Since June 2007, British Council has worked alongside the West Bengal Board of Primary Education to overhaul the primary English syllabus in the state, create new study materials for pupils and resources for teachers and conduct extensive training of master and key resource people. The first batch of materials – Year One book for pupils, a teachers’ book with instructions for teaching the Year One materials and a comprehensive Teachers’ Companion – were ready by this summer and are being used extensively by pupils and teachers across the state.

Project English engaged Scottish English language expert Dr Ray Mackay to lead a sterling team of textbook writers selected by the West Bengal Primary Board. At every stage, the project received wholehearted support of the West Bengal government. School Education minister Shri Partha Dey attended many of the training sessions, conducted by Ray with untiring zeal. Prof Sulapani Bhattacharya, former president of the board, and Prof Debarshi Mondal, secretary of the board, were practically at every cascade workshop conducted at the district level. Dr Nandita Chatterjee, Principal Secretary of School Education, brushed aside all the teething problems that cropped up in the early stages of the programme.

In the middle of September this year, three of us got back to our Kolkata office from an exhausting but exhilarating visit to a school in the backwaters of Bengal, having witnessed how well the materials produced by Ray Mackay are being handled by a very competent primary teacher. Sujata Sen, Director of the British Council in East India, Alison Barrett, Head of State Partnerships, Project English and I accompanied Prof Bhattacharya and Prof Mondal to a school of their choice.

Baradabar Jeleypara Primary School is 80 kms away from Kolkata, just by the National Highway 6, set in picture-postcard rural Bengal countryside, and straight out of a Satyajit Ray film, fields of paddy plump and ripe in the monsoon rains, the crops swaying in the wet winds when we visited. Leaving the cars on the highway, we tip-toed across a skeletal wooden bridge (no handrails, with a few planks missing) over a canal in which a country boat gently rocked, as if made to order, putting the finishing touches to a bucolic scene of impossible beauty.

The school has 117 pupils, two full-time teachers and one para teacher. Though the village has electricity, the school cannot afford a connection. Almost all the residents of the village are fishing folk, hence the name Jeleypara, “jeley” meaning fisherman in Bangla. The headteacher informs us that a majority of the pupils come from families living below the poverty line.

The pupils sat scattered mostly on the ground, on mats and durrees, rickety benches sprouting here and there from a very uneven and scarred floor, like cacti on a desert landscape. Tarpaulin screens separated one classroom from another in what was essentially a long multipurpose hall with no proper ceiling but only an asbestos roof to keep the rain and sun away. The screens were set up for our benefit. Usually, one class melts seamlessly into another,making it a single, free, riotous zone which must be envied by these pupils’ urban, affluent counterparts, herded into their pens from the time they are just barely three.

One of the teachers was trained by Ray directly as part of the master-resource person training he conducted last year and he is now a convert to a methodology he described as “Mackay Magic.”

Dilip Bera then proceeded to demonstrate exactly how that spell worked. Walking into the Year One classroom, he was greeted by the shrill cacophony of “Good-morning-teacher” in the same sing-song voice that one is used to hearing in urban private English medium schools. With our crusty and hawkish evaluators’ skins on, we were not terribly impressed. Then Bera proceeded to teach item after item in English – passably fluent, not infallibly grammatical, but most important, recognisably English.

The class responded, sometimes in chorus, and at others, as individuals, as their teacher bade them to, always in English. Then Bera deviated from the textbook. He picked up or pointed at everyday objects strewn across the classroom and asked them what they were. His pupils answered in halting English, “This is a mobile, this is a chappal”. When told that the chappal was a shoe, they added the word instantly to their budding vocabulary, “This is a SHOE,” they screamed, unable to contain their excitement of a new discovery. Bera used Bangla very sparingly, mostly when his own English failed him and very rarely to instruct.

The pupils sang simple rhymes, complementing the chants with bodily movements, unfailingly relating the words to the action, bolting the Saussurian signifier to signified firmly. Bera asked his pupils why they liked the new books. An initial hesitation as the pupils processed this new instruction. Then the responses tumbled out freely: the books were fun, colourful, easy to read. Simple reasons that made all those agonising hours and days spent over design worthwhile in one instant.

Then, Bera stunned us all by asking Alison and Sujata to step into his shoes and proceed from where he left. The kids carried on responding, curious but unfazed by the sight and sound of foreign and townie types, dispelling all residual doubts that this was another choreographed school visit. Clearly, Bera’s magic wand was not a baton to whose every twitch his pupils were responding. Bera’s trick lay elsewhere; in channelling the more elemental human urge to learn, to make sense of an ever changing world, to excel. Bera’s own imagination was fired up by thenew methodology of old-fashioned Total Physical Response that Ray Mackay had unveiled for him and others.

His colleague, the head-teacher, spoke glowingly of what a transformation the ‘method’ and the materials (Primary One Pupils’ Book) have achieved, not just among the pupils but among the entire community. Initially, there was resistance from irked parents who thought their wards were whiling away their time in school playing, singing and dancing instead of being grim and serious, hectored by their masters to study ever harder. They were worried that the cane had been put away for good. But that was then. And we returned with the tantalising vision of a very different ‘now’.