Title: Learning at bodhshala, Re-orienting the school to its community
Author: Rajan venkatesh,
Other India Press
According to Rajan Venkatesh, the author of ‘Learning at Bodhshala’, school should be a place for discovering what is right way of living. Without such investigation, it is dead. He uses the word education ‘in its truest sense of encompassing ethics, understanding truth and falsehood, right and wrong.’
The book, published in 2015 by Other India Press, documents the philosophy and activities of Bodhshala, a learning centre in rural Tehri-Garhwal in Uttarakhand from first-hand experience of the author, who ran the school from June 2008 to March 2012.
The students participated in growing crops and saving seeds, grinding millets and corn in the water-mill, and making food-products for self-consumption and for local market. By dealing with growing and cooking food in day-to-day lives, the teachers and students together dealt with questions of natural sciences, history, geography,
economics, language, health.
A characteristic of the approach was that instead of negation of traditional language, it encouraged learning from the local environment.
The book details a number of ‘experiments’ relating food to economics. One of these was when students decided to make biscuits. They calculated how much it costed them to make biscuits and found out that buying the same quantity as packets from market was much much cheaper. The reason, they discovered, was the replacement of some key ingredients with inferior or unhealthier substitutes , for instance, ghee is replaced with hydrogenated vegetable oil and the percentage of refined flour (or maida) is increased.
Another such example was when they started growing haldi (turmeric). Like detectives, they carried out a fact-finding mission about how haldi powder was cheaper than sabut haldi because of adulteration of haldi powder available in market with wheat flour, corn flour or chemicals.
A rationale behind such investigations was the belief that ‘togetherness of food and health helps us see the togetherness of work and responsibility’. The author reasoned that if such an approach is used, food produced and consumed locally will be the best in quality and price, a model which encourages localisation and social responsibility.
Many other interesting endeavours are also described in the book. For instance, making chachi ka namak (a seasoning salt with 8 spices and condiments) and home-made potato chips. One of the projects also involved bringing out a compilation on local cuisine which talked about not just local recipes but also local agriculture, food and health, properties of diff erent food items and techniques of preparation.
Beyond food, such experiments extended to other arenas of life, like preparing a herbal dant-manjan (toothpaste), creating hand-made paper through recycling and making their own soap. The recipes for how to make all these things are shared in the book consciously, with a respect for preserving the common nature of such knowledge.
Throughout the book, the author discusses the underlying philosophies of what they were trying to do. He firmly insists that ‘participation in an alternate economic system is an inseparable part of alternate education…While the modern system is destroying local communities, the alternate economic system would promote and support self-sufficient communities. In this way, one may explore what is right livelihood at an individual and family level, and its relationship with justice, social harmony, ecological harmony and
psychological fulfilment.’
Although the school is not running anymore, the documentation of what the children and teachers tried to work towards forms a very interesting reading for anyone interested in food, education or even, life in general.
As published in People in Conservation, 2016, Vol 7, Issue 1, Jan-June
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