An Ideal Boy

Thanks to Chapati Mystery, one of my favourite blogs, I came across 'Adarsh Balak', an art project by Priyesh Trivedi. It's a satire on classroom posters from my childhood. Most of them were badly illustrated and seemed to have been designed by people with little education and even less imagination.

Unfortunately it's satirical only if you grew up privileged and had the benefit of a private education. So it's really just an in-joke for the upper-middle class.

There are some examples of these posters below, after the art work.

In the piece below, the large word in the background spells 'Swag' in Hindi and the chain around his neck says 'YOLO'.

Based on the alphabet posters. This one says (pretty much) ' T for Toke'.

'Adarsh Balak' is translated as 'An Ideal Boy' in the poster below. This is still a top selling poster (my guess is that Williamsburg is their biggest market) for the Indian Book Depot, which is a private publisher founded in the 1930s in what is today Pakistan (it moved to India after Partition). They produced a variety of second-world-style content that seems more like propaganda than educational and reveal the (not always subtle) prejudices and stereotypes I grew up with.

The chart below would be used to teach the Hindi alphabet. The letter third from end, has the word 'Kshatriya' as an example, which is a reference to the Hindu warrior caste. It's an odd thing to put on educational material in a country where the caste system is illegal.

Second from the end has 'Trishul' as an example. It's a trident. Its only currency is as a symbol for the Hindu god Shiva. Not exactly the sort of thing that one would expect to pop up in conversations much, especially if you're not a Hindu, but then again another of the examples below is a cow's udder, so who knows..? Maybe the designer of this chart led a more interesting life than I did.

Four of the letters have no associated examples at all. That's because they never occur at the beginning of a word and the designer probably didn't think to include words that might contain them. 

The most modern object in the chart is a wristwatch.

As you read this you'll realise that I'm guilty of the educated middle-class snobbery I referred to at the start. The objects in this chart would not be unreasonable examples to have in rural communities in the North of India (I was familiar with most of them even growing up in a city of 4 million people). Some of the examples have been used for generations (Mango, Owl). 

I'd have preferred only secular examples and for it to be less anachronistic. But that's the opinion of someone who is an outsider now. When I was growing up there I had no trouble reconciling rural and Nationalist Romances from 1950s Bollywood with the latest Hollywood fare. 

In the "People of India", Punjabis and Sikhs show up as separate categories. The designer clearly had a more sophisticated system of stereotypes than I have. (In my mind Sikhs *are* Punjabi).

Nepali men dress in uniform for some reason. It's an interesting inclusion considering Nepal has never been a part of India. It might be a reference to a colonial military hangover known as the Gorkha Regiments, which were used as cannon fodder. Every Nepali male servant that I knew was always called 'Bahadur', Hindi for 'brave'. They never seemed to have first names like the other servants.

The Assamese, of course, are half-naked tribals. A redeeming quality of this poster is the Mohamedan woman without a burqa.

Clothing and accessories play a big part in Indian stereotypes and as a trained Indian stereotyper, this is what I see in the poster below. The draper and the confectioner wear the flat-top caps that would be associated by the merchant or Bania community. The shoppers in the marketplace are all well-to-do educated middle class professionals and office workers (as you can tell by their Western-style clothes and their flash cars). The butcher is a muslim (always) with his beard and skullcap. The Chemist and the book-seller are clearly educated and went to English-medium schools. They both wear glasses and one wears Western-style braces while the other wears a Western-style waistcoat.