01/06/2023
An English Teacher Remembered:
An initiative for the Conference on English Teaching organised by the Department of English at SJU.
When he came in for the first time, he looked a little bit like Laxman’s Common Man. Taller, but the same balding, bespectacled, genial older man vibe. I was far away from home, in a Malleswaram that looked and smelled swank, and this sighting was the first note of the familiar.
He told us his name, and said my initials are TGR, add the appropriate vowels. My guess was Tagore, but everybody else in my bench got it and began gleaming in the way that young boys do when they get your joke and want to show that they approve. My neighbour saw my unenlightened face, and said, Tiger, man.
I had never been taught English by a man, so that was one new thing. And he had a caustic sense of humour. But there were others. He had a way of opening a poem, whether it was something new and unfamiliar to us I PUC fellows like Ajamil and the Tigers, by Arun Kolatkar, or lines we thought we knew everything about, like George Herbert’s The Pulley.
I came across A.K.Ramanujan this way. Our textbook had his translation of Ullavaru sivalayava maduvaru, and he let it drop that he found the translation unwieldy. The word ‘cupola’ figures in the AKR version, and he said it was a terrible choice. He let it slip that he knew the translator and thought much of him, but still objected violently to cupola.
TGR would find a line, and ask us a question, and laugh at our assumptions and our lazy attempts repeatedly, till we finally found something interesting to say.
I had never been taught poetry like that. Many were line-by-liners, which meant that they went over every line painstakingly, an operator that ended like every surgery in blood and and a bandaged version of the thing that was whole. Many others were summarisers, who crushed every word till it disappeared into a whirling mass of dreck generalities even as they addressed us in the dire deadpan drone of wet grinders doing their duty.
Instead, of all this, TGR asked us questions each time, and twirled away from our answers like a toreador laughing off a hurl of huffy bulls. I went to each of his classes with a tingly anticipation. I grew to enjoy this chasing after clarity so much that I began reading poetry on my own.
On other days, he would talk to us about contemporary events, and laughed at the students who had signed up for tuitions, or at those who felt the need for more tuitions to write CET. One day he told us about teachers forming unions named FUCTAK and AIFUCTO. He always had something to say about political events in the news to us and got us to be curious about our immediate worlds.
My long trudge from science to humanities began in these classes. I owe the things that became possible for me to him and to the trouble he took over a bunch of grotty teenagers in I PUC D Section at MES College, Bengaluru. Thank you, Prof. T.G. Raghavan, you were one of a kind.
Do you have reason to remember an English teacher who had an impact on you? What can you tell us about them? We'd like to know.
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