11 highlights
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The “Krishnamurti schools” in India are “alternative” schools that were established by the thinker-philosopher J. Krishnamurti (1895-1986)
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The schools are supposed to be (and I do believe they were/are) conceived and established out of love and a deep feeling for “a fundamental transformation in this destructive society”. However, it’s unfortunately this “love” that both holds us (students, former students, teachers) to the place fondly and traps us from ever being fully cognisant of the problems and subconscious casteism here.
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To my mind, this absence of caste and conversations around caste is not in any way incongruent to the dominant schooling experience in the country.
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The incongruence is with the importance the Krishnamurti schools place on conversation, on dialogue, understanding our own positions and the spaces we navigate, and most importantly on trying to talk to students about systemic inequalities — of class, gender, race, sexuality, but never of caste.
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The fact that the body of “teaching-staff” is primarily savarna elite needs close examination
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That the majority of the bahujan staff are called “non-teaching” — even when they do teach students weaving, carpentry or cook everyday meals in the kitchen — and that even many of their names remained mostly unknown to students (the schools are very small spaces where one would boast of everybody knowing each other) is a telling testament.
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In Krishnamurti schools across the country, students eat meals cooked at school together. These meals are entirely vegetarian (and egg-free in most cases). For the longest time as a student, I justified this to myself and others as a matter of “violence”, but this conception of violence is no more than a brahmanical myth, functions as code for purity politics, and a hegemonic control of food-practices of dalit, bahujan, adivasi and Muslim peoples.
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I do think, however, that Krishnamurti’s own position on meat needs to be critically placed within the context of his own brahmin background and Theosophical Society upbringing — to examine this is to consider the possibility that his position was inherited from a casteist ecosystem and acknowledge that he too was not somehow magically free of caste or casteless.
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In saying this, I am not suggesting immediately that including meat and eggs in the diet is somehow the solution. The suspicion however, is that the non-examination of this vegetarian diet, while it might be rationalised as “non-violence” or “Krishnamurti school principles” holds beneath it several notions held by teachers, students and parents that have to do with purity, pride in vegetarianism, discomfort or disgust with meat or those who eat meat
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Even besides the fact of vegetarianism, meals are designed (by a group of “teaching staff” and not those who actually cook the meals) to cater to a brahmin sensibility and taste. A
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The K school in Chennai, for example, serves curd-rice every day as a staple in the meal; the amount of onion and garlic used in the food are regulated to ensure that it is not “too much” etc. These decisions are of course unspoken or unwritten, and made covertly, but guided very deeply by what “right” food must be — “sattvic”.