About the poet

Stephen Spender (1909-1995) was an English poet and an essayist. He left University College, Oxford without taking a degree and went to Berlin in 1930. Spender took a keen interest in politics and declared himself to be a socialist and pacifist. Books by Spender include Poems of Dedication, The Edge of Being, The Creative Element, The Struggle of the Modern and an autobiography, World Within World. In, An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum, he has concentrated on themes of social injustice and class inequalities.

Before you read

Have you ever visited or seen an elementary school in a slum?
What does it look like?

Far far from gusty waves these children’s faces.
Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor:
The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paperseeming
boy, with rat’s eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir
Of twisted bones, reciting a father’s gnarled disease,
His lesson, from his desk. At back of the dim class
One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream,
Of squirrel’s game, in tree room, other than this.

On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare’s head,
Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.
Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map
Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these
Children, these windows, not this map, their world,
Where all their future’s painted with a fog,
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky
Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example,
With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal—
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Unless, governor, inspector, visitor,
This map becomes their window and these windows
That shut upon their lives like catacombs,
Break O break open till they break the town
And show the children to green fields, and make their world
Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues
Run naked into books the white and green leaves open
History theirs whose language is the sun.

Tyrolese valley : pertaining to the Tyrol, an Austrian Alpine province
catacombs : a long underground gallery with excavations in its sides for tombs. The name catacombs, before the seventeenth
century was applied to the subterranean cemeteries, near Rome

Think it out

1. Tick the item which best answers the following.
(a) The tall girl with her head weighed down means
The girl
(i) is ill and exhausted
(ii) has her head bent with shame
(iii) has untidy hair
(b) The paper-seeming boy with rat’s eyes means
The boy is
(i) sly and secretive
(ii) thin, hungry and weak
(iii) unpleasant looking
(c) The stunted, unlucky heir of twisted bones means
The boy
(i) has an inherited disability
(ii) was short and bony
(d) His eyes live in a dream, A squirrel’s game, in the tree
room other than this means
The boy is
(i) full of hope in the future
(ii) mentally ill
(iii) distracted from the lesson
(e) The children’s faces are compared to ‘rootless weeds’
This means they
(i) are insecure
(ii) are ill-fed
(iii) are wasters

2. What do you think is the colour of ‘sour cream’? Why do you think the poet has used this expression to describe the classroom walls?

3. The walls of the classroom are decorated with the pictures of ‘Shakespeare’, ‘buildings with domes’, ‘world maps’ and beautiful valleys. How do these contrast with the world of these children?

4. What does the poet want for the children of the slums? How can their lives be made to change ?

Notice how the poet picturises the condition of the slum children.

Notice the contrasting images in the poem — for example, A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.

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About the poet

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) is the pen name of Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto who was born in the town of Parral in Chile. Neruda’s poems are full of easily understood images which make them no less beautiful. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in the year 1971.
In this poem Neruda talks about the necessity of quiet introspection and creating a feeling of mutual understanding among human beings.

Before you read
What does the title of the poem suggest to you? What do you think the poem is about?

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the Earth
let’s not speak in any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines,
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victory with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their
brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.
If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Perhaps the Earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

to have no truck with : to refuse to associate or deal with, to refuse to tolerate something

Think it out

1. What will counting upto twelve and keeping still help us achieve?
2. Do you think the poet advocates total inactivity and death?
3. What is the ‘sadness’ that the poet refers to in the poem?
4. What symbol from Nature does the poet invoke to say that there can be life under apparent stillness?

Try this out

Choose a quiet corner and keep still physically and mentally for about five minutes. Do you feel any change in your state of mind?

Notice the differing line lengths of the stanzas and the shift in thought from stanza to stanza.

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About the poet

John Keats (1795-1821) was a British Romantic poet. Although trained to be a surgeon, Keats decided to devote himself wholly to poetry. Keats’ secret, his power to sway and delight the readers, lies primarily in his gift for perceiving the world and living his moods and aspirations in terms of language. The following is an excerpt from his poem ‘Endymion; A Poetic Romance’. The poem is based on a Greek legend, in which Endymion, a beautiful young shepherd and poet who lived on Mount Latmos, had a vision of Cynthia, the
Moon Goddess. The enchanted youth resolved to seek her out and so wandered away through the forest and down under the sea.

Before you read

What pleasure does a beautiful thing give us? Are beautiful things worth treasuring?

A thing of beauty is a joy forever
Its loveliness increases, it will never
Pass into nothingness; but will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old, and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
‘Gainst the hot season; the mid forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms;
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read;
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven’s brink.

rills : small streams
brake : a thick mass of ferns

Think it out

1. List the things of beauty mentioned in the poem.
2. List the things that cause suffering and pain.
3. What does the line, ‘Therefore are we wreathing a flowery band to bind us to earth’ suggest to you?
4. What makes human beings love life in spite of troubles and sufferings?
5. Why is ‘grandeur’ associated with the ‘mighty dead’?
6. Do we experience things of beauty only for short moments or do they make a lasting impression on us?
7. What image does the poet use to describe the beautiful bounty of the earth?

Notice the consistency in rhyme scheme and line length. Also notice the balance in each sentence of the poem, as in,
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways
Made for our searching: yes in spite of all,

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About the poet

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is a highly acclaimed American poet of the twentieth century. Robert Frost wrote about characters, people and landscapes. His poems are concerned with human tragedies and fears, his reaction to the complexities of life and his ultimate acceptance of his burdens. Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Birches, Mending walls are a few of his well-known poems. In the poem A Roadside Stand, Frost presents the lives of poor deprived people with pitiless clarity and with the deepest sympathy and humanity.

Before you read

Have you ever stopped at a roadside stand? What have you observed there?

The little old house was out with a little new shed
In front at the edge of the road where the traffic sped,
A roadside stand that too pathetically pled,
It would not be fair to say for a dole of bread,
But for some of the money, the cash, whose flow supports
The flower of cities from sinking and withering faint.
The polished traffic passed with a mind ahead,
Or if ever aside a moment, then out of sorts
At having the landscape marred with the artless paint
Of signs that with N turned wrong and S turned wrong
Offered for sale wild berries in wooden quarts,
Or crook-necked golden squash with silver warts,
Or beauty rest in a beautiful mountain scene,
You have the money, but if you want to be mean,
Why keep your money (this crossly) and go along.
The hurt to the scenery wouldn’t be my complaint

So much as the trusting sorrow of what is unsaid:
Here far from the city we make our roadside stand
And ask for some city money to feel in hand
To try if it will not make our being expand,
And give us the life of the moving-pictures’ promise
That the party in power is said to be keeping from us.

It is in the news that all these pitiful kin
Are to be bought out and mercifully gathered in
To live in villages, next to the theatre and the store,
Where they won’t have to think for themselves anymore,
While greedy good-doers, beneficent beasts of prey,
Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits
That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits,
And by teaching them how to sleep they sleep all day,
Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way.

Sometimes I feel myself I can hardly bear
The thought of so much childish longing in vain,
The sadness that lurks near the open window there,
That waits all day in almost open prayer
For the squeal of brakes, the sound of a stopping car,
Of all the thousand selfish cars that pass,
Just one to inquire what a farmer’s prices are.
And one did stop, but only to plow up grass
In using the yard to back and turn around;

And another to ask the way to where it was bound;
And another to ask could they sell it a gallon of gas
They couldn’t (this crossly); they had none, didn’t it see?

No, in country money, the country scale of gain,
The requisite lift of spirit has never been found,
Or so the voice of the country seems to complain,
I can’t help owning the great relief it would be
To put these people at one stroke out of their pain.
And then next day as I come back into the sane,
I wonder how I should like you to come to me
And offer to put me gently out of my pain.

quarts : bottles or containers
squash : a kind of vegetable (gourd)

Think it out

1. The city folk who drove through the countryside hardly paid any heed to the roadside stand or to the people who ran it. If at
all they did, it was to complain. Which lines bring this out? What was their complaint about?

2. What was the plea of the folk who had put up the roadside stand?

3. The government and other social service agencies appear to help the poor rural people, but actually do them no good. Pick out the
words and phrases that the poet uses to show their double standards.

4. What is the ‘childish longing’ that the poet refers to? Why is it ‘vain’?

5. Which lines tell us about the insufferable pain that the poet feels at the thought of the plight of the rural poor?

Talk about it

Discuss in small groups.
The economic well-being of a country depends on a balanced development of the villages and the cities.

Try this out

You could stop at a dhaba or a roadside eatery on the outskirts of your town or city to see
1. how many travellers stop there to eat?
2. how many travellers stop for other reasons?
3. how the shopkeepers are treated?
4. the kind of business the shopkeepers do.
5. the kind of life they lead.

Notice the rhyme scheme. Is it consistent or is there an occasional variance? Does it indicate thought predominating over sound pattern?

Notice the stanza divisions. Do you find a shift to a new idea in successive stanzas?

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About the poet

Adrienne Rich (1929) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. She is widely known for her involvement in contemporary women’s movement as a poet and theorist. She has published nineteen volumes of poetry, three collections of essays and other writings. A strong resistance to racism and militarism echoes through her work. The poem Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers addresses the constraints of married life a woman experiences.

Before you read

What does the title of the poem suggest to you? Are you reminded of other poems on tigers?

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

denizen : a person, an animal or a plant that lives, grows or is often found in a particular place.
sleek : elegant

Think it out

1. How do ‘denizens’ and ‘chivalric’ add to our understanding of the tiger’s attitudes?
2. Why do you think Aunt Jennifer’s hands are ‘fluttering through her wool’ in the second stanza? Why is she finding the needle so
hard to pull?
3. What is suggested by the image ‘massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band’?
4. Of what or of whom is Aunt Jennifer terrified with in the third stanza?
5. What are the ‘ordeals’ Aunt Jennifer is surrounded by, why is it significant that the poet uses the word ‘ringed’? What are the
meanings of the word ‘ringed’ in the poem?
6. Why do you think Aunt Jennifer created animals that are so different from her own character? What might the poet be suggesting, through this difference?
7. Interpret the symbols found in this poem.
8. Do you sympathise with Aunt Jennifer. What is the attitude of the speaker towards Aunt Jennifer?

Notice the colours suggested in the poem.
Notice the repetitive use of certain sounds in the poem.

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About the Author

  is a modern writer, who lives in Zurich and writes in English. In the story Going Places, Barton explores the theme of adolescent fantasising and hero worship.

Notice these expressions in the text. Infer their meaning from the context.

y incongruity                            y arcade
y prodigy                                    y amber glow
y chuffed                                     y wharf
y solitary elm                            y pangs of doubt

“When I leave,” Sophie said, coming home from school, “I’m going to have a boutique.”
Jansie, linking arms with her along the street; looked doubtful.
“Takes money, Soaf, something like that.”
“I’ll find it,” Sophie said, staring far down the street. “Take you a long time to save that much.”
“Well I’ll be a manager then — yes, of course — to begin with. Till I’ve got enough. But anyway, I know just how it’s all going to look.”
“They wouldn’t make you manager straight off, Soaf.” “I’ll be like Mary Quant,” Sophie said. “I’ll be a natural.
They’ll see it from the start. I’ll have the most amazing shop this city’s ever seen.’”
Jansie, knowing they were both earmarked for the biscuit factory, became melancholy. She wished Sophie wouldn’t say these things.
When they reached Sophie’s street Jansie said, “It’s only a few months away now, Soaf, you really should be

sensible. They don’t pay well for shop work, you know that, your dad would never allow it.”
“Or an actress. Now there’s real money in that. Yes, and I could maybe have the boutique on the side. Actresses don’t work full time, do they? Anyway, that or a fashion designer, you know — something a bit sophisticated”.
And she turned in through the open street door leaving
Jansie standing in the rain.
“If ever I come into money I’ll buy a boutique.”
“Huh – if you ever come into money… if you ever come into money you’ll buy us a blessed decent house to live in, thank you very much.”
Sophie’s father was scooping shepherd’s pie into his mouth as hard as he could go, his plump face still grimy and sweat — marked from the day.
“She thinks money grows on trees, don’t she, Dad?’
said little Derek, hanging on the back of his father’s chair.
Their mother sighed.
Sophie watched her back stooped over the sink and wondered at the incongruity of the delicate bow which fastened her apron strings. The delicate-seeming bow and the crooked back. The evening had already blacked in the windows and the small room was steamy from the stove and cluttered with the heavy-breathing man in his vest at the table and the dirty washing piled up in the corner. Sophie felt a tightening in her throat. She went to look for her brother Geoff.
He was kneeling on the floor in the next room tinkering with a part of his motorcycle over some newspaper spread on the carpet. He was three years out of school, an apprentice mechanic, travelling to his work each day to the far side of the city. He was almost grown up now, and she suspected areas of his life about which she knew nothing, about which he never spoke. He said little at all, ever, voluntarily. Words had to be prized out of him like stones out of the ground. And she was jealous of his silence. When he wasn’t speaking it was as though he was away somewhere, out there in the world in those places she had never been. Whether they were only the outlying districts

of the city, or places beyond in the surrounding country — who knew? — they attained a special fascination simply because they were unknown to her and remained out of her reach.
Perhaps there were also people, exotic, interesting people of whom he never spoke — it was possible, though he was quiet and didn’t make new friends easily. She longed to know them. She wished she could be admitted more deeply into her brother’s
affections and that someday he might take her with him. Though

their father forbade it and Geoff had never expressed an opinion, she knew he thought her too young. And she was impatient. She was conscious of a vast world out there waiting for her and she knew instinctively that she would feel as at home there as in the

Thinks as you read
1. Where was it most likely that the two girls would find work after school?
2. What were the options that Sophie was dreaming of? Why does Jansie discourage her from having such dreams?

city which had always been her home. It expectantly awaited her arrival. She saw herself riding there behind Geoff. He wore new, shining black leathers and she a yellow dress with a kind of cape that flew out behind. There was the sound of applause as the world rose to greet them.
He sat frowning at the oily component he cradled in his hands, as though it were a small dumb animal and he was willing it to speak.
“I met Danny Casey,” Sophie said.
He looked around abruptly. “Where?” “In the arcade — funnily enough.” “It’s never true.”
“I did too.”
“You told Dad?”
She shook her head, chastened at his unawareness that he was always the first to share her secrets.
“I don’t believe it.”
“There I was looking at the clothes in Royce’s window when someone came and stood beside me, and I looked around and who should it be but Danny Casey.”

“All right, what does he look like?”
“Oh come on, you know what he looks like.” “Close to, I mean.”
“Well — he has green eyes. Gentle eyes. And he’s not so tall as you’d think…” She wondered if she should say about his teeth, but decided against it.
Their father had washed when he came in and his
face and arms were shiny and pink and he smelled of soap. He switched on the television, tossed one of little Derek’s shoes from his chair onto the sofa, and sat down with a grunt.
“Sophie met Danny Casey,” Geoff said.
Sophie wriggled where she was sitting at the table. Her father turned his head on his thick neck to look at
her. His expression was one of disdain.
“It’s true,” Geoff said.
“I once knew a man who had known Tom Finney,” his father said reverently to the television. “But that was a long time ago.”
“You told us,” Geoff said.
“Casey might be that good some day.” “Better than that even. He’s the best.”
“If he keeps his head on his shoulders. If they look after him properly. A lot of distractions for a youngster in the game these days.”
“He’ll be all right. He’s with the best team in the country.”
“He’s very young yet.” “He’s older than I am.”
“Too young really for the first team.”
“You can’t argue with that sort of ability.”
“He’s going to buy a shop,” Sophie said from the table. Her father grimaced. “Where’d you hear that?”
“He told me so.”
He muttered something inaudible and dragged himself round in his chair. “This another of your wild stories?”
“She met him in the arcade,” Geoff said, and told him how it had been.

“One of these days you’re going to talk yourself into a load of trouble,” her father said aggressively.
“Geoff knows it’s true, don’t you Geoff?” “He don’t believe you – though he’d like to.”

*                                                               *                                                               *
The table lamp cast an amber glow across her brother’s bedroom wall, and across the large poster of United’s first team squad and the row of coloured photographs beneath, three of them of the young Irish prodigy, Casey.
“Promise you’ll tell no-one?” Sophie said. “Nothing to tell is there?”
“Promise, Geoff — Dad’d murder me.” “Only if he thought it was true.” “Please, Geoff.”
“Christ, Sophie, you’re still at school. Casey must have strings of girls.”
“No he doesn’t.”
“How could you know that?” he jeered. “He told me, that’s how.”
“As if anyone would tell a girl something like that.” “Yes he did. He isn’t like that. He’s… quiet.”
“Not as quiet as all that — apparently.”
“It was nothing like that, Geoff — it was me spoke first. When I saw who it was, I said, “Excuse me, but aren’t you Danny Casey?” And he looked
sort of surprised. And he said, “Yes, that’s right.” And I knew it

must be him because he had the accent, you know, like when they interviewed him on the television. So I asked him for an autograph for little Derek, but neither of us had any paper or a pen. So then we just talked a bit. About the clothes in Royce’s window. He seemed lonely. After all, it’s a long way from the west of Ireland. And then, just as he was going, he said, if I would care to meet him

Thinks as you Read.

1. Why did Sophie wriggle when Geoff told her father that she had met Danny Casey?
2. Does Geoff believe what Sophie says about her meeting with Danny Casey?
3. Does her father believe her story?
4. How does Sophie include her brother Geoff in her fantasy of her future?
5. Which country did Danny Casey play for?

next week he would give me an autograph then. Of course, I said I would.”
“As if he’d ever show up.”
“You do believe me now, don’t you?”
He dragged his jacket, which was shiny and shapeless, from the back of the chair and pushed his arms into it. She wished he paid more attention to his appearance. Wished he cared more about clothes. He was tall with a strong dark face. Handsome, she thought.
“It’s the unlikeliest thing I ever heard,” he said.

*                                                                           *                                                                         *
On Saturday they made their weekly pilgrimage to watch United. Sophie and her father and little Derek went down near the goal — Geoff, as always, went with his mates higher up. United won two-nil and Casey drove in the second goal, a blend of innocence and Irish genius, going round the two big defenders on the edge of the penalty area, with her father screaming for him to pass, and beating the hesitant goalkeeper from a dozen yards. Sophie glowed with pride. Afterwards Geoff was ecstatic.
“I wish he was an Englishman,” someone said on the bus. “Ireland’ll win the World Cup,” little Derek told his mother when Sophie brought him home. Her father was
gone to the pub to celebrate.

“What’s this you’ve been telling?” Jansie said, next week.
“About what?”
“Your Geoff told our Frank you met Danny Casey.” This wasn’t an inquisition, just Jansie being nosey.
But Sophie was startled. “Oh, that.”
Jansie frowned, sensing she was covering. “Yes — that.” “Well-yes, I did.”
“You never did?” Jansie exclaimed.
Sophie glared at the ground. Damn that Geoff, this was a Geoff thing not a Jansie thing. It was meant to be something special just between them. Something secret. It wasn’t a Jansie kind of thing at all. Tell gawky Jansie

something like that and the whole neighbourhood would get to know it. Damn that Geoff, was nothing sacred?
“It’s a secret — meant to be.”
“I’ll keep a secret, Soaf, you know that.”
“I wasn’t going to tell anyone. There’ll be a right old row if my dad gets to hear about it.”
Jansie blinked. “A row? I’d have thought he’d be chuffed as anything.”
She realised then that Jansie didn’t know about the date bit — Geoff hadn’t told about that. She breathed more easily. So Geoff hadn’t let her down after all. He believed in her after all. After all some things might be sacred.
“It was just a little thing really. I asked him for an autograph, but we hadn’t any paper or a pen so it was no good.” How much had Geoff said?
“Jesus, I wish I’d have been there.”
“Of course, my dad didn’t want to believe it. You know what a misery he is. But the last thing I need is queues of people round our house asking him, “What’s all this about Danny Casey?” He’d murder me. And you know how my mum gets when there’s a row.”
Jansie said, hushed, “You can trust me, Soaf, you know that.”

*                                                                             *                                                                             *
After dark she walked by the canal, along a sheltered path lighted only by the glare of the lamps from the wharf across the water, and the unceasing drone of the city was muffled and distant. It was a place she had often played in when she was a child. There was a wooden bench beneath a solitary elm where lovers sometimes came. She sat down to wait. It was the perfect place, she had always thought so, for a meeting of this kind. For those who wished not to be observed. She knew he would approve.
For some while, waiting, she imagined his coming. She watched along the canal, seeing him come out of the shadows, imagining her own consequent excitement. Not until some time had elapsed did she begin balancing against this the idea of his not coming.

Here I sit, she said to herself, wishing Danny would come, wishing he would come and sensing the time passing. I feel the pangs of doubt stirring inside me. I watch for him but still there is no sign of him. I remember Geoff saying he would never come, and how none of them believed me when I told them. I wonder what will I do, what can I tell them now if he doesn’t come? But we know how it was, Danny and me — that’s the main thing. How can you help what people choose to believe? But all the same, it makes me despondent, this knowing I’ll never be able to show them they’re wrong to doubt me.
She waited, measuring in this way the changes taking place in her. Resignation was no sudden thing.
Now I have become sad, she thought. And it is a hard burden to carry, this sadness. Sitting here waiting and knowing he will not come I can see the future and how I will have to live with this burden. They of course will doubt me, as they always doubted me, but I will have to hold up my head remembering how it was. Already I envisage the slow walk home, and Geoff’s disappointed face when I tell him, “He didn’t come, that Danny.” And then he’ll fly out and slam the door. “But we know how it was,” I shall tell myself, “Danny and me.” It is a hard thing, this sadness.
She climbed the crumbling steps to the street. Outside the pub she passed her father’s bicycle propped against the wall, and was glad. He would not be there when she got home.
“Excuse me, but aren’t you Danny Casey?”
Coming through the arcade she pictured him again outside Royce’s.
He turns, reddening slightly. “Yes, that’s right.”
“I watch you every week, with my dad and my brothers. We think you’re great.”
“Oh, well now — that’s very nice.”
“I wonder — would you mind signing an autograph?” His eyes are on the same level as your own. His nose is
freckled and turns upwards slightly, and when he smiles he does so shyly, exposing teeth with gaps between. His eyes are green, and when he looks straight at you they

seem to shimmer. They seem gentle, almost afraid. Like a gazelle’s. And you look away. You
let his eyes run over you a little. And then you come back to find

them, slightly breathless.
And he says, “I don’t seem to have a pen at all.”
You realise you haven’t either. “My brothers will be very
sorry,” you say.
And afterwards you wait there alone in the arcade for a long while, standing where he

Things as you Read

1. Why didn’t Sophie want Jansie to know about her story with Danny?
2. Did Sophie really meet Danny Casey?
3. Which was the only occasion when she got to see Danny Casey in person?

stood, remembering the soft melodious voice, the shimmer of green eyes. No taller than you. No bolder than you. The prodigy. The innocent genius. The great Danny Casey.
And she saw it all again, last Saturday — saw him ghost past the lumbering defenders, heard the fifty thousand catch their breath as he hovered momentarily over the ball, and then the explosion of sound as he struck it crisply into the goal, the sudden thunderous eruption of exultant approbation.

Understanding the text

1. Sophie and Jansie were class-mates and friends. What were the differences between them that show up in the story?

2. How would you describe the character and temperament of Sophie’s father?

3. Why did Sophie like her brother Geoff more than any other person? From her perspective, what did he symbolise?

4. What socio-economic background did Sophie belong to? What are the indicators of her family’s financial status?

Talking about the text

Discuss in pairs.

1. Sophie’s dreams and disappointments are all in her mind.

2. It is natural for teenagers to have unrealistic dreams. What would you say are the benefits and disadvantages of such fantasising?

Working with words

Notice the following expressions. The highlighted words are not used in a literal sense. Explain what they mean.

• Words had to be prized out of him like stones out of a ground.
• Sophie felt a tightening in her throat. If he keeps his head on his shoulders.
• On Saturday they made their weekly pilgrimage to the United.
• She saw… him ghost past the lumbering defenders.

Noticing form

Notice the highlighted words in the following sentences.

1. “When I leave,’ Sophie said, coming home from school, “I’m going to have a boutique.”

2. Jansie, linking arms with her along the street, looked doubtful.

3. “I’ll find it,” Sophie said, staring far down the street.

4. Jansie, knowing they were both earmarked for the biscuit factory, became melancholy.

5. And she turned in through the open street door leaving Jansie
standing in the rain.
– When we add “ing” to a verb we get the present participle form.
The present participle form is generally used along with forms of “be’, (is, was, are, were, am) to indicate the present continuous tense as in “Sophie was coming home from school.”
– We can use the present participle by itself without the helping verb, when we wish to indicate that an action is happening at the same time as another.
– In example 1, Sophie “said” something. “Said”, here, is the main action.
– What Sophie was doing while she was “saying” is indicated by “coming home from school”. So we get the information of two actions happening at the same time. We convey the information in one sentence instead of two.

– Analyse the other examples in the same way.
– Pick out five other sentences from the story in which present participles are used in this sense.

Thinking about language

Notice these words in the story.

• “chuffed ”, meaning delighted or very pleased
• “nosey ”, meaning inquisitive
• “gawky”, meaning awkward, ungainly.

These are words that are used in an informal way in colloquial speech.Make a list of ten other words of this kind.

Writing

– Think of a person who you would like to have as your role- model.
– Write down the points to be discussed or questions to be asked, if you were asked to interview that person on a television show.

Things to do

Look for other stories or movies where this theme of hero worship and fantasising about film or sports icons finds a place.

ABOUT THE UNIT

THEME
Adolescent hero-worship and fantasising.

SUB-THEME
Relationships – family, friends.

COMPREHENSION
Inferential comprehension.

TALKING ABOUT THE TEXT
Discussion on a subject of immediate relevance to the life of school-leavers.

WORKING WITH WORDS
Metaphorical expressions.

NOTICING FORM
Focus on the use of present participles to indicate simultaneity of action.
THINKING ABOUT LANGUAGE
Colloquial expressions, teenage slang.

THINGS TO DO
Extension activity: Relating to other stories or films (any language).

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In one important sense, Sociology is unlike any other subject that you may havestudied. It is a subject in which no one starts from zero – everyone alreadyknows something about society. Other subjects are learnt because they are taught(at school, at home, or elsewhere); but much of our knowledge about society isacquired without explicit teaching. Because it is such an integral part of theprocess of growing up, knowledge about society seems to be acquired “naturally”or “automatically”. No child is expected to already know something about History,Geography, Psychology or Economics when they come to school. But even a sixyear old already knows something about society and social relationships. It is allthe more true then, that, as young eighteen year old adults, you know a lot aboutthe society you live in without ever having studied it.

This prior knowledge or familiarity with society is both an advantage and adisadvantage for sociology, the discipline that studies society. The advantageis that students are generally not afraid of Sociology – they feel that it can’t bea very hard subject to learn. The disadvantage is that this prior knowledge canbe a problem – in order to learn Sociology, we need to “unlearn” what we alreadyknow about society. In fact, the initial stage of learning Sociology consistsmainly of such unlearning. This is necessary because our prior knowledgeabout society – our common sense – is acquired from a particular viewpoint.This is the viewpoint of the social group and the social environment that we aresocialised into. Our social context shapes our opinions, beliefs and expectationsabout society and social relations. These beliefs are not necessarily wrong,though they can be. The problem is that they are ‘partial’. The word partial isbeing used here in two different senses – incomplete (the opposite of whole),and biased (the opposite of impartial). So our ‘unlearnt’ knowledge or commonsense usually allows us to see only a part of social reality; moreover, it is liableto be tilted towards the viewpoints and interests of our own social group.

Sociology does not offer a solution to this problem in the form of a perspectivethat can show us the whole of reality in a completely unbiased way. Indeedsociologists believe that such an ideal vantage point does not exist. We canonly see by standing somewhere; and every ‘somewhere’ offers only a partialview of the world. What sociology offers is to teach us how to see the worldfrom many vantage points – not just our own, but also that of others unlikeourselves. Each vantage point provides only a partial view, but by comparingwhat the world looks like from the eyes of different kinds of people we get somesense of what the whole might look like, and what is hidden from view in eachspecific standpoint.

What may be of even more interest to you is that sociology can show youwhat you look like to others; it can teach you how to look at yourself ‘from theoutside’, so to speak. This is called ‘self-reflexivity’, or sometimes just reflexivity.This is the ability to reflect upon yourself, to turn back your gaze (which isusually directed outward) back towards yourself. But this self-inspection mustbe critical – i.e., it should be quick to criticise and slow to praise oneself.

At the simplest level, you could say that understanding Indian society andits structure provides a sort of social map on which you could locate yourself.Like with a geographical map, locating oneself on a social map can be useful inthe sense that you know where you are in relation to others in society. Forexample, suppose you live in the state of Arunachal Pradesh. If you look at ageographical map of India, you know that your state is in the North-easterncorner of India. You also know that your state is small compared to many largestates such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra or Rajasthan,but that it is larger than many others such as Manipur, Goa, Haryana or Punjab.If you look at a physical features map, it could tell you what kind of terrainArunachal has (hilly, forested) compared to other states and regions of India,and what natural resources it is rich in, and so on.

A comparable social map would tell you where you are located in society.For example, as a seventeen or eighteen year old, you belong to the social groupcalled “young people”. People your age or younger account for about forty percent of India’s population. You might belong to a particular regional or linguisticcommunity, such as a Gujarati speaker from Gujarat or a Telugu speaker fromAndhra Pradesh. Depending on your parent’s occupation and your familyincome, you would also be a member of an economic class, such as lowermiddle class or upper class. You could be a member of a particular religiouscommunity, a caste or tribe, or other such social group. Each of these identitieswould locate you on a social map, and among a web of social relationships.Sociology tells you about what kinds of groups or groupings there are in society,what their relationships are to each other, and what this might mean in termsof your own life.

But sociology can do more than simply help to locate you or others in thissimple sense of describing the places of different social groups. As C.WrightMills, a well-known American sociologist has written, sociology can help you tomap the links and connections between “personal troubles” and “social issues”.By personal troubles Mills means the kinds of individual worries, problems orconcerns that everyone has. So, for example, you may be unhappy about theway elders in your family treat you or how your brothers, sisters or friends treatyou. You may be worried about your future and what sort of job you might get.Other aspects of your individual identity may be sources of pride, tension,confidence or embarrassment in different ways. But all of these are about oneperson and derive meaning from this personalised perspective. A social issue,on the other hand, is about large groups and not about the individuals whomake them up.

Thus, the “generation gap” or friction between older and younger generationsis a social phenomenon, common to many societies and many time periods.Unemployment or the effects of a changing occupational structure is also asocietal issue, that concerns millions of different kinds of people. It includes,for example, the sudden increase in job prospects for information technology related professions, as well as the declining demand for agricultural labour.Issues of communalism or the animosity of one religious community towardsanother, or casteism, which is the exclusion or oppression of some castes byothers, are again society-wide problems. Different individuals may be implicatedin them in different roles, depending on their social location. Thus, a personfrom a so-called upper caste who believes in the inferiority of the people borninto so-called lower castes is involved in casteism as a perpetrator, while amember of a so-called low caste community is also involved, but as a victim. Inthe same way, both men and women, as distinct social groups, are affected bygender inequalities, but in very different ways.

One version of such a map is already provided to us in childhood by theprocess of socialisation, or the ways in which we are taught to make sense ofthe world around us. This is the common sense map. But as pointed outearlier, this kind of map can be misleading, and it can distort. Once we leaveour common sense maps behind, there are no other readymade maps availableto us, because we have been socialised into only one, not several or all, socialgroups. If we want other kinds of maps, we must learn how to draw them.A sociological perspective teaches you how to draw social maps.

1.1 INTRODUCING AN INTRODUCTION…

This entire book is meant to introduce you to Indian society from a sociologicalrather than common sense point of view. What can be said by way of anintroduction to this introduction? Perhaps it would be appropriate at this pointto indicate in advance the larger processes that were at work in shaping Indiansociety, processes that you will encounter in detail in the pages to follow.

Broadly speaking, it was in the colonial period that a specifically Indianconsciousness took shape. Colonial rule unified all of India for the first time,and brought in the forces of modernisation and capitalist economic change. Byand large, the changes brought about were irreversible – society could neverreturn to the way things were before. The economic, political and administrativeunification of India under colonial rule was achieved at great expense. Colonialexploitation and domination scarred Indian society in many ways. Butparadoxically, colonialism also gave birth to its own enemy – nationalism.

Historically, an Indian nationalism took shape under British colonialism.The shared experience of colonial domination helped unify and energise differentsections of the community. The emerging middle classes began, with the aid ofwestern style education, to challenge colonialism on its own ground. Ironically,colonialism and western education also gave the impetus for the rediscovery oftradition. This led to the developments on the cultural and social front whichsolidified emergent forms of community at the national and regional levels.

Colonialism created new classes and communities which came to playsignificant roles in subsequent history. The urban middle classes were themain carriers of nationalism and they led the campaign for freedom. Colonialinterventions also crystallised religious and caste based communities. Thesetoo became major players. The complex ways in which the subsequent historyof contemporary Indian society evolved is something you will encounter in thefollowing chapters.

1.2 A PREVIEW OF THIS BOOK

In this, the first of two textbooks on sociology, you will be introduced to thebasic structure of Indian society. (The second textbook will be focussed on thespecifics of social change and development in India.)

We begin with a discussion of the demographicstructure of the Indian population (Chapter 2). As youknow, India is currently the second most populouscountry in the world, and in a few decades is projectedto overtake China and become the most populouscountry in the world. What are the ways in whichsociologists and demographers study a population?Which aspects of the population are socially significant,and what has been happening on these fronts in theIndian case? Is our population simply an obstacle todevelopment, or can it also be seen as helpingdevelopment in some ways? These are some of thequestions that this chapter tries to tackle.

In Chapter 3, we revisit the basic building blocks ofIndian society in the form of the institutions of caste,tribe and family. As a unique feature of the Indiansubcontinent, caste has always attracted a lot of scholarlyattention. How has this institution been changing overthe centuries, and what does caste really mean today?What is the context in which the concept of ‘tribe’ wasintroduced into India? What sorts of communities aretribes supposed to be, and what is at stake in definingthem as such? How do tribal communities definethemselves in contemporary India? Finally, the familyas an institution has also been subjected to tremendouspressure in these times of rapid and intense social change. What changes dowe see in the diverse forms of the family that exist in India? By addressingquestions like these, Chapter 3 builds the base for looking at further aspects ofIndian society which would pre-suppose caste, tribe andfamily.

Chapter 4 explores the socio-cultural dimensions ofthe market as a powerful institution that has been thevehicle of change throughout world history. Given thatthe most sweeping and rapid economic changes werebrought about first by colonialism and then bydevelopmental policies, this chapter looks at how marketsof different kinds have evolved in India, and the chainreactions they set in motion.

Among the features of our society that have been thecause of greatest concern are its seemingly unlimitedcapacity for generating inequality and exclusion. Chapter5 is devoted to this important subject. Chapter 5 looksat inequality and exclusion in the context of caste, tribe,gender and the ‘differently abled’. Notorious as aninstrument of division and injustice, the caste systemhas been the object of concerted attempts by the stateand by the oppressed castes to reform or even abolishit. What are the concrete problems and issues that thisattempt faced? How successful have movements to resistcaste exclusion been in our recent past? What have been the special problemsof tribal movements? In what context are tribal identities reasserting themselvestoday? Similar questions are dealt with in the context of gender relations, andthe ‘disabled’ or differently abled. To what extent is our society responsive tothe needs of the differently abled? How much of an impact has the women’smovement had on the social institutions that have oppressed women?

Chapter 6 deals with the difficult challenges posed bythe immense diversity of Indian society. This chapter invitesus to step outside our normal, comfortable ways of thinking.The familiar cliches and slogans about India being a landof unity in diversity have a hard and complex side to them.Despite all the failures and inadequacies, India has notdone too badly on this front. What have been our strengthsand our weaknesses? How may young adults face issueslike communal conflict, regional or linguistic chauvinism,and casteism without either wishing them away or beingoverwhelmed by them? Why is it important for our collectivefuture as a nation that every minority in India not feel thatit is insecure or at risk?

Finally, in Chapter 7, some suggestions are providedfor you and your teachers to think about the practicalcomponent of your course. This can be quite interestingand enjoyable, as you will discover.

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Demography is the systematic study of population. The term is of Greekorigin and is composed of the two words, demos (people) and graphein (describe),implying the description of people. Demography studies the trends and processesassociated with population including – changes in population size; patterns ofbirths, deaths, and migration; and the structure and composition of thepopulation, such as the relative proportions of women, men and different agegroups. There are different varieties of demography, including formaldemography which is a largely quantitative field, and social demography whichfocuses on the social, economic or political aspects of populations. Alldemographic studies are based on processes of counting or enumeration – suchas the census or the survey – which involve the systematic collection of data onthe people residing within a specified territory.

Demography is a field that is of special importance to sociology – in fact, theemergence of sociology and its successful establishment as an academicdiscipline owed a lot to demography. Two different processes happened to takeplace at roughly the same time in Europe during the latter half of the eighteenthcentury – the formation of nation-states as the principal form of politicalorganisation, and the beginnings of the modern science of statistics. The modernstate had begun to expand its role and functions. It had, for instance, begun totake an active interest in the development of early forms of public healthmanagement, policing and maintenance of law and order, economic policiesrelating to agriculture and industry, taxation and revenue generation and thegovernance of cities.

This new and constantly expanding sphere of state activity required thesystematic and regular collection of social statistics – or quantitative data onvarious aspects of the population and economy. The practice of the collectionof social statistics by the state is in itself much older, but it acquired its modernform towards the end of the eighteenth century. The American census of 1790was probably the first modern census, and the practice was soon taken up inEurope as well in the early 1800s. In India, censuses began to be conducted bythe British Indian government between 1867-72, and regular ten yearly (ordecennial) censuses have been conducted since 1881. Independent Indiacontinued the practice, and six decennial censuses have been conducted since1951, the most recent being in 2001. The Indian census is the largest suchexercise in the world (since China, which has a slightly larger population, doesnot conduct regular censuses).

Demographic data are important for the planning and implementation ofstate policies, specially those for economic development and general publicwelfare. But when they first emerged, social statistics also provided a strongjustification for the new discipline of sociology. Aggregate statistics – or thenumerical characteristics that refer to a large collectivity consisting of millionsof people – offer a concrete and strong argument for the existence of socialphenomena. Even though country-level or state-level statistics like the number of deaths per 1,000 population – or the death rate – are made up by aggregating(or adding up) individual deaths, the death rate itself is a social phenomenonand must be explained at the social level. Emile Durkheim’s famous studyexplaining the variation in suicide rates across different countries was a goodexample of this. Durkheim argued that the rate of suicide (i.e., number of suicidesper 100,000 population) had to be explained by social causes even though eachparticular instance of suicide may have involved reasons specific to thatindividual or her/his circumstances.

Sometimes a distinction is made between formal demography and a broaderfield of population studies. Formal demography is primarily concerned with themeasurement and analysis of the components of population change. Its focusis on quantitative analysis for which it has a highly developed mathematicalmethodology suitable for forecasting population growth and changes in thecomposition of population. Population studies or social demography, on theother hand, enquires into the wider causes and consequences of populationstructures and change. Social demographers believe that social processes andstructures regulate demographic processes; like sociologists, they seek to tracethe social reasons that account for population trends.

SOME THEORIES AND CONCEPTS IN DEMOGRAPHY

THE MALTHUSIAN THEORY OF POPULATION GROWTH

Among the most famous theories of demography is the one associated with theEnglish political economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834). Malthus’stheory of population growth – outlined in his Essay on Population (1798) – wasa rather pessimistic one. He argued that human populations tend to grow at amuch faster rate than the rate at which the means of human subsistence(specially food, but also clothing and other agriculture-based products) cangrow. Therefore humanity is condemned to live in poverty forever because thegrowth of agricultural production will always be overtaken by population growth.While population rises in geometric progression (i.e., like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc.),agricultural production can only grow in arithmetic progression (i.e., like 2,4, 6, 8, 10 etc.). Because population growth always outstrips growth inproduction of subsistence resources, the only way to increase prosperity is bycontrolling the growth of population. Unfortunately, humanity has only a limitedability to voluntarily reduce the growth of its population (through ‘preventivechecks’ such as postponing marriage or practicing sexual abstinence or celibacy).Malthus believed therefore that ‘positive checks’ to population growth – in theform of famines and diseases – were inevitable because they were nature’s wayof dealing with the imbalance between food supply and increasing population. Malthus’s theory was influential for a long time. But it was also challengedby theorists who claimed that economic growth could outstrip population growth.

The power of population is so superior tothe power of the earth to producesubsistence for man, that premature deathmust in some shape or other visit the human race.The vices of mankind are active and able ministers ofdepopulation. They are the precursors in the greatarmy of destruction, and often finish the dreadful workthemselves. But should they fail in this war ofextermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence,and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep offtheir thousands and tens of thousands. Should successbe still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalksin the rear, and with one mighty blow levels thepopulation with the food of the world.”– Thomas Robert Malthus, An essay on theprinciple of population, 1798.

However, the most effective refutation of his theory wasprovided by the historical experience of European countries.The pattern of population growth began to change in thelatter half of nineteenth century, and by the end of the firstquarter of the twentieth century these changes were quitedramatic. Birth rates had declined, and outbreaks ofepidemic diseases were being controlled. Malthus’spredictions were proved false because both food productionand standards of living continued to rise despite the rapidgrowth of population.

Malthus was also criticised by liberal and Marxistscholars for asserting that poverty was caused by population growth. Thecritics argued that problems like poverty and starvation were caused by theunequal distribution of economic resources rather than by population growth.An unjust social system allowed a wealthy and privileged minority to live inluxury while the vast majority of the people were forced to live in poverty.

THE THEORY OF DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION

Another significant theory in demography is the theory of demographic transition.This suggests that population growth is linked to overall levels of economicdevelopment and that every society follows a typical pattern of development-related population growth. There are three basic phases of population growth.The first stage is that of low population growth in a society that is underdevelopedand technologically backward. Growth rates are low because both the deathrate and the birth rate are very high, so that the difference between the two (orthe net growth rate) is low. The third (and last) stage is also one of low growthin a developed society where both death rate and birth rate have been reducedBOX

ACTIVITY 2.1

Read the section on theprevious page and thequotation from Malthus inBox 2.1. One reason whyMalthus was proved wrongis the substantial increasesin the productivity ofagriculture. Can you findout how these productivityincreases occurred – i.e.,what were the factors thatmade agriculture moreproductive? What couldbe some of the otherreasons why Malthus waswrong? Discuss with yourclassmates and make a listwith the help of yourteacher considerably and the difference between them is again small.Between these two stages is a transitional stage of movementfrom a backward to an advanced stage, and this stage ischaracterised by very high rates of growth of population.

This ‘population explosion’ happens because death ratesare brought down relatively quickly through advancedmethods of disease control, public health, and betternutrition. However, it takes longer for society to adjust tochange and alter its reproductive behaviour (which wasevolved during the period of poverty and high death rates)to suit the new situation of relative prosperity and longerlife spans. This kind of transition was effected in WesternEurope during the late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury. More or less similar patterns are followed in theless developed countries that are struggling to reduce thebirth rate in keeping with the falling mortality rate. In Indiatoo, the demographic transition is not yet complete as themortality rate has been reduced but the birth rate has notbeen brought down to the same extent.

COMMON CONCEPTS AND INDICATORS

Most demographic concepts are expressed as rates orratios – they involve two numbers. One of these numbers isthe particular statistic that has been calculated for a specificgeographical-administrative unit; the other number provides a standard forcomparison. For example, the birth rate is the total number of live births in aparticular area (an entire country, a state, a district or other territorial unit)during a specified period (usually a year) divided by the total population of thatarea in thousands. In other words, the birth rate is the number of live birthsper 1000 population. The death rate is a similar statistic, expressed as thenumber of deaths in a given area during a given time per 1000 population.These statistics depend on the reporting of births and deaths by the families inwhich they occur. In fact, in most countries including India, people are requiredby law to report births and deaths to the appropriate authorities – the localpolice station or primary health centre in the case of villages, and the relevantmunicipal office in the case of towns and cities.

The rate of natural increase or the growth rate of population refers to thedifference between the birth rate and the death rate. When this difference iszero (or, in practice, very small) then we say that the population has ‘stabilised’,or has reached the ‘replacement level’, which is the rate of growth required fornew generations to replace the older ones that are dying out. Sometimes,societies can experience a negative growth rate – that is, their fertility levels arebelow the replacement rate. This is true of many countries and regions in theworld today, such as Japan, Russia, Italy and Eastern Europe. On the otherACTIVITY

ACTIVITY 2.2

Try to find out why the birthrate is slow to decline butthe death rate can fallrelatively fast. What aresome of the factors thatmight influence a family orcouple’s decision abouthow many children tohave? Ask older people inyour family or neighbour-hood about the possiblereasons why people in thepast tended to have manymore children. hand, some societies experience very high growth rates, particularly when theyare going through the demographic transition described on the previous page.
The fertility rate refers to the number of live births per1000 women in the child-bearing age group, usually taken tobe 15 to 49 years. But like the other rates discussed on theprevious page (the birth and death rates) this is a ‘crude’ rate– it is a rough average for an entire population and does nottake account of the differences across age-groups. Differencesacross age groups can sometimes be very significant inaffecting the meaning of indicators. That is why demographersalso calculate age-specific rates. The total fertility rate refersto the total number of live births that a hypothetical womanwould have if she lived through the reproductive age groupand had the average number of babies in each segment ofthis age group as determined by the age-specific fertility ratesfor that area. Another way of expressing this is that the totalfertility rate is the ‘the average number of births to a cohort ofwomen up to the end of the reproductive age period (estimatedon the basis of the age-specific rates observed during a givenperiod)’ (Visaria and Visaria 2003).

The infant mortality rate is the number of deaths of babies before the age ofone year per 1000 live births. Likewise, the maternal mortality rate is the numberof women who die in childbirth per 1000 live births. High rates of infant andmaternal mortality are an unambiguous indicator of backwardness and poverty;development is accompanied by sharp falls in these rates as medical facilities andlevels of education, awareness and prosperity increase. One concept which issomewhat complicated is that of life expectancy. This refers to the estimatednumber of years that an average person is expected to survive. It is calculated onthe basis of data on age-specific death rates in a given area over a period of time.

The sex ratio refers to the number of females per 1000 males in a given areaat a specified time period. Historically, all over the world it has been found thatthere are slightly more females than males in most countries. This is despitethe fact that slightly more male babies are born than female ones; nature seemsto produce roughly 943 to 952 female babies for every 1000 males. If despitethis fact the sex ratio is somewhat in favour of females, this seems to be due totwo reasons. First, girl babies appear to have an advantage over boy babies interms of resistance to disease in infancy. At the other end of the life cycle,women have tended to outlive men in most societies, so that there are moreolder women than men. The combination of these two factors leads to a sexratio of roughly 1050 females per 1000 males in most contexts. However, it hasbeen found that the sex ratio has been declining in some countries like China,South Korea and specially India. This phenomenon has been linked to prevailingsocial norms that tend to value males much more than females, which leads to‘son preference’ and the relative neglect of girl babies.

The age structure of the population refers to the proportion of persons indifferent age groups relative to the total population. The age structure changesin response to changes in levels of development and the average life expectancy.Initially, poor medical facilities, prevalence of disease and other factors makefor a relatively short life span. Moreover, high infant and maternal mortalityrates also have an impact on the age structure. With development, quality oflife improves and with it the life expectancy also improves. This changes theage structure: relatively smaller proportions of the population are found in theyounger age groups and larger proportions in the older age groups. This is alsorefered to as the aging of the population.

The dependency ratio is a measure comparing the portion of a populationwhich is composed of dependents (i.e., elderly people who are too old to work,and children who are too young to work) with the portion that is in the workingage group, generally defined as 15 to 64 years. The dependency ratio is equal tothe population below 15 or above 64, divided by population in the 15-64 agegroup; the ratio is usually expressed as a percentage. A rising dependency ratiois a cause for worry in countries that are facing an aging population, since itbecomes difficult for a relatively smaller proportion of working-age people tocarry the burden of providing for a relatively larger proportion of dependents. Onthe other hand, a falling dependency ratio can be a source of economic growthand prosperity due to the larger proportion of workers relative to non-workers.This is sometimes refered to as the ‘demographic dividend’, or benefit flowingfrom the changing age structure. However, this benefit is temporary because thelarger pool of working age people will eventually turn into non-working old people.

SIZE AND GROWTH OF INDIA’S POPULATION

India is the second most populous country in the world after China, with a totalpopulation of 103 crores (or 1.03 billion) according to the Census of 2001. Ascan be seen from Table 1, the growth rate of India’s population has not alwaysbeen very high. Between 1901-1951 the average annual growth rate did notexceed 1.33%, a modest rate of growth. In fact between 1911 and 1921 therewas a negative rate of growth of – 0.03%. This was because of the influenzaepidemic during 1918 -19 which killed about 12.5 million persons or 5% of thetotal population of the country (Visaria and Visaria 2003: 191). The growthrate of population substantially increased after independence from British rulegoing up to 2.2% during 1961-1981. Since then although the annual growthrate has decreased it remains one of the highest in the developing world.Chart 1 shows the comparative movement of the crude birth and death rates.The impact of the demographic transition phase is clearly seen in the graphwhere they begin to diverge from each other after the decade of 1921 to 1931.

Before 1931, both death rates and birth rates are high, whereas, after thistransitional moment the death rates fall sharply but the birth rate only falls slightly.

The principal reasons for the decline in the death rate after 1921 wereincreased levels of control over famines and epidemic diseases. The latter causewas perhaps the most important. The major epidemic diseases in the past werefevers of various sorts, plague, smallpox and cholera. But the single biggestepidemic was the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, which killed as many as 125lakh people, or about 5% of the total population of India at that time. (Estimatesof deaths vary, and some are much higher. Also known as ‘Spanish Flu’, theinfluenza pandemic was a global phenomenon – see the box below. A pandemicis an epidemic that affects a very wide geographical area – see the glossary).

The Global Influenza Pandemic of 1918 – 19

Influenza is caused by a virus that attacks mainly the upper respiratorytract – the nose, throat and bronchi and rarely also the lungs. Thegenetic makeup of influenza viruses allows for both major and minor geneticchanges, making them immune to existing vaccines. Three times in the lastcentury, the influenza viruses have undergone major genetic changes,resulting in global pandemics and large tolls in terms of both disease anddeaths. The most infamous pandemic was “Spanish Flu” which affected largeparts of the world population and is thought to have killed at least 40 millionpeople in 1918-1919. More recently, two other influenza pandemics occurredin 1957 (“Asian influenza”) and 1968 (“Hong Kong influenza”) and causedsignificant morbidity and mortality globally.The global mortality rate from the 1918/1919 Spanish flu pandemic is not known,but is estimated at 2.5 – 5% of the human population, with 20% of the worldpopulation suffering from the disease to some extent. Influenza may havekilled as many as 25 million in its first 25 weeks; in contrast, AIDS killed 25 millionin its first 25 years. Influenza spread across the world, killing more than 25 millionin six months; some estimates put the total killed at over twice that number,possibly even 100 million.In the United States, about 28% of the population suffered, and 500,000 to675,000 died. In Britain 200,000 died; in France more than 400,000. Entire villagesperished in Alaska and southern Africa. In Australia an estimated 10,000 peopledied and in the Fiji Islands, 14% of the population died during only two weeks,and in Western Samoa 22%. An estimated 17 million died in India, about 5% ofIndia’s population at the time. In the British Indian Army, almost 22% of troopswho caught the disease died of it.While World War 1 did not cause the flu, the close quarters and mass movementof troops quickened its spread. It has been speculated that the soldiers’immune systems were weakened by the stresses of combat and chemicalattacks, increasing their susceptibility to the disease.

Improvements in medical cures for these diseases, programmes for massvaccination, and efforts to improve sanitation helped to control epidemics.However, diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and diarrhoea and dysenteryscontinue to kill people even today, although the numbers are nowhere as highas they used to be in the epidemics of the past. Surat witnessed a small epidemicof plague in September 1994, while dengue and chikungunya epidemics havebeen reported in various parts of the country in 2006.
Famines were also a major and recurring source of increased mortality.Famines were caused by high levels of continuing poverty and malnutrition inan agroclimatic environment that was very vulnerable to variations in rainfall.Lack of adequate means of transportation and communication as well asinadequate efforts on the part of the state were some of the factors responsiblefor famines. However, as scholars like Amartya Sen and others have shown,famines were not necessarily due to fall in foodgrains production; they werealso caused by a ‘failure of entitlements’, or the inability of people to buy orotherwise obtain food. Substantial improvements in the productivity of Indianagriculture (specially through the expansion of irrigation); improved means ofcommunication; and more vigorous relief and preventive measures by the statehave all helped to drastically reduce deaths from famine. Nevertheless, starvationdeaths are still reported from some backward regions of the country. TheNational Rural Employment Guarantee Act is the latest state initiative to tacklethe problem of hunger and starvation in rural areas.

Unlike the death rate, the birth rate has not registered a sharp fall. This isbecause the birth rate is a socio-cultural phenomenon that is relatively slow tochange. By and large, increased levels of prosperity exert a strong downwardpull on the birthrate. Once infant mortality rates decline, and there is an overallincrease in levels of education and awareness, family size begins to fall. Thereare very wide variations in the fertility rates across the states of India, as can beseen in Chart 2. Some states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu have managed tobring down their total fertility rates (TFR) to 2.1 and 1.8 respectively. Thismeans that the average woman in Tamil Nadu produces only 2.1 children,which is the ‘replacement level’ (required to replace herself and her spouse).Kerala’s TFR is actually below the replacement level, which means that thepopulation is going to decline in the future. Many other states (like HimachalPradesh, West Bengal, Karnataka, Maharashtra) have fairly low TFRs. Butthere are some states, notably Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and UttarPradesh, which still have very high TFRs of 4 or more. These few states alreadyaccounted for almost 45% of the total population as of 2001, and they will alsoaccount for about half (50%) of the additions to the Indian population upto theyear 2026. Uttar Pradesh alone is expected to account for a little less than one-quarter (22%) of this increase. Chart 3 shows the relative contribution topopulation growth from different regional groupings of states.

AGE STRUCTURE OF THE INDIAN POPULATION

India has a very young population – that is, the majority of Indians tend to beyoung, and the average age is also less than that for most other countries.Table 2 shows that the share of the under 15 age group in the total populationhas come down from its highest level of 42% in 1971 to 35% in 2001. Theshare of the 15-60 age group has increased slightly from 53% to 59%, while theshare of the 60+ age group is very small but it has begun to increase (from 5%to 7%) over the same period. But the age composition of the Indian populationis expected to change significantly in the next two decades. Most of this changewill be at the two ends of the age spectrum – as Table 2 shows, the 0 -14 agegroup will reduce its share by about 11% (from 34% in 2001 to 23% in 2026)while the 60 plus age group will increase its share by about 5% (from 7% in2001 to about 12% in 2026.) Chart 4 shows a graphical picture of the ‘populationpyramid’ from 1961 to its projected shape in 2016

EXERCISE FOR CHART 4

The Age Group ‘pyramid’ shown in Chart 4 provides a much moredetailed version of the kind of age grouped data presented in Table 2.Here, data are shown separately for males (on the left side) and females(on the right side) with the relevant five-year age group in the middle.Looking at the horizontal bars (including both males and females in aparticular age group) gives you a visual sense of the age structure ofthe population. The age groups begin from the 0-4 years group at thebottom of the pyramid and go on to the 80 years and above age groupat the top. There are four different pyramids for the decennial censusyears of 1961, 1981, 2001 and the estimates for 2026. The pyramid for2026 shows the estimated future size of the relevant age groups basedon data on the past rates of growth of each age group. Such estimatesare also called ‘projections’.These pyramids show you the effect of a gradual fall in the birth rateand rise in the life expectancy. As more and more people begin to liveto an older age, the top of the pyramid grows wider. As relatively fewernew births take place, the bottom of the pyramid grows narrower. Butthe birth rate is slow to fall, so the bottom doesn’t change muchbetween 1961 and 1981. The middle of the pyramid grows wider andwider as its share of the total population increases. This creates a ‘bulge’in the middle age groups that is clearly visible in the pyramid for 2026.This is what is refered to as the ‘demographic dividend’ which will bediscussed later in this chapter.Study this chart carefully. With the help of your teacher, try to tracewhat happens to the new-born generation of 1961 (the 0-4 age group)as it moves up the pyramid in succesive years

• Where will the 0-4 age group of 1961 be located in the pyramids forthe later years?
• Where – in which age group – is the widest part of the pyramid asyou move from 1961 to 2026?
• What do you think the shape of the pyramid might be in the year2051 and 3001?

As with fertility rates, there are wide regional variations in the age structureas well. While a state like Kerala is beginning to acquire an age structure likethat of the developed countries, Uttar Pradesh presents a very different picturewith high proportions in the younger age groups and relatively low proportionsamong the aged. India as a whole is somewhere in the middle, because itincludes states like Uttar Pradesh as well as states that are more like Kerala.Chart 5 shows the estimated population pyramids for Uttar Pradesh and Keralain the year 2026. Note the difference in the location of the widest parts of thepyramid for Kerala and Uttar Pradesh.

The bias towards younger age groups in the age structure is believed to bean advantage for India. Like the East Asian economies in the past decade andlike Ireland today, India is supposed to be benefitting from a ‘demographicdividend’. This dividend arises from the fact that the current generation ofworking-age people is a relatively large one, and it has only a relatively smallpreceding generation of old people to support. But there is nothing automaticabout this advantage – it needs to be consciously exploited through appropriatepolicies as is explained in Box 2.3 below.

Does the changing age structure offer a ‘demographicdividend’ for India?
The demographic advantage or ‘dividend’ to be derived from the age structureof the population is due to the fact that India is (and will remain for some time)one of the youngest countries in the world. A third of India’s population wasbelow 15 years of age in 2000. In 2020, the average Indian will be only 29 yearsold, compared with an average age of 37 in China and the United States, 45 inWestern Europe, and 48 in Japan. This implies a large and growing labour force,which can deliver unexpected benefits in terms of growth and prosperity.

The ‘demographic dividend’ results from an increase in the proportion of workersrelative to non-workers in the population. In terms of age, the working populationis roughly that between 15 and 64 years of age. This working age group mustsupport itself as well as those outside this age group (i.e., children and elderlypeople) who are unable to work and are therefore dependents. Changes in theage structure due to the demographic transition lower the ‘dependency ratio’,or the ratio of non-working age to working-age population, thus creating thepotential for generating growth.

But this potential can be converted into actual growth only if the rise in the workingage group is accompanied by increasing levels of education and employment.If the new entrants to the labour force are not educated then their productivityremains low. If they remain unemployed, then they are unable to earn at all andbecome dependents rather than earners. Thus, changing age structure by itselfcannot guarantee any benefits unless it is properly utilised through planneddevelopment. The real problem is in defining the dependency ratio as the ratioof the non-working age to working-age population, rather than the ratio of non-workers to workers. The difference between the two is determined by the extentof unemployment and underemployment, which keep a part of the labour forceout of productive work. This difference explains why some countries are able toexploit the demographic advantage while others are not.

India is indeed facing a window of opportunity created by the demographicdividend. The effect of demographic trends on the dependency ratio defined interms of age groups is quite visible. The total dependency ratio fell from 79 in 1970to 64 in 2005. But the process is likely to extend well into this century with theage-based dependency ratio projected to fall to 48 in 2025 because of continuedfall in the propotion of children and then rise to 50 by 2050 because of an increasein the proportion of the aged.

ACTIVITY 2.3

What impact do you thinkthe age structure hason inter – generationalrelationships? For instance,could a high dependencyratio create conditions forgreater tension betweenolder and youngergenerations? Or would itmake for closerrelationships and strongerbonds between youngand old? Discuss this inclass and try to come upwith a list of possibleoutcomes and the reasonswhy they happen.

The problem, however, is employment. Data from theNational Sample Survey studies of 1999-2000 and from the2001 Census of India reveal a sharp fall in the rate ofemployment generation (creation of new jobs) across bothrural and urban areas. This is true for the young as well. Therate of growth of employment in the 15-30 age group, whichstood at around 2.4 per cent a year between 1987 and1994 for both rural and urban men, fell to 0.7 for rural menand 0.3 per cent for urban men during 1994 to 2004. Thissuggests that the advantage offered by a young labourforce is not being exploited.

Strategies exist to exploit the demographic window ofopportunity that India has today. But India’s recentexperience suggests that market forces by themselves donot ensure that such strategies would be implemented.Unless a way forward is found, we may miss out on thepotential benefits that the country’s changing agestructure temporarily offers.

THE DECLINING SEX-RATIO IN INDIA

The sex ratio is an important indicator of gender balance in the population. Asmentioned in the section on concepts earlier, historically, the sex ratio has beenslightly in favour of females, that is, the number of females per 1000 males hasgenerally been somewhat higher than 1000. However, India has had a decliningsex-ratio for more than a century, as is clear from Table 3. From 972 females per1000 males at the turn of the twentieth century, the sex ratio has declined to 933at the turn of the twenty-first century. The trends of the last four decades havebeen particularly worrying – from 941 in 1961 the sex ratio had fallen to an all-time low of 927 in 1991 before posting a modest increase in 2001.

But what has really alarmed demographers, policy makers, social activistsand concerned citizens is the drastic fall in the child sex ratio. Age specific sexratios began to be computed in 1961. As is shown in Table 3, the sex ratio forthe 0 – 6 years age group (known as the juvenile or child sex ratio) has generallybeen substantially higher than the overall sex ratio for all age groups, but it hasbeen falling very sharply. In fact the decade 1991-2001 represents an anomalyin that the overall sex ratio has posted its highest ever increase of 6 points fromthe all time low of 927 to 933, but the child sex ratio has dropped from 945 to927, a plunge of 18 points taking it below the overall sex ratio for the first time.

The state-level child sex ratios offer even greater cause for worry. As manyas six states and union territories have a child sex ratio of under 900 femalesper 1000 males. Punjab is the worst off with an incredibly low child sex ratioof 793 (the only state below 800), followed by Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi,Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. As Chart 6 shows, Uttaranchal, Rajasthan,Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra are all under 925, while Madhya Pradesh,Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Orissa are abovethe national average of 927 but below the 950 mark. Even Kerala, the statewith the best overall sex ratio does not do too well at 963, while the highestchild sex ratio of 986 is found in Sikkim.

Demographers and sociologists have offered several reasons for the decline inthe sex ratio in India. The main health factor that affects women differently frommen is childbearing. It is relevant to ask if the fall in the sex ratio may be partlydue to the increased risk of death in childbirth that only women face. However,maternal mortality is supposed to decline with development, as levels of nutrition,general education and awareness as well as the availability of medical andcommunication facilities improves. Indeed, maternal mortality rates have beencoming down in India even though they remain high by international standards.So it is difficult to see how maternal mortality could have been responsible for theworsening of the sex ratio over time. Combined with the fact that the decline inthe child sex ratios has been much steeper than the overall figure, social scientistsbelieve that the cause has to be sought in the differential treatment of girl babies

Several factors may be held responsible for the decline in the child sex ratioincluding – severe neglect of girl babies in infancy, leading to higher deathrates; sex specific abortions that prevent girl babies from being born; and femaleinfanticide (or the killing of girl babies due to religious or cultural beliefs). Eachof these reasons point to a serious social problem, and there is some evidencethat all of these have been at work in India. Practices of female infanticide havebeen known to exist in many regions, while increasing importance is beingattached to modern medical techniques by which the sex of the baby can bedetermined in the very early stages of pregnancy. The availability of the sonogram(an x-ray like diagnostic device based on ultra-sound technology), originallydeveloped to identify genetic or other disorders in the foetus, may be used toidentify and selectively abort female foetuses.

The regional pattern of low child sex ratiosseems to support this argument. It is strikingthat the lowest child sex ratios are found inthe most prosperous regions of India.Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi, Gujaratand Maharashtra are among the richeststates of India in terms of per capita incomes,and they are also the states with the lowestchild sex ratios. So the problem of selectiveabortions is not due to poverty or ignoranceor lack of resources. For example, if practiceslike dowry mean that parents have to makelarge dowry payments to marry off theirdaughters, then prosperous parents wouldbe the ones most able to afford this. However,we find the sex ratio is lowest in the mostprosperous regions.

It is also possible (though this issue isstill being researched) that as economicallyprosperous families decide to have fewerchildren – often only one or two now – theymay also wish to choose the sex of theirchild. This becomes possible with theavailablity of ultra-sound technology,although the government has passed strictlaws banning this practice and imposingheavy fines and imprisonment as punishment. Known as the Pre-NatalDiagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, this law hasbeen in force since 1996, and has been further strengthened in 2003. However,in the long run the solution to problems like the bias against girl childrendepends more on how social attitudes evolve, even though laws and rules canalso help.

LITERACY

Literacy as a prerequisite to education is an instrument of empowerment. Themore literate the population the greater the consciousness of career options, aswell as participation in the knowledge economy. Further, literacy can lead tohealth awareness and fuller participation in the cultural and economic wellbeing of the community. Literacy levels have improved considerably afterindependence, and almost two-thirds of our population is now literate. Butimprovements in the literacy rate have to struggle to keep up with the rate ofgrowth of the Indian population, which is still quite high. Enormous effort isneeded to ensure the literacy of the new generations – which are only justbeginning to be smaller in numbers than in the past (remember the discussionon age structure and the population pyramids earlier in this chapter).
Literacy varies considerably across gender, across regions, and across socialgroups. As can be seen from Table 4, the literacy rate for women is almost 22%less than the literacy rate for men. However, female literacy has been risingfaster than male literacy, partly because it started from relatively low levels.Thus, female literacy rose by almost 15% between 1991 and 2001 compared tothe rise in male literacy of a little less than 12% in the same period. Literacyrates also vary by social group – historically disadvantaged communities likethe Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes have lower rates of literacy, andrates of female literacy within these groups are even lower. Regional variationsare still very wide, with states like Kerala approaching universal literacy, whilestates like Bihar are lagging far behind. The inequalities in the literacy rate arespecially important because they tend to reproduce inequality across generations.Illiterate parents are at a severe disadvantage in ensuring that their childrenare well educated, thus perpetuating existing inequalities.

RURAL-URBAN DIFFERENCES

The vast majority of the population of India has always lived in the rural areas,and that continues to be true. The 2001 Census found that 72% of ourpopulation still lives in villages, while 28% is living in cities and towns. However,as Table 5 shows, the urban population has been increasing its share steadily,from about 11% at the beginning of the twentieth century to about 28% at thebeginning of the twenty-first century, an increase of about two-and-a-half times.It is not a question of numbers alone; processes of modern development ensurethat the economic and social significance of the agrarian-rural way of life declinesrelative to the significance of the industrial-urban way of life. This has beenbroadly true all over the world, and it is true in India as well.

Agriculture used to be by far the largest contributor to the country’s totaleconomic production, but today it only contributes about one-fourth of thegross domestic product. While the majority of our people live in the rural areasand make their living out of agriculture, the relative economic value of whatthey produce has fallen drastically. Moreover, more and more people who livein villages may no longer work in agriculture or even in the village. RuralTABLE

ACTIVITY 2.4

metrosDo a small survey inyour school to find outwhen (i.e., how manygenerations ago) thefamilies of your fellowstudents came to live in acity. Tabulate the resultsand discuss them in class.What does your survey tellyou about rural-urbanmigrations?

people are increasingly engaged in non-farm ruraloccupations like transport services, business enterprises orcraft manufacturing. If they are close enough, then theymay travel daily to the nearest urban centre to work whilecontinuing to live in the village.

Mass media and communication channels are nowbringing images of urban life styles and patterns ofconsumption into the rural areas. Consequently, urbannorms and standards are becoming well known even in theremote villages, creating new desires and aspirations forconsumption. Mass transit and mass communication arebridging the gap between the rural and urban areas. Evenin the past, the rural areas were never really beyond thereach of market forces and today they are being more closelyintegrated into the consumer market. (The social role ofmarkets will be discussed in Chapter 4).

Considered from an urban point of view, the rapid growth in urbanisationshows that the town or city has been acting as a magnet for the rural population.Those who cannot find work (or sufficient work) in the rural areas go to the cityin search of work. This flow of rural-to-urban migration has also been acceleratedby the continuous decline of common property resources like ponds, forestsand grazing lands. These common resources enabled poor people to survive inthe villages although they owned little or no land. Now, these resources havebeen turned into private property, or they are exhausted. (Ponds may run dryor no longer provide enough fish; forests may have been cut down and havevanished…) If people no longer have access to these resources, but on theother hand have to buy many things in the market that they used to get free(like fuel, fodder or supplementary food items), then their hardship increases.This hardship is worsened by the fact that opportunities for earning cash incomeare limited in the villages.

Sometimes the city may also be preferred for social reasons, specially therelative anonymity it offers. The fact that urban life involves interaction withstrangers can be an advantage for different reasons. For the socially oppressedgroups like the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, this may offer somepartial protection from the daily humiliation they may suffer in the village whereeveryone knows their caste identity. The anonymity of the city also allows thepoorer sections of the socially dominant rural groups to engage in low statuswork that they would not be able to do in the village. All these reasons makethe city an attractive destination for the villagers. The swelling cities beartestimony to this flow of population. This is evident from the rapid rate ofurbanisation in the post-Independence period. While urbanisation has been occurring at a rapid pace, it is the biggestcities – the metropolises – that have been growing the fastest. These metrosDo attract migrants from the rural areas as well as from small towns. There arenow 5,161 towns and cities in India, where 286 million people live. What isstriking, however, is that more than two-thirds of the urban population lives in27 big cities with million-plus populations. Clearly the larger cities in India aregrowing at such a rapid rate that the urban infrastructure can hardly keeppace. With the mass media’s primary focus on these cities, the public face ofIndia is becoming more and more urban rather than rural. Yet in terms of thepolitical power dynamics in the country, the rural areas remain a decisive force.

POPULATION POLICY IN INDIA

It will be clear from thediscussion in this chapter thatpopulation dynamics is animportant matter and that itcrucially affects thedevelopmental prospects of anation as well as the healthand well being of its people.This is particularly true ofdeveloping countries whohave to face special challengesin this regard. It is hardlysurprising therefore that Indiahas had an official populationpolicy for more than a halfcentury. In fact, India wasperhaps the first country toexplicitly announce such apolicy in 1952. The population policy took the concrete form of the National Family PlanningProgramme. The broad objectives of this programme have remained the same –to try to influence the rate and pattern of population growth in socially desirabledirections. In the early days, the most important objective was to slow down therate of population growth through the promotion of various birth control methods,improve public health standards, and increase public awareness about populationand health issues. Over the past half-century or so, India has many significantachievements to her credit in the field of population, as summarised in Box 2.4. The Family Planning Programme suffered a setback during the years of theNational Emergency (1975-76). Normal parliamentary and legal procedureswere suspended during this time and special laws and ordinances issued directlyby the government (without being passed by Parliament) were in force. Duringthis time the government tried to intensify the effort to bring down the growth

India’s Demographic Achievement

Half a century after formulating the national family welfare programme, India has:

• reduced crude birth rate from 40.8 (1951) to 24.1 (2004, SRS);
• reduced the infant mortality rate from 146 per 1000 live births (1951) to 58 per 1000 live births(2004, SRS);
• quadrupled the couple protection rate from 10.4 percent (1971) to 44 percent (1999);
• reduced crude death rate from 25 (1951) to 7.5 (2004, SRS);
• added 25 years to life expectancy from 37 years to 62 years;
• achieved nearly universal awareness of the need for and methods of family planning, and
• halved the total fertility rate from 6.0 (1951) to 3.0 (2004, SRS).

National Socio-Demographic Goals for 2010

• Address the unmet needs for basic reproductive and childhealth services, supplies and infrastructure.
• Make school education up to age 14 free and compulsory, and reducedrop outs at primary and secondary school levels to below 20 per cent forboth boys and girls.
• Reduce infant mortality rate to below 30 per 1000 live births.
• Reduce maternal mortality ratio to below 100 per 100,000 live births.
• Achieve universal immunisation of children against all vaccine preventablediseases.
• Promote delayed marriage for girls, not earlier than age 18 and preferablyafter 20 years of age.
• Achieve 80 percent institutional deliveries and 100 per cent deliveries bytrained persons.
• Achieve universal access to information/counselling, and services for fertilityregulation and contraception with a wide basket of choices
• Achieve 100 per cent registration of births, deaths, marriage andpregnancy.
• Contain the spread of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), andpromote greater integration between the management of reproductivetract infections (RTI) and sexually transmitted infections (STI) and the NationalAIDS Control Organisation.
• Prevent and control communicable diseases.
• Integrate Indian Systems of Medicine (ISM) in the provision of reproductiveand child health services, and in reaching out to households.
• Promote vigorously the small family norm to achieve replacement levels ofTFR
• Bring about convergence in implementation of related social sectorprogrammes so that family welfare becomes a people centred programme.

rate of population by introducing a coerciveprogramme of mass sterilisation. Heresterilisation refers to medical procedureslike vasectomy (for men) and tubectomy (forwomen) which prevent conception andchildbirth. Vast numbers of mostly poorand powerless people were forcibly sterilisedand there was massive pressure on lowerlevel government officials (like schoolteachers or office workers) to bring peoplefor sterilisation in the camps that wereorganised for this purpose. There waswidespread popular opposition to thisprogramme, and the new governmentelected after the Emergency abandoned it.

The National Family PlanningProgramme was renamed as the NationalFamily Welfare Programme after theEmergency, and coercive methods were nolonger used. The programme now has abroad-based set of socio-demographicobjectives. A new set of guidelines wereformulated as part of the NationalPopulation Policy of the year 2000. Theseare summarised in Box 2.5 in the form ofthe policy targets set for the year 2010.

The history of India’s National FamilyWelfare Programme teaches us that whilethe state can do a lot to try and create theconditions for demographic change, mostdemographic variables (specially thoserelated to human fertility) are ultimatelymatters of economic, social and culturalchange.

Questions

1.Explain the basic argument of the theory of demographic transition. Whyis the transition period associated with a ‘population explosion’?

2.Why did Malthus believe that catastrophic events like famines andepidemics that cause mass deaths were inevitable?

3.What is meant by ‘birth rate’ and ‘death rate’? Explain why the birth rateis relatively slow to fall while the death rate declines much faster.

4.Which states in India have reached or are very near the ‘replacementlevels’ of population growth? Which ones still have very high rates ofpopulation growth? In your opinion, what could be some of the reasonsfor these regional differences?

5.What is meant by the ‘age structure’ of the population? Why is it relevantfor economic development and growth?

6.What is meant by the ‘sex ratio’? What are some of the implications of adeclining sex ratio? Do you feel that parents still prefer to have sons ratherthan daughters? What, in your opinion, could be some of the reasons forthis preference?

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About the author

Asokamitran (1931), a Tamil writer, recounts his years at Gemini Studios in his book My Years with Boss which talks of the influence of movies on every aspect of life in India. The Gemini Studios, located in Chennai, was set up in 1940. It was one of the most influential film- producing organisations of India in the early days of Indian film-making. Its founder was S.S. Vasan. The duty of Asokamitran in Gemini Studios was to cut out newspaper clippings on a wide variety of subjects and store them in files. Many of these had to be written out by hand. Although he performed an insignificant function he was the most well-informed of all the members of the Gemini family. The following is an excerpt from his book My Years with Boss.

Notice these words and expressions in the text. Infer their meaning from the context.

• blew over
• was struck dumb
• catapulted into
•  a coat of mail
• played into their hands
• the favourite haunt
• heard a bell ringing

Pancake was the brand name of the make-up material that Gemini Studios bought in truck-loads. Greta Garbo1 must have used it, Miss Gohar must have used it, Vyjayantimala2 must also have used it but Rati Agnihotri may not have even heard of it. The make-up department of the Gemini Studios was in the upstairs of a building that was believed to have been Robert Clive’s stables. A dozen other buildings

1. A Swedish actress, in 1954 she received an Honorary Oscar for her unforgettable screen performances. The Guinness Book of World Records named her the most beautiful woman who ever lived. She was also voted Best Silent Actress of the country.
2. An Indian actress whose performance was widely appreciated in Bimal Roy’s Devdas. She won three Best Actress awards for her acting. She is now an active politician.

in the city are said to have been his residence. For his brief life and an even briefer stay in Madras, Robert Clive seems to have done a lot of moving, besides fighting some impossible battles in remote corners of India and marrying a maiden in St. Mary’s Church in Fort St. George in Madras.

The make-up room had the look of a hair-cutting salon with lights at all angles around half a dozen large mirrors. They were all incandescent lights, so you can imagine the fiery misery of those subjected to make-up. The make-up department was first headed by a Bengali who became too big for a studio and left. He was succeeded by a Maharashtrian who was assisted by a Dharwar Kannadiga, an Andhra, a Madras Indian Christian, an Anglo-Burmese and the usual local Tamils. All this shows that there was a great deal of national integration long before A.I.R. and Doordarshan began broadcasting programmes on national integration. This gang of nationally integrated make-up men could turn any decent-looking person into a hideous crimson hued monster with the help of truck-loads of pancake and a number of other locally made potions and lotions. Those were the days of mainly indoor shooting, and only five per cent of the film was shot outdoors. I suppose the sets and studio lights needed the girls and boys to be made to look ugly in order to look presentable in the movie. A strict hierarchy was maintained in the make-up department. The chief make-up man made the chief actors and actresses ugly, his senior assistant the ‘second’ hero and heroine, the junior assistant the main comedian, and so forth. The players who played the crowd were the responsibility of the office boy. (Even the make-up department of the Gemini Studio had an ‘office boy’!) On the days when there was a crowd- shooting, you could see him mixing his paint in a giant vessel and slapping it on the crowd players. The idea was to close every pore on the surface of the face in the process of applying make-up. He wasn’t exactly a ‘boy’; he was in his early forties, having entered the studios years ago in the hope of becoming a star actor or a top screen writer,

director or lyrics writer. He was a bit of a poet.

In those days I worked in a cubicle, two whole sides of which were French windows. (I didn’t know at that time they were called French windows.) Seeing me sitting at my desk tearing up newspapers day in and day out, most people thought I was doing next to nothing. It is likely that the Boss thought likewise too. So anyone who felt I should be given some occupation would barge into

Think as you Read

1. What does the writer mean by
‘the fiery misery’ of those subjected to make-up’?
2. What is the example of national integration that the author refers to?
3. What work did the ‘office boy’ do in the Gemini Studios? Why did he join the studios? Why was he disappointed?
4. Why did the author appear to be doing nothing at the studios?

my cubicle and deliver an extended lecture. The ‘boy’ in the make-up department had decided I should be enlightened on how great literary talent was being allowed to go waste in a department fit only for barbers and perverts. Soon I was praying for crowd-shooting all the time. Nothing short of it could save me from his epics.
In all instances of frustration, you will always find the anger directed towards a single person openly or covertly and this man of the make-up department was convinced that all his woes, ignominy and neglect were due to Kothamangalam Subbu. Subbu was the No. 2 at Gemini Studios. He couldn’t have had a more encouraging opening in films than our grown-up make-up boy had. On the contrary he must have had to face more uncertain and difficult times, for when he began his career, there were no firmly established film producing companies or studios. Even in the matter of education, specially formal education, Subbu couldn’t have had an appreciable lead over our boy. But by virtue of being born a Brahmin — a virtue, indeed!

— he must have had exposure to more affluent situations and people. He had the ability to look cheerful at all times even after having had a hand in a flop film. He always had work for somebody — he could never do things on his own

— but his sense of loyalty made him identify himself with his principal completely and turn his entire creativity to his principal’s advantage. He was tailor -made for films. Here was a man who could be inspired when commanded. “The rat fights the tigress underwater and kills her but takes pity on the cubs and tends them lovingly

— I don’t know how to do the scene,” the producer would say and Subbu would come out with four ways of the rat pouring affection on its victim’s offspring. “Good, but I am not sure it is effective enough,” the producer would say and in a minute Subbu would come out with fourteen more alternatives. Film-making must have been and was so easy with a man like Subbu around and if ever there was a man who gave direction and definition to Gemini Studios during its golden years, it was Subbu. Subbu had a separate identity as a poet and though he was certainly capable of more complex and higher forms, he deliberately chose to address his poetry to the masses. His success in films overshadowed and dwarfed his literary achievements

— or so his critics felt. He composed several truly original ‘story poems’ in folk refrain and diction and also wrote a sprawling novel Thillana Mohanambal with dozens of very deftly etched characters. He quite successfully recreated the mood and manner of the Devadasis of the early 20th century. He was an amazing actor — he never aspired to the lead roles

— but whatever subsidiary role he played in any of the films, he performed better than the supposed main players. He had a genuine love for anyone he came across and his house was a permanent residence for dozens of near and far relations and acquaintances. It seemed against Subbu’s nature to be even conscious that he was feeding and supporting so many of them. Such a charitable and improvident man, and yet he had enemies! Was it because he seemed so close and intimate with The Boss? Or was it his general demeanour that resembled a sycophant’s? Or his readiness to say nice things about everything? In any case, there was this man in the make-up department who would wish the direst things for Subbu.

You saw Subbu always with The Boss but in the attendance rolls, he was grouped under a department called the Story Department comprising a lawyer and an assembly of writers and poets. The lawyer was also officially known as the legal adviser, but everybody referred to him as the opposite. An extremely talented actress, who was also extremely temperamental, once blew over on the sets. While everyone stood stunned, the lawyer quietly switched on the recording equipment. When the actress paused for breath, the lawyer said to her, “One minute, please,” and played back the recording. There was nothing incriminating or unmentionably foul about the actress’s tirade against the producer. But when she heard her voice again through the sound equipment, she was struck dumb. A girl from the countryside, she hadn’t gone through all the stages of worldly experience that generally precede a position of importance and sophistication that she had found herself catapulted into. She never quite recovered from the terror she felt that day. That was the end of a brief and brilliant acting career — the legal adviser, who was also a member of the Story Department, had unwittingly brought about that sad end. While every other member of the Department wore a kind of uniform — khadi dhoti with a slightly oversized and clumsily tailored white khadi shirt — the legal adviser wore pants and a tie and sometimes a coat that looked like a coat of mail. Often he looked alone and helpless — a man of cold logic in a crowd of dreamers — a neutral man in an assembly of Gandhiites

Think as you Read

1. Why was the office boy frustrated? Who did he show his anger on?
2. Who was Subbu’s principal?
3. Subbu is described as a
many-sided genius. List four of his special abilities.
4. Why was the legal adviser referred to as the opposite by others?
5. What made the lawyer stand out from the others at Gemini Studios? 

and khadiites. Like so many of those who were close to The Boss, he was allowed to produce a film and though a lot of raw stock and pancake were used on it, not much came of the film. Then one day The Boss closed down the Story Department and this was perhaps the only instance in all human history where a lawyer lost his job because the poets were asked to go home.

Gemini Studios was the favourite haunt of poets like S.D.S.Yogiar3, Sangu Subramanyam, Krishna Sastry and Harindranath Chattopadhyaya4. It had an excellent mess which supplied good coffee at all times of the day and for most part of the night. Those were the days when Congress rule meant Prohibition and meeting over a cup of coffee was rather satisfying entertainment. Barring the office boys and a couple of clerks, everybody else at the Studios radiated leisure, a pre-requisite for poetry. Most of them wore khadi and worshipped Gandhiji but beyond that they had not the faintest appreciation for political thought of any kind. Naturally, they were all averse to the term

‘Communism’. A Communist was a godless man — he had no filial or conjugal love; he had no compunction about killing his own parents or his children; he was always out to cause and spread unrest and violence among innocent and ignorant people. Such notions which prevailed everywhere else in South India at that time also, naturally, floated about vaguely among the khadi-clad poets of Gemini Studios. Evidence of it was soon forthcoming.

When Frank Buchman’s Moral Re-Armament army, some two hundred strong, visited Madras sometime in 1952, they could not have found a warmer host in India than the Gemini Studios. Someone called the group an international circus. They weren’t very good on the trapeze and their acquaintance with animals was only at the dinner table, but they presented two plays in a most professional manner. Their ‘Jotham Valley’ and ‘The Forgotten Factor’ ran several shows in Madras and along with the other citizens of the city, the Gemini family of six hundred saw the plays over and over again. The message of the plays were usually plain and simple homilies, but the sets and costumes were first-rate. Madras and the Tamil drama community were

3. A freedom fighter and a national poet.
4. A poet and a playwright.

terribly impressed and for some years almost all Tamil plays had a scene of sunrise and sunset in the manner of
‘Jotham Valley’ with a bare stage, a white background curtain and a tune played on the flute. It was some years later that I learnt that the MRA was a kind of counter – movement to international Communism and the big bosses of Madras like Mr. Vasan simply played into their hands. I am not sure however, that this was indeed the case, for the unchangeable aspects of these big bosses and their enterprises remained the same, MRA or no MRA, international Communism or no international Communism. The staff of Gemini Studios had a nice time hosting two hundred people of all hues and sizes of at least twenty nationalities. It was such a change from the usual collection of crowd players waiting to be slapped with thick layers of make-up by the office-boy in the make-up department.

A few months later, the telephone lines of the big bosses of Madras buzzed and once again we at Gemini Studios cleared a whole shooting stage to welcome another visitor. All they said was that he was a poet from England. The only poets from England the simple Gemini staff knew or heard of were Wordsworth and Tennyson; the more literate ones knew of Keats, Shelley and Byron; and one or two might have faintly come to know of someone by the name Eliot. Who was the poet visiting the Gemini Studios now? “He is not a poet.

He is an editor. That’s why The Boss is giving him a big reception.” Vasan was also the editor of the popular Tamil weekly Ananda Vikatan.

He wasn’t the editor of any of the known names of British publications in Madras, that is, those known at the Gemini Studios. Since the top men of The Hindu were taking the initiative, the surmise was that the poet was the editor of a daily — but not from The Manchester Guardian or the London Times. That was all that even the most well- informed among us knew.

At last, around four in the afternoon, the poet (or the editor) arrived. He was a tall man, very English, very serious and of course very unknown to all of us. Battling with half a dozen pedestal fans on the shooting stage, The Boss read

Think as you Read

1. Did the people at Gemini Studios have any particular political affiliations?
2. Why was the Moral Rearmament Army welcomed at the Studios?
3. Name one example to show that Gemini studios was influenced by the plays staged by MRA.
4. Who was The Boss of Gemini
Studios?
5. What caused the lack of communication between the Englishman and the people at Gemini Studios?
6. Why is the Englishman’s visit referred to as unexplained mystery?

out a long speech. It was obvious that he too knew precious little about the poet (or the editor). The speech was all in the most general terms but here and there it was peppered with words like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Then the poet spoke. He couldn’t have addressed a more dazed and silent audience — no one knew what he was talking about and his accent defeated any attempt to understand what he was saying. The whole thing lasted about an hour; then the poet left and we all dispersed in utter bafflement — what are we doing? What is an English poet doing in a film studio which makes Tamil films for the simplest sort of people? People whose lives least afforded them the possibility of cultivating a taste for English poetry? The poet looked pretty baffled too, for he too must have felt the sheer incongruity of his talk about the thrills and travails of an English poet. His visit remained an unexplained mystery.

The great prose-writers of the world may not admit it, but my conviction grows stronger day after day that prose- writing is not and cannot be the true pursuit of a genius. It is for the patient, persistent, persevering drudge with a heart so shrunken that nothing can break it; rejection slips don’t mean a thing to him; he at once sets about making a fresh copy of the long prose piece and sends it on to another editor enclosing postage for the return of the manuscript. It was for such people that The Hindu had published a tiny announcement in an insignificant corner of an unimportant page — a short story contest organised by a British periodical by the name The Encounter. Of course, The Encounter wasn’t a known commodity among the Gemini literati. I wanted to get an idea of the periodical before I spent a considerable sum in postage sending a manuscript to England. In those days, the British Council Library had an entrance with no long winded signboards and notices to make you feel you were sneaking into a forbidden area. And there were copies of The Encounter lying about in various degrees of freshness, almost untouched by readers. When I read the editor’s name, I heard a bell ringing in my shrunken heart. It was the poet who had visited the Gemini Studios — I felt like I had found a long lost brother and I sang as I sealed the envelope and wrote out his address. I felt that he too would be singing the same song at the same time — long lost brothers of Indian films discover each other by singing the same song in the first reel and in the final reel of the film. Stephen Spender5. Stephen — that was his name.

And years later, when I was out of Gemini Studios and I had much time but not much money, anything at a reduced price attracted my attention. On the footpath in front of the Madras Mount Road Post Office, there was a pile of brand new books for fifty paise each. Actually they were copies of the same book, an elegant paperback of American origin. ‘Special low-priced student edition, in connection with the 50th Anniversary of the Russian Revolution’, I paid fifty paise and picked up a copy of the book, The God That Failed. Six eminent men of letters in six separate essays described ‘their journeys into Communism and their disillusioned return’; Andre Gide6, Richard Wright7, Ignazio Silone8, Arthur Koestler9, Louis Fischer10 and Stephen Spender. Stephen Spender! Suddenly the book assumed tremendous

Think as you Read

1. Who was the English visitor to the studios?
2. How did the author discover who the English visitor to the studios was?
3. What does The God that Failed refer to?

5. An English poet essayist who concentrated on themes of social injustice and class struggle.
6. A French writer, humanist, moralist, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947.
7. An American writer, known for his novel Native Son and his autobiography Black Boy.
8. An Italian writer, who was the founder member of the Italian communist party in 1921, and is known for the book. The God That Failed, authored by him.
9. A Hungarian born British novelist, known for his novel Darkness at Noon.
10. A well known American journalist and a writer of Mahatma Gandhi’s biography entitled The Life of Mahatma Gandhi. The Oscar winning film Gandhi is based on this biographical account.

significance. Stephen Spender, the poet who had visited Gemini Studios! In a moment I felt a dark chamber of my mind lit up by a hazy illumination. The reaction to Stephen Spender at Gemini Studios was no longer a mystery. The Boss of the Gemini Studios may not have much to do with Spender’s poetry. But not with his god that failed.

Understanding the text

1. The author has used gentle humour to point out human foibles.Pick out instances of this to show how this serves to make the piece interesting.
2. Why was Kothamangalam Subbu considered No. 2 in Gemini Studios?
3. How does the author describe the incongruity of an English poet addressing the audience at Gemini Studios?
4. What do you understand about the author’s literary inclinations from the account?

Talking about the text

Discuss in small groups taking off from points in the text.
1. Film-production today has come a long way from the early days of the Gemini Studios.
2. Poetry and films.
3. Humour and criticism.

Noticing transitions

• This piece is an example of a chatty, rambling style. One thought leads to another which is then dwelt upon at length.
• Read the text again and mark the transitions from one idea to another. The first one is indicated below.

Make-up department Office-boy Subbu

Writing

You must have met some interesting characters in your neighbourhood or among your relatives. Write a humourous piece about their idiosyncrasies. Try to adopt the author’s rambling style, if you can.

Things to do

Collect about twenty cartoons from newspapers and magazines in any langauge to discuss how important people or events have been satirised. Comment on the interplay of the words and the pictures used.

ABOUT THE UNIT

THEME
An account of the events and personalities in a film company in the early days of Indian cinema.

SUB-THEME
Poets and writers in a film company environment.

COMPREHENSION

• Understanding humour and satire.
• Following a rambling, chatty style and making inferences.

TALKING ABOUT THE TEXT

Discuss

• Today’s film technology compared with that of the early days of Indian cinema (comparing and contrasting).
• Poetry and films; criticism and humour.

NOTICING TRANSITIONS
Focus on devices for achieving thematic coherence.

WRITING
Practice writing in the humorous style.

THINGS TO DO
Extension activity on cartoons as a vehicle of satirical comment on human foibles.

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Non-Ideal Solutions

Non­ideal solutions are the solutions in which solute solvent interactions are different from solute solute and solvent solvent interactions. These solutions do not obey Raoult’s law for all concentrations and

1. ΔH (mix) ≠ 0
2. ΔV (mix) ≠ 0

Types of non-ideal solutions

(a) Non-ideal solutions showing positive deviations:  Positive deviation occurs when total vapour pressure for any mole fraction is more than what is expected according to Raoult’s law. This happens when the new interactions are weaker than the interaction in the pure component
(A – B < A – A or B – B interactions).

It forms minimum boiling azeotropes, for example, C₂H₅OH + cyclohexane. The Bonding present in pure C₂H₅OH is cut off on adding cyclohexane. For such solution, ΔV and ΔH are positive.

Examples:

1. Acetone + carbon disulphide,
2. Acetone + benzene
3. Carbon tetrachloride + chloroform or Toluene
4. Methyl alcohol + water
5. Acetone + C₂H₅OH

Non-ideal solutions showing negative deviations:  Negative deviation occurs when total vapour pressure for any mole fraction is less than what is expected according to Raoult’s law. This happens when the new interactions are stronger than the interaction in the pure component
(A – B > A – A or B – B interactions).

It forms maximum boiling azeotrope, for example, CHCl₃+ CH₃COCH₃.For such solutions, ΔV and ΔH are negative.

Examples:

1. Chloroform + benzene or diethyl ether
2. Acetone + aniline
3. Nitric acid (HNO₃) + water
4. Acetic acid + pyridine

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1. Samajika Bigyan
2. Sikshya Mano Bigyan
3. Ganita Sikshyadana Padhati
4. Odia Sikshyadana Padhati
5. Bigyan Sikshyadana Padhati
6. Pathyakrama Samranchana ‘O’ Sampadana
7. Bikashshila Bharatiya Samajara Sikshya
8. Teaching of English
9. Swasthyakala ‘O’ Karmasikshya
10. Urdu Method

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