Symbolic violence, straightening, and the re(production) of social power through education in India

• In Event: Justice, Social movements, and Protest in/through Education

Proposal

This paper draws on a larger project which examines the role that schools play in the production of caste and gender-based relations of domination in India. The project aims to make visible the normalized and deeply implicit facets of caste patriarchal domination in schools. My paper draws on this ethnographic study of a low-fee private school and a government school in an urban industrial area Raipur, Chhattisgarh in Central India, consisting of 5 months of school observations, 19 semi-structured and unstructured interviews with teachers, principals, and parents, and ethnographic work with children within the urban industrial settlement. This article employs a critical anti-caste framework to build on Yunus’s (2018) argument that students are constructed as historically specific subjects within the dominant upper caste-class classroom discourse that is present in the urban Indian context. I demonstrate that focusing on the affective dimensions of caste in the classroom and school in a process of ‘straightening’(Ahmed, 2006, 2010) - an act, done by institutions, systems, people or ideas, that both incentivizes and normalizes certain behavior and thought through systems of rewards and punishments- into Brahmanical ways of being. This helps understand not just how wider social relations of caste and gender are sought to be reinforced in and through schooling but place children, even those who fiercely resist the imposition of these relations, in positions of contradiction and ambivalence.

The scholarship that exists on the reproduction of systems of oppression in India in and through education focuses on different aspects of social power such as religion, class, gender, and caste. One body of work focuses on the negotiation of nationalist ideologies and processes of regulation of gender in Indian classrooms across a range of schools (Kumari, 2022; Manjrekar, 2011; Sundar, 2004; Bénéï, 2008; Bhattacharjee, 2021; Pappu & Vasanta, 2010; Thapan, 2014). Pappu and Vasanta (2010)’s work offers insight into the chasm between the way normative conceptions of childhood shape texts and curricular expectations of quality education in Indian schools and the realities of children studying in schools in the urban social context of class-caste relations and gendered labor. Benei’s (2008) and Manjrekar’s (2011) work helps deconstruct classroom texts as these seek to produce binaries of “us”/Hindus and “them”/Muslims, they do not explore the experience of Muslim and ‘lower’ caste pupils in the classroom. Bhattacharjee (1999) delves into the process of gendered socialization of children and their negotiation of everyday practices that seek to shape the subjectivities of children into ‘appropriately’ gendered ways of being; her work, however, does not take caste and class hierarchies into account. Yunus’s (2018) work provides a rare empirical investigation into the classroom processes and texts that reproduce hierarchies of gender, caste, and class in Indian schools.

An important aspect of the reproduction of systems of oppression that existing scholarship does not examine is students’ affect in the contestation and accommodation of dominant worldviews. Since caste is often experienced as a feeling (Vaghela et al., 2022), I explore the impact of affective processes in the process of social reproduction through schools.

One important finding of my research was how policies regarding what food will be served in the midday meal, what festivals and occasions will be celebrated in schools, how they will be celebrated, fused with expectations that the ‘ideal’ student is someone who is obedient, good at following orders, and never questions their elders (whether teachers or parents), straighten students into Brahmanical ways of being. This includes idealized forms of girlhood (Kumar, 2017).

A second finding was that one of the most strikingly common things that both the girls in JMPS (the Low Fee Private School) and the BMS (the government school) said when we talked about a range of things such as whether they had the freedom to go outside their homes or run an Instagram account, was “hum koi galat cheez nahi karte hain” (we don’t do bad things). It was striking because although there were nuances in the way they were regulated by their parents (and brothers), the idea of staying away from doing ‘bad things’ was deeply ingrained. Although many girls constantly resisted their teachers' policing of their clothes, friendships with boys and ‘roaming’ (being out and about with their friends) - this resistance transformed into uncertainty and hesitation when we spoke of marriage. While they clearly expressed the idea that they believed they should have a choice in who they would marry, ultimately the discourse of marrying within one’s caste was uncontested. Their primary struggle was an affective one - and it manifested in multiple ways; for instance in the feeling it would make their parents unhappy, that it would bring social ostracization to the rest of their family and that ultimately, since it would make those around them unhappy, it would make genuine happiness for them impossible.


Sara Ahmed (2010) argues that happiness functions as a promise that directs you towards certain objects as if they provide you the ingredients of a good life. The purpose of straightening devices is to orient individual and group behavior towards certain ends, like happiness, such that pathways form that make traveling towards those objects easier. Happiness is an affective form of orientation and I explain that paying attention to how affect shapes the direction in which girls are orientated is helpful to unpack some of the work that happens in straightening and keeping girls in line with the norms of caste patriarchal society.

This paper would be of relevance to scholars of gender and education since it brings to the conversation about the role of education in social reproduction an analysis of how caste and gender domination in and through schools by way of everyday practices, school culture and affective production of ideal girlhood. It makes a contribution to comparative and international theories of educational inequality by addressing the caste - an under-recognized marker of urban educational inequality.

Author

• Aditi Tandon, Indiana University Bloomington