Mainstream WeeklyWithin educational research, much attention has been given to studies at scale that attempt to gather data and analyse the relationship of caste, education and social reproduction. In “Government Brahmin”—Caste, the Educated Unemployed, and the Reproduction of Inequalities, however, A.R. Vasavi (2014) examines these ideas through new forms of ethnography, drawing on observations, diaries and discussions with the interlocutor to study the impact of policies, processes and institutions at the level of a human being. The paper includes select excerpts from a diary Vasavi asked the pseudonymous B. Mallesha to keep for 5 years. These entries are followed by her commentary, contextualising his lived experiences within the transnational and national narratives, discourses and scholarly research on universal education, equality of opportunity and the reservation policy. The paper is a trenchant critique of the neoliberal model of development which views education as a means to building human capabilities in service of the dominant model, insensible to anguish the marginalised must suffer to find their place in the mainstream and the cost of “the erosion of their plural life-worlds’’. The biographical nature of this paper marks it as an important addition to writing by scholars like Parry, Velaskar, Madan and Weisskopf by focusing on, both, the subjective and the objective.
The paper is divided into sections that detail aspects of Mallesha’s life from birth to the present—“Family and Community”, “Neighbourhood and Community”, “School”, “Illness”, “Educational Institutions: Social Scarring and Humiliation”, “Dreams of English”, etc. While the diary entry included in each section is autobiographical, Vasavi’s commentary, making linkages with research, demonstrates that Mallesha’s experiences read close to those of millions (“up to six million”) who share his predicament.
Mallesha’s story
Mallesha was born into a scheduled caste family of the Madiga (leather workers) sub-caste. His parents lived in a Madiga settlement of 180-200 households near the Kollegal-Bangalore highway. His father earned a living by buying and selling sheep and goats for meat—engaging in leather-related work like much of the community. After he lost his father at a young age, his mother moved the family into a paternal uncle’s home. But the friction in the large family forced her to separate. She started doing daily wage and informal work to support herself and her three children. She was later helped by her youngest brother. She enrolled Mallesha in a no-fees school run by Catholic priests. Mallesha was a good student but, after being caned by a teacher, dropped out for a year. He was later readmitted. He showed aptitude for drawing and began practising. Around this time, he developed a severe allergy that persisted till he went to pre-university.
Mallesha started contributing financially to the family when he reached 10th grade, working as a painter’s apprentice. He continued to do similar work during his bachelor’s degree and in later life. Although he aspired to work as an artist, Mallesha could not afford expensive art supplies and had to drop out of his fine arts college. The stipend he received as a Scheduled Caste student was only Rs 150 per month. He then completed a BA degree, and, unable to find a job, an MA degree in history. And, finally, a B.Ed. Mallesha cites not knowing English as an obstacle to his finding a job.
The “Backward Classes” Hostel he lived in as a master’s student, consisted of overcrowded hostel rooms, insufficient and poor quality mess food. His teachers were disinterested. Here, he was labelled a “government Brahmin”, undeserving reservation and government support.
Painting hoardings and banners continued to be Mallesha’s source of income. It was low-paying, sporadic work. He started applying to government jobs, considered by his community to be the best—secure, permanent and prestigious. In the next ten years, Mallesha wrote 10 government exams for various posts. After five years of writing one of these, Mallesha was appointed as the headmaster of a village school.
Caste and education
Education in India, perhaps all over the world, has always been stratified. In the Pre-British era, children of the affluent rent-receiving class attended tols and madrasas while those of the masses attended institutions of indigenous vernacular education in the form of pathshalas and maktabs. While much has been written in praise of the decentralised, autonomous and self-sustaining nature of the indigenous vernacular education system, society was stratified and did not allow for social mobility. The participation of lower castes was met with hostility by the upper castes who had vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
In the early and late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, social revolt movements in Maharashtra identified education as a “significant social force” in the “social transformatory processes” and demanded education for Dalits (Velaskar, 1998). The most prominent leaders of these movements were Jyotirao Phule (1827-90) and Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), both from Dalit backgrounds themselves and products of the formal education system.
Phule called out “Brahmin domination and Brahmanical Hinduism as the root cause of economic exploitation and cultural oppression of the Shudras, ati-Shudras and women”. He demanded compulsory primary education for children of all castes. Phule founded the new theistic religion of Sarvajanik Dharma and, through the Satyashodhak Samaj movement, set up schools for untouchables and women in British India. The impact work of the Satyashodhak missionaries was deep and widespread, reaching all of Maharashtra and the Deccan. However, the movement failed to forge a unity of all non-Brahmin castes, which was one of its basic aims (Velaskar, 1998).
The year 1900 witnessed one of the first organised Dalit protests by the Mahar community of Maharashtra—due to the ideas disseminated by the Satyashodhaks and avenues for occupational mobility in British textile, railway, army and domestic services. New economic opportunities meant that the Mahars need not partake in the balutedari economy—in return for all the work the Mahar did like taking away dead cattle, performing in weddings, making door-to-door announcements, etc., they had rights to a certain amount of the land’s produce annually. This corn and grain was begrudgingly given and was insufficient for survival, which meant that the Mahars had to beg for leftovers from the upper caste and even eat dead cattle. Also, as untouchables, Mahars were assigned land and wells separate from the main village in areas called Mahawadas (Pawar, 2005).
A similar economy and way of life seems to have existed in the rest of the country as the Satnamis, Dalit caste in Chhattisgarh, also lived away from the Hindu paras in areas called Satnami paras (Parry, 2005) and even Mallesha’s family lived in the Madiga settlement in urban Bangalore in the state of Karnataka. Parry’s work also points out that while all castes in the village had some land to farm, the majority of it was the property of the upper caste Malguzar. The lower castes, especially the Dalits, regularly suffered “dearth, drought and famine” (Parry, 2005).
In any case, the Mahars revolted against the bondage of the balutedari system and sought other, more dignified jobs. The leaders of the Mahar movement made efforts “to overcome the traditional barriers to learning, gain education and stake a claim in the new urban occupational structure” (Velaskar, 1998).
Velaskar argues that these early Dalit movements “got caught in reformism”. The wholesale destruction of the caste apparatus, of the Hindu religion itself, was proposed for the first time by Ambedkar. “Ambedkar’s vision of an ideal society incorporated…a socialist social order underpinned by a new morality…based on the values of liberty, equality, fraternity and rationality” (Velaskar, 1998).
While the Ambedkarite movement provoked the Dalits, especially Mahars, to leave balutedari and migrate to cities for employment, quality education remains a dream for Dalits even now. Despite the ideals of equality and socialism embedded in the Constitution of India, education continues to be stratified. Rather than imparting humane and liberating ideas, schools and colleges continue to socialise students into hegemonic ideas and dominant ways of being.
In Mallesha’s case, for instance, the historical oppression of the Madiga caste was the reason for his poverty. While he attended formal schooling, the education available to him did not emphasise English—a hindrance in finding a respectable job. The benefits of reservation were insufficient for him to pursue a higher education and career in fine arts, for which he had interest and aptitude. In any case, education and employment in art, especially those for the marginalised, is not on the state’s agenda which views education in the narrow sense—as a way to train workers for the economy. The paltry state budget on education and stratified schools means that people of Mallesha’s backgrounds are earmarked for the lowest paying and least respectable work, while more comfortable and profitable work is allocated to the middle classes and the wealthiest.
Neoliberalism and the false promise of “education for all”
The inequalities of the caste-feudal society continue to persist in the new India that, contrary to its Constitution, increasingly embraces neoliberalism and participates in the economy of global and technocratic capitalism.
As Vasavi points out, the rhetoric of international organisations like the World Bank is that universalization of education is key to alleviating poverty and multiple inequalities and rights violations that result from it. The way to close the “gaps” in education is compulsory schooling and improvement in the quality of teaching. However, mere enrollment is insufficient to counter social stratification and low inputs cannot improve quality. The national and transnational support for privatisation of education in contrast to the decreasing expenditure for government schools indicates that the world and the state has selected a particular economic model and is complicit in reproducing “claste” hierarchies. The conditions of the primary producers and the lowest wage earners in India is rather like the conditions of workers in newly-industrialised England. The government’s reluctance to increase budgetary allocation in education signals its intent in viewing stratified education in a functionalist way, to continue the supply of cheap labour as the state builds industrial and technological capacity and profits accumulate at the top.
Even in the “quality” aspect of education, only the knowledge and skill that serve the interest of further industrialization and technological revolution are valued. Science, technology, engineering and mathematics are the most lucrative fields and, at school level, “quality” is reduced to measurable and objective “learning outcomes” in basic literacy and numeracy. This hyper focus of schooling negates “plural and diverse practices and forms of livelihoods and life-worlds” (Vasavi). There is no place for a marginalised student from an agrarian or non-industrial background to receive a well-rounded education that supports their interests and skills. The mainstream does not value or support the development of manual and artistic skills they learn from their communities or might be interested in, and the substandard education made available to them streams them to low-wage insecure work in the informal sector.
In Mallesha’s community, for example, men in his community no longer engage in their traditional occupations and have had to find work as construction workers, drivers, painters or labour in cotton and sugarcane mills, while the women do household work. Most of the young people in the community study up to high school. Some go to pre-university but drop out. Only a few men are able to finish college.
Education as per the dominant model of school places psychological stress and leads to situations of humiliation and violence against children in schools. Much like Mallesha’s inability to step into school after being caned, violence against children has been recorded in research and beatings are a common reason for children dropping out of school.
The fundamental issue is that the economic model and policies of the state are at the root of the continuing oppression of the marginalised.
Reservation policy and the job market
Education in India is a “contradictory resource”. Even with universalisation of elementary education and national and international measures to improve access and quality, education is key to reproduction of social stratification and the production of privileges, exclusions and inequalities (Tschurenev, 2019).
In this regard, the reservation policies are critical instruments to support the higher education of students from marginalised backgrounds, and support them in gaining “elite occupations and decision-making positions” (Weisskopf, 2004) that will “integrate” them with the upper strata of society and reduce deeply entrenched social and historical inequalities.
Research indicates that a miniscule number of students from SC and ST backgrounds are able to access higher education—
“..over 60 per cent of SC students and roughly 75 per cent of ST students are enrolled in relatively low-prestige arts programmes. In contrast to this, roughly 40 per cent of all students are enrolled in these programmes…The SC proportion of all graduates of higher educational institutions rose from 0.9 per cent in 1961 to 3.3 per cent in 1981, and the corresponding ST proportion rose form 0.1 per cent in `961 to 0.8 per cent in 1981…SC and ST graduates represented only about 3 per cent and 1 per cent, respectively, of all Indian graduates in 1981.” (Weisskopf, 2004)
It is worthy noting that while the reservation policy was set down in the 1950s, its implementation was delayed by a decade or two in institutions and it is not established everywhere in India even now. Moreover, while OBC seats are almost always filled, SC and ST seats often go unfilled because there are not enough applicants from these groups who have completed secondary education (Weisskopf, 2004). This is echoed in Mallesha’s experience where most of the young people in his community study up to high school.
The “graded inequality” (Ambedkar) of caste in Indian society means that, even among SCs and STs, certain groups have become the custodians of the benefits of the reservation policy. A caste census, by making regional caste identities and data regarding them visible, can support the percolation of benefits to the most needy groups.
Weisskopf (2004) writes that the few studies “tracing the post-university careers of SC and ST students” who have benefited from reservation and graduated from elite colleges suggest that the students ended up with “responsible and well-paying jobs, attaining a much higher socio-economic status than their parents”. In contrast to this it is most likely that SC and ST beneficiaries like Mallesha who are not able to attend elite higher education institutions struggle for years to get a government job, much like communities living beside the Bhilai Steel Plant in Chhattisgarh who wait for 10 to 12 years in queue—for the lowliest post of plant attendant (Parry, 2005).
Velasker (1998) writes “...the struggle for education and reservation benefits has critically revealed that attainment of equal opportunity and equal rights is very difficult in a society where notions of unequal status and privilege are deeply ingrained…” As we move further away from the ideal of education as a humanising and liberating force, Vasavi’s work goes a long way to give voice to the disadvantaged and make sense of their experiences of public institutions, policies and processes.
References
- Amman Madan. (2007). Sociologising Merit. Economic and Political Weekly, 42(29), 3044–3050. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4419817
- Parry, J. (2005). Changing Childhoods in Industrial Chhattisgarh. In Chopra, R & Jeffrey, P (Eds.), Educational Regimes in Contemporary India. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
- Pawar, D. (2015). Baluta (J. Pinto, Trans). (Original work published 1978)
- Poromesh Acharya. (1978). Indigenous Vernacular Education in Pre-British Era: Traditions and Problems. Economic and Political Weekly, 13(48), 1981–1988. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4367149
- Tschurenev, Jana. (2019). Inequality, Difference, and the Politics of Education for All. Südasien-Seminar der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
- Vasavi, A.R. (2014). “Government Brahmin”—Caste, the Educated Unemployed, and the Reproduction of Inequalities. Working Papers of the Max Weber Foundation’s Transnational Research Group India, Poverty Reduction and Policy for the Poor between the State and Private Actors: Education Policy in India since the Nineteenth Century.
- Velaskar, P. (1990). Unequal Schooling as a Factor in the Reproduction of Social Inequality in India. Sociological Bulletin, 39(1/2), 131–145. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23634530
- Velaskar, P. (1998). Ideology, Education and the Political Struggle for Liberation: Change and Challenge among the Dalits of Maharashtra. In Shukla, S. & Kaul, R. (Eds.), Education Development and Underdevelopment. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
- Weisskopf, T. E. (2004). Impact of Reservation on Admissions to Higher Education in India. Economic and Political Weekly, 39(39), 4339–4349. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4415591
(Author: Ishita Sinha worked as a teacher for many years in different kinds of schools. Most recently she guided children in English and social studies at The Montessori Academy, Pune. She can be reached at ishitasinha.cdg[at]gmail.com)