The Teacher’s Voice: Pedagogy of Resistance in Kumud Pawde’s ”The Story of My Sanskrit” and Mary Church Terrell’s A Colored Woman in a White World
Author(s): 1. Chestha Padia, 2. Prof. (Dr.) Hemant Kumar Jha
Authors Affiliations:
- PhD Research Scholar, Amity School of Liberal Arts, Amity University Haryana, Gurugram, India
- PhD Coordinator, Amity School of Liberal Arts, Amity University Haryana, Gurugram, India
This study asks what a teacher's training contributes to the way a woman writes about exclusion. It reads Kumud Pawde's "The Story of My Sanskrit" (from Antahsphot, 1981) alongside Mary Church Terrell's A Colored Woman in a White World (1940), two autobiographical texts by women who were teachers. Pawde taught Sanskrit, a language her caste had been forbidden to study. Terrell taught at Wilberforce University and M Street High School in Washington before marriage ended her teaching career. Through close reading, the study identifies a teacher's voice: a narrative strategy that explains how a system of exclusion works by setting out worked examples, drawing distinctions, and guiding the reader step by step. In Pawde, this strategy appears in her separation of visible cleanliness from caste-based purity and in her account of a lectureship credited to her husband's surname. In Terrell, it appears in her chapter on the absence of any hotel or restaurant open to a Black traveler and in her sequence of letters in which a school's acceptance was reversed within two days. This strategy differs in emphasis from argument, which mainly seeks agreement, and from testimony, which mainly asks the reader to witness. The study claims an association, not a cause, and rests on two texts. It proposes that professional identity, alongside caste, race, and gender, can shape how a life is written, and it names the teacher's voice as a category for comparative study of life writing.
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