I admitted right away that all these points were valid ones, as far as they go. Yes, I wrote as a man, because that is what I happen to be. If columnists were all obliged to be Ardhanarishwaras (the half-man, half-woman figure of Hindu mythology), we might be more evenhanded in our judgments, but I doubt very much that all our columns would be worth reading. The purpose of a column is to offer an individual perspective — with which the reader is not only free to disagree, but encouraged, even invited, to disagree. If my point of view offended any of my female readers, I apologize, but I do not apologize for having expressed my point of view on this subject, as on any other. If a female columnist were to expatiate on the merits of tight jeans on male hips, I may not agree with her, but I would not excoriate her for taking a female view of male attire. What other view could she take but her own?
What about my unreasonable demand that women preserve and transmit Indian culture? I have to concede that Indian men have abandoned traditional clothing in even larger numbers than women have put aside the sari. For every Karunanidhi or Chidambaram who adorn our public life in spotless white mundus, there are ten others in trousers. And, as several of my critics pointed out, my argument was a bit rich coming from someone who spends his working days in a Western suit and tie.
Point conceded, but I should hasten to add that this is not a result of my own preference, but of the norms of international officialdom. Early in my UN career I turned up at work in an elegant cream kurta, only to have my Danish boss ask disparagingly, “Who do you think you are — a surgeon?” I still wear kurtas all the time after hours, at least when the climate permits it, and mundus in Kerala; but it was clear to me that if I was to represent the United Nations to the world, I was expected to do it in a suit and tie. Indian women in India, on the other hand, would face no disdain for sporting the sari: if they choose not to, it is because they choose not to, not because their employment obliges them not to.
And let's face it — whatever the aesthetic merits of the dhoti or mundu, they pale in comparison with those of the sari. It's fatuous to suggest, as several of my critics did, that the two are equivalent. Ask a fair-minded jury of women and they'll agree that the beauty of a well-crafted sari is a source of nonsexist pleasure — to them, not just to men — in a way that no dhoti can possibly match.
Saris may well be a hassle to wear, and less convenient to get around in, but those are points I had already conceded. What they are, though, is special — and to my relief a handful of Indian women wrote to say they agreed with me. Shreyasi Deb sent me a blog post in which she declared, “I know that the ultimate weapon in my kitty is the saree…. This Sunday I have taken down my Ikat, Chanderi, Puneri, Laheriya, Bandhej, Bomkai, Gadwal, Narayanpet, Maheshwari, Kantha, and Kanjeevaram sarees and stroked them in the reflecting sunlight.” (I guarantee no man would ever think of doing anything similar with his dhoti collection.) And Sindhu Sheth wrote that she would heed my appeaclass="underline" “I have decided to wear a sari (instead of my regular churidar-kurta) — once a week, to begin with.” In that “to begin with” lies the hope that my original appeal will not have been entirely in vain.
19. The Challenge of Literacy
For those who care about illiteracy, India is the largest country in a subcontinent that gives great cause for concern. South Asia has emerged as the poorest, the most illiterate, the most malnourished, and the least gender-sensitive region in the world, with over half the world's illiterate adults and 40 percent of the world's out-of-school children. South Asia has by now the lowest adult literacy rate (49 percent) in the world. It has fallen behind Sub-Saharan Africa (at 57 percent), even though in 1970 South Asia was ahead. Thirty-seven percent of all Indian primary school children drop out before reaching the fifth grade. We have a shortage of schools and a shortage of teachers, and the problem gets worse every year because of population growth. Our subcontinent has the worst teacher-pupil ratio in the world. The illiterate population of India exceeds the total combined population of the North American continent and Japan.
India has made only uneven progress in educating its population. Whereas most districts in Kerala, following the introduction of free and compulsory education by an elected Communist government in 1957, have attained 100 percent literacy, the national literacy level still hovers around the halfway mark; the current figure is 62 percent. Kerala has a literacy rate of nearly 100 percent while Bihar is at only 44 percent. And Bihar has a female literacy rate of only 29 percent.
The traditional explanation for the failure to attain mass education is two-pronged: the lack of resources to cope with the dramatic growth in population (we would need to build a new school every day for the next ten years just to educate the children already born) and the tendency of families to take their children out of school early to serve as breadwinners or at least as help at home or on the farm. Thus, though universal primary education is available in theory, fewer than half of India's children between the ages of six and fourteen attend school at all.
But official national policy is undoubtedly in favor of promoting literacy. As a schoolchild I remember being exhorted to impart the alphabet to our servants under the Gandhian “each one teach one” program; and many of us were brought up on Swami Vivekananda's writings about the importance of education for the poor as the key to their uplift. But it is true that, fifty-nine years after independence, progress has still been inexcusably slow, and that Indian politicians are all too quick, as Mrs. Indira Gandhi once was, to take refuge in sharp rejoinders about not drawing the wrong conclusions from the illiteracy figures. Education, Mrs. Gandhi would often say, was not always relevant to the real lives of village Indians, that India's illiterates were still smart, and illiteracy was not a reflection of their intelligence or shrewdness (which they demonstrated, of course, by voting for her). Fair enough, but Kerala's literate villagers are smart, too.
Now, there has been good news. The adult literacy rate has more than tripled since 1951, from 18 percent in 1951 to 62 in 2001. (But one must be wary of these figures. UNESCO defines an illiterate person as one who cannot, with understanding, both read and write a short, simple statement on their everyday life. By that definition, I suspect fewer than half our population would really qualify as literate.) The increase is even more dramatic for female literacy, from 9 percent to 43 percent. The gender gaps have been closing as female literacy increased much faster than male literacy.
The task of providing elementary education to all children is massive. India is making a major effort now to expand primary education. Our primary school system has become one of the largest in the world, with 150 million children enrolled. But it's not enough.