“Persons trying to find a motive in this story will be prosecuted.
Persons trying to find a moral in it will be thrown out of the country
Persons trying to find a conspiracy in it will be shot.
I pledge my allegiance to India, in whose happiness lies my own.”

These lines are published on the first page of an English reader for Huckleberry Finn found in our girls class at the Railway school. There is a lot of pride in producing stories in the many local dialects or the national language. The sentiment may not be so strongly felt today, but on finding that book I was reminded of the resistance to the myths of another people’s language and literature.

In my own class, I have felt a corresponding unease asking students to express themselves in a language not their own. Language barriers have not been a huge issue, but they do limit the students’ capacity for poetic expression. It is as if they write just enough to invite understanding. They intimate a larger world within where they speak of their family and of friendship and of love that understands them just to the point where a young child wants to be understood.

A colleague of mine asked me to define a ‘modern story.’ It’s opposite implies ‘traditional stories,’ but I’m not sure how to define either one. I’ve tried to walk around the city as much as I could to get a feel of the area before forming my own ideas on how telling ‘modern stories’ matters to our students. As we head into our third week at Nalgonda and our second week at the Railway, I am reminded of Joseph Campbell’s famous work, “The Power of Myth,” where he notes that more kids grow up nowadays with their own laws and myths and rituals that are not those of the city. This, for Joseph Campbell, makes the narratives that many children believe about themselves ‘modern’ exactly because they have fewer traditions and rites of passage in which to come of age. Campbell’s “The Power of Myth” seems to hold true in Nalgonda where many boys believe the laws of their own bodies are not those of the world around them, and there is a destructive element in their play. The saying ‘Boys will be boys’ has a unique spin in Nalgonda, the students’ childish wonder seems to acknowledge they live in a world that does not necessarily confer distinction upon them. Yes, it is easy to lose oneself in an urban center. The atmosphere of this rapidly developing city is not un-like the air breathed before waking, there is a magical-realism in those surroundings so conducive to suspending belief, each alley an invitation to retreat rather than succeed in a metropolis, easier to lose oneself beneath the skyline, itself the shore of a dream.

Class dynamics in response to this language barrier have expressed themselves in noticeable differences. At the all boys school, the effort to concentrate on discussions held in English makes many boys wriggle in their seats and act out. At the all girls school, the language barrier quiets many who might otherwise express their opinions in their native tongue.

So far, stories have concentrated on the family and community. Girls have talked about their fathers in positive ways. At the boys school I have not heard a single story about the students’ fathers. There is a natural tendency for younger boys, at least among kids I grew up with, to eclipse their own perceived shortcomings with a father’s infamy. Their stories tend toward the fantastic, while the girls’ stories are grounded in community issues and have a sense of immediacy. In both schools, I have seen promising examples that the students will produce excellent work despite the language barrier and the extra concentration it exacts upon them. Once issues of plagiarism at Nalgonda are worked out and the students begin their own original compositions to showcase at the Railway school in Hyderabad/Secunderbad we’ll post examples here for others to see. The Railway school is also preparing a function with thousands of community members at the end of December where students will have a few minutes to showcase their work completed during their TMS classes. Language might also be an issue there too and so we hope to coach the students in how to read in English clearly and with a unique voice to maximize the impact their stories might have on the mothers, fathers and other members of their community who will be in attendance.