how do the school teachers fall short off the ideal image of the guru?
Answers
Explanation:
Omprakash Valmiki is a great poet and short story writer in Hindi Dalit Literature. “Joothan” is an autobiographical account of his miserable birth and life. Omprakash traces his lineage to Valmiki, the great author of ‘Ramayana’ and proves that even Valmiki belongs to the sweeper caste. Joothan literally means scraps of food left on a plate. It is related to the word jootha which means polluted. The sweeper caste (untouchables) has been forced to eat jootha for centuries. The word shows the pain, hurt, humiliation and poverty of the untouchables.
Omprakash Valmiki’s family was in the colony of the village where the untouchables lived. Chuhra, Chamar and Jhinwar are the caste names of the untouchables. Tyagi, Taga are the upper caste people of both Hindus and Muslims. Valmiki’s home was in front of the stinking cowshed of an upper caste family. On the one side there was a pond and the other side there were high walls of the brick homes of the Tagas. In his family there were five brothers, one sister, two uncles and the elder brother of his father. All of them worked hard, yet they couldn’t get two decent meals a day. Most often they had no payment for their work. Instead they got only abuse from the upper caste people. They never thought of these untouchables as human beings. If one happened to touch a Chuhre (untouchables), the upper caste people got polluted. But if animals touched them, it was not pollution!
The first teacher who came to Valmiki’s childhood days was Sewak Ram Masihi. He was a Christian who would sit with the children of the untouchables and taught them reading and writing. It was an open air school and Valmiki learned the alphabets. One day there was an argument with Valmiki’s father and Valmiki’s father took him to the Basic Primary School. As per Mahatma Gandhi’s advice, the government schools allowed the untouchables to study. Valmiki’s father begged the master of the school to teach his child and he would be forever in his debt. Master asked him to come the next day and Valmiki and his father kept going for several days and one day he was admitted to the school.
Valmiki had to sit on the floor