The spectacle of violence in classroom

The video of a Muslim child being slapped by his classmates under the orders of their teacher has elicited public shock and anger. Defending her action, the teacher, Tripta Tyagi, said that the Muslim student was being punished for not doing his homework. In one of her interviews, she justifies her action by saying that it is important to “control” the children in school.

Tyagi has been criticised for the wrongful and depraved exercise of her authority as a teacher, that is, for expressing her Islamophobia. Tyagi stated that she was exercising her right as a teacher to discipline an errant student by being “strict” with him. This is a defence that would be acceptable to a society that condones and invisibilises many kinds
of violence in the name
of disciplining and educating its young.

Although the many kinds of violence that are inherent to the hierarchical and divisive organisation of our society have been normalised for us, once in a while, a spectacular display of this violence shocks us and angers us. When does the normality of violence become a spectacle that defamiliarises our familiar ways of seeing and legitimising violence? What in this spectacle is different from our quotidian and naturalised practices and perceptions of violence? In what ways does this spectacle change our existing perceptions and practices of violence?

Violence becomes a spectacle when a particular social manifestation of it exacerbates it beyond the limits of its normalised familiarity and, hence, gives rise to questions regarding the social rationale for the existence and exercise of that violence. The Tyagi incident in Uttar Pradesh can be understood as an example of the legitimate and mandated exercise of the adult’s right and duty to socialise and discipline the non-adult through the infliction of physical and mental violence within institutional spaces like the school and the family. However, the egregious excess of violence inflicted by Tyagi upon her student and her repeated identification of the punished student as a Muslim ruptures the normality of disciplinary violence as it has been legitimised within and through the institutional location of the school.

Secondly, the gestural normality of that violence is defamiliarised when the teacher makes the young classmates of the boy slap him. If Tyagi were to slap the boy herself, its visuality might not have disturbed a society that is inured to inflicting bodily hurt in the name of discipline on the vulnerable and the weak who cannot retaliate because they are positioned in a structural relationship of powerlessness to the powerful discipliner in terms of gender, caste, religion, age, physical disability, etc. 

Finally, the visuality of a very young child inflicting hurt on an equally young classmate, albeit under the order of his teacher, is also shockingly strange. What ruptures into visibility, through this spectacular display of violence, is the presence within the classroom of the larger social divides, and the violent ways in which these divides are reaffirmed and perpetuated through the routines and justifications of classroom discipline.

Tyagi’s display of Islamophobic violence would have remained invisible had she expressed it under the guise of “strictness”, generally considered as being necessary for effective teaching and learning. But the brazen confidence with which she displayed it, certain that she would suffer no legal repercussions for it, indicates that Islamophobia has been normalised in the larger community within which she is located and has the patronage and encouragement of the political regime. Faced with public backlash and possible legal action, Tyagi was forced to explain her violence as the necessity of a “strict”, thus efficacious, teacher.

The anger expressed against this incident on social media has been largely directed against the teacher. However, to view this incident as the ex-centric manifestation of an abnormally violent and bigoted teacher is to fail to recognise the everydayness of violence that is being increasingly normalised into familiarity in our society. Such a view recuperates into normality disciplinary regimes that keep people in their places through everyday rituals of violence. It reaffirms a culture of violence through the renewal and reinstatement of a normative repertoire of gestural conventions, disciplinary regimes and institutional protocols of violence. It erases the instrumentality of violence in the disciplining of a people into inequality and fear.

(The writer is Professor, Dept of English, Mangalore University)