The Little Headmaster And His Big Homework

Every day 16-year-old Babar Ali walks 10 kilometres to attend school. In the afternoon he runs his own school for other children in his village, says SAMRAT CHAKRABARTI

Babar Ali

FIVE HOURS’ bus ride from Kolkatta, just past the railway crossing at Beldanga, is a dilapidated concrete structure covered in half-torn posters variously advertising a Marxian utopia, films for red-blooded adults and bedroom advice for couples intent on children. Inside, in a tiny, dank room behind a desk, sits someone the Queen of England knows by name – and you should too. Lanky, awkward and at 16, the possessor of a faint fuzz above his upper lip, this is Babar Ali: the world’s youngest school headmaster.

Behind the office, next to a garbage dump, is a gate that opens into Babar Ali’s home. Rows of children, arranged in differently facing rectangles, sit under blue sky and spare shade with mostly quiet concentration, some squinting hard at their copies, others squinting hard at their neighbours’. In the middle, in khaki shorts that he is soon set to outgrow, stands the headmaster, shouting instructions, even as Class I, the squiggly rectangle in the distance, insists on giggling loudly and playing with dirt.

How hungry is India to learn? Welcome to Babar Ali’s school, where 800 kids who fell through the gaps in the formal education system walk miles to learn, free of cost, what those chalk lines on the blackboard mean. Anand Siksha Niketan grew out of a game. “We used to play school-school, with me as teacher. My friends had never seen the inside of a school, so they enjoyed playing students. They ended up learning arithmetic and enjoying it.” In 2002, the game got institutionalised, with a strength of eight.

Babar grew up better off than many others. In the Bhapta neighborhood of Gangapur village in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district, this means that he lives with three siblings and parents in a thatched room made of brick, the size of the average city kitchen. He was better off also in being the son of Nasiruddin Sheikh, a jute seller and class II dropout who believes that education is man’s true religion and initially supported his son’s venture with his own income. An occasional Rs 50 would go into buying chatais, pencils and notebooks. As word spread and the numbers grew, help began to come from other quarters: Babar’s own teachers, monks at the local Ramakrishna Mission, sympathetic IAS officers, even local cops. When Babar first thought up a mid-day meal scheme, the rice came from his father’s fields, but now, with the aid of friends in the administration, it comes from government stock.

Blackboard jungle Babar Ali runs a school for 400+ students in Ganganagar village in Murshidabad, West Bengal

Every morning at seven, Babar walks five kms to the Cossimbazar Raj Govinda Sundari Vidyapeeth in Beldanga, where he is a class XII student. When school ends at 1pm, he runs back to be headmaster at his own. Meanwhile, his students, done with tending to fields and buffaloes and housework, arrive in time for Tulu mashi’s opening bell. Clad in widow’s whites, stick in hand, Tulu Rani Hazra is an illiterate fishmonger by morning and a crusading educationalist by afternoon. On fish-selling rounds of nearby villages, her job is to confront erring parents who’ve stopped sending their children to school and to find new students. So far, she’s found 80.

Children not old enough to work are easier to enroll, so Class I and II have over 200 students. Class VIII has just 20 students, studying 10 subjects, mostly taught by Babar and Debarita Bhattacharya, another volunteer. The school is too bareboned to be recognised by the government but it tries to follow the West Bengal Board syllabus. Text books are free from class I to V, but for the rest money needs to be arranged. On any given day there are close to 400 students physically present in Babar’s front yard.

The school runs from 3pm to 7pm through the week and 11am to 4pm on Sundays. The teaching staff of nine is made up of high school student volunteers. The most educated, Debarita, goes to college in Behrampur. “Education dispels darkness. It’s the way to a better life around here,” says Imtiaz Sheikh, who’s in Class X. “That’s why I come to teach.” Is it hard to get the children to listen, being so young themselves? “The narrow age gap works to our advantage,” says Babar. “We are more like friends. The rod is spared in my school.”

Things weren’t always this smooth. There were jibes from elders: what’s the point of teaching those who don’t get enough to eat? How will girls get married if they are educated? Babar’s father, who thinks the worst insult is to be illiterate, not only dismissed the talk but also made sure his daughter Amina, in class IX, was consecrated into long division. Now, the school is filled with these one-squaremeal daughters of labourers and farmers, like Mamataz Begum and Moniyara Khatun, a mother-daughter duo who travel 20km to Babar’s school, the mother studying in class VII and the daughter in class III. “I couldn’t help my daughter with her homework so I decided to study,” says Mamataz Begum.

RECENTLY INVITED to speak at and become a Fellow at the hallowed Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference, Babar is now recognised as a social entrepreneur of high worth. In the last year, French documentary filmmakers, South Korean journalists and a BBC television crew have all told Babar’s story to a global audience far removed from sleepy Bhapta. Babar has never heard of Facebook, which has a page dedicated to him. He has heard rumours of an internet. He understands the computer, he says, but what are people saying about him on the internet?

The headmaster’s next dream is a pucca building. He dreams, too, of shining labs, a sports ground, perhaps even an auditorium. But that’s for later. At any rate, his school is not deterred from celebrating an annual sports day and cultural day. If imagination is a resource, then Babar Ali’s school is rolling in the stuff. Hope is the currency in which it trades – and in each laughing face of a dusty child, the audacity to cock a snook at circumstance.

WRITER’S EMAIL
samrat@tehelka.com