Return to the Roots

SNATCHES OF CHANTING and the rattle of a handloom welcome you to Vidyakshetra, a school in Kengeri on the outskirts of Bengaluru. Children in beige kurta-pyjamas flit about, sweep­ing the campus, collecting dry leaves and water­ing plants. Small brick structures dot the campus that is planted with fruiting trees. The chikoo and fig trees are heavy with fruit and mango blossoms herald the coming of summer, but inside the huts—built with brick and lime-cow dung mortar—that serve as classrooms, it is cool. “The students learn eco-friendly construction and build something every year, in December,” says Shamanth Murthy, a young parent who joined the school three years ago to help manage its internet presence. We peep in on a class in progress in one of the huts—the children sit cross-legged on the floor, reciting multiplication tables in Kannada. This is Vyasa varga, Murthy says. Vidyakshetra does not follow the K12 grade system; it follows a system inspired by gurukuls of yore where a guru handholds a group of children through the learning journey, calling upon experts as and when needed. “Our oldest batch of students, who just graduated, are pursuing careers in dance, yoga, product design and psychology among other fields. The idea is to help them find their path early in life,” says Sripad Rao, 42, who leads Bharadwaja varga, comprising eight nine-year-olds. He quit Thoughtworks, a global tech consultancy, to join the experiment that is Vidyakshetra. At the rustic dining pavilion, Rao and Natyas­hree Avinash are mixing up a large batch of churmuri—puffed rice, raw vegetables, a squeeze of lemon and a dash of chilli—with their students for the mid-morning snack. As they slice, dice, grate and toss, the students sing ‘Maadu sikkadalla’, a devotional mundige, or riddle-song, composed by Purandara Dasa, a Bhakti composer and Haridasa philosopher who lived in 15th-to16th century Karnataka.

Walking past classes in progress—the Vashishtha varga students preparing for their Class 10 National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) examinations that are almost upon them; Kapi­la varga, the fresh batch of primary students, experimenting with Sanskrit as a language of classroom instruction; Atri varga, led by a specialist in Kannada folk culture, enjoying some fresh jaggery lollipops and banter; girls playing the tabla; strains of a Hindu­stani bandish on Saraswati from an upstairs room—Vidyakshetra increasingly feels like a commune. There is a roster of responsi­bilities for adults and children alike, and a community kitchen with parents taking turns to help out, with lunch—today, it is sambar, beetroot palya, buttermilk and red rice—eaten off leaves, sitting cross-legged on the floor. There are no shoes or screens in sight, and almost every child sports a tika, bindi or Vibhuti. The girls wear dupattas tied to one side, their hair parted down the middle and plaited. Everything is tinged with nostalgia for a past these children may have never known otherwise.

Although not a residential school, many teachers, including an artist from Odisha, live on campus and the students are picked with care from “culturally aligned families”, says Murthy, who moved all the way from Malleswaram in the heart of the city to be near the school. His five-year-old daughter attends the shishu vatika (kinder­garten) at Vidyakshetra. “We are about 130 students now, across 11 vargas. There is no interview, unlike in mainstream schools, but the parents who approach us are usually aware and want to walk on the path of dharma. There is no fee because the founders believe food, education and medicine were never sold in pracheen Bharat,” he says.

Muneet Dhiman, founder and managing trustee of Vidyakshet­ra, is clear that he doesn’t want to go mainstream. Bharatiya values have been subsumed by uncontrolled industrialisation, he says, and to reclaim them one must step away from all that has broken the fabric of our society. “When you make Indian arts and culture and Sanskrit a part of the curriculum, on par with science and maths, you begin to see results,” he says. “Education is not mere literacy, it is sampurna yog,” he says. The Vidyakshetra curriculum has 24 sub­jects, including kalarippayattu, painting, history and geometry, and takes a block-learning approach to most of them. The pedagogy is based on the Upanishadic concept of holistic development through pancha koshas—annamaya kosha, related to physical development; pranamaya kosha, involving bodily awareness; manomaya kosha, or emotional and spiritual development; vijnanamaya kosha, or the development of the intellect; and anandamaya kosha, the experi­ence of the transcendent. Late last year, the Narendra Modi govern­ment released a National Curriculum Framework (NCF) document under the National Education Policy, 2020 (NEP) for children aged three to eight, advocating the pancha kosha concept. “The NCF team visited us,” says Dhiman, who quit his job as R&D head of Mindtree Europe after reading the Bhagavad Gita and plunged full-time into building a model school. “We visited 26 schools with various pedagogies inspired by J Krishnamurti, Waldorf, Montes­sori, Sri Aurobindo, Gandhi, and others before starting out on our own. The dharmic element was missing in most of them,” he says, adding that Vidyakshetra does not shy away from performing aartis and yagnas in its festive celebrations.

THE SCHOOL BELIEVES in inculcating ‘Indian’ values, including respecting elders, not wasting food, and not fall­ing into the consumerist trap. Not far from the teachers’ room and library stacked with books on grihastha ashrama, reli­gion and Sanskrit besides Rajiv Malhotra’s works—it used to be the Dhiman residence until they moved to a larger house on the cam­pus—Kupendra Kumar, a master weaver, mans a handloom he has built himself. For the past couple of months, he has been teaching students to weave fabric out of the thread they spin from cotton sourced from Heggodu. He points to a natural dyeing unit under construction nearby. “We have already made dozens of metres of fabric. The goal is to eventually make uniforms for teachers and for students inhouse from scratch,” Kumar says. Vidyakshetra wants children to learn to make roti, kapda, makaan from scratch. To this end, they begin their day—after prayer—with an hour of farming on a patch opposite the school. There is also a goshala coming up, with the two resident cows grazing freely on campus.

For several decades now, educationists have been interrogat­ing Western pedagogies and looking for ways to situate learning in the Indian context. The schools run by the Jiddu Krishnamurti Foundation and the Sri Aurobindo Society stand out in their hu­manistic approach and focus on self-awareness, respect for nature and holistic development. Other mainstream schools, such as the Padma Seshadri Bala Bhavan (PSBB) group of schools founded by Rajalakshmi Parathasarathy in Chennai in 1958, while retaining English as the medium of instruction, have a clear Indian focus, looking at the arts, cultural traditions, and Indian mythology, scrip­ture and heritage. Students of PSBB, which has on many occasions been accused of perpetuating Brahminism and caste violence, greet teachers with ‘Gurubhyo namaha (I salute the guru)’ instead of a ‘good morning’. For the past few years, even before NEP envis­aged bringing Indian languages and pedagogies into the ambit of mainstream education, the demand for incorporating traditional values and culture in school curricula has been steadily rising, as is evident from the number of such schools that have mushroomed across the country: Gyankriti in Indore bills itself as a modern guru­kul where Sanatana Dharma is studied alongside modern subjects; Ved Dhara in Himachal Pradesh’s Kangra district lists the promo­tion of Indian culture and Sanskrit among its key objectives; Matri Kiran in Gurugram takes Sanskrit seriously right from Class 1. “We teach Sanskrit through stories, small dialogues, songs and shlo­kas and don’t worry too much about grammar when the child is young. The idea is not to give religious instruction but to inculcate an interest in the language so that they may work towards profi­ciency as they grow older,” says Kiran Sharma, head of the Sanskrit department at Matri Kiran, which follows a three-language policy in Classes 1-8 and employs four Sanskrit teachers.

At Indic International School, a new venture in Kompally, Hy­derabad, by Ashish Naredi, meditation and Sanskrit are introduced right from kindergarten. “If we want students to understand who we are and how our society is, it is important to be able to speak, read and write Sanskrit so that one can read ancient Indian texts in the original,” says Naredi. In 2022-23, the school’s first academic year, Indic International admitted 235 students. “As a mainstream school, we had a lot of debate on introducing Sanskrit but we have been pleasantly surprised by the feedback from parents; even Mus­lim parents are happy their child is learning the language with­out any pressure of exams.” Naredi does not rule out teaching the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, or the Gita in the future “to get chil­dren thinking”.

Vidyakshetra has 24 subjects, including kalarippayattu, painting, history and geometry. The pedagogy is based on the Upanishadic concept of pancha koshas

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“The bhakti aspect need not be taught in school, but stories from these texts and the moral dilemmas they feature merit discussing with students. We are doing ourselves a disservice if we don’t take them up,” says Naredi, adding that “a big section of parents want schools to introduce value education”. The school has made music a compulsory subject and plans to introduce a course on the Indian calendar system, designed by mathematician CK Raju.

“Indian education is broken because it is unable to resolve di­chotomies between professional, family and school lives, between tradition and modernity, between local and global,” says Srinivas Guttal, founder of Purnapramati, which runs several schools in Bengaluru and a Vedic gurukul in Magadi. “Back in 2010, we were one of the first to experiment with Bharatiya kalas, Ramayana, Gita, Sanskrit and other traditional knowledge at the school level. We started with 37 kids and there was a lot of resis­tance. The political climate wasn’t conducive. But in the past few years, there is a renewed interest in Indian culture and Sanskrit. Today, we touch the lives of about 800 children. People with an affinity towards tradition have moved from other cities to join our school,” he says. Writing NIOS examinations is optional at Pur­napramati; instead the focus is on traditions, Sanskrit and Kannada, with the pedagogy incorporating cultural songs, Ramayana and Bhagavatam among other Hindu works. “We encourage parents to change the overall culture at home, and to continue to learn throughout their adult lives. Students are encouraged to think about what modernity has done to us in the past couple of hundred years—from our modes of commu­nication to how we dress, what we eat and how we travel,” Guttal says. Are students able to integrate into mainstream society upon graduating? “Unfortunately, more students choose to pursue a con­ventional degree than we expected. We hoped they would go to the mountains, dive in rivers, establish their own path,” Guttal says.

You don’t have to be an alternative school to fill children “with the pride of being Indian,” says Anjali Jaipuria, vice-president, Integral Education Society, which runs the Seth MR Jaipuria group of schools, 55 of them, spread across the Uttar Pradesh heartland, Bihar and other northern states. Jaipuria, a follower of Sri Aurobindo, was among the first educa­tionists to introduce Sanskrit as a compul­sory subject from Class 1 over 20 years ago. She approached Sampadananda Mishra, a veteran Sanskrit educator, to design text­books and a curriculum that would be fun and easy to implement. “With this curricu­lum, children learn Sanskrit spontaneous­ly, much the same way they would learn to speak in their mother tongue—through songs, rhymes, funny stories, conversa­tions and shlokas,” says Jaipuria, who has also incorporated spirituality—“awareness of the soul”—and biographies of eminent Indians into the curriculum. “It is impor­tant that children learn about our country and its culture first. They have the rest of their lifetimes to learn about the world,” she says.

“I created an activity-based curriculum based on nature, role play, stories about inspiring people, and about our cultural heri­tage,” says Mishra, whose curriculum and textbooks are in use in hundreds of schools. He has designed books for state governments and trained dozens of teachers. “The easiest way to keep Bharatiya jnana at the centre of our education system—which is also the goal of NEP—is through Sanskrit,” Mishra says. “With increasing aware­ness among the elite about our civilisational values, our temples and our art forms, and with historical truths coming to the front, there is a concurrent spike in interest in Sanskrit. Like any language, it is best learnt when you are young.” Indic International, Ved Dhara and other schools that follow his curriculum claim to have achieved spectacular results in a short time. He is in talks with other schools, among them a Guwahati-based school with 70 locations.

While Sanskrit is essential to samskruti, there are few schools today that are looking at education from a Bharatiya drishti, says Diwakar Chennappa, founder of Udhbhavaha, an alternative com­munity school with 64 children on the fringes of Bengaluru. “Most schools tend to focus on the first-benchers and the backbenchers but the ones in the middle are getting left behind. At Udhbhavaha, we try to embrace our ordinariness as well as the uncertainty of life,” says Chennappa, also part of Vidyakshetra’s founding team. Every year, the school undertakes a padayatra, walking through villages with no destination or agenda. “You don’t know where you will sleep or who will offer food. On our last three padayatras, we never had to cook for ourselves, even though we were a large group of over 50. When children see this goodness at the heart of Indian society, they begin to ask interesting questions,” he says. It is important to bring experiential and oral learning back because they were central to the Indian way of education, he notes. “My grandfather always told me, you have to take care of your parents when they are old like they are taking care of me. Today, we have inhibitions with our chil­dren and we don’t have these conversations with them. We say, how can we expect this of a generation that is hopeless. Schools with a Bharatiya drishti are here to tell us that hope is something we have to carry, and that we should not give up on dharmic expectations.”

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