Literature and Education

Abstract

N the mid-sixties an Anglo-Indian film, directed by James Ivory, had a brief showing in a few major cities. Shakespeare Wallah portrayed the dwindling fortunes of an itinerant troupe of English Shakespearean actors doing the circuit of the Indian hill towns in the years following independence. In the last scene of the movie, a class of Indian schoolboys emerges from a performance of Othello and eagerly waits to catch a glimpse of a sexy Indian screen actress, who is scheduled to pass by. The teaching of literature, until very recently at least, seemed as well established as the British Raj once was in India. Even now, in our time of austerities and cutbacks, departments of language and literature, graduate and undergraduate, still dot the academic landscape more thickly than Indian Army barracks were once scattered over the landscape of the subcontinent. The MLA-the professional organization of university teachers of modern languages and literatures-has so many thousands of members that only two or three cities in the country have enough hotel rooms to accommodate those who attend its annual conventions.