‘Under the Bakul Tree’: This Assamese YA novel deftly addresses education and the environment

In Mrinal Kalita’s novel, Under the Bakul Tree, Anubhav Sir changes the way mathematics is taught to the students of Class 10 in a village school in Assam. Challenging the rote system, the new teacher breaks down the formulas, applying logic and creative problem-solving techniques instead. Suddenly the teenagers are no longer bored and fidgety. Next, he sets three maths questions for homework, which they must solve in seven days.

The questions set by the young teacher are pivotal. They become another pathway that leads Nirmal, one of the brightest students in Anubhav Sir’s class, back to his once-academic rival Ashim, who has been forced to drop out of school.

“The intention of embedding these problems into the story was to show to our students that creative thinking plays a pivotal role not only in literature but also in subjects like mathematics,” Kalita told me in an email interview about his Young Adult book. “But one cannot solve these problems mechanically merely by applying some formulae. Some readers and students told me that they had found these problems very interesting and they had a taste of a different type of mathematics in them and that was my intention.”

What follows is a story of friendship, empathy, and...

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