Staying in the Water

{Nidhi Kinhal is a New Delhi-based researcher and social sector professional. Her work is at the intersection of gender, education and adolescence. She is also deeply interested in what the process of learning can teach us about ourselves, our histories and the world.}

In my adult life, learning has been about building a practice. Not as a mounting pressure to be perfectly something—which I often felt growing up—but as participating in a process of returning to something and enjoying it. Three years ago, I enrolled in swimming, and last year, I started classes in Hindustani music to sing, wondering, will I stick around this time? Will I learn something?

I have discovered a strange and strong affinity between swimming and singing. When I sit down to sing, I begin with long, sustained notes, working my way across the scale to warm up. Sometimes, for a second, I see myself in the swimming pool, pushing off the shallower end when I let my voice go, and looking at the other end of the pool as I breathe my voice out. I am somewhere in the water now. I feel drawn to share what the water around me feels like in this moment. Even if I use all the wrong and clumsy words, I want to investigate how learning is changing me.

In the water, it becomes amply clear all the ways in which I do not help myself. I crouch, clench muscles and make my feet heavy. Sureshot way to sink. Learning has meant figuring out how to help myself. To be in the water without rushing to reach the distant wall. To do counterintuitive things that challenge the panicky brain. To become light, long, slow, and buoyant so I can move through the blue and bubbling water confidently, as it grows deeper under me. 

It is challenging to learn the language of the body. Accustomed to academic social science classrooms, I had been experiencing learning as cerebral and conscious. But now, my intuition had to be affected, not just understanding. Repetition became a way to be alert to my body—the new neural pathways and muscle memory it opened up. As I practised, my back muscles felt fragile; I was constantly interrupted by burps, my breath tripped up.

When my body leads the way, I feel new kinds of confusion and clarity. When I sing, for instance, I am visited by deja vus, out-of-body experiences, illusory sensations, not trusting what I have sung, losing my mind-body coordination… But also, succeeding at little things I could not do yesterday. I practise today, and the very next day, my body feels more confident. At the same time, being guided by less conscious parts of me is scary. The smallest bits of improvisation or immersion in a song cause me to clam up. The moment to start singing keeps slipping away. I hold my thighs tight and my notes tighter, never really relaxing into what I have learned. If I have to exert myself to sing 'right', did I really learn anything? Once again, I forget to stay light, to stay in the water, to allow myself to do counterintuitive things.

When I had first tried to learn swimming, in school, the coach would line us up and insist that we jump in. No matter how much I saw other people do it unhurt and told myself to let go, I could not. I would stand at the edge, imagining how I could jump in the next three seconds, contemplating its easy straightforward steps, but never being able to do it. Unsurprisingly, I didn't learn a thing in that summer camp.

When you freeze in a space you are supposed to stay open and moving, how do you help yourself? Usually, you need someone else—teachers, friends—to offer practical and analytical training wheels, to listen, to insist, to reflect with you, to explain how they do it, to interrupt your default ways, to create safe frames in which to try, or to let you panic and escape till you feel ready to try again.

Last summer, my friend taught me how to float on my back. Till I went swimming with her, I thought of it like an exercise regimen. You go, you swim lap after lap till your time is up. But she saw it like play. She paused for long durations, just jumping in and out of the water, turning herself into a cannonball, wiping her face after coming back up. The thought of dropping my back into the water was alarming. I worried about not being able to see the water or worse, having the water crawl up my face and into my mouth and nose. I'll hold you, here, she said, let's try this, as I quietly screamed. By the end of the hour, we had figured out a way.

This kind of teaching and learning environment is not familiar to me. In the classrooms I have been in, participation has been about presentation, not practice. You do the work, and then you present in class. Most of the struggling happens outside of the classroom. The performance has to be seamless and beautiful and already worked out.

But in the water I am sometimes flailing—there is no way to work it out outside the water. Applying the same principle, letting myself sound glitchy is the only way out of a musical difficulty. I need to see the classroom as a space where we find ways for the learning to sink into intuition.

Moments of freezing are revealing something important about my journey with learning. What fails in that moment that causes me to quit trying? Am I missing certain skills that are required? Or does it interrupt the performance of power, effortless competence and superiority that my caste-enabled cultural capital has afforded me and required me to keep up?

Growing up, I witnessed the culture of impressing an authority figure in music learning. In classical music circles I had seen, they were often old, traditional, male brahmin teachers who had led generations of students. Their staunch evaluation of a student's performance would decide their worth, and their relationship with singing. The anxiety in the room was always palpable: I learned that singing meant worrying and proving. And listening to other people as if they had something to prove.

When I sang in school, I worried, tried to impress my peers, noticed my flaws or was made to notice them. I got compliments but I was stressed about keeping them. Singing was like an Indian Idol-esque display of individual skill, which had led me to conclude that I was incurably mediocre. My voice was never enough. It had to be closely measured and policed, filtering out the beautiful parts from the ugly.

It is no coincidence that teaching-learning systems that draw on brahminical values and traditions breed a joyless culture—one that makes students feel incompetent or superior, one that insists on pure ways of performing, or excludes them entirely from participating in it.

But I want to float and glide in my voice. In the absence of easily accessible radical pedagogies or alternative musical traditions to be guided by, are there ways to engage with diverse musical forms, including 'classical' music, and make them feel joyous, free and expansive?

Practice needs to be guided by values that disrupt sharp distinctions between ugly, pretty, skilled, unskilled, deserving, undeserving, talented, untalented, good music, bad music, good bodies, bad bodies. Returning to singing and swimming have taught me many things. The importance of being in the water, that is, constantly keeping yourself interested and trying. The indispensability of critical and reflective learning. The necessity of creative practice to life.

It's telling that only some of us are able to access the tiniest pockets of time and space to learn safely and vulnerably, reframe ourselves, and find new pleasures. Structured by hierarchies of class, caste, gender, disability and location, access to semi- or non-institutionalised settings, disposable income and free time is impossible for most people.

For those of us who have experienced transformative learning and leisure, there is work to do. Not only in demanding that such experiences become possible for everyone at all ages, but also in making classrooms and educational institutions that allow everybody to freeze, struggle, be messy, and practise together. To figure out how best to reject unequal histories and reframe social values of various practices—in singing, swimming, formal academic disciplines or anything else. What practices of teaching, learning, listening, speaking, fighting, dismantling, creating can make this happen?