35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

222
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
when they are telling him he will be the raja, why is he not also
believing them when they are saying his children will not take
crown because the Banko’s issues, they will be taking crown?’
It was the most intelligent question I’d ever been asked about
Macbeth. Students I’d taught at Oxford were always more interested
in whether Lady Macbeth and the witches had a conspiracy going,
or if Macbeth could be fairly described as a paranoid schizophrenic
suffering from delusions of grandeur and hallucinations.
I looked at the list on my massive desk. There were five columns:
Sl.No . . . Name of the Students . . . II language . . . Caste . . . and Remarks.
I looked down the list.
‘Sunderasan C.N., isn’t it?’
‘No, sir. I am Bhagvanulu, sir.’ He sounded hurt.
Sunderasan’s second language, I noticed, was listed as Sanskrit.
Where had he picked that up? I soon found the correct name. It
spanned half the page, flowing into an adjacent column: Nunna
Sathyanarayana Bhagvanulu. His second language was Telegu, and
his caste was described as Kamma (B. Co.). There were no remarks
in the entire ‘Remarks’ column.
‘Very good, Nunna,’ I told him, wondering how far down the
hierarchy Kammas were. Most of my students were listed as
Brahmin. And hadn’t the caste system been officially abolished,
anyway?
It took me a while to discover that there was a quota system
operating in Indian colleges, as well as a vestigial caste system. They
were obliged to take a certain proportion of local students, whether
these students were up to university standards or not. This meant
that over half my class consisted of sophisticated, urbane rich kids
from Delhi who spoke fluent English, and often nothing else, and
poor kids from the surrounding villages whose second language, I
soon learned, was often also their only language. For people who
would have big problems reading Dr. Seuss, it seemed rather cruel
to be asking them what they thought of Shakespearean tragedy. Yet,
as Bhagvanulu’s question proved, Macbeth, with its tribal feuds and
supernatural phenomena, was something South Indians in
particular could relate to. Macbeth himself would probably have
felt quite at home out in the more remote parts of Andhra Pradesh