ALTHOUGH the signal importance of education, particularly primary school education, is widely endorsed in the contemporary world as a crucial indicator of human development, rarely does one come across a focused, intense discussion on inclusive classrooms with an accent on policies and practices. I propose to focus on three types of exclusions obtaining in classrooms in India. I shall designate these exclusions as ideological, cultural and structural, although they often overlap and interpenetrate. The ideological exclusion I refer to emanates from curriculum, the cultural exclusion from the medium of instruction, and the structural exclusion from social hierarchy.

The Education Commission (1964-66) chaired by D.S. Kothari famously observed: ‘The future of India is shaped in her classrooms.’ If one goes by the content of school textbooks, India’s multicultural future is not only not bright, but bleak. The contents of textbooks reflect and reinforce most of the negative values which are prevalent in contemporary India, resulting in the exclusion or at best ambiguous inclusion of a substantial proportion of children in the school system. A content analysis of school textbooks I made reveals the following:

1. The privileging of urban India and relegating rural India to the background, although the population of the latter is even now close to 70 per cent.

2. Presenting the needs and aspirations of the male population as more important than those of the female population, thereby reinforcing patriarchy.

3. Marginalizing Dalitbahujans constituted by Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and the Other Backward Classes, accounting for the overwhelming majority of India’s population.

4. Projecting the value orientations and aspirations of the Indian middle class as ‘national’ and upholding the rapacious upper class as the role model to be emulated by the young student.

5. Denying identity to religious minorities of which there are three strands. One, Hindu expansionism vis-à-vis religious minorities of Indian origin – Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs – as well as the primal vision of Scheduled Tribes (naturism, animism etc.) by treating them as mere offshoots and/or parts of Hinduism. Two, ignoring the identity of small religious minorities (e.g. Jews, Baha’is, Zoroastrians) and treating them as cultural outsiders. Three, by characterizing Muslims as ‘anti-national’ and Christians as ever indulging in fraudulent conversions, these religious minorities are projected as the ‘Other’ in India which finds subtle, if not open expression in textbooks.

6. Privileging Hindi speakers as belonging to the national mainstream, and treating the speakers of other languages as belonging to different ‘regions’, which is contrary to the constitutional vision. The first sentence of the Constitution of India characterizes India as a ‘Union of States’; these states are linguistic entities to which considerable autonomy is conceded in the conceived federal set up.

7. Imagining a singular past for India and ignoring its multiple pasts; projecting Ancient India favourably and castigating Medieval India and British India as periods of conquest and colonialism respectively, thereby ignoring the positive developments and contributions of these periods.

8. Distorting the constitutional understanding of secularism, that is, the state treating all religions with equal respect and/or the state keeping equal distance from all religions; presenting Hinduism as the mainspring of India’s secularism. In these processes fact, myth and fiction are often mixed and irrationality inculcated in the young minds, even if unwittingly.

9. While the religions of Indian origin can legitimately boast of a cosmocentric value-orientation, this is often ignored to pursue high-technology driven rapid economic development. The imperative need of reciprocity between humanity and nature to help nurture sustainable development is rarely advocated in India’s school textbooks. This being so, it can be said without fear of being contradicted that most of the textbooks and/or parts of them present a view from above, typically a Hindu-upper caste-male- urban-middle class perspective. Consequently the perspectives of the rural folk, women, Dalitbahujans, different nationalities, religious minorities, federal-secular India, and the harmony between humanity and nature are understated or missing, resulting in ideological exclusion which unobtrusively mentally alienates the young students from the classroom, even as they are physically present in it.

 

Textbooks in India are produced and distributed by different agencies and the deficits listed above are more pronounced in the textbooks sponsored by some of the non-government organizations. The National Curriculum Framework acknowledges the fact that ever since 1986, when the National Policy on Education was approved by Parliament, the effort has been to redesign the curriculum for the creation of a ‘national’ system of education. There is an inherent contradiction between one national system of education and the acknowledgement of the need to nurture cultural pluralism, unless the former is understood as an instrument fostering core values such as equality, rationality, fraternity, liberty, dignity, identity and harmony between humanity and nature without endangering cultural diversity and compromising cultural pluralism.

The fact that India has no official/national religion, although 82 per cent of its population is Hindu, and that India recognizes 22 languages as ‘official’ are clear pointers that India cannot be labelled as a ‘nation state’. Therefore, I propose that we need to conceptualize India as a national state, which celebrates cultural diversity and which combines equality and diversity so that fostering cultural pluralism becomes legitimate. This paradigm shift in conceptualization is the first necessary step to produce authentic textbooks with inclusive orientations relevant for India.

 

The second context of exclusion in the classroom that I propose to discuss arises out of the ambivalence which prevails regarding the medium of instruction to be used at the primary school level. India is the most complex polyglot country in the world and the Indian Constitution judiciously mandates that every child should be imparted education through her mother tongue till the age of 14.

A word about the characteristic feature of mother tongue is in order here. Mother tongue is learned through association, as a part of the social milieu in which a child grows up. No child needs to be taught to speak her mother tongue. However, the child needs to be taught to read and write her mother tongue. When the child is taught the mother tongue or through the mother tongue, the capacity of retaining what is taught or learned is substantial.

One must also be clear about the notion of mother tongue. With the onward march of urbanization and consequent accelerated migration, an increasing proportion of the population does not live in their ancestral cultural homeland where the mother tongue is the language spoken. Consequently, the children who grow up in large urban settlements often do not have the possibility of learning their ancestral mother tongue. But they do pick up the language of their social milieu even without formal schooling. The mother tongue should, therefore, be understood as the language of the child’s social milieu in the urban context.

 

We must also be clear about two other features of language. First, language is a group or community phenomenon. One cannot meaningfully speak of a language which is exclusive to one person. Those who share a common language usually use it as a medium of interaction. Only then can the language be retained as a live language. Second, language is both a resource, an instrument of achievement, as well as a source of identity, a channel of emotional attachment. English, for example, is a resource for upward mobility in India, but the mother tongue is a marker of identity for most Indians. However, the mother tongue can combine both the instrumental and emotional functions. This is an important reason why we need to nurture mother tongues.

The list of mother tongues recorded in the Indian Census number over a thousand, but only a little over hundred of them are spoken by ten thousand or more people. This is not a big number for a one-billion plus country like India. And yet, only 22 of these languages are recognized by the Constitution of India. The problem begins here. The same Constitution which prescribes compulsory education through the child’s mother tongue does not recognize a majority of mother tongues spoken in the country.

 

This brings us to the politics of language, which has several aspects. First, linking language with religion, viz. Sanskrit with Hinduism, Pali with Buddhism, Urdu with Islam, Punjabi with Sikhism and English with Christianity, is an untenable proposition. The coterminality of religious and linguistic communities is not an empirical fact, only a figment of the imagination. All the religious communities of India, with perhaps the exception of Sikhs, belong to several linguistic communities, viz. Punjabi is the common language of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs.

The second aspect of the politics of language relates to the marginalization of mother tongues of adivasis and peasants. There are 461 Scheduled Tribe communities in India and all of them have their distinct languages: some small, some big. But the cultural linguistic integrity of even the biggest of them is not nurtured. The Bhils and the Santhals number more than five million each. But the Bhils are distributed between Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Maharashtra. In the first two states, the Bhil children have to learn in Hindi, and in the latter two, in Gujarati and Marathi respectively but not in their mother tongue. In this process, Bhili, their mother tongue, is marginalized and liquidated. The Santhals are vivisected between West Bengal, Orissa and Bihar and are subjected to a similar fate.

The third aspect of the politics of language I want to refer to is Hindi hegemony. Hindi is spoken by a staggering 337 million people in India, and yet they constituted only 38 per cent of the population in 1991. As the Radhakrishan Commission observed in 1950: ‘Hindi does not enjoy in India such natural ascendancy over provincial languages as to incline the inhabitants to accept a secondary position for their own language. Hindi is the language of the minority, although a large minority. Unfortunately, it does not possess any advantages, literary or historical, over other modern languages.’ And yet, Article 343 of India’s Constitution endorses Hindi written in the Devnagri script as the official language of the Union, conceived as a link language initially and national language ultimately.

 

The problem is that Hindi is not a natural language, but a political construction. It is useful to note several facts here. One, though Hindi is a Persian word, but today it stands mentally antagonistic to its source. Two, Hindi was a Khari Boli, a speech variety, a dialect. And, Braj was a bhasa, a full-fledged language with long literary history. This equation now stands inverted. Three, Hindi encapsulated 50 dialects of which 18 have one million or more speakers and four – Bhojpuri, Chhattisgarhi, Magadhi and Rajasthani –have ten million or more speakers. In fact, out of 337 million counted as Hindi speakers, only 233 million account for proper Hindi. This makes for only 23 per cent of India’s population. Four, some of the languages are arbitrarily absorbed into Hindi. The classic case is that of Maithili. Both Grierson, who undertook the monumental Linguistic Survey of India (17 volumes) and S.K. Chatterji, the eminent Indian linguist, unambiguously certified that Maithili, though a language by itself, continues to be treated as a dialect of Hindi.

Most countries in the world which have achieved total literacy use the mother tongue as the medium of instruction. The earlier we recognize this the better it is for us. The Official Language Commission advised long ago: ‘The variety of Indian linguistic media is not a national skeleton to be ashamed of, to be somehow hidden away. It is a wealth of inheritance in keeping with the continental size, ancient history and distinctive tradition of assimilating and harmonizing diverse cultural and racial elements, of which this country can be justly proud.’ But, India’s language policy has not heeded this sane advice.

 

If the mother tongues of the adivasis and peasantry are not given due recognition even in their native places as noted above, the migrant groups are denied the opportunity to learn through mother tongues in their newly adopted homelands. The classic case in India is that of Sindhis who do not have their own specific homeland in India and unsurprisingly their language is fast disappearing. In fact, the most widely dispersed languages in India are Hindi and Urdu. When people with these linguistic backgrounds are outside their regions, they tend to lose their cultural identity. Similarly, the Bengalis in Delhi or Tamilnadu, the Punjabis in West Bengal or Maharashtra too are handicapped. But this is largely an urban phenomenon and even then there is a language of the region, the language of the social milieu. It is Bengali in Calcutta, Tamil in Chennai, Kannada in Bangalore, Marathi in Mumbai and so on. That is, we need to use the mother tongue or the language of the social milieu as the medium of instruction at the school level.

I can very well anticipate an objection to this argument from those who look upon English as the instrument of upward mobility. I am not denying the importance of English and the need to learn it. But it should be introduced only as a second language gradually at the post-primary stage. As Jawaharlal Nehru remarked, English is not suitable to tackle the problem of mass education in India. Therefore, some argue that instead of English, Hindi should be the language of instruction at the primary school level. But for a Tamil or Bengali speaker, Hindi is as much a foreign language as English is. And they are not inclined to view Hindi as a better option to their own mother tongues.

It is against this background that I consider the implementation of the constitutional prescription of educating the child through her mother tongue in primary school as an instrument of inclusion. However, it is necessary to gradually introduce other languages, be it English, Hindi or whatever, depending upon the utility of the language, the need of the region and inclination of the learner. This is the surest way of creating not only a literate India but also thinking Indians. Neglecting mother tongues will create a new breed of rootless cultural amphibians who will remain excluded from their cultural milieu even if educated.

 

The third context of exclusion that I want to discuss is the most problematic and widely analyzed as an aspect of social exclusion prevailing in classrooms in India and hence I will be very brief and highlight only some of the neglected and distorted aspects. The general tendency is to replicate the prevailing western pattern of analysis by invoking class, gender and race as the causes of social exclusion, substituting caste in the place of race and adding religion, language and ethnicity, that all-too-ambiguous attribute! But if race is invariably conceptualized as a dichotomy between Black and White peoples, caste ought to be conceived as a complex continuum which is sanctified and legitimized by religion. In contemporary India, this continuum operates in at least three broad clusters – the twice born Upper Castes (UCs), the Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Scheduled Castes (SCs). While the SCs were earlier considered as untouchables, in 1955 the practice of untouchability was legally abolished and made a punishable offence. And yet, SCs are socially discriminated in numerous contexts, including classrooms, particularly in rural India.

 

The OBCs are placed above the pollution line and yet they are far below the UCs in the field of education. Similarly, although the Scheduled Tribes (STs) do not constitute a part of the Hindu caste hierarchy and hence not seen as victims of untouchability, they are below even the SCs in the field of literacy. However, most analysts invariably refer to SCs and STs in the same breath and treat them as sociological Siamese twins as it were in the context of education. The point I want to make is that caste is a far more complex phenomenon (unlike race) and several factors – religious sanctions and doctrines, occupational differentiation, social approbation or stigmatization – interpenetrate in its functioning. On the other hand, the case of STs is critically different in that they are outside the pale of the caste system and yet remain substantially excluded from education. The crucial factors which explain the low level of literacy among the STs is their physical isolation and social exclusion, occasioned by the stigmatization of their mother tongues.

It may also be noted that as different caste groups inhabit the same set of villages, social exclusion and discrimination within the classroom occurs in their native villages. In contrast, the STs invariably live in their exclusive habitats (although villages inhabited both by castes and tribes are not rare) in which social exclusion and discrimination based on their tribal identity is a rarer possibility.

Finally, it is crucial to remind ourselves about the bi-dimensional character of the status system spawned by the caste system. Even traditionally, the caste system had both ritual and secular dimensions of status, leading to Brahmin-Kshatriya tensions anchored to power, not to speak of the Brahmin-Vaishya tensions as the former were relatively poor as compared to the latter. With the onset of urban industrialization and modernization, the secular dimension has outpaced, but not eclipsed, the ritual dimension. This is the context in which the admission of students drawn from different caste clusters into the same classroom takes place. As classmates they are equals in a secular context, but as members of different castes they are unequals. As classmates they constitute a unity, subjects of inclusion, but as caste members they are objects of exclusion, indeed a multiplicity. The reconciliation of ritual and secular statuses and the contradictions between multiplicity and unity pose basic dilemmas of exclusions and inclusions in the life-world of the classroom. I am afraid we have not yet adequately captured this structural reality of the Indian classroom.

 

The points I was to make in this context are the following:

1. Caste persists as a core aspect of Indian society and the practice of untouchability, while a crucial dimension of social exclusion in classrooms, is not the only factor of social exclusion.

2. The occupational tradition of a caste group often functions as an impediment for social inclusion, sometimes self-exclusion, from taking to education. This is often exemplified by the peasant castes and artisan groups.

3. The availability of adequate capital for investment with some of the caste groups incline them to engage in occupations wherein education is not perceived as a relevant factor. Further, lack of interest in education leads to exclusion from education of some learners from all caste clusters.

4. Even when the caste factor is irrelevant, a group may get excluded substantially from education, as exemplified by the Scheduled Tribes.

5. The increasing importance of the secular dimension and the persisting salience of the ritual dimension provide for situations of both inclusion and exclusion in the classroom.

In the light of these facts one has to be cautious in attributing direct causal relationship between caste and exclusion in the context of education, although there indeed is some correlation between the two.

 

I have identified three contexts of exclusion in education – ideology, culture and structure. I have illustrated some manifestations of social exclusion in classrooms, invoking the examples of curriculum, medium of instruction and caste structure. The content of curriculum often creates an estrangement between the value orientations contained in them and the life-world of the dominated categories. The medium of instruction, in so far as it is different from that of the learners’ mother tongue, alienates them from the socio-cultural milieu of the classroom. The caste structure impinges differently on different caste clusters, favourably in the case of upper caste learners but with differing intensity of disadvantage on the OBCs and SCs. Although caste is irrelevant in the case of STs, they are more excluded from education than the SCs, the worst sufferers of the caste system. It appears that we need to carefully analyze not only the neglected dimensions such as curriculum and medium of instruction but also over-analyzed dimensions such as caste in order to understand the nature and causes of social exclusion in India’s classrooms.

 

* This is a shorter version of valedictory address delivered on 8 September 2010 at the India International Centre on the occasion of National Consultation on Inclusive Classroom, Social Inclusion/Exclusion and Diversity: Perspectives, Policies and Practices, organized by Deshkal Society, Delhi.