Tag Archives: India

“Education for the Poor: The Politics of Poverty and Social Justice”

On February 14, 2015, the Transnational Research Group “Poverty and Education in India” will move into their new offices at the India International Centre in New Delhi. Therefore, the Centre invites the interested public to the panel discussion “Education for the Poor: The Politics of Poverty and Social Justice“, followed by a lecture by Carlos Torres (University of California, Los Angeles) on “Neoliberalism, Globalization Agendas and Banking Educational Policy: Is Popular Education an Answer?

The speakers are:

Marcelo Caruso, Professor and Chair of the History of Education Division, Institute of Education Studies, Humboldt University of Berlin

Kalpana Kannabiran, Professor and Director, Council for Social Development, Hyderabad

Krishna Kumar, Professor, Department of Education, University of Delhi and Former Director, National Council for Educational Research and Training

Crain Soudien, Professor, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Former Director, School of Education, University of Cape Town Chair and

Moderator: Geetha B. Nambissan, Professor, Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

 

The Transnational Research Group (TRG) “Poverty Reduction and Policy for the Poor between the Sate and Private Actors: Education Policy in India since the Nineteenth Century”, that also joined the Winter Academy, is a cooperation between the German Historical Institute London, the King’s India Institue at King’s College London and the Centre for Modern Indian Studies (CEMIS) at Göttingen University. Their local cooperation partners in India are researchers from the Centre for Historical Studies and the Centre for Educational Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. The goal of its 12 docs and post-docs is to explore education in India from a historical perspective.

Find out more about the TRG on their website where you can also find more information about the panel discussion.

Videos of Conference Panel IV: “Private Actors in the Education System”

Chair: Andreas Gestrich (German Historical Institute London)DSC02124

Panelists:

Geetha Nambissan (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi)

Hania Sobhy (Orient-Institut Beirut)

 

In some regions, non-state actors have had a long (colonial) tradition in the education system. Currently, probably due to failures of government-run infrastructures, a variety of new actors (business-oriented and non-profit, national and international) are coming into play. In some countries, the balance of public and private investment in the educational sector is tilted to an extent that is criticized as risking a devaluation of the national educational system. Can we observe (regional or even global) trends toward a hierarchization, privatization and commercialization of education for both the elites and the masses? How do liberalization discourses in other fields of society impact upon these developments and the corresponding norms and values? What is the role of religious entities in the educational sector?

Continue reading

Private Actors and Education for the Poor in India

Conference Paper to be presented by Geetha Nambissan

Geetha B. Nambissan is Professor of Sociology of Education at the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research focuses on exclusion, inclusion and the education of marginal groups, the middle classes and educational advantage and the social and educational implications of private schools for the poor. 

Over the last decade, transnational and local advocacy networks have been projecting the low-cost unregulated school market in India as a cost-efficient, high-quality and equitable solution to the education of the poor and as a site for viable business options. The actors in this market include individual “edupreneurs” and, more recently, corporate groups that have entered the school business in later-developing countries. What we are witnessing is the construction of narratives of “good education” for the poor in extremely minimalistic terms, validated through “research” and disseminated by powerful networks. The attempt is to evolve globally scalable models that will deliver “high-quality” education at the lowest of costs, ensuring profits. In this paper, I map some of these trends, highlighting the manner in which private actors are attempting to change education policy in India by drawing upon neo-liberal discourses and constructing new narratives, networks and practices around schooling. I argue that these trends have serious implications for social justice in education for the poor.

Social Inclusion in Schools: Experiences and Role of Teachers, Students, Management and Parents

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Deepika K Singh.

Deepika Singh is a research scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Her research questions and interest emanate from eleven years of work with government schools, budget schools, teachers, rural communities, groups that are lowest in caste hierarchies, class hierarchy, women and ethnic minorities.

Social exclusion and inclusion are two terms that are making inroads in policy discourse, especially in developing nations including India. They are not part of a binary, although inclusion should be understood in the context of exclusion. In the Indian context according to Thorat and Newman (2010, p 6.), exclusion revolves around societal institutions that exclude on the basis of group identities such as caste, ethnicity, religion and gender. Continue reading

Gender, Caste and Higher Education: Pathways and Experiences of Dalit Women in an Elite College in Delhi

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Meenakshi Gautam.

Meenakshi Gautam is currently pursuing a Ph.D. from Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is especially interested in gender and its relation to higher education.

The participation of both men and women in higher education in India has rapidly expanded over the past six decades. There has been steady educational progress among socio-economically disadvantaged and culturally marginalised groups such as SC (Scheduled Caste) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) as well. However, the representation of these groups in higher education is relatively small in comparison to their proportion of population (Rao, 2002; Deshpande, 2006; Chanana, 2012; Weisskopf, 2004). Women belonging to scheduled castes are among the most disadvantaged in relation to their access to higher education (Chanana, 2012; Raju, 2008; Rao, 2002). There is hardly any research on the groups such as SC (or dalit) women who suffer multiple disadvantages resulting from the intersection of caste, class and gender. The intersection of gender with caste and class is likely to lead to diverse pathways and experiences in higher education for dalit women. The present research work aims: a) to map the pathways of dalit women in higher education, b) to explore the pathways of selected women students’ male sibling(s) vis-à-vis participant, and c) to understand the experiences of dalit women within the university.

The study is informed by the intersectionality framework which problematises the intermeshing of structures of inequality (such as caste, race, gender and patriarchy) and analyses them within specific socio-historical contexts (Collins, 2004; Ramirez, 2013). In the Indian context, scholars have observed that the interlocking of class, caste and gender is likely to have a cumulative effect on access to and participation in education (Velaskar, 2007; Chanana, 2007; Paik, 2009). In order to study the experiences of Dalit women, many of whom are first generation in higher education, it becomes important to link their “individual histories” with their “familial habitus” (Reay, et.al. 2005), access to valued “cultural capital” (Bourdieu, 1977) and the challenging and unfamiliar “institutional habitus” of the university (Reay, et.al. 2005).

The methodology is informed by the intersectionality framework and adopts life-history methodology to understand the pathways and experiences of dalit women’s students. It situates the in-depth account of their personal lives within a socio-cultural context (Mwangi, 2009).

A Script for the Masses? Pedagogic Practices and Didactic Traditions among Sylhetis

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Debarati Bagchi.

Debarati Bagchi is as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Dehli, and a member of the Max Weber Foundation Transnational Research Group “Poverty and Education in Modern India”. She is currently working on Sylhet Nagri texts and pedagogic practices in colonial Northeast India.

This proposed project intends to track the circulation of printed and handwritten texts in Sylheti-Bengali, written in Sylhet Nāgarī script in late nineteenth-early twentieth century Sylhet and later among the London-based Sylheti diaspora. The Sylhet Nāgarī script was projected to have been devised as a ‘simplified alternative’ of the sanskritised version of Bengali and was chiefly attributed to the ‘illiterate masses of the Muslim population’ including peasants, fishermen, boatmen – people who were ‘not well versed in Bengali literature.’ Its entire pedagogic endeavour was to bridge the gap between the written (lekhya bhasha) and the spoken (kathya bhasha) and thereby meeting one of the preconditions of democratisation of education – the concern for reaching out to a larger mass. The primer of the script differed from the available forms and contents of primers in the school system not only in its lack of secular content but also in addressing the audience. The declared purpose of this primer was to address an adult audience who would be able to read the texts in Sylhet Nāgarī outside the school system. In content, these texts dealt with the ethics and values associated with the local form of Islam where it was not impossible to find the stories of Yusuf Zuleikha along with the stories Radha-Krishna and the nineteenth century concern for the pervasive threat of conversion to Christianity. Besides songs by Pirs and Fakirs, didactic manuals for the followers of Islam, popular stories viz. the war of Karbala, the life story of Hazrat Muhammad or the love story of Yusuf Zuleikha, the texts also occasionally dealt with chronicles of contemporary social events. It was quite a popular pastime among rural households, especially among women who gathered together from neighboring households to read and listen to these texts.

We do not yet have a comprehensive understanding of the social content of readership and the meaning of these texts in their everyday lives. Through the study of these didactic texts, this project aims to explore the nature of ‘alternative’ pedagogic practices prevalent among the poor masses of Sylhet. Instead of probing the origin of the script or analysing the religious-philosophical foundations of the texts, this project would track the circulation of the texts and the politics of standardisation of the script. It attempts to form an understanding of the public sphere that once consumed these texts and develop an understanding of the colonial modern in the formation of a regional identity. The project also seeks to add a postcolonial dimension to the question by trying to address the historical reasons leading to the revival of Sylhet Nāgarī script among the diasporic population in UK.

Critical Mind and Labouring Body: Caste and Education Reforms in Kerala

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Sunandan K.N.

Sunandan K.N. is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Transnational Research Group “Poverty and Education in Modern India” and currently based at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi. His research explores the concepts of mental and manual labour in relation to the caste experiences in the domain of education in India.

Exploring the various educational reform programs implemented in primary schools and high schools in Kerala in India in the last two decades, the project seeks to analyze the dichotomous concepts of mental and manual labour, theoretical and practical knowledge, and general and technical education which constituted the premise of these reform interventions. The broader objective of the project is to understand the role of caste practices in conceptions of body, skill and knowledge as constructed and disseminated in the practices of educational institutions in India. The work focuses on the crucial connection between the reproduction of the above concepts and caste as it is practiced in contemporary Keralam.

The critical scholarship has already mapped the failure of reform initiatives in challenging the continuing domination of patriarchal and casteist forces that operate in the domain of education. Most of these studies conceptualize the question of domination as problem of exclusion of the marginalized groups. This is expressed as the lack of representation of women and Dalits in the decision making bodies, lack of resources for these groups, their low enrollment and high drop-out rate in schools and in general as a problem of socio-economic exclusion.  Naturally the suggestions were focused on educational programs which can become more inclusive and incorporative of marginal groups. While these explanations are valid and important, this works attempts to extend this criticism to basic concept of ‘school’ itself, and as an extension, to the basic assumptions behind the present educational methodologies. The attempt in here is to shift the debate on the exclusions and dominations in education from the domain of institutional to the epistemological. This project attempts to locate the Brahmanical and patriarchal domination not just in the institutional structures but in the very conception of education based on the division between mental and physical labour. The major objective of this project is to develop some preliminary concepts that would help us understand education not only as a project of developing ‘critical thinking’ but also as a project of creating ‘critical action.’

Continue reading

Poverty, Hunger and State Welfare – The Example of the Indian Mid-Day Meal Scheme

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Alva Bonaker.

Alva Bonaker is a member of the Max Weber Foundation Transnational Research Group “Poverty and Education in Modern India” and based at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Her PhD thesis investigates local perceptions of the Indian Mid-Day Meal Scheme.

photo: private

School Lunch (photo: private)

The nationwide Mid-Day Meal Scheme (MDMS) in India was introduced in 1995 with the objectives of enhancing school enrollment, retention and attendance while simultaneously improving nutritional levels among children. The government, moreover, claims that local communities, parents and teachers – especially those from disadvantaged groups – should be given an active role and the scheme should, hence, enhance social equality in classrooms and beyond.

This PhD research traces the question: How do parents, teachers and local communities understand the MDMS, and to what extend do they exert control over its effects? To finally arrive at answering this question, a crucial aspect, which this paper will engage with, is to understand the nature of the scheme within the broader context of state welfare interventions. How have hunger and poverty been understood, and how has this shaped particular social and governmental responses to them? Since the end of the 19th century after disastrous famines in Ireland and India, hunger was increasingly understood as a humanitarian problem and a failure of the government or international political economy (Vernon 2007). In recent times it seems, however, that the humanitarian response has gained most popularity and, as argued by Fassin (2012), governments consciously use the language of humanitarian reason to react to human suffering, but obscure the larger structural and legal systems and distributional politics that cause or maintain inequalities and suffering in society. Fassin points to the consequences of placing compassion over justice, thereby making people mere objects who receive humanitarian aid rather than active subjects.

We can observe the same mechanisms when looking at the reaction of the Indian government to the demand for a right to food. Under pressure from the Right to Food Campaign the government enacted a National Food Security Act in 2013, based on the National Food Security Bill (2011). This Bill has been highly critiqued for its weak interpretation of “entitlements” and “food security”, which give people a passive right to receive something rather than a positive right which they can actively claim. The shift to the provision of cooked meals under the MDMS was also a response of the government to the Right to Food Campaign. This might, hence, be seen as an attempt to draw positive attention to this popular scheme, demonstrating that the government recognizes its moral obligation to provide poor children with food, while refusing to acknowledge poverty and hunger as man-made problems and tackling its actual causes.

Continue reading

Schooling Women: Debates on Education in the United Provinces (1854-1930)

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Preeti.

Preeti is presently a PhD research scholar at Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. As a member of the Transnational Research Group “Poverty and Education in Modern India”, she is working on “Poverty Reduction and Policy for the Poor – Between the State and Private Actors: Education Policy in India since the Nineteenth Century”.

This doctoral research is focusing on the school education of women (especially of poor and the underprivileged members among the Hindus, and comparison would be made with other communities) in the United Provinces between 1854 and 1930. The present work is confined to the intervening period when the formalization of girls’ education was being mapped out, institutionalized and debated as well. It will examine not only the governmental initiatives, particularly those aimed at the poor and marginalized communities, but also private and missionary efforts, early nationalist efforts, the reach of religious institutions and some of the nascent efforts made by women themselves to assist in the development and growth of women’s education more generally. Why did women’s education, and the education of the poor among them, become a concern of the colonial government at all? What were the social and economic structures which may have thwarted or stimulated the necessity for female education? Comparisons will be made between boys’ and girls’ education through debates regarding the curriculum, funding, special schools or co-education, compulsory education and the creation of demand of female education through the grant of privileges.

Against the socio-cultural environment of nineteenth and early twentieth century, this work is an attempt to explore women’s education in United Provinces. One thing that needs to be remembered is that the women being talked about here are the middle class women, as most writings on education are silent on the question of the education of rural and non-elite women. Female education was limited to middle class women during the late nineteenth century and that is the focus of scholars such as Partha Chatterjee, Tanika Sarkar, J. Devika, and Rosalind O’ Hanlon. These scholars have not explored the state of learning among the poor classes or low caste women. This work would try to explore caste and class differentiation in the field of women’s education. This can be explored through Missionary accounts of their assessment of and contribution to the field of women’s education.

Inequalities and the Production of New Cultural Forms at Government Secondary Schools in Kolkata, India

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Maya Buser De.

Maya Buser De is a PhD student at the Graduate School of International and Area Studies at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul. She works on the reproduction of existing inequalities and the production of new cultural forms by the students at government secondary schools in the megacity of Kolkata.

Indian cities like Kolkata are changing rapidly under the influence of globalization. Economic differences in the population have become more evident, not only in terms of the urban landscape but also in the educational sector. Elite and middle class students have moved to private schools, while government schools mostly cater to students from poor and marginalized backgrounds. Nevertheless, the efforts towards the universalization of primary education have paid off in many parts of the country, even though its quality often remains a concern. On the other hand, secondary schools have not yet received much attention, neither from the authorities nor from the academic community. However, in an increasingly competitive job market they are becoming more and more important for the future of youth from unprivileged backgrounds.

Through a multisite case study, this project attempts to understand how existing inequalities of caste, class and gender are reproduced in government secondary schools in Kolkata and at the same time how students produce new cultural forms to contest and creatively engage with them. This study relies on an approach in critical education theory, with a focus on the socio-economic and cultural dimensions of power relations in and around the school, parallel to an intersectionality approach to inequalities. Moreover, it employs the concept of cultural production, derived from cultural studies, as theoretical framework to understand the agency of students in contesting inequalities in the school environment.

Who Studies What, Where and Why? Systemic Inequalities beyond Affirmative Action Policies in Indian Higher Education

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by V. Kalyan Shankar.

V. Kalyan Shankar is ICSSR Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Economics, University of Pune (India). His doctoral research was based on the emergence and deepening of inter-country value-addition chains among select Southeast Asian economies.

In the delivery systems of higher education in India, there has been an attempt to counter social inequalities through implementing a system of affirmative action policies – implying positive discrimination – in favor of the disadvantaged. Lack of access to education is posited as a problem of those left out from the delivery systems, of inadequate representation and participation of certain social groups. The state intervention in countering underrepresentation has been through the constitutional provisions for reservations. The debates surrounding reservations and their implementation have been fought on several turfs. In addition to the more conspicuous divide of affirmative action versus meritocracy, academic enquiries have probed into reservations on caste versus class grounds, on the need for expanding the umbrella of reservations to a wider segment of the society and more recently, on the inadequacy and irrelevance of affirmative action once the turf changes from academics to employment.

Even as these debates are running their course, what about the delivery systems of education, the terrain on which the edifice of reservations is built? While socio-economic backgrounds do influence individual participation in education, can differentiated access to education be attributed solely to them? Can the systems be really termed fair in their attempt at creating equality of access? It needs to be recognized that the systems themselves generate their own set of embodied institutional distortions that get superimposed over and above socio-economic inequalities. This project seeks to explore the systemic dimensions of inequality in Indian education. This work has been centered on the distortions resulting from structural overlaps in the delivery systems and the restriction of choices in higher education based on the medium of instruction in schooling.

Continue reading

Refugee Settlements and the Role of Education in Post-Partition West Bengal

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Kaustubh Mani Sengupta.

Kaustubh Mani Sengupta joined the Max Weber Stiftung Transnational Research Group “Poverty and Education in Modern India” after finishing his PhD in 2013. In his current project, he is looking at the ways West Bengal refugees negotiated with the post-colonial situation and the role of education in their lives.

The project studies the role of education and school in the lives of the refugees who settled in West Bengal after the partition of British India in 1947. Most of the early refugees from East Bengal belonged to the upper or middle caste groups–the bhadraloks. They tended to gravitate towards the urban centres, more specifically to Calcutta. An acute housing crisis forced a majority of them to forcibly occupy barracks and empty tracts of lands and to build up squatter colonies there. After securing the basic necessity of life, the members of the colony would look to establish a school, as they regarded education as the utmost important element for the children of refugee population to survive in the alien land. This was a common pattern without any exception – either a particular colony had a school for itself or a few colonies collectively would develop a school. The study explores the possible reasons behind the importance that education had among the refugees – was it their bhadralok baggage that made them invest their capital, labour and time in developing neighbourhood schools; or was educating their children necessary to ensure a job in the foreign land? Also, what were the cultural significances of building up a school in a colony, where did the money come from, who taught in these schools and what were their relations with the government sanctioned education board?

The bhadralok colony-dwellers formed only a section of the refugee population. Among the migrants from East Pakistan, there were poor cultivators, artisans, petty traders and others. They lacked the minimum means necessary for setting up squatter colonies. They took refuge in the government camps. These camps had government-run schools and training centres. The camp population was often transitory in nature as the government tried to rehabilitate the inhabitants somewhere permanently. Did the curricula in these schools and centres take into account the possible temporariness of the population? Often the pupils in these schools were first-generation school-goers – how did the primary education mould their life-cycles, what were the drop-out rates and how important was the vocational training among the downtrodden refugees – these are some of the issues that the project will address.

In brief, the project critically interrogates the role of education in the development of a group of people who were trying to carve out a niche for themselves in a new country. The post-partition period was a critical phase in the biography of the new nation as well. The refugees as well as the government, both were trying to work out a way to move ahead, leaving behind the tumultuous last few years. The broad sets of sources for this study include various government reports, school magazines and commemorative volumes, refugee memoirs and oral narratives.

Continue reading

Marketization, Managerialism and School Reforms: A Study of Public-Private Partnerships in Elementary Education in Delhi

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Vidya K.S.

Vidya K.S. joined the Max Weber Stiftung Transnational Research Group “Poverty and Education in Modern India” in 2014. She is a doctoral student at the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi, where she works on the interaction between global and national discourses of privatisation in school.

Through the late 1970s, there was a fundamental repositioning of education in relation to the nation-state, most notably in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Part of larger processes of economic reforms initiated by New Right governments in these countries, a central feature of this trend was the move to “disempower centralized educational bureaucracies and create in their place devolved systems of schooling, entailing significant degrees of institutional autonomy and a variety of forms of school based management and administration” (Whitty 1997: 299). These reforms were advocated with the view of addressing the rising discourse of falling educational standards in public schools in these countries that blamed teachers and poor school management (Whitty 1997, Helsby 1999, Connell 2009, Maguire 2010).

In the run up to the reforms, various facets of the school came under public scrutiny. These included forms of management, kinds of curriculum, teaching and learning transactions and the structures of labour hierarchies within schools and across school administration boards. The project of educational reform led to new forms of partnerships between the state and the private sector. Principles of public management emphasising performance and outcomes popular in the corporate industrial sector were imported as alleviatory measures into the public school system. Increasingly, these typologies of reform are being imported into later developing countries, including India, as effective measures of repairing an increasingly maligned public school system. The modes through which these discourses of reform are interfacing with educational reforms in the context of a postcolonial country such as India present a complex picture today.

The focus of this research study is to examine these broader global discourses of reform and the complex nature of this interface with a heterogeneous government schooling system in India. The consequent changes that these reforms impose on the school will be examined through the lens of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) that are one of the key modes through which markets are entering elementary education in the country. Teacher training programs are an emerging form of PPP that are seen as central to improving school outcomes. Apart from a survey of the range and nature of teacher training PPPs, the study will examine the ‘Teach for India’ (TFI) intervention, one significant PPP in teacher training, that seeks to address educational inequity in teaching-learning transactions in the classroom.

Continue reading

Educational & Professional Status of Scheduled Castes/Tribes: Attainment & Challenges

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Bharat Chandra Rout

Bharat Chandra Rout submitted his doctoral thesis on social justice and higher education in the National University of Educational Planning and Administration, New Delhi. Currently he is a research fellow of the Indian Council of Social Science Research and assistant editor of the journal ‘College Post’, a quarterly journal of the Indian Colleges Forum.

Scheduled Castes [SC] and Scheduled Tribes [ST] constitute around one-fourth of the total population of India. Both of these communities are considered as deprived and exploited for various reasons. While SCs were (and even now are) subjected to discrimination and marginalization through the processes of untouchability and rigid caste practices, STs were deprived and exploited because of their socio-cultural and geographical isolation in Indian society. The caste system presupposes a form of social stratification in which people in the society are divided into different ‘strata’. The essential characteristics of a caste-based division of society into different hierarchical caste groups are, amongst others, the rigid occupational entitlements by birth, rigid caste identity based on endogamy and a lack of social mobility. The dominant and depressed caste groups in India are characterized by the differential access to societal opportunities and entitlements, social mobility and larger social/public resources. It is the lower strata of the society, particularly that of SCs and STs, to which social opportunities and economic facilities have long been denied. Access to public resources, institutions and even to basic needs were structurally guided by the system of social stratification. In other words, the caste system legitimized the forms and contours of neglect and deprivation and wilfully rationalized marginalization and discrimination of SCs and STs.

Continue reading

Recasting the Self: Missionaries and the Education of the Poor in Kerala (1854-1956)

Research Project (to be discussed at the Winter Academy) by Divya Kannan.

Divya Kannan is currently pursuing her PhD in Modern Indian History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her study seeks to examine the history of education and discourses on poverty in the late 19th and  20th century Kerala, particularly amongst so-called lower caste groups.

The history of education in India is relatively a new field of research compared to its counterparts in sociology and psychology. Although, there have been studies on the system of modern education in the country from the 19th century onwards, most debates have tended to look at policy shifts. These can be broadly classified into two categories. One category of research comprises chronological histories of Indian education, detailing major policy shifts and the impact of western education on Indian society and polity. This group has argued within the simplistic framework of impact-response of the benefits of English education for India. One of the debates which has occupied scholarly attention in this regard has been the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy of the 1830s. Another loosely defined category, particularly in the post-independence period, has mined rich sources (albeit a majority of them official) to understand the trajectory of schooling in colonial India by looking at aspects of technical, vocational and mass education. The historical study of education has moved beyond the noting of enrolment figures towards assessing the role of education in shaping political contexts and social relationships. Questions of inequality, poverty, discrimination, assertion, empowerment and politicization have come to the forefront of new research on education.

Despite their evangelical agenda, mission schools became an important factor in local societies by enabling formal schooling opportunities to hitherto excluded groups. These mission schools provided instruction in the three Rs as well as subjects such as history, geography, elementary science and basic vocational training. For labouring populations, this opened up new opportunities, albeit limited, to develop new modes of expression, participation in the literate public sphere and to aspire for social mobility through new jobs. Missionary schooling, particularly for Christian converts also had a dual objective. European protestant missionaries aimed at moulding a new sense of self amongst their converts by attempting to break down caste markers. Education was the domain to introduce new habits, patterns of work, social organisation, gender roles and language for Christian converts.

It is this aspect of forging a new ‘individual’ that characteristically marks the project of schooling the poor in colonial India. It can be argued that it was a ‘double civilizing mission’ on the part of European missionaries and colonial government.  On the one hand, in tune with the colonial idea of a civilizing mission for Indians, as a whole, and on the other, ‘the civilizing of the lower caste/classes’ in particular.  In villages, missionaries opened schools for marginalised groups, and vernacular instruction was often provided only up to the elementary level, owing to financial constraints, among other reasons. They, however, actively engaged in the secondary and higher education in the towns, chiefly aimed at attracting the upper castes/classes and providing an English education which many wanted to gain government employment. This gulf in the educational provision tended to perpetuate existing social divisions. This research seeks to examine these overlapping motives by directing the historian’s lens to the education of the poor in the late 19th and 20th century Kerala, in south-western India.

Continue reading