the Other—was harder for an exercise of this sort, for its sheer reflective quality, which for some students at least felt like an abstraction. I had to dedicate more office hours at this time to help the students feel more confident about the assignment. What my students submitted finally left me feeling astonished and thoroughly pleased. I particularly want to mention two of these: the first one was an op-ed on Kannada-medium schools of Kanhangad in Kasaragodu district of Kerala (Kannada to English), and the second, a translation of the poem ‘Tum Kaun Jaat Ho Bhai’ by Bachcha Lal Unmesh (Hindi to English). These two submissions had expertly woven concepts from our classroom discussions into the translation without in any way compromising the integrity of the original text itself. I was gobsmacked on seeing this, catching perhaps just a glimpse of the tremendous possibilities that such an exercise might present.
There was another striking thing that happened with each cohort that I assigned this exercise to. In every section, certain students who were diffident about their spoken English and their ability to negotiate classroom discussions, generally the quieter ones, suddenly came to life with this exercise. Their newfound sense of confidence was evident and interestingly, in the aftermath of this exercise, some of them even became more conversant in the classroom. One of them was a deeply engaged albeit painfully shy student who wanted to translate an op-ed which was not in their mother tongue but in the language of the state the family had been posted in for long, Meitei. Yet another layer of bringing the self to the theme at hand was added in this particular student’s submission.
What becomes evident after doing this over four semesters is that the students see it as an exercise where they can a)show something of their personal self b)unleash some amount of creativity. I am frankly more interested in the first bit of evidence—the fact that being able to show something of themselves/their intimate selves/their lives at home, in a critical thinking classroom, engendered such productivity and purposeful work on part of the students. Let’s unpack this point further.
In a symposium panel on Voice and Power in Literature organised by RMIT University Melbourne which I was part of recently as the respondent, one of the panelists, the brilliant writer and scholar Roanna Gonsalves talked about bell hooks’s fascinating conceptualisation about ‘coming to voice’. Gonsalves writes, ‘ In hooks’ conceptualisation, no single voice is identified as authentic. Instead, the sense of self, and of voice, is conceptualised as multi-dimensional, dynamic, versatile. Speaking is seen as a way to active self-transformation, as a gesture of resistance, of affirmation and of struggle.’ In a much humbler and scaled down manner, I suppose it is this motivation that I was trying to keep alive by introducing the translation exercise in my critical thinking classroom. At the same symposium panel, another participant, Creative Writing Professor Marjorie Evasco spoke about the Dagat Bohol project she was part of in the port town of Jagna in Philippines, where several groups were formed including two individuals from the local fisher folk community and 3-4 high school students. The groups then wrote narratives together, negotiating the fisherfolk’s use of their own language throughout. What was particularly enlightening for me in Evasco’s description of the Filipino project was the fact that the mentors stepped back entirely once the students and the fisherfolk began engaging with each other. ‘We wanted to learn how these young writers would create literature in the language of their local communities, retrieving and reaffirming the value of the tried-and-tested wisdom and knowledge systems of artisanal fishermen, who are often, if not always, taken for granted and marginalized in society.’ I have seen architecture and art students work with local communities to create an artefact or structure together, exchanging ideas and knowledge, and keeping alive the local idioms, motifs and techniques; how exciting it would be to see students develop stories and narratives together in the same way with a local community!
In conclusion, to me, such interventions are nothing short of the result of what I call Audacious Mentoring, mentoring that refuses to remain circumscribed within established parameters of what is possible and instead pushes the envelope, based on the trust that the mentee will meet the mentor halfway. It is without doubt the only way to enable students to find their voice in the classroom, where the instructor does not foist their ideas and ‘self’ on the students, rather she holds space within which the students can engage in an exploration to find their own path.
About Arpita Das
Arpita Das is an alumna of St Stephen’s College, Delhi University and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, for which she received the Felix Scholarship. She is the Founder-Publisher of the award-winning independent publishing house based in New Delhi, Yoda Press. She teaches the Publishing Seminar to senior students of Creative Writing at Ashoka University and a Foundation Course called Introduction to Critical Thinking to first-year students. In the past, she helped set up the Word Lab at the Indian Institute of Human Settlements in Bangalore, and led the Sage School of Publishing courses at various universities and institutions across India. A Board Member of PublisHer (womeninpublishing.org), she writes often on book culture, publishing, popular culture, gender and bibliotherapy for various periodicals and platforms. She is also the Editor of the South Asia Series at Melbourne University Publishing.
Image by paullita100 from Pixabay
