Shanno was murdered by her own teacher in a school in Delhi in 2011. Unable to answer a teacher’s question, she was forced to squat, doubled over, in the hot sun while the teacher piled seven bricks on her small back. She collapsed finally and died in hospital that evening.
An essay by Dr Sebastian Gruschke on the unbearable weight of ‘learning’ that led to Shanno’s death (originally published in The Hindu).
Too heavy a price…
Dearest Shanno,
Dearest, sweetest, little girl,
Dearest Shanno.
Although I have never met you, I will miss you. I read about your death in the newspaper this morning. You were tortured and killed in such a brutal way and yet for so many children, what happened to you is just part of the daily routine.
I wonder if you met a guardian angel, a little friendly, fairy-tale woman who gave you support in the last hours before you died. A guardian angel who wiped the tears and the sweat from your face while you waited obediently in the murga position and who gave you the strength to hold on. Who gave you two drops of the magic water that helped you stop feeling the pain. Did she come? She stayed with you when you were in LNJP hospital all night, didn’t she?
Too familiar
Since I read about you this morning, I see your eyes everywhere, even when I look at my own two little boys. It feels like I know you. Perhaps I only know the fear that I see in your eyes.
But I do know the bricks. I definitely know the seven bricks that were placed on your back while you crouched in the murga position for those two hours under that burning sun. In fact, I see those bricks everyday. I see them everyday when I talk to people, when I read the newspaper and when I watch television.
The first brick is the parents who are keener on their children learning discipline than learning fun. The second brick is your schoolmates who have learned to stare at injustice but not to act against it. The third brick is your teachers who do not realise that they can learn more from a child in one day than they will ever be able to teach. The fourth brick is the politician who calls a bandh for every tiny issue that is in his party’s interest, but not when a child gets tortured to death at a Delhi school because she wasn’t able to recite the alphabet. The fifth brick is the police that will not call a teacher’s corporal punishment a crime, simply because they themselves believe in violence. The sixth brick is the Indian upper class, who, since India’s independence, have seen the poor as the main problem for the nation (and not the poor children’s school).
I hate to tell you what the last brick is, little Shanno. But I think I recognise the seventh one too. That brick is your guardian angel, who gave you the strength to endure all this, but not the courage to walk away. You must have been afraid that worse would happen to you. You never imagined your obedience would kill you.
Dear Shanno, I feel so sorry about your death, so sad that you had to die for the stupidity of grown-ups.
But perhaps it will not be for nothing. Perhaps your death will make us realise that there is something fundamentally wrong with the Indian education system, something fundamentally evil about the seven bricks that helped build it.
Not in vain
Perhaps now, in your memory, people might start breaking those seven bricks to pieces. Because those bricks were not only on your back last Friday. Those same bricks turn up again and again, on the backs of thousands and thousands of little children just like you, children who are too eager to learn and too frightened to cry out.
Perhaps, because of you and your suffering, something new will start. A new school system, with caring parents, caring teachers, caring politicians, caring police and wealthy people caring for the poor.
And above all, children who no longer hate and blame themselves because they cannot cope but instead are proud of what they are able to do, who hold their heads high, with love for themselves and for their classmates.
Dearest Shanno, I will miss you.
