Blog Post #10

Gifts of Passage / Santha Rama Rau

By- Ava Daniels

This excerpt from Gifts of Passage by Santha Rama Rau sounded fairly familiar to me as I was reading it. It starts out with Rau saying how her and her older sister were starting a new school together. Not only 10 minutes into introductions, a faculty at the school had already changed their traditional Indian names to english names saying "Suppose we give you pretty English names" (672). What stood out to me about this part of the reading was that often times in history, the English or European way, whether it is dialect, fashion, or beauty standards, are considered the more acceptable version of things. Without even trying to pronounce the girls given names, which also did not seem that complicated to me personally, the teacher had already changed them commenting that their Indian names were too hard to say. I remember watching a film about young Native Australian children that were taken away from their families and sent to an institution similar to a camp where colonizers had retaught them the "right" way to live and tried to strip them of everything that they new and learned from their native parents. Even though only their names were changed during the part that I am referring to, their English teacher still wanted to change something about them and their culture that did not need to be changed. 

I also wanted to touch on the climax of the reading. When Rau and her sister had gone to school on the day of her sisters test, they ended up walking all the way home before school had got out. It is later revealed that the reason they left is because of clear blatant racism from the school teacher. The teacher made all three of the Indian children in the class sit in the back and put space between their desks and told the children that "...Indians cheat" (672). I actually applaud the sister for leaving the school. I think that that showed a lot of courage for standing up for something that she knew was not right. 

Comments

Parker said…
I do agree that the older sister did the right thing by leaving the school and taking her sister with her after dealing with that. Premila did not want to have to subject Santha to this truth yet, but Santha already had an understanding which had to be hard to deal with at such a young age being the victim of blatant racism.
February 6, 2023 at 6:41 AM
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