When the Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Program letter arrived, it felt like the sky opening. Four months in the United States to study how language learning could become fairer — a chance to turn years of classroom struggle into practical change. The excitement was immediate, but so were the responses from people around me: Who will look after your children? What about your husband’s conjugal life?
No one asked about the research, or how I planned to use what I learned to improve classrooms. There were only those blunt, practical questions, heavy with the assumption that a woman’s ambitions must bend around domestic duty. When a woman announces success, it is rarely a whole sentence; it arrives tethered to a footnote about sacrifice.
I am an English teacher from Bankura, a rural district in West Bengal. For 24 years I have taught first-generation learners — children who speak Bengali or Santali at home, whose parents often sign with trembling hands that carry the invisible weight of illiteracy. My classroom is small: a cracked blackboard, a slow ceiling fan, benches that creak. And yet those modest walls hold fierce hunger for learning.
Now, during my fellowship term in Pennsylvania, I observe schools that are modern and well-equipped. Teachers are called professionals, not “lady teachers.” Students draft essays on laptops instead of on scraps of reused paper. And still I notice women here juggling motherhood, grading and exhaustion. Patriarchy travels well; its accents change, but its demands persist.
Language has been my chosen battlefield. In the classroom and in after-hours literacy lessons in the slums, I tell my students — especially the girls — that English is not a colonial badge but a tool to claim space. In India, English opens gates to opportunity and privilege. Yet words like freedom and choice often live precariously in these girls’ mouths: they can spell them but not always live them.
The statistics are stark. Nearly one in four young women in India marry before turning 18; among girls with no schooling the share is close to half. Early marriage narrows horizons. Choice becomes a borrowed word — briefly held at school and then taken away at home.
Fulbright became a bridge between two selves: the teacher who analyzes syntax and the woman who lives inside the syntax of social expectation. My research grew from that tension. It began with Soma, a 15-year-old in my class who could copy every English word from the blackboard yet fell silent when I asked what they meant. That moment shaped the Dual Toolkit I am developing.
The Dual Toolkit is simple and radical: it listens. It does not measure how well students memorize; it asks whether they understand. It uses the textbooks already in students’ hands as doorways, and their home language as the light that makes meaning visible. If English is a gatekeeper of opportunity, the Toolkit is a way to hand the key to those who have been kept outside.
First-generation learners and I share something: we are both firsts. I am the first teacher from my government school selected for this award; my students are the first in their families to sit at a desk. Together we are learning to write sentences the world has not yet approved.
Sometimes after a day of school visits I return to my dorm room — a room of my own — and picture the girls back in Bankura, sitting on rough benches, hair oiled and braided, notebooks open like small windows. I wish they could see that much of what the world labels advanced still contends with the same basic frameworks of gender.
When I go home, the questions will return. Who looked after your children? I will say, They gained independence. What about your husband’s conjugal life? I will answer, He survived my absence and perhaps learned solitude.
Every woman who crosses an ocean for her work carries a small rebellion in her suitcase. Mine is lined with lesson plans, stories of my girls from the school and the slums, and a stubborn belief that my worth is not measured by how much I preserve other people’s comfort. Education is an act of faith that minds can open, and that even inherited questions can change.
I hope that when another woman from a small town wins a fellowship abroad, someone will simply ask: What will you discover?
The author is a participant in Fulbright Teacher Exchanges, programs of the U.S. Department of State administered by IREX. The views here are the grantee’s own and do not represent the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright Program, or IREX.