[Reader-list] A messy corner of India’s modernity

[Rajkamal Goswami]

 "When we ignore these structures and act like impatient activists, we
inadvertently place ourselves at the disposal of strategists whose
interests are narrow and short-term."

The above line in the concluding para gives the whole essay a definite
ambiguous edge. One is then no longer sure the motive behind the
essay. Is it to articulate that a girl child's destiny is
pre-determined because of societal norms (therein lies a helpless
despondency)? Or is it just to notify that Dubey was well ahead of her
times when she wrote that long EPW essay? But I feel that it was
written just to berate the 'activists' by implying that an
'unemotional' scholar is desirable over an 'ignorant' and 'impatient'
activist to bring in social change.

On 6/30/12, Jeebesh <jeebesh at sarai.net> wrote:
>
> It is nice to read an well argued essay that brings into focus the need for
> a scholarship that can generate insight and understanding outside the
> "current affairs" opinion attitude. It's more valuable now since most
> institutions are going the policy way to justify their intellectual and
> social efficacy. best jeebesh
>
>
> http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article3585664.ece
>
> A messy corner of India’s modernity
>
> Krishna Kumar
>
>
> A school principal in Melur in Madurai district, Tamil Nadu, is reported to
> have denied admission to two girls whose parents had married them off after
> they completed Class X (The Hindu, June 23). Prima facie, it seems the
> principal is wrongly applying her authority. Also, in the broader social
> context, it seems strange and unacceptable that the benefits of education
> should be denied to a girl just because she is now a married woman. There
> are other ways to look at this story. When I read it, I wished Leela Dube,
> the sociologist who died last month, were alive and I could phone her to
> find out what she thought about it. Her view of such matters derived its
> perspective from a deeper commitment — to social reality, rather than to
> activism or political correctness. Before I speculate on how she might have
> responded to the Melur principal’s decision, let me recall my pedagogic
> experience with one of her writings.
>
> Do girls have a childhood?
>
> Gender is now a common topic in courses on education and teaching. Everyone
> knows that discrimination on the basis of gender is a major problem in
> schools. Equally clearly, everyone has figured out how to talk about this
> problem. Political correctness on this topic has seeped in, all the way to
> the district and block-level institutions of teacher training. Resource
> persons are now readily available in all parts of the country who can wax
> eloquent about gender parity and how it can be sustained in the classroom.
> Officers at all levels have equipped themselves with power point
> presentations that will show how fast the gender gap is shrinking in
> enrolment, retention and outcomes. The same ease and excitement pervade the
> media when the CBSE and other boards declare their Class X and XII results.
> “Girls outshine boys” says the banner headline year after year. An ethos
> pointing to a nice social revolution envelopes us. In a happy environment of
> this kind, how do you ask students to notice the social world stretched
> right across their daily vision but tightly wrapped up under the pleasant
> discourse of change shared by the state and the social activist? Faced with
> this problem, I ask my students to read Leela Dube’s paper tersely titled,
> “On the construction of gender: socialisation of Hindu girls in patrilineal
> India.” Once they read it, they stop being glib, which is no small matter in
> this age of readiness to recommend.
>
> In this paper, first published in 1988, Leela Dube portrays the cultural
> imprinting that turns girls into socially acceptable women. The portrait is
> laboriously drawn, with data and insights acquired from diverse sources and
> regions. The style is marked by a concern for accuracy and detail, and the
> reader is nowhere treated as either a concerned citizen or a social
> reformer. Throughout its 40 pages, Leela Dube sticks to her role as a
> scholar whose primary job is to examine human behaviour and the institutions
> that shape it. In this case, the institutions are family and kinship. Their
> joint venture ensures that a little girl starts to learn, from infancy
> onwards, that it is her destiny to leave her natal home for an uncertain
> future in a family to which she will belong after marriage. This destiny is
> cast in the rock of cultural practices, ranging from religious rituals to
> everyday language of lullabies, songs, idioms and metaphors. For the
> single-minded pursuit of matrimony, the girl’s appearance, body movements,
> habits and dispositions are to be honed into the approved model of beauty,
> self-restraint and self-abnegation. Space and time are supposed to shrink
> into increasingly narrow corridors of activity, and the natural desire for
> freedom a girl might have felt as a baby must be dissolved into a regime of
> responsibility and self-denial.
>
> The essay leaves you wondering whether girls have a childhood at all, or
> whether they move straight from infancy into adulthood. Secondly, it sets up
> an explicit conflict between the aims of girls’ socialisation at home and
> their education at school. Tradition and customs require girls to learn
> during childhood that they must submit to male authority in all aspects of
> their life. The core of this learning lies in giving up any claim to
> intellectual autonomy and individual uniqueness. With the full force that
> religious and caste beliefs, and their representations in mythology, might
> be expected to carry for the young mind, girls are made to internalise the
> all-encompassing social value of their bodies for reproduction. Restrictions
> on physical movement and posture, and on the use of time and space begin
> much before puberty, but after menarche these restrictions acquire
> comprehensive rigour. If we add to these the chronic anxiety about the
> inescapability of leaving one’s parents’ home, we can somewhat appreciate
> how incompatible are the norms of girlhood in India with the basic
> principles of education. These principles revolve around the child’s agency
> and freedom. Progressive pedagogy is supposed to enhance the child’s
> confidence and courage to develop her identity as an individual. Both in
> terms of its emotional content and the reasoning on which it is based, the
> agenda of cultural imprinting of girls’ minds contradicts the objectives of
> child-centred education.
>
> Peripheral to society
>
> Leela Dube does not hesitate to articulate this conflict. “Can we really
> think of reforming the education system to bring about a more ‘enlightened’
> relationship between the sexes as long as the larger structures which
> provide the context for the education system continue to reproduce
> gender-based relationships of domination and subordination?” Let us make an
> attempt to use this perspective to make sense of the news from the
> government school at Melur. Both girls who are being denied admission to
> Class XI have studied at this school till Class X. The school and its
> principal were apparently not taken into account by the parents who arranged
> their marriage, nor by the larger community which participated in the
> ceremony. In matters of this kind, we tend to ignore how peripheral the
> school is to society. It is a place where people send their children to
> enable them to seek certified qualifications. The school neither forms a
> point of reference for making decisions, nor does its curriculum carry
> relevance to everyday living. Its principal and teachers are perceived as
> petty functionaries of the government.
>
> In her denial of admission to the two girls who have now become married
> women, the principal is conveying her inconsequential anger. If we blame her
> for misusing her authority and compel her to admit these girls — as the
> Tamil Nadu government will surely do quite soon — we miss the opportunity to
> listen to a voice we have institutionally muzzled. This is the voice of
> teachers who are supposed to carry on their lean shoulders the full burden
> of the rhetoric of national development and social transformation. The
> enormity of challenges teachers face in their daily professional routine is
> trivialised by us when we expect them to act like pedagogues and social
> reformers rolled in one. This latter role constitutes a grand illusion as
> they can expect to receive no cooperation from the larger society when they
> try to go against established norms. Curricular policies reduce their
> intellectual struggle to a ritual, to be observed for the sake of
> examination success and certification. Indeed, their training as teachers
> lacks professional rigour and length precisely because both the state and
> society treat them — whatever the rhetoric may be — as minor cogs in the
> system’s wheel. The Melur principal has made the mistake of conveying this a
> bit too explicitly. She is right in indicating that she is not equipped to
> run a school for married women. If the government is concerned about the
> education of child brides, it should develop a curriculum for them and start
> institutions where it can be taught.
>
> True, such a step will form an oxymoron. The state cannot acknowledge a
> child bride as an adult citizen with constitutionally endowed rights. She is
> an ambiguous entity, a progeny of contradiction between the state and
> society. She inhabits a messy, forgotten corner of India’s modernity. We
> tend to look at her, when we must, with emotion and studied surprise. What
> distinguished Leela Dube as a social scientist was that she had the courage
> to stare unemotionally at such dim-lit corners of Indian modernity. About
> child labour too, she wrote in a similar vein, arguing that it is embedded
> in the deeper structures of society, not all of which have a purely economic
> character. When we ignore these structures and act like impatient activists,
> we inadvertently place ourselves at the disposal of strategists whose
> interests are narrow and short-term. As a major scholar of our times, Leela
> Dube teaches us how to register the present moment in the long story of
> women’s subordination.
>
>
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-- 
Rajkamal
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