The case of the ten-year-old child at the Patha Bhavan School at the world-famous Vishva Bharati in Shantiniketan, not far from Kolkata, who was made to lick her own urine on the mattress as a punishment for bed-wetting by the hostel warden, has shocked the nation.
That such an act of medieval conception should be made to happen at a great educational institution founded by Rabindranath Tagore is an irony that cannot be lost on anyone.
Even a century ago, the visionary poet and artist sang of human emancipation and liberation from cobwebs of the past. The structures of his thought and passions were founded on modernist and liberal ideals, and on the basis of rejection of superstition and the darkness of mind and soul. It was, therefore, expected that both the teaching and the non-teaching staff at all levels at Vishva Bharati would be selected with sensitivity to the founding ideals of the famous institution. That, alas, has clearly not been the case.
As we quite appropriately condemn the warden in question, we may also summon a degree of sympathy for her. Evidently, she knew no better. The university has hinted in a statement that the obviously ignorant woman may have laboured under the superstition that licking her own urine off the mattress would cure the child of the bed-wetting habit. This does not reduce the insensitive warden’s culpability, and she would have deserved the punishment the court hands out to her, but we should give ourselves pause to make allowance for the fact that the warden is clearly a victim of false consciousness. For this reason, she shouldn’t have been in a job that made her the caretaker of little girls in their formative years.
Especially for a position such as this, the university should have thought to have someone of the right educational as well as cultural background. On the face of it, the warden, who is being proceeded against, appears to be a semi-literate individual with a baggage of values in her head that have no place in our times. Someone like her is also likely to be carrying other ideas of bringing up children that may be antithetical to the liberal and humane milieu that Tagore brought into existence, and should therefore be replaced right away.
It may be incumbent on the university authorities to carry out an audit of the credentials of all its staff. India lives on many levels and is at several places at the same time, each caught up in a different historical time. Being alive to this is not to condone unwarranted conduct but to be aware of the right institutional choices to make.