A classroom is a microcosm of life where lessons are to be learned within the covers of books and without. “Nearly half of your personality is what your teachers have made of you,” says A Noel Joseph Irudayaraj, who has spent over three decades in higher education.
The Tiruchi-based academic has served as teaching faculty and research guide in Tamil Nadu Government Collegiate Services, University of Madras Post-Graduate Centre and Bharathidasan University for 38 years from 1970, and written poems and critical essays in both English and Tamil.
Among his noted articles that had Tamil literary circles alive with discussion was the 1988 essay Iyakkatthilirunthu Aattaththirku, published in the magazine Melum , about post-modernism.
He was the head and chairperson of the Department of English from 1999 to 2009.
Dr Noel attributes his love of language (he knows Latin and French as well) to his teachers. The son of a teacher in St Mary’s High School, Dindigul, he remembers the atmosphere at home and in school being filled with linguistic goals.
“I was very keen on becoming a Tamil pundit, and my father used to supply me with many literary texts from the school library. He gave me Pulavar Kuzhandai’s Yaapathigaram , the manual for Tamil prosody (the patterns of stress and intonation in a language). I wrote my first poem in Tamil, (on the collapse of the Pamban bridge) for my school magazine when I was in Class 8,” he recalls.
It was his class teacher LJ Durairaj, who turned his attention towards English.
“Everyday, he’d take English tuitions on the verandah because the classrooms wouldn’t be open yet, standing throughout and checking the books of the boys,” says Dr Noel. “I never questioned his advice to become an English teacher, because in those days, tutors were like God to us. It is different now.
“Teachers with such a high level of commitment to their student’s welfare are hard to find,” he adds.
Etymology love
Language is a matter of cultural assimilation and practice, says Dr Noel. “Mr Durairaj made us all bring a dictionary to class. We would have our text-books and dictionary open for easy reference, and students would be asked to find out meanings of difficult or unfamiliar words,” he says.
It was an early introduction to etymology, (the study of origin of words), says the academic. “Post-graduate students of literature have to learn etymology because it is essential to understanding literary theory. I followed Mr Durairaj’s example, and made all my students bring a dictionary to class when I became a tutor,” he says.
When he was an English Literature undergraduate in St Joseph’s College, Tiruchi from 1965-68, there would be many ‘wars’ among the dictionary lovers.
“A classmate called Venkatramani had the habit of bringing a pocket Oxford dictionary into the classroom. He would pick out 4 or 5 words, learn their meanings in the lunch hour, and then confront us with his new vocabulary. One day he asked us to define ‘eleemosynary’. I felt really small because I did not know the meaning of the word, and my dictionary didn’t have it either,” he says.
Language today is not taken seriously at all, especially when teachers feel that an “efficient use of a restricted vocabulary is fine,” says Dr Noel.
This has led not just to a diminishing interest in etymology, but also in the use of physical reference books like the dictionary. “I think nobody takes any new word seriously. They don’t bother about its range, depth or delicacy, and just skip it,” he rues.
Inspired by Professor A Joseph, he started systematically using the encyclopaedia for all his research work. Father L Sundaram, Fr George Thottungal and Professor Seshadiri were among the other tutors Dr Noel remembers as key influences.
Dr Noel’s articles on linguistics and stylistics have been published in Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad, Bangalore Language Institute Bulletin and Indian Journal of English Studies . He co-founded and co-edited the literary journal Criticle .
Language of reference
At the Madras Christian College, Tambaram, where he did his Masters in Literature, Dr Noel was a gold medallist and first rank-holder in his subject in 1970. With the active encouragement of Professor Bennet Albert, he became a tutor for bridge course students even before graduation.
He gained his PhD on American post-modern poet Theodore Roethke from the Madras University as an independent research scholar who was exempt from working under an official guide.
To collect materials for his doctoral research in 1981-83, he visited the United States.
While there, he earned an extra MA degree at New York University-New York City (NYU-NYC), where he was a Fulbright Exchange Visitor in the first year and a NYU scholar in the second.
He also spent a brief while in the United Kingdom as a University Grants Commission (UGC) Senior Lecturer Exchange Visitor in 1991.
“But for me, English was always a language of reference, never of social usage, even up to my college years,” says Dr Noel.
“I had this awareness that I was not educated in the medium of English from the beginning. I may expound on scholars and theory in English, but I may not be able to recite nursery rhymes. I didn’t read fairy tales; my first English novel was Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.”
He paraphrases his ‘heart-throb’ French philosopher Jacques Derrida, when says, “Everything has become vulgarised. Despite all the reading material easily available physically to a reader now, it is not intellectually accessible. Students these days have simply thrown away their capacity to process information.”
Jocularly proclaiming that he was too old when he went abroad, Dr Noel says that his foreign stints and classroom sessions with thinkers like M L Rosenthal and Dennis Donahue, among others, taught him that there are many ways to approach a text, and still understand the quintessence of a theory.
Dr Noel Irudayaraj continues to participate in matters linguistic and literary in his retirement years.
“The teacher is the best source of knowledge, learning and information for a student,” he says. “I owe a lot to my teachers, and cannot forget their role in my life.”
