ABSTRACT
Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity describes a slum girl Manju’s struggle with her college curriculum in English literature:
Today’s assignment was eighteenth century Restoration drama and Congreve’s The Way of the World.
Manju hadn’t read The Way of the World, nor did her professors expect her to. Except in the best colleges, dominated by high-caste, affluent students, Indian liberal arts education was taught by rote. At her mediocre all-girls college, founded by Lions Club, she was simply required to memorize a summary the teacher provided for each literary work on the syllabus, then restate it on the test and, later, on state board exam.
(Boo 2012: 59) Even the summary is hard for Manju to grasp as she cannot distinguish between Millamant, Mirabell and Petulant, the three major characters in the play. She says to her friend: ‘Everyone is telling lies and tricking people to get money, but where my teacher wrote what the story means, I don’t understand.’