A Teacher's Resignation in 1921
In February 1921 a teacher at a government-aided upper primary school in a village near Balasore is visited by three volunteers of the district Congress committee. They ask him to resign, to persuade parents to withdraw sixty children from the school, and to burn the school's stock of English readers at the next weekly market. The school is the only one within eight kilometres; the teacher's twenty-two rupees a month supports a widowed mother and two younger sisters. The volunteers argue that Non-Cooperation means refusing everything the colonial government runs, including its schools and the clerk's jobs they lead to. The district magistrate has already warned that anyone 'inciting withdrawal from a recognised school' will lose the school's grant and may face proceedings. The teacher's elder brother, who edits a small nationalist weekly in Cuttack, urges him to resign and start a 'national school' instead, though no funds, building or second teacher have been arranged. The teacher has one week to decide.
1. State the strongest argument on each side, judged strictly by what the Non-Cooperation programme actually asked of Indians by 1921 - not by general ideas about education.
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For the volunteers. The boycott of government-aided schools and colleges was a declared item of the programme, not a local enthusiasm. Nationalist opinion held that these institutions produced clerks and petty officials loyal to the Raj, and that a parallel system of national schools was needed to produce a different kind of citizen. Withdrawal of children was therefore a legitimate and recognised form of non-cooperation, and the teacher, as an employee of that system, was the obvious person to be asked to leave it. His refusal would be read locally as a refusal of the movement itself.
Against the volunteers. The programme asked people to surrender Government posts and titles; it did not ask them to become destitute on command. Where the local committee demanded a resignation, it was expected to have arranged the alternative - a national school, a teacher's maintenance, community support. Here none of these exists. Further, the demand to burn readers and pull sixty children out of the only school within eight kilometres harms those who have no substitute, and it is not clear that this was ever the committee's instruction rather than the volunteers' own addition.
The judgement turns on the difference between a boycott that has an alternative behind it and a boycott that is only a gesture.
2. Suppose the teacher accepts his brother's plan for a 'national school'. What three practical conditions must be met before his resignation would strengthen the movement in this village rather than discredit it?
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1. A funded salary for at least one year. A national school that collapses in three months proves the volunteers' opponents right. Money must be committed in advance - from the district committee, from local merchants, or from fees pledged by parents - and the teacher must know the amount and the duration before he resigns.
2. A building, basic materials and a second teacher. Sixty children in one room with one teacher is not a school; it is a shelter. The national school must be able to teach more than the government school did, or parents will drift back at the first inspection.
3. A credible answer about examinations and livelihood. Parents withdraw children because they expect the schooling to lead somewhere. If the national school's certificates are not recognised, its promoters must show what its pupils will do - spinning and weaving, a village industry, or admission to other nationalist institutions. Without this, the school asks poor families to gamble their children's future on a political gesture.
A fourth, softer condition is worth naming: the decision should be taken by a village meeting, not announced by three visitors from town. Consent that is produced rather than obtained will not survive the first difficult month.
3. A student wants to find out whether such pressure on schoolteachers was common in coastal Odisha in 1921. Name three types of source she could use and state one limitation of each.
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Fortnightly reports of the district magistrates and police. These are the most continuous record of local political activity and often mention school boycotts by name. Limitation: they are written by officials whose purpose is to detect and suppress unrest, so they exaggerate Congress influence, label ordinary disputes as 'sedition', and rarely record the teacher's own reasons.
Records of the district Congress committee and local nationalist newspapers. These show how the boycott was intended - circulars, resolutions, reports of national schools opened. Limitation: they are propaganda and self-reporting; failures and refusals are seldom printed, and where records survive at all they are incomplete for small towns.
School inspection registers and grant-in-aid files. These give enrolment figures before and after 1921, and record loss of recognition or withdrawal of grants. Limitation: enrolment falls for many reasons - harvest, epidemic, migration - so a drop cannot by itself be attributed to Non-Cooperation; the file shows the effect, not the motive.
Oral history from descendants and local memory. Useful for the motives officials never recorded. Limitation: memory reshapes itself over decades and tends to produce a heroic version.
A sound answer would cross-check at least two of these against each other.