Shilpa Raj

Born within the Dalit (untouchable) caste in extremely poor rural India, Shilpa Raj only narrowly avoided being abandoned in the dung heap at birth. At age 4, she is sent by her father, against her mother's desperate wishes, to a residential school run by an American philanthropist in Tamil Nadu. The school promises it will change her family's fate by educating its students through college entirely for free and then helping them attain good(-paying) jobs. For the families, everything but room, board, and clothing is intangible. Raj returns home for school vacations, but otherwise spends the next 14 years receiving an American-style international education in India. By school policy, her two younger siblings are not allowed to attend; they remain in the village. Raj's younger sister especially seems to chafe against her lack of future, and her lack of familial status from being youngest and female, before she dies mysteriously as a teenager caught up with the wrong crowd. Raj wrote this memoir from that school immediately after graduating high school, before starting college to become a journalist, reflecting on her history and interviewing both her family of origin and her school community.

It's an impressive memoir, most especially from someone not yet 20 years old. Raj doesn't seem to hold back; she opens a vein and bleeds on the page. Her stories -- and the stories of all the other students she tells -- are very powerful, and very well written.

The vast, vast majority of the book focuses on her relationship with her family, which was surprising to me. I was expecting much more of a focus and analysis of her relationship with the school, which changed her life so extraordinarily and which seems to have left her struggling to "fit" outside that context -- neither in her village nor in college among the rich students. In retrospect, I completely understand her focus. Her school identity seems to be her identity as of writing this book. The questions that are problematic for her and that take up her headspace are around how her family fits into her self-image and values and identity. Her shaping childhood school experiences are (to her) mostly unremarkable. This is as it should be, though I'm immensely curious if she'll have a different perspective once she's into middle age.

As an outsider, I am engaged particularly in the role of the school's founder and philanthropist. An American of Indian heritage, he made large amounts of money in the US, and then decided to quit his job and start a school to educate the poorest of the poor and change lives, family by family, in a decades-long project. This is simultaneously one of the most inspiring stories I've ever heard, and also one of the most ethically fraught. He frames the children as family, and quickly and effectively used them to bust a strike among school staff, who were also very poor and the families of students. His American values are in tension with the values of the community he hires from (one beloved teacher is fired the day he learns she uses corporal punishment). The school teaches "universal" values like honesty, rather than any individual religion, and it doesn't seem to interrogate what it means to be teaching the religion of capitalism. Certainly "you'll get a good education" is less about education than "your original class markers will be washed away and you'll leave prepared to be perceived as a higher social class, leaving you a class traitor to your previous life"; this isn't unlike the purpose of American college, even in its hesitancy to actually call that dynamic out explicitly. I also find the ethical implications of indoctrinating small children into the burden of "raising up one's family" rather fraught. But even so... even so... he has done a truly amazing thing. These children, especially the girls, who otherwise would have very few prospects now have choices. That is incredibly powerful, and a worthwhile project for one's final decades.

This book offers an entertaining story and potentially a lot of space for personal reflection. It's very well-written, and the audiobook is well-narrated. Recommended to anyone interested in education, class, poverty, gender, inequality, culture, castes in India, or ethics.… (mehr)