Sitabai Deshmukh, 88, has spent her whole life in a village in Maharashtra, Fangane. When she was a child, her village didn’t have a school. So she couldn’t study and, like many women of her age, settled into the rhythms of domesticity: She became a wife, a mother, a grandmother—an eternal care giver. But in the spring of 2016, on Women’s Day, a school opened in Fangane enrolling students like her, Ajjibaichi Shaala (Grandmother’s School). Soon, she had a new morning routine: wearing a pink sari, keeping a slate in her satchel, and walking across the village to reach the school—her school.
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Sitting on the floor with fellow students—old women from the ages of 60 to 90—she learned to read alphabets and numbers, opening a new world, meeting her new version. Her story illuminates the joys of personal reinvention and the real meanings of education: liberating it from the confines of a ‘neoliberal project’—something solely tied to a job and a salary, reducing diverse people to money-minting tools—and recasting it as a means of fulfilment, empowerment, and self-discovery.
“Now I’m ready,” she says in a documentary. “At the gates of heaven if I’m asked, ‘What did you do as a human?’, then I’ll be able to say, ‘I went to school. I can sign my name.’”
