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Subjects of Development: Teachers, Parents and Youth Negotiating Education in Rural North India

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Abstract

This article examines negotiations of school education in a mountainous rural region of North India. I show how such negotiations are a part of broader cultural politics of development differentiated by class, generation and gender. In doing so, I address the utility and limitations of governmentality as a framework to understand how education and development shape young people’s relationships to changing terms of social reproduction. My analysis draws on ethnographic studies of the micro-politics of development and education to highlight how they work through both disciplinary and governmental forms of power to re-entrench existing inequalities and boundaries, yet also involve negotiations and contradictory experiences by teachers, parents and youth. I argue that such experiences and articulations on the part of ‘subjects’ of development signal the limits of governmental power, and counter notions of inevitable outcomes and choices for the futures of rural youth and their communities.

Abstract

Cet article s’intéresse aux négociations relatives à l’enseignement scolaire dans une région rurale et montagneuse du nord de l’Inde. Je montre que ces négociations s’inscrivent dans une politique culturelle plus générale de développement variant en fonction de la catégorie sociale, de la génération et du sexe. Ce faisant, je traite de la question de l'utilité et des limites de la gouvernementalité en tant que cadre pour comprendre en quoi l'éducation et le développement influencent le rapport des jeunes aux changements dans la reproduction sociale. Mon analyse s'appuie sur des études ethnographiques sur la micro-politique du développement et de l’éducation pour montrer comment, à travers des formes de pouvoir à la fois disciplinaires et gouvernementales, ils renforcent les inégalités et les cloisonnements existants, mais mettent pourtant en jeu des négociations et des expériences contradictoires d’enseignants, de parents et de jeunes. Je soutiens que les expériences et voix des «sujets» du développement servent à signaler les limites du pouvoir gouvernemental et à contrecarrer l’idée d’issue inévitable et la notion de choix incontournables pour l'avenir de la jeunesse et des communautés rurales.

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Notes

  1. Kempty is a semi-rural qasba (between a village and town in classification) in the Aglar River valley of Jaunpur block, Tehri Garhwal district of the North Indian hill state of Uttarakhand. In this article, I draw on 2 years (2006–2008) of qualitative research in this region of the Western Himalayan foothills. The research was largely conducted in Hindi, which I speak, read and write at an intermediate level. In Jaunpur, the local Jaunpuri dialect is spoken, but Hindi is the language of public engagements such as education, commerce and government. Shobhan Singh Negi assisted me with the research drawn on here. He speaks and writes intermediate English, as well as fluent Hindi and Jaunpuri. I was dependent on Shobhan’s knowledge of Jaunpuri for conversations with some elders (particularly older women) who only spoke Jaunpuri. In these conversations, Shobhan would intermittently translate orally into Hindi; I interjected questions in Hindi, and jotted notes in a mix of Hindi and English. All of my interactions with youth took place in Hindi; again my jotted notes were bi-lingual, and when needed I consulted with Shobhan for translations while writing up my notes. Most of my conversations with government school teachers and officials were similarly conducted in Hindi, except when my conversation in Hindi was met with replies in English, and on two occasions (with the Kempty inter-college principal and a block-level education department officer), Shobhan actually advised me to introduce myself in English to prove my ‘credentials’, as well as indicate my recognition of their status and knowledge of English. Thus, the following conversation with the Kempty inter-college principal took place in English.

  2. Critical school ethnographies have similarly illustrated how contingency and agency – or cultural productions – mediate processes of reproduction as well as transformation in liberal democracies (Willis, 1977; Levinson and Holland, 1996).

  3. Uttarakhand was formed as a new state in 2000 after a protracted struggle for separation from Uttar Pradesh. Demands for secession were based primarily on the economic and cultural marginalization of the hill region.

  4. In her research on girls’ education elsewhere in rural North India, Gold (2002, p. 97) noted that teachers routinely asked students to ‘forget’ everything that they had in their minds before coming to school, ‘to erase them like blank slates’.

  5. Cf. Fernandes (2006) and Mazzarella (2003) on middle-class formation and assertion in contemporary India.

  6. Hence, ‘failure’ indicates the need for more, better-targeted or reformed intervention rather than raising fundamental questions about the terms of success and failure, or of inequalities and exclusions that produce such outcomes (cf. Ferguson, 1994).

  7. ‘Inter education’ refers to any inter-college, or high school, education.

  8. Young women reflected on the value of education almost exclusively in relation to work and self-improvement. Girls’ education does affect marriage, as girls with Class VIII–XII education (though not lower or higher levels of education) will be ‘seen’ by an enhanced number of prospective grooms, and hence potentially choose from a wider range of offers. Yet given that education for girls is increasingly the norm, other markers of distinction such as class and caste background, and physical appearance are likely to contribute more to mobility through marriage than education per se.

  9. See Jeffrey et al (2008) on how educated, unemployed young men elsewhere in North India similarly emphasize the value of education for self-improvement.

  10. See Jackson (1999) on the importance of recognizing how men’s relationships to hegemonic gender discourses around work are often contradictory and complex.

  11. While caste and religion do matter in the context of my research, relative caste homogeneity in an almost completely Hindu social milieu means that they are less central as differentiators of educational experiences and outcomes than in other parts of rural North India (cf. Jeffrey et al, 2008).

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Morarji, K. Subjects of Development: Teachers, Parents and Youth Negotiating Education in Rural North India. Eur J Dev Res 26, 175–189 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejdr.2013.55

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