Chennai
Maria Montessori, who challenged the prevalent system of education and came up with her own method that is still followed by millions of schools, was arrested in Madras within a year of her arrival.
The first woman doctor in Italy, Maria had important friends all over the world – men like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison were her hosts in the US.
Just before the outbreak of World War II, Maria Montessori and her son were invited to visit India by George Arundale and his danseuse wife Rukmani, who were instrumental in convincing her that there were links between Theosophy and the Montessori method. Theosophy dealt with of self-realisation leading to the freedom of the true self, while Montessori’s method dealt with releasing the spirit of the child through education.
In 1939, 69-year-old Montessori arrived in India and started the first official training centres for teachers in Madras at the Olcott bungalow in the Theosophical Society.
Maria first stayed at the Leadbeater Chambers and came to Olcott’s bungalow by a hand-drawn rickshaw daily. She found it exciting and advantageous to study infants in Indian families, as they were always the centre of attention. It is the time she spent in India that established the Montessori tutoring in the subcontinent.
The stay in India that began in 1939 was supposed to be short. But unexpectedly, it was to last until 1946, well after World War II concluded, during which she made Adyar her home. It was here that she developed her work ‘education for peace’ and was nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was perhaps unwise of the Montessoris to make the trip to the subcontinent. As part of the British Empire, India was at odds with the Italian Fascist state. When Mussolini’s Italy declared war on Great Britain in 1940, Maria and her son Mario were identified as “enemy aliens”.
In deference to her advanced years, Maria was placed under house arrest but allowed to continue with her lecturing on the Montessori Method to Indian audiences. But Maria was stunned with Mario’s actual imprisonment in Pallavaram along with prisoners of war and other aliens.
Thanks to the influence of George Arundale, Maria could visit him twice a year, and with her she took some of the children she was teaching. At one time, one of the students tried to shake hands with Mario across the barbed wire and the policeman on guard used a baton to beat him. Maria reportedly cried uncontrollably.
The embarrassing issue was Mario was actually her son though born out of wedlock when a lover cheated her. Till then, she used to introduce him as a nephew or secretary. But while pleading with British government, she had to accept Mario was her son to add weightage. Those were dark days for Maria and only the humanity of her Indian acquaintances made the circumstances tolerable.
For all her lustre as a scholar, Maria was ill at ease with English, which proved to be her biggest predicament. Without Mario to interpret, she was as good as being speech impaired. When she could not communicate with her hosts, there was an immense sense of inaccessibility.
But being a genius, this limitation made Maria theorise in her studies on learning languages. She realised that language acquisition has nothing to do with will or discipline. It was a drive that is innate to every child, but the adults face great difficulty in acquiring a second language.
When the word on the Montessoris being interned in India spread, many wrote letters on their behalf to the viceroy. After constant lobbying by Arundale, the Indian authorities decided to give Maria Montessori a special gift for her 70th birthday. She received a telegram from the Viceroy of India: “We have a long thought about what to give you for a 70th birthday.
We thought the best present I would give you was send you back your son.” This was the first public reference to Mario as Montessori’s son. Mother and son were united and spent the rest of the war years in Madras. Her momentous work, The Absorbent Mind, was the culmination of all of her thinking and decades of research and had its genesis in Adyar.
The writer is a historian and author
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