Now if you’re thinking that getting thrashed was a bad thing, think again. He has a strange way of playing his cards, God.
The next day when I went to school, He made his presence felt through a particular History teacher who, until that day, had never taken notice of me, but who, upon seeing my black and blue adornments, decided to take me under wing.
This was a good thing, for the History teacher in question was to play a crucial role in my rediscovery of myself in the time to come.
The chapter being taught that day was “The Revolt of 1857”...
The chapter was heavy and all of us were expecting to be crushed once and for all under its heaviness in the heat of the last period of school in that electricityless Lucknow summer afternoon. The ripple of a suppressed yawn left its briny residue in many a watery eye and the clock seemed to be ticking ever so slightly slower every time we looked at it.
However, our history teacher had plans for our salvation from boredom that we were unaware of.
I studied in a school with more than a hundred and fifty years of history behind it. With an institution that old, the perspective with which history is taught acquires a strange familiarity for, many a time, the characters in history are also associated intimately with the institution’s past.
Our school being as old as it is and also being founded by, strangely enough, a Frenchman who defected from the French army to join the British army, was involved intimately in the revolt.
Consequently, the “revolt” of 1857, became the “mutiny” of 1857 in which our old boys were heroes and we were even awarded battle colours by the British Army for the defence of the Residency in Lucknow.
Stir up pride and an ability to relate to a story in an Indian and you’ve won over his heart. We found ourselves mesmerized by how we had suddenly begun to relate to History and enjoy it.
Now in this strange concoction of an Indian identity, with a British and French history, one particular student, an individual by the name of Shiv Prakash Sharma, decided to sow the seeds of dissension.
“With all due respect Sir, please call it the first war of Indian Independence”
Details, definitions of “war” and “mutiny” ensued. Debate followed. The matter seemed to be nearing resolution when Shiv Prakash Sharma said “Sir, you are a Christian and that’s why you are siding with the British. Next you’ll be preaching the gospel and trying to convert us.”
The entire class was in shock. If there was one thing eleven years of education had taught us in La Martiniere, it was that religion was always to be respected and never used as a point of discrimination.
And then, an even stranger thing happened.
An Anglo-Indian boy by the name of George Ducasse stood up and said “Just because this country has a Hindu majority, are you going to re-write history?”
It seemed as if things were going to get riotously ugly but the ringing bell signalling the end of school saved the day.
As I went home that day, my own dilemmas of where my life was headed next were completely replaced with thoughts on where our country was headed. With governments using religion as a political agenda, how long was it going to be till another Shiv Prakash Sharma said something to offend another George Ducasse? How long before that George Ducasse fought back? Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth. Who could change this?
And that moment left me with a certain something that was to influence the course of actions for the rest of my life; a humbling.
(to be continued ... as usual ...)
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