When the principal of Chalk N Duster says she would not like her teachers to be jokers and mimics, she unwittingly speaks for those of us who prefer realistic films on schools and teachers rather than unfunny caricatures.
Even if I had been a teacher trainee and not 25 years into the profession, I would have still found the storyline, characters and treatment of Chalk N Duster utterly farcical. For all the issues that are crammed into it, Chalk N Duster is essentially about a winning duo – two teachers, Jyoti and Vidya, unconditionally loved by all. They can bag the jackpot on a general knowledge quiz competition, win the love of top dog students heralded as Arjunas, vanquish a trustee-backed usurper, reinstate a principal who spreads sweetness and light, and finally restore goodness to their school of light and learning.
This doesn’t work even as a bedtime story for a five-year-old.
In Aparna Sen’s 36 Chowringhee Lane, a sensitive and mature script shows the lives of teachers and the internal politics of a school. Here we engage with adults speaking in language that requires no eye rolling or exaggerated mouth twisting for comic effect. Senior English teacher Violet Stoneham (played with poignant grace by Jennifer Kapoor) is sincere and committed, and though she has little to offer in terms of imaginative teaching, she does what she can to give her best. She is not a caricature.
In Sai Paranjpye’s Sparsh, Shabana Azmi superbly plays Kavita Prasad, a young widow who takes on a teaching assignment in a school for the blind. As she teaches, she also learns that gallantly taking on a noble cause is not without struggle. She fumbles, falters, and then, through her own sense of touch and sound, discovers the world in which the children live. She explores the inner weave of baskets with her fingers, organises handicraft experts to come to the school and works out a unique form of playing cricket by using sound rattles.
After an argument with headmaster Anirudh Parmar (Naseeruddin Shah) Kavita goes ahead to study and then write stories in Braille for the children of her school. The film shows us how a teacher can grow in understanding her role in a child’s life. Kavita is not a caricature either.
However strong and moving the characters in these two stories are, our films are yet to take up complex issues that show teachers as people beyond their duties, fighting their own demons in some cases and in others, not always being a howling success.
All teachers do not have an inborn passion for their profession. Mark Thackeray (To Sir, with Love) initially doesn’t feel teaching is an inner call and is forced to struggle against racist remarks and children who are either hostile or indifferent. He does not particularly care for the challenge and looks for options to quit.
All teachers are not dynamic. Chips (Goodbye Mr Chips), with his stodgy Latin certainly isn’t, and neither is Crocker Harris (The Browning Version), a crotchety and difficult person to begin with, also has to cope with his wife’s desertion .
A teacher may also be controversial. Smart aleck John Keating of Dead Poets Society challenges the pillars of power and influences his students to find their own voices. However, after a dramatic turn of events, Keating is held responsible for a tragedy and dismissed from the school. For the boys he taught, however, he will always be “Captain.”
In these films, as possibly in life too, it is not an external index or a competition, but the students themselves who, through their own interactions, validate the position of a teacher in their lives.
Nobody has to be a performer and nobody has to win.