“My love was like a red red rose
The petals soon fell off
Instead of me my lover chose
A bottle of Stroganoff…”
From The Bachchoonama

They used to say “spare the rod and spoil the child.” It was universally believed that a slap or two or a good thrashing were obvious corrective therapies. Before I heard of public whippings in contemporary Islamist societies and resolved not to go there, I vowed never to join the British Navy. I had read about the Mutiny on the Bounty and other maritime tales in which the least defiance would lead to being lashed to the mast and flogged. Which of us can boast of being able to control our defiance when faced with the demands of fools?
Now modern ships don’t have masts, not being wind powered, so I presume that punishments take some different form, but my resolve never to join the British Navy remains intact.
As a corrective or disincentive to defiant behaviour, I suppose, though I can produce no statistical evidence, a good beating might work. The two clichés about thrashing that come from the public school traditions of Britain are “I was beaten black and blue and it never did me any harm.” This from the old Etonian or Harrovian with a twitching left eye, a reflexively clenching and loosening bottom and the shakes.
The second cliché is the dispenser of corporal punishment confronting his would-be victim with the classical “This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you!” Such were the pleasures of British S&M. (Does it account for the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey?)
Now caning and other forms of corporal punishment are banned in British schools. There is also a law against the physical chastisement of children in the home, though most parents would acknowledge that they have on occasion given their offspring a rap on the knuckles. One hears from the media the horrific reports of real harm being done to children in the home by their parents or step-parents. There have been recent cases of helplessly young children being fatally beaten in the most cruel circumstance.
A few days ago Indian newspapers reported that 66 per cent of Indian parents admit to administering corporal punishment to their children. I presume these beatings are restricted to what very many Indian women threaten when they say “I’ll give you two slaps!” I hope as an opponent of beating kids that it doesn’t escalate to three.
My sister (who it is rumoured was born in Abu Dhabi, though she vehemently denies it not wanting to claim Arab citizenship with all its drawbacks) insists that our mother would apply the sharp corrective touch of the back of a hair-brush on occasions to get her to stand still or for some petty misdemeanour. I can’t recall being beaten at home.
My neighbours were. Our friends, the boys who lived at the end of our street on the chowk, inhabited the low-slung first floor of a building with a wooden frame that protruded over the pavement and had huge stained glass windows from which one or other child was projected into the street in the course of a physical encounter with their very muscular dad. These boys, nursing their bruises from the fall to the pavement over a cup of tea at the corner Irani cafes, would swear that if their father touched them again they would retaliate physically. We knew it was a vain boast. Their dad was massive and lifted weights for a pastime.
Though it didn’t strike me then, it seems very strange now that in school we were often beaten for failures of the intellect. Our maths teacher, one Mr Wright, would line those who had got one or more sums wrong out of the 10 he may have set us for homework by his desk and deliver a slap for each one he’d marked with a large X in our orange-covered exercise books. He wore several silver and gold rings on his fingers and the slap on the cheek from his palm was calculated to sting if not do more damage.
I doubt if the slapping improved the general level of mathematical competence of the class, but it certainly led to the frantic early-morning copying by the less competent of the workings and answers of geometric “riders” and algebraic sums from the exercise books of the mathematically gifted or attentive.
It could have been that our teachers believed that getting the wrong answer was not a function of limited intelligence but was pure laziness and a refusal to read. Intelligence can’t be instilled through the stick, but perhaps sloth can be beaten out of a brain as dust can be out of a carpet.
That was certainly the case in several instances I can recall. In our junior years in secondary school one of the standard questions in Indian history might have been, “What reforms did Sher Shah Suri carry out?”
If one hadn’t properly absorbed the chapter on the named monarch one could garner a few marks and avoid a beating by answering “He built roads and rest-houses, dug wells and planted shady trees for travellers!” The question could have been about Muhammad bin Tughlaq instead of Sher Shah Suri and still the answer would be valid for say three marks out of 10. It would be above the beating threshold.
One of my classmates, who had developed a severe allergy to reading history or any other texts, though he was a great boxer, footballer and maker of catapults, sat the preliminary exam in our final year. History had progressed a long way from the simplicities of Sher Shah’s reign; we were now confronted with the Independence Movement.
“What were the Morley-Minto reforms?” was the first question.
Our hapless pupil, who shall remain nameless, wrote, “Minto and Morley built roads, resthouses, dug wells and planted shady trees for travellers.” Despite respect for his seniority he was beaten in front of the class.