When the Fulbright Distinguished Awards letter arrived, it felt as if a door I had long knocked on at last opened. Four months in the United States to study how language teaching could be more equitable — and for a moment I only tasted joy. Almost immediately, though, that joy was clouded by two questions from people around me: “Who will look after your children?” and “What about your husband’s conjugal life?”
No one asked about my project, my plans for classrooms, or how I hoped to share what I learned. Instead the response assumed that a woman’s work must be weighed against household duty. When a woman announces success, it is rarely a complete sentence; it arrives with an obligatory footnote about sacrifice.
I teach English in Bankura, a rural district of West Bengal. For 24 years I have worked with first‑generation learners — children who speak Bengali or Santali at home while their parents, often illiterate, sign with trembling hands. My classroom is small, the blackboard chipped, the fan slow. Still, hunger for learning burns fiercely in that space.
Now, during my fellowship in Pennsylvania, I move through schools that are modern and well resourced. Teachers are called professionals rather than “lady teachers.” Students write essays on laptops instead of on scraps of reused paper. And yet I see female educators here juggling diapers, grading and exhaustion — a reminder that patriarchy travels well; it simply changes its accent.
Language has been my chosen field of struggle. In school and in the evening literacy classes I run in the slums, I tell my students, especially the girls, that English is not a colonial trophy. It is a practical tool to claim space. In India, English still opens doors — to opportunity, mobility and power.
But the words my students learn — freedom, choice — are often precarious toys in their mouths. They can spell the words without being able to inhabit them.
Consider the facts: almost one in four young women in India marry before they turn 18; among girls with no schooling that rate approaches one in two. When early marriage defines a life, “choice” becomes a borrowed word — briefly available at school, then taken away at home.
Fulbright has been, for me, a bridge between two selves: the teacher who analyzes syntax and the woman who lives within the syntax of social expectation. The research I am developing here grew from that friction.
The idea began with Soma, a 15‑year‑old who could copy every English word from the blackboard perfectly but would fold her notebook and fall silent when I asked what the words meant. My Dual Toolkit is designed for girls like her. It does something both simple and radical: it listens. It shifts the focus from memorization to comprehension. Using the textbooks they already hold as doorways and their home language as the light that reveals meaning, the Toolkit helps students use English as a key rather than as an unreachable gatekeeper.
There is a kinship between first‑generation learners and women like me: we are both firsts. I was the first teacher from a government‑run school in my district to receive this award, and my students are often the first in their families to dream beyond their village. We are all trying to write sentences the world has not yet approved.
After school visits I sometimes return to my dorm — a small room of my own — and think of the girls in Bankura sitting on rough benches, hair oiled and braided, notebooks open like tiny windows. I wish they could see that much of what is called “advanced” education still runs on the same basic assumptions about gender.
When I go home, the questions will come back.
“Who looked after your children?” people will ask. I will answer, “They learned independence.”
“What about your husband’s conjugal life?” they will say. I will answer, “He survived my absence and perhaps learned how to be alone.”
Every woman who crosses an ocean for her work carries a small rebellion in her suitcase: lesson plans, stories of her students, and a quiet conviction that her worth is not measured by how comfortable she keeps others. Education is an act of faith that minds can open and that inherited assumptions can change.
I hope that one day, when another woman from a small Indian town wins a fellowship, someone will simply ask her, “What will you discover?” and mean it.
The writer is a participant in Fulbright Teacher Exchanges, programs of the U.S. Department of State administered by IREX. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not represent the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright Program, or IREX.