Krishna in The English Teacher by R K Narayan and His Attitude to Education

     The English teacher written in 1945 is the 3^rd book of the semi-autobiographical trilogy written by R K Narayan. The story is set in a mythical village called Malgudi that evolves and expands in each of the writer’s new creations. Krishna, the protagonist of The English Teacher, is a teacher at Alfred Mission College in Malgudi. Hailing from another village called Kamalapuram, Krishna is an average middleclass young Hindu man with a newly acquired wife and a just born baby.

     The young English teacher often displays a cavalier attitude towards the policies followed by his school which in turn indicates his general impression of education system itself.       

     The principal of Alfred Mission College where Krishna teaches is an Englishman called Mr. Brown who has an overinflated view of the importance of English as a language. This is seen clearly in the incident where he calls the teachers of the English Department for a meeting exclusively to voice his concern over a student spelling honour without ‘u’. In response to their employer’s grave tone, Krishna’s colleagues too consider the incident with befitting gravity. In contrast, Krishna considers the entire episode as a source of amusement. Addressing Gajapathy, his immediate superior, Krishna offhandedly says, “We will have to call a staff meeting to decide how many marks are to be deducted for spelling honour with the middle u.”

     The novel begins with Krishna reading “for the fifteenth time Milton, Carlyle, and Shakespeare,” which implies the monotony of the academic existence. The protagonist is teaching at the same college he studied; moreover, he is staying in the same hostel even after his marriage. It is as if he is reluctant to leave the familiar surroundings. Krishna says that he feels as if he “lived like a cow.”

     Despite his obvious connection with the school, the protagonist is often highly critical of the system of education practiced in it throughout the book. The phenomenon is not new as there are frequent references to Krishna being a radical during his student days. Upon receiving the message to tech History of Literature, Krishna threatens a bewildered Gajapathy to reveal to the students his views on the matter. To this the harried superior replies: “Your college habits have not left you yet.” Krishna retaliates by saying that now he is able to discern the difference between “fatuities and serious work.” The English Department of Albert Mission College (AMC), according to Krishna, is a “garbage department” and teachers, in his opinion, are “paid servants” who fed literary garbage to their students (150).

     Students are trained to dissect literature through their studies in the same way a coroner would bisect a corpse looking for the cause of death. Krishna laments that students are being fed on the “dead mutton of literary analysis and theories of histories while what they needed was lessons in the fullest use of mind” (178). He referees to “a whole century of false education.” This is obviously a reference to the western education system introduced by the colonizers to India which has made his people “a nation of morons”. It is said that the system of Anglican education has made Indians strangers to their own culture and turned them into “camp followers” of another. This is a horrifying picture. The term ‘camp follower’ is often used for prostitutes; Krishna seems to imply that the system is producing people who are willing to sell themselves for a sum. This is further highlighted when he says, “(But the system would provide) efficient clerks for all your business and administrative offices.” The education system practiced at AMC is produces a particular brand of people to fill a specific slot in society. School themselves are like factories that produce a particular brand- low-paid white collar workers like Krishna himself. The tragedy, according to the central character, is both the teacher and the student, like Tantalus, are surrounded by delicacies of a rich literature but never allowed to taste them for their own merits. Instead, as Krishna says, students are conditioned to think that literature is a means to an end – material for “examinations and critical notes.”

     Krishna is not blind to the beauty of the words of great western writers. He asks, “What fool could be insensible to Shakespeare’s sonnets or The Ode to the West Wind or A thing of beauty is a joy forever?” (178). But the institution he is a part of has preset concrete boundaries in the form of syllabuses, aims, test scores, etc. which do not allow both the educator and the pupil to roam at will in the mysterious gardens of English literature. They are confined to paths and trespassers are punished, severely. This is why the book Krishna had specially made to write his great epic is still barely touched. An environment like AMC is not conducive to activities such as composition of poems which require a great degree of autonomy and flexibility. 

     The roles of the teacher and the student are summed up by Krishna quite succinctly in this line: “I mug up and repeat and they mug up and repeat in examinations.” The entire process of education is reduced to rote learning; critical thinking, debates, discussions, etc. that edifies the mind are considered a hindrance to the smooth running of the process of imparting knowledge. It should be noted that Krishna, despite his radical ideas, is a product of the existing system and to an extent institutionalized by it. This could be the reason why the protagonist is unable to cut the umbilical cord the school had wrapped around his neck even at the age of thirty.

     At the beginning, though he rebels quite vociferously, Krishna follows the norms of the institution which he finds wanting and restrictive. Farewell speeches and the grand send off he receives in the end allude to the fact that the protagonist has been one of ‘them’ despite his token shows of resistance. Krishna could not understand how his father, a beneficiary of a similar kind of education, could be happy in a village looking after his property. This shows that the education he received has unconsciously conditioned Krishna to think that the certificate should have practical application in the form of a vocation which in turn brings monetary rewards. 

     Krishna’s views on education are further jaundiced by his personal problems. On one occasions, he tells one of his students, “Don’t worry so much about these things – they are trash, we are obliged to go through, and pretend we like them, but all the time the problem of living and dying is crushing us” (149).  

     But if one takes education as life experiences, Krishna is quite receptive to them. This is clear from the way he takes over the responsibilities of raising his small daughter on his own after his wife’s death. Another occasion in which Krishna is seen as willing to experience is when he takes instructions from his dead wife on “self development”. This is after teasing his wife when she was alive in chapter two on wanting to be a yogi.

     His meeting with the eccentric headmaster of his daughter’s play school prompts the protagonist’s views on education to take a radical turn. The man introduces Krishna to another dimension of learning. In the Leave Alone System, learning is enjoyable and largely unconscious. Whatever the child produces is valued for its own merit, not in comparison as in the mainstream system of education Krishna is a part of. The headmaster says, “And then our own schooling which puts blinkers on to us…It has always seemed to me that teachers helped us to take a wrong turn” (148). This meets with Krishna’s approval and he shows it by inviting the headmaster to make himself at home in his house. The new system of the headmaster requires very few material things. The headmaster in addition seems to have an aversion to the government when he says, “[A]nd look to the government for support, and you sell your soul to the government for grant.” So students of the play school sit on mats or move about freely according to the task involved. Krishna marvels at the notion on his first visit.

     The headmaster does not approve of the role played by sports in schools either. Krishna, once again, agrees with him. He says that Mr Brown “gives no end of liberties to the tournament players” and “are made to pass examinations.” In the system of education practice at schools like AMC, sports have obtained a significance that is associated with the prestige of the school.

     The headmaster who refuses to identify himself by any other name seems to be content in that identity in contrast to Krishna who considers his role as an educator a worse form of torture.

     It is upon returning home from his village Krishna stumbles upon the most important lesson in his life. He says, “We come together only to go apart again.” This idea frees him from the ever present grief he has felt since his wife’s death. He is finally ready to break the vicious cycle to which his life has been bound to for so many years. In a way, like the headmaster, Krishna is given a rebirth by the knowledge of the transient nature of human relationships. He realizes the futility of he present existence trapped in a system he abhorred. In contrast, when he is in the playschool, Krishna finds deep joy and contentment (177). This ultimately makes Krishna choose and he resigns from his post at AMC.

     While handing over his resignation letter to his principal, Krishna says he is “beginning a new experiment in education with another friend.” He adds that teaching as he did, did not please his “innermost self” and that he felt like a fraud. Krishna adds that he reveres the poets and the dramatists and he hoped to give them to his new students for “their delight and enlightenment, but in a different measure and a different manner.”

     Young idealistic Krishna had to go through a gauntlet of life to find out what education meant to him. He comprehends that it is not education itself that puts blinkers on the students, but the method of impartation. In the end the protagonist finds his mission in life and takes a bold step to grasp happiness and a purpose in life.

     It should be noted that during his tenure as a representative of Rajya Sabha (1980-86) R K Narayan has focussed on a single issue: the dilemma of school children due to the heavy load of their knapsack and a system that stifled their creativity. His tireless campaigning resulted in the appointment of a committee to recommend changes in the school education system of India. This, in the light of the book being semi-autobiographical, further substantiates the attitude of the writer/protagonist.       

Work Cited

“The English Teacher.” home page. Randomhouse. 17 Nov. 2009  <htt://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl/isbn=8781400044764&view=quotes>.  

Iyenger, Sirinivasa. R K Narayan, Indian writing in English. 6^th ed. New Delhi: Sterling,   1987.

Krishnan, S. Memories of Malgudi.New Delhi: Penguin India, 2002

Narayan, R K. Swami and the Friends. Madras: Indian Thought P, 2008.

Narayan, R K. The English Teacher. Madras: Indian Thought