“One can draw many parallels between William Shakespeare’s drama Twelfth Night and the ongoing prohibition debate in Kerala,” says the lecturer, piquing the interest of undergraduate students of the Government College for Women. The students have already done their preparatory work on the 17th century comedy and immediately cotton on to what he is trying to explain. “It’s essentially about feasting and sobriety and the eternal debate between the two, which has lots of contemporary value,” he says, opening the floor for a lively discussion on the play, interwoven with insights on Kerala’s socio-cultural-political milieu, Shakespeare’s craft, the Elizabethan age, British history, and the like.
This is a BA Honours English class at the college; a way of teaching, learning and understanding English language and literature that’s remarkably different from the usual, line by line explanation and comprehension of poetry, prose and drama.
B.A. Honours degree programmes were re-introduced in the state in the last academic year, after it was stopped in the late 1960s. Women’s College in the city is the only college in the state that currently offers one in English language and literature. “B.A. Honours is equivalent to a general B.A. degree in every sense of the term, except that content wise and merit wise they are vastly different,” says S. Sajeev Rose, course coordinator.
“The course is aimed at nurturing the research aptitude of students and designed for those who have an affinity for it and want to pursue higher education in it. It’s an integrated programme, where the syllabus is as tough as it is deep and the content is vast. It requires intensive and analytical study, with emphasis on interactive classroom activity, lectures, discussions, seminars and projects,” explains Dr. Sajeev. “It gives students an in-depth knowledge on the subject and is pitched higher than general undergraduate courses. Only students with a minimum of 70 per cent marks can apply for the course and it requires and demands a lot of extra reading and effort on their part,” adds P. Anitha Dhamayanthy, head of the Department of English of the college.
Indeed, just reading through the syllabus of the six-semester course, quickly turns into Greek and Latin! For one, these undergraduates have to clear 30 papers on topics as different as ‘British Literature (1350 to 1600)’, ‘Indian Renaissance’, ‘Dalit Literature’, ‘Kerala Culture and Literature’ and ‘Fundamentals of Theatre Studies and Performance’, to name a few.
Secondly, from the word go, they are thrown into the literary deep end, in an attempt to get “an overall view” of complex texts such as Marlow’s Edward II , Ben Johnson’s Everyman and his humour and John Milton's Areopagitica , and about Petrarchan tradition of sonnets, Jacobean playwrights, the ‘Indianness’ of Indian English literature.... The students attend six hours of class a day – that’s one more than the rest of the campus. They don’t have any ‘complementary’ subjects to learn but share a common communicative English paper with other honours students.
Currently there are 30 students per batch. Many of the students say that they signed up for the honours degree, out of the love for the subject. “It is very hard, especially for some of our classmates who studied in the Malayalam medium. The sheer volume of reading material and course work means that we’ve had to slog it out since day one, to the point of haunting libraries in the city. But we are relishing the challenge, learning about literatures and cultures as different as Russian and Kokborok,” says sprightly Nekha Fathima, in between prepping for the upcoming second semester exams.
The course is challenging for the teachers too. Assistant professor M.N. Parasuraman, who is group tutor for the second semester students, says: “It involves a lot of preparation for us too and some topics need the expertise of experienced teachers. Also, some students are not able to cope with the volume of work and we teachers sometimes have to turn counsellors too,” he says.
All that said, the course is facing several teething issues such as a dearth of resource personnel and funding constraints, not to mention flak from certain quarters, who don’t believe in creating ‘an elite’ set of students within the system.
“Not all of the books prescribed as reading material, is available. For example, The Rusted Sword , the translation of Indira Goswami’s Sahitya Akademi award-winning Assamese novel, Mamore Dhora Toruwal , which is part of the second semester paper on contemporary Indian literature and culture, is proving difficult to source. I even requested some of my fellow academics in Assam to source it for me, but no luck so far. Often, students and teachers spend money out of their own pockets to source the books. Thankfully, the State Planning Commission has offered us a financial grant to source books that are not easily available,” says Dr. Parasuraman.
The students themselves are a bit worried, especially on what to do after graduation. “If we join for post-graduation, it’s like wasting two years because we would have already learnt a majority of the topics in the present M.A. course. The only option, then, is to apply to central universities or go abroad,” says second semester student Bindhya M.
Roll Call
As envisaged by the State Planning Commission, BA (Hons) degrees in various subjects were re-introduced by the Higher Education Department in the state in September 2013, in four top government colleges, as part of its efforts ‘to enhance the quality of higher education and the potential for employment’. Maharajas College, Kochi [BA (Hons) Economics], Government Victoria College, Palakkad [B Com. (Hons)] and Government Brennen College, Thalassery [BSc (Hons) Mathematics] are the other colleges in the pilot programme.
