Meet the reader inspired to seek their own eclectic, confused and misdirected adventures with books

Cramming half-heartedly for the Scholarship,
I looked up from the red-jacketed Williamson’s
History of the British Empire, towards
the barrack’s plumed, imperial hillsides
where canon-bursts of bamboo sprayed the ridge,
riding to Khartoum, Rorke’s Drift,
through dervishes of dust,
behind the chevroned jalousies
I butchered fellaheen, thuggees, Mamelukes, wogs

The imagination of the modern high school or college classroom across the historical stretch of the British Empire is incomplete without a certain student right at the back of the lecture hall. They are perpetually distracted, immersed in their own unruly imagination; they shirk homework and fail at examinations. But they are scandalous in a special way. Their failure is both a rebellion and a creation, a glazed indifference to an instrumental system of education whose colonial character – often long past decolonisation – is hinted rather than directly established.

Rabindranath Tagore’s short story, “Tota Kahini”, translated as “The Bird’s Tale”, is iconic in this indictment. In this allegorical story, a bird is captured by the order of the king. Infuriated by its wild and unrestrained singing, the king hands the bird over to pundits who train it day and night, drowning it in tables and grammar, till the bird eventually becomes a lifeless body, silent at last, brought to the king, who...

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