Abstract
This chapter sets the tone for looking at education policy from multiple locations, voices, stand-points and perspectives. While the enterprise of policy studies heavily relies on measuring, impact analysis and best possible solutions, my attention is directed at the cultural politics of education policy in India. How do we make sense of the enormous expansion of educational institutions and desires to access these spaces despite them being exclusionary, disciplining and alienating? How do caste blind assumptions and caste-driven practices impact everyday schooling and institutional cultures? How do educational ideals such as equality, autonomy and respect begin to change as they begin their institutional lives?
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Notes
- 1.
Caste-based violence, along with its raw, spectacle-making execution, has been on the rise in Maharashtra for over three decades. Impacting collective conscience was brutal violence and murders in Khairlanji in 2006. Starting out as an altercation over clearing of a path between adjoining farms, the Bhotmange family’s priority to education, assertion of their rights and access to a small land holding caused much resentment among their Maratha neighbours culminating in the brutal murders of five of their family. Satya Sagar (2006) and Anand Teltumbde (2016) analyse the case in detail, emphasising the crucial role of caste in the violence. While the tensions between Maratha and Dalit communities have a long and complex history, in recent times they have become intense especially after the Namantar Andolan (movement to re-name). The clashes over naming Marathwada University after Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar lasted for 16 years from 1978 to 1994. Disturbingly high in numbers and alarmingly regular in occurrences, caste-based violence in Ahmednagar district over the last few years has been extensively reported by Marathi news media and to a smaller extent English media. This, however, has not received enough scholarly attention.
- 2.
A number of other states in India have seen similar agitations by the dominant and middle castes. While the demands by Jats, Patels, Gujjars and Kapus are gaining popularity and momentum, the states are attempting to sort out legal issues (Kumar 2016; Deshpande and Ramachandran 2016; Deshpande 2016; Jaffrelot and Kalaiyarasan 2018).
- 3.
Uma Chakravarti’s brilliant text Gendering Caste (2003) begins with her observations during the anti-Mandal agitations by “upper-caste” students. One photograph, in particular, captured the connections between caste and gender and practices of terrain guarding by restricting access to education. The photograph in question showed women students carrying placards that read “We don’t want unemployed husbands!” A sentiment both baffling and commonplace in the wake of the reservations to OBCs, the women were protesting on behalf of their meritorious “upper-caste” husbands who would be denied a shot at glorious careers as a result of reservations.
- 4.
Gopal Guru engages with the concept of humiliation as he places it within the prevailing philosophical articulations of social power and ethical reorganisation of the social. While hurt, humiliation, shame and insult are understood to be worth eliminating in favour of respect and dignity, Guru presents a stunning complication:
In colonial societies [the] traditional elite develop an insight into humiliation. However, they acquire this insight not because they have an innate moral capacity. In fact, a colonial configuration of power, produced by western modernity, necessarily disrupts their feudal complacency and awakens them to their own subordination within this framework of power” (p. 3). Opening an important conversation, Guru and Sarukkai (2012) bring experience into social science in their work.
- 5.
Couples involved in intercaste romance have had to endure a spate of violence by families and caste organisations. With an alarming increase in reporting these “honour crimes”, several accounts suggest that over 300 deaths occurred between 2015 and 2018 (Babu 2016; Krishnan 2018; Times of India 2018). As establishing strict control over the lives of the young is often understood to deter intercaste courtship and love, educational spaces, access to mobile phones and practices of youth sociality receive intense scrutiny.
- 6.
Documentation of exclusionary practices in institutions of higher education reveals the connection between historical and structural conditions and everyday interactions. In a move to make the pain visible and interrupt the singular narrative of “failure” attached to disadvantaged students, the Death of Merit brings to the fore the suicides by students on Indian campuses. See https://thedeathofmeritinindia.wordpress.com/
- 7.
Even a cursory scanning of the available empirical data and reports on employment, caste and patterns of recruitment and retention reveals exclusion. Thorat Committee report of 2007 focusing on All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) discusses cases of students from disadvantaged caste background singled out by their professors and marked low on purpose.
- 8.
Ashram school Sanhita or the code book that includes rules and guidelines of managing Ashram schools in the state of Maharashtra opens with these objectives.
- 9.
For the most part, education research in India became institutionalised under departments of sociology and psychology; and as a result, socio-anthropological and psychological orientation has been quite visible in contemporary research. Suma Chitnis and Karuna Chanana offer an elaborate trajectory of development in this regard. For comprehensive review and trends, see Velaskar (1990) and Nambissan and Rao (2016).
- 10.
For recent reports on schooling and humiliation, see https://feminisminindia.com/2018/05/15/frequent-humiliation-girl-students/ and http://citizenmatters.in/india-city-schools-homophobia-lgbt-discrimination-gender-research-6863
- 11.
Welfare policies for women, especially the ways in which they reinscribe the notions of social reproduction, women’s bodily autonomy and social shame open up a series of urgent questions of gender and education. Wanda Pillow’s work on teenage pregnancy and schooling (2004) and Cris Mayo’s research on sexuality and public schools (2007) are cases in point.
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Tukdeo, S. (2019). Struggles of the Word and the World. In: India Goes to School. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3957-4_1
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