Learning Begins
Vidyarambha, Upanayana, and Vedarambha: how the Hindu civilisation invented the world's oldest school admission, the world's oldest student initiation, and the world's oldest curriculum convocation, and how Harvard's freshman convocation, Hogwarts' Sorting Hat, and the modern adult-learning literature are still rediscovering the design
A child of three writes the first letter of the alphabet on a tray of rice. A boy of eight is given the sacred thread by his teacher and whispered the Gayatri Mantra into his right ear. A young scholar at the start of formal Veda study performs the upakarma and begins the curriculum. The lesson opens these three samskaras of learning, traces them from the Atharva Veda through the Manava Grihya Sutra to Chandragupta Maurya's recorded Upanayana at Taxila, and shows how the same identity-commitment design that Knowles named as the foundation of adult learning and Hattie identified as the strongest predictor of academic achievement was already operating in the Hindu household three thousand years before either researcher arrived.
A Child Writing in Rice on Vijayadashami Morning
In a small flat in Mylapore, Madras, on a Vijayadashami morning in 1992, a child of three years and four months sits on her grandfather's lap. The grandfather is a retired Sanskrit teacher. In front of them is a brass tray, and on the tray is a thin layer of uncooked white rice. The grandfather takes the child's right hand in his own. He guides the small index finger to the rice. Together, slowly, they trace the Tamil letter அ. Then ஆ. Then இ. The child laughs at the way the rice grains feel under her finger. The grandfather does not laugh. He is whispering, very softly, the opening line of the Saraswati stuti: saraswati namastubhyam, varade kamarupini. He pauses. He guides the child's hand again. The same three letters. He says, almost to himself, ezhuthu pillai aanaal, vidya kanda devi varum. When the writing-child appears, the goddess of knowledge will come.
The child does not understand. The child is three. But twenty-two years later, when she is finishing her doctorate in computational linguistics at the Indian Institute of Science, she will remember the rice under her finger and the grandfather's whisper. She will remember it the way one remembers a smell. The Vidyarambha, the formal beginning of letters, has placed an anchor in the body of the child that no later education can remove.
Five years after that morning, in the same family, her older brother turns eight. He is the first male grandchild of the family. The household priest arrives at six in the morning of an auspicious day chosen by the family panchanga. The boy is bathed, dressed in a fresh white dhoti, and seated on a wooden plank facing east. The priest performs a brief homa. The boy's father, who has fasted for the previous twenty-four hours, takes the sacred thread, the yajnopavita, made of three twisted strands of cotton, and places it over the boy's left shoulder. The priest then leans close to the boy's right ear and whispers the Gayatri Mantra: om bhur bhuvah svah, tat savitur varenyam, bhargo devasya dhimahi, dhiyo yo nah pracodayat. The boy is asked to repeat. He stumbles on the third line. The priest waits. The boy gets it. The boy is now a brahmachari. The boy is now, in the language of the dharma literature, dvija, twice-born. His first birth was from his mother. His second birth has just occurred from his teacher.