Paathshaala — A Revolution Part 10

Written by Nishanthini Ganesan

Edited by Parveen Maghera

“Revolution doesn’t belong to an era, it can occur any­where, any­time and anyhow.”

India, home of the second-largest Education sys­tem in the world; but where 53% of stu­dents drop out before com­plet­ing pri­mary school. What isn’t rare in this coun­try is for a school to become so poor that due to a lack of sup­plies, their stu­dents barely learn any­thing even after being enrolled in it for 5 years. The Central Government of India spends 10% of its bud­get on Education but as there are no reli­able reports on the dis­tri­b­u­tion of gov­ern­ment resources, there is no way to tell where the money really goes. The sys­tem itself is rife with cor­rup­tion and pol­i­tics so what is left for the pub­lic schools is just a frac­tion of the intended expenditure.

Private schools rely on high stu­dent fees and trustees to cover their costs. These schools are left to the mercy of tyrants dis­guised as the respec­tive schools’ Board of Directors who turn the schools into profit-generators.

What do these schools do to make up for their lack of income?

They put their stu­dents through vig­or­ous train­ings dis­guised as co-curricular activ­i­ties in order for them to appear on tele­vi­sion and print, in this way bring­ing hon­our and atten­tion to the schools. The school becomes the vic­tim of mass-communication and a port for sup­plies to be bought in and sold out­side. The biggest profit is no longer the stu­dents com­ing into this school and leav­ing with a proper edu­ca­tion. It becomes cold, hard cash. Lakhs and lakhs of rupees are earned and thou­sands of stu­dents crum­ble and break under the pres­sures of these school sys­tems. Along with this, stu­dents in the top schools face exam stress. To quote the head of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, C.N. Rao, “India has an Exam System, not Education system.”

Like a plea from the masses to address this prob­lem came the rev­o­lu­tion­ary 2008 Hindi Film, Paathshaala.

The open­ing cred­its of Paathshaala are a grim reminder of the con­se­quences of the Indian Education sys­tem. To me, the effect of news­pa­pers slid­ing in and out of the screen wasn’t orig­i­nal, but it was a way to dic­tate the impact Director Milind Ukey was striv­ing to make with this film. It is very early on in the review but I will say that he suc­ceeded in what he aimed to achieve.

Paathshala is a Hindi term. Translated, it means school. The movie is set in a fic­tional school, Sarawasti Vidya Mandir, where knowl­edge is taught, learned, and shared. This is where staff and stu­dents from dif­fer­ent back­grounds, live, learn, cry, and love together like a fam­ily. At the head of this fam­ily is Principal Aditya Sahay who, at the begin­ning of this film, makes it appar­ent that he has been forced to under­take a chal­lenge that will affect the school, pos­i­tively neg­a­tively. The rea­son for this remains undis­closed until his speech at the end of the movie, but its nature of the chal­lenge becomes clearer as the film progresses.

This film is not merely a cri­tique of the Indian Education sys­tem. Even though Saraswati Vidya Mantir does not exist out­side the movie Paathshaala, it has man­aged to take us, the audi­ence, to school. There are impor­tant val­ues addressed in this film that aims to chal­lenge the way we per­ceive schools in India and what Education should aim to achieve as a whole.

Friendship is one of these these val­ues. English teacher Rahul Prakash Udyavar, played by Shahid Kapoor, could not have proven this fact any clearer as he tries to mend the gap between Parth, a good-natured boy born with a dis­fig­ur­ing blot on his face who is estranged from his class­mates, and the rest of the stu­dents who ostracise him. Rahul teaches his stu­dents and us, the view­ers, a les­son when he explains, “the lan­guage of friend­ship is unique. It only lis­tens to the heart.” This is illus­trated when Parth, who has no one in the school to call his friend, man­ages to befriend a group of pup­pies while the rest of the class watch, help­less and unable to do the same. This heart-breaking por­tion of the film was aimed directly at the old-fashioned, super­sti­tious Indian belief that a child born with a blot on his or her face is inauspicious.

This is one exam­ple in Paathshaala of stereo­types being used to abol­ish stereo­types. Another would be the devel­op­ment of Rahul’s char­ac­ter in the movie. Throughout India, English teach­ers are looked down upon as they are seen as ser­vants to the British, the ene­mies of the rev­o­lu­tion. In this film, the English teacher Rahul Prakash Udayavar is the leader of the Education revolution.  

A sequence of the film that will leave many view­ers want­ing to throw their drinks at the screen is when the school’s foot­ball boys pose for a pho­to­graph to be fea­tured in a news­pa­per. The stu­dents attempt at a for­ma­tion, a human pyra­mid that is mock­ingly called the “Great Wall of Japan” by the peo­ple in charge of the photo-shoot. The stu­dents were at the mercy of the tor­tur­ous heat and the immense pres­sure on their shoul­ders, and if that weren’t enough, the pro­cras­ti­na­tion and the utter unpro­fes­sion­al­ism of the pho­tog­ra­phers and jour­nal­ists who are later revealed to be frauds; igno­rant free­lancers with no portfolio.

Along with giv­ing us a look at the lengths that some schools will go to and the pres­sures they will put on their stu­dents in order for the school to gain expo­sure, we are shown the mean­ing of per­se­ver­ance and deter­mi­na­tion, as well as team­work. We learn to respect val­ues and the peo­ple who have acquired them. We learn that we learn more dur­ing harsh times, and there­fore should not let a chal­lenge sim­ply pass by us as we do noth­ing more than wave as it goes alone. The “Great Wall of Japan” for­ma­tion did col­lapse, but it was not due to fatigue or intol­er­ance on the part of the stu­dents. It was a small slip of a foot off a sweaty shoul­der. The photo was not taken due to the pho­tog­ra­phers’ pro­cras­ti­na­tion. Despite the hard work that they put in to achieve the for­ma­tion of the human pyra­mid and to keep it stand­ing for more than 10 min­utes, the stu­dents and their coach were insulted.

Paathshaala is one story made up of many oth­ers. There are plenty of sub-plots in this film; blos­som­ing romances between the stu­dents, school nutri­tion­ist Anjali’s wish to study abroad and her reject­ing it in the end due to the oblig­a­tion she feels to the school and the wel­fare of its stu­dents. The next part of this review will take a look at the tech­ni­cal and musi­cal aspect of the film, as well as how those brought the audi­ence closer to the char­ac­ters in this movie.

Paathshaala — A Revolution Part 2