B.A.(Prog.)/B.Com.(Prog.) Semester-I/II English CORE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH LITERATURE Unit 1-(c), 2, 3 & 5 SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING University of Delhi Department of English Under Graduate Course CORE ENGLISH LANGUAGE ENGLISH LANGUAGE THROUGH LITERATURE CONTENTS Unit 1 : UNDERSTANDING EVERYDAY TEXTS C- Letters every parent every child should read on Children’s day The Indian Express 10 November 2014 Unit 2 : UNDERSTANDING DRAMA Crossing the River Dr. Neeta Gupta Ambai Unit 3 : UNDERSTANDING POETRY 1. Caged Bird Maya Angelou P.K. Satapathy 2. Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T.S. Nissim Ezekiel Dr. V.P.Sharma 3. Once Upon a Time Gabriel Okara S.K. Mukherjee 4. Last Lesson of the Afternoon D.H. Lawrence Mary Samuel Unit 5 : CREATING YOUR OWN VOICE A - How Social Media Endangers Knowledge Hossein Derakhshan Nalini Prabhakar B- Lesson from Frida : Backbone Can Win Over Broken Spine Twinkle Khanna Nalini Prabhakar SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING University of Delhi 5, Cavalry Lane, Delhi-110007 UNDERSTANDING EVERYDAY TEXTS Unit 1-C Letters Every Parent Every Child Should Read On Children’s Day The Indian Express 10 November 2014 INTRODUCTION This lesson has various kinds of letters written under various circumstances and for various occasions. You are expected to read these letters and use them as samples to compose letters as and when necessary. Sample Letter 1 From a Poet to his daughter ‘The capacity for accommodation is our strengthʼ Dear Sabitha, I am writing this letter to you not exactly from a prison as Jawaharlal Nehru did when he wrote his letters on world history to his daughter, but from a country that threatens to turn into a prison for the lovers of freedom and those committed to democratic openness and cultural plurality. Amma and I have been proud of you not just as a brilliant student, a much-loved teacher and now a Commonwealth scholar, but for having been socially concerned and politically alert from your early days. There has hardly been any major protest movement in Delhi of which you were not a part — whether it be against atrocities on women or suppression of human rights. Your poetry reflects your concerns, while your research looks at the colonial representations of India in the East India Company paintings and related texts. These are what encourages me to write to you about some of the anxieties that we both share. Democracy, as you well know, must constantly expand its base, remove the curbs on peopleʼs freedom and reduce the presence of the state in their everyday lives; but I fear the opposite is happening with our democracy now. I know from your Facebook posts and our conversations that you have watched its recent turn — elevating to power a political outfit that has opposed a secular outlook, freedom of expression and cultural diversity that was so dear to the founding fathers of our nation like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and BR Ambedkar — with shock and pain. This party has upheld the idea of a highly reductive and standardised “Indian” culture which to them means only their own mutilated and sanitised version of an imagined “Hindu” culture that ignores the contributions of other modes of life and faith to our composite civilisation. I need not tell you how India has always not just lived with, but been proud about the multiplicity of her religions, world views, cultures, knowledge systems, landscapes, languages and literatures, the very source of her cultural richness. How poor our culture would have been without the Mughal miniatures and architecture best represented by the 1 Taj Mahal, Sufi literature and music, Buddhist and Jain mythology and art, the Parsi ways of thought and life, Guru Nanakʼs syncretism, the translations of the Holy Bible and the churches in Roman and Gothic styles. How poor our philosophy would have been without those beautiful conversations and arguments among the several systems including Sankhya and Charvaka, Buddhist and Jain that had no place for the idea of God. And how poor our literature would have been bereft of Shantideva and Ashwaghosha, Ghalib, Mir and Bulle Shah and scores of writers who belong to different religious and non-religious thought systems! Our tribal cultures, that are genuinely native to India, with their immense variety of languages, oral lore, music, dance, paintings and sculptures were never considered “Hindu” until their “Sanskritisation” began recently. Our folk cultures, from which emerged epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata and many collections of tales such as the Kathasaritsagara, Brihatkatha and the Jataka, and the systematised forms of music and dance that we tend to call classical, too, were seldom recognised as “Hindu”, an umbrella term used by those who came from outside to qualify those who lived by the Indus river. The champions of cultural Hindutva have manufactured an inauthentic and unified- looking collage of a religion by choosing certain elements from our past to the exclusion of so many others. Ours has been an inclusive culture with an infinite capacity for absorption of and negotiation with cultures that had their origins outside the country. This quality is evident in our clothing and cuisine and even within our languages that carry words from so many tongues. Our mother tongue, Malayalam, for example, has many words borrowed from Arabic, Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, Kannada, Persian, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Tamil and then nativised so well that we do not even recognise them as foreign. Some states in the North-east even have English as the state language. This capacity for accommodation and absorption is not our weakness, but our strength. And this is what is being sentenced to amnesia in the divisive practices of fundamentalists and cultural nationalists. Now some of their spokespersons, who had earlier sent a great artist like MF Hussain into exile, attacked the great Bhandarkar Institute, destroyed the tomb of the poet Wali Dakhani and razed to ground Babri Masjid, are taking up cudgels against the most eminent of our historians. They are striving to crush every voice of dissent in their attempt to foist a monolithic culture on India. The future of India is in the hands of freedom-loving, forward-thinking youth like you. I am sure we will work towards this end together once you are back, and you will continue my work even after I am gone. With hugs and kisses, Acha 2 K Satchidanandan is a Malayalam poet and critic. Sabitha is a PhD student at the University of London Sample Letter 2 From a musician to her son ‘It is the search which will give you strengthʼ Dearest Aarjan, Writing to you in November with the fan whirring above my head. Sheetkaal kakhon ashbe Suparna? When will winter come? A poet of this city had once asked his friend. I think those who have grown up in this city crave its winter in a way that we who have known other winters in other lands will not understand or feel. Winter in Calcutta for me is a dry and dusty time — it is getting drier and dustier every year. And less and less cold. I remember cold hands and feet under the red quilt in our Shillong home, and misty windowpanes on which we wrote our names — our hands and feet were small then. Indrani from my left/lost hill town of Shillong says they need fans now, even ACs. And their summers are stony hot, because there is less rain in the hills. Yet, our childhood was so full of the sound of rain on the tin roof. That is what happens, of course, when we cover our hills with concrete and line our streets with cars. In Calcutta, the winter birds do not come to the zoo any more. Iʼve read that in the papers. I think, isnʼt that how it was meant to be? That news doesnʼt affect me as much because, actually, there is little I expect from this city. You need to belong even to hate or feel anger. (Gayatri Chakravorty) Spivak had talked once about simultaneously being at home and being an outsider in the same place; the mark of belonging, she said, was the anger you felt for the place. It worries me sometimes that as time goes, I feel less and less of anything for this place. But can it be that I feel nothing? Does that mean I donʼt belong? The students of Jadavpur (University) were singing my songs. What are my songs if not a part of me? I am glad you were following the news about the Jadavpur University studentsʼ movement. Wish you were here at this time. You would have been able to connect, I know. I saw your face in that crowd. Yours and your friendsʼ too. The day after the police beat up the students in the dead of the night, I joined the protesters and met old friends and new ones. I thought I recognised some; old faces mirrored new ones. Do you remember the march against the war in Iraq in London in 2002? On the Tube, it had seemed like the whole city was going to the march, young and old, children and parents and grandparents. And at Regent Park — what a sea of humanity! We marched that day, millions and millions across the world marched, and yet the war happened. What do we do then? Practise the art of endurance or hone the spirit of resistance and find new ways of subversion? 3 You know, I have been thinking a lot about Ananyo of late. You used to like that song I wrote so many years ago.