Education, Poverty and Gender

Schooling Muslim Girls in India

Latika Gupta

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780815373346
• eBook ISBN: 9781317408888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book investigates the nature of identity formation among economically backward adolescent Muslim girls in northern India by focusing on the interstitial spaces of the 'home' and 'school'. It examines issues of religion, patriarchy and education, to interrogate the relationship between pedagogy and religion in South Asia.

Using a multi-disciplinary approach and multiple research methods, the volume makes significant contribution to the study of socialisation and modern education among minorities and other marginalised groups in India. It will be of interest to scholars of education, culture and gender studies, sociology, psychology, Islamic studies, and to policy-makers and non-government organisations involved in education.

1
Introduction

Education occupies an intersecting space located between the economic and cultural spheres. It also mediates between society and its culture, on one hand, and the modern state on the other. The study of a minority school for Muslim girls offers an opportunity to examine the complex interplay of sociocultural forces involved in the shaping of religious and gender identities. The inquiry presented in this book is concerned with this space. It attempts to trace and examine the formation of religious and gender identities among poor Muslim girls in the context of their schooling. The confluence of gender and religious identities makes an absorbing area of inquiry because it helps us understand the dichotomies of social and personal lives of girls. No matter how we define the term ‘community’, gendering of girls across different communities in India implies preparation for carrying a special responsibility to maintain cultural norms and practices (Dube 1996). My study demonstrates that while a community may be based on wider forces like religious faith, occupation and income, it forms an ethos which is essentially local in character. It is through the ethos that a community carries out the socializing function so essential for its own survival. As a modern institution, the school has the choice to share the ethos of a community or form its own. A lot depends on this choice.

My interest in religious identity derives from my earlier work (Gupta 2008) on Hindu and Muslim children living in Daryaganj, a composite neighbourhood of Old Delhi. I found that children as young as four years of age had begun to identify with their religious group and had developed a sense of separateness from other religious groups. While the Muslim children seemed better informed about Hindu practices and rituals than vice versa, the Hindu children carried strong prejudices against Islam and articulated their negative feelings towards Muslims quite spontaneously. Apparently, the cohabitation of Hindus and Muslims in Old Delhi had not resulted in tolerance towards the minority religion. I felt curious about the development of self-identity in such children.

The quality of educational experiences and the desire to assert one’s freedom to realize personal aspirations play a critical role in shaping the modern individual self. Modernity can be perceived as a process whereby individual freedom and choices get enhanced (Madan 1987; Rudolph and Rudolph 1967). The analysis presented in the book offers insights to appreciate what education can achieve in its role as an enabling mediator. Education mediates between the responsibility of a modern state towards its citizens on one hand and culture on the other. While the study analyses the interplay of various institutions in the life of adolescent girls, its focus remains on the multidimensional role that education performs across the milieux formed by the family, the community and its social force. According to Mills (1959), to understand an individual we need to discern all the roles she plays in different social institutions. The institutions and the roles played in them by individuals constitute different milieux. Originally used in mechanics and biology, the notion of milieu refers to influential circumstances in an individual’s life. It can be understood as a system of connections that an individual has with his/her circumstances and surroundings (Canguilhem and Savage 2001). As Mills (1969) pointed out, the exercise of sociological imagination enables us to gain an understanding of society and learn the meaning of an individual life. The relation between individual lives and social history is what Mills called ‘troubles’ and ‘conflicts’. These are specific to a location, ‘within the character of the individual and within the range of her immediate relations’. This is what constitutes an individual’s milieu (ibid.: 8). In every milieu rises a specific ethos which is a system of durable dispositions of institutions such as family, school or neighbourhood. Ethos performs a structuring function in various social institutions (Smith 2003) which determine what people do in different settings and expect others to do. In its structuring function, ethos regulates people’s thoughts and behaviour and consolidates their similarity with the cultural group, resulting in a collective identity. It becomes a device for learning ethics and norms accepted in a group or setting.

Gender constitutes a major site of tension between the socioreligious ethos of a community and the expectations arising out of modernity. A modern democratic state expects individual citizens to become capable of making judgements on the basis of objective evidence, to be aware of rights and duties and to choose an occupation. These expectations apply to both the sexes. However, society’s expectations from young girls, which are based on cultural norms and religious values, impose a conflicting framework of goals and meaning. On one side is the specific code of conduct for women followed by the community and reinforced by religious scriptures, and on the other side is the wider ethos of Indian society in which the lives of girls, irrespective of their religious affiliation, are being increasingly shaped by the economic aspirations of the family and the images of modern-looking women portrayed in the media. The education of girls needs to be studied in the context of these conflicting social and cultural expectations. The goal of promoting a secular national identity among children presupposes that religious identities will not become hostile to a civic identity. To socialize children in secular thought and attitudes implies that they will respect the spirit of religion – one’s own and others’ – and maintain alongside a scientific temper which will provide alternative explanations to life events, that is other than those available in a religious framework.

The study attempts to comprehend the life of Muslim girls in the context of their school, home and the specific religiocultural ethos of these institutions and the spaces around them. In order to do so, the study deconstructs the interplay of gender and religion in shaping identity and describes how it unfolds in a unique manner in the socio-economic setting of Daryaganj. Daryaganj is an attractive place for any research in social relations because it has mixed population and it is a residence-cum-trading area. The presence of Muslim families is quite prominent in Daryaganj, yet it does not come across as a ghetto like some other Muslim-dominated areas of Delhi. I gained access to adolescent Muslim girls through a school located in Daryaganj. In this book, the school will be referred to as Muslim Girls School (MGS¹).

MGS is a government-aided school, run under the provisions made in the Constitution of India under Articles 29 and 30. These articles allow religious minorities to run their own educational institutions in order to preserve and promote their culture, language and faith. MGS was set up by a charity group which runs an orphanage in the same building as the school. It was originally meant to provide education to the children of the orphanage. Starting in the early 1970s, it has gradually evolved into a senior secondary school which receives financial aid from the Government of Delhi. It provides free education to girls. The school is located in a relatively wealthier part of Daryaganj where several reputed private schools and publishing houses are situated. Most students of MGS reside in the other part of Daryaganj, which is relatively poor and has several small markets and residential areas divided by an intricate network of lanes. This part of Daryaganj lies behind Jama Masjid and extends from Netaji Subhash Marg to Turkmaan Gate. There are 21 small mosques in this area.

MGS was established to promote education among Muslim girls with a view to improve their ability to look after a family. According to the 33rd annual report of the school, ‘an educated woman is like a blessing for the entire family because she can serve her roles of wife and mother better’. The school’s perspective on the education of girls derives from the community’s cultural and religious ideals in which the supreme role of a girl is believed to be in the family. This role requires worldly wisdom and an informed personality capable of ensuring the upbringing of children with efficiency and traditional values. The school situates its educative role in this view on girls’ education:

As she provides not only love, affection and care for the family but also provides help whenever required…. Furthermore, a good wife forgets, corrects and forgives mistakes. Forgiveness comes with wisdom and wisdom comes with education. (MGS 2009: 9)

MGS provides religious as well as modern education to its students. The students of MGS appear in the public examinations conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), and the school therefore officially follows the curriculum prepared by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and uses all its textbooks. The medium of instruction for all subjects is Urdu, while Hindi and English are studied as extra languages.

Gender

Gender is a sociocultural phenomenon. Varied strands of scholarly inquiry and social movements across the world have led to a gradual development of this field in the twentieth century. We can draw upon three sources to seek ideas and inspiration in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of gender. These are (i) the Western tradition of feminist theory; (ii) committees appointed by the Government of India and scholarly work by Indian researchers and (iii) social activist sites constituted by public intellectuals in India.

Western scholarship

Margaret Mead (1935) was the first theorist to argue that gender was a cultural, not a biological, concept. She emphasized the relevance of social environment in shaping the culturally specific constructs of gender. However, biology continued to shape the discourse of gender until the 1950s when the research carried out by Talcott Parsons and Robert F. Bayles (1955) on the roles of men and women in a family setting set the stage and shaped the discourse of gender in the decades following Mead’s work. The thrust of Parsons’s work was that different roles of men and women had a biological basis; and the process of industrialization and modernization had rationalized the allocation of sexual and economic functions between the two. The participation of women in power structures constituted the main axis on which the concept of gender had been constructed. Erving Goffman’s (1956, 1957) work on social interaction laid out the rules for a sociological understanding of spoken and physical interaction in ‘social situations’. His contention was that human beings assume that all of them possess an ‘essential nature’ when they interact with others in their familiar environment. The essential nature can be determined through the ‘natural signs expressed by them’ (1957: 48). Femininity and masculinity are prototypes of essential expression which draw the basic characterization of every individual. Following this contention, three significant concepts in the structural understanding of gender can be attributed to Goffman. The first concept is the understanding of women’s experiences in public spaces, including the conversations held and remarks passed on the street. Carol Gardner (1983) found that women saw public spaces as ‘sites of sexual harassment in everyday life’, and she identified a system through which men frighten women and dominate them. The second concept given by Goffman is the recognition of asymmetrical distribution of power in the spoken interaction of men and women. Goffman (1956) had identified a general principle of symmetrical relations between equals and asymmetrical relations between those who are not. He devised a method of watching and listening to interactions which was used by feminists to understand what happens between men and women in everyday talks. Pamela Fishman (1978) identified an asymmetrical relationship between women and men. She found that women contributed significantly more than men to generate a flow of messages in family settings. Women remained attentive listeners and also displayed appreciation of what men spoke, whereas men showed a lack of interest in what women had to say.

The third significant concept in this category stems from Goffman’s (1976, 1977) own work on sex and gender. He reconceptualized gender from the perspective of social order and situations that maintain it. He showed that society first produces gender-specific displays (behaviours) and then reads them as reflecting the ‘essential natures’ of men and women. He explicated how innate sexual differences are used to argue in favour of existing institutional arrangements; and then those arrangements ensure the distinction between the sexes and support the justification of perceived differences. Carol Gilligan’s (1982) research changed the face of feminist scholarship on human development. In her book, In a Different Voice, she showed how the understanding of human development had so far excluded women’s experiences. She critiqued theories which made male experiences normative and presented the female experience as deviant, particularly the theory of moral development proposed by Lawrence Kohlberg (1966). Gilligan found that the trajectory of women’s moral development differed from that of men, revolving around issues of responsibility towards others. The content of women’s reflections did not adhere to the logic of fairness and equality. It accommodated concerns for the actual concrete consequences in relative terms to the parties involved in a moral conflict. Gilligan’s contribution is germinal as it points towards the need to review universalistic norms which were at that time and still are highly gendered.

Candace West and Don Zimmerman (1987) took the understanding of gender to another level of advancement by arguing that gender is a routine, methodical and repeated achievement. In simple words, a ‘doing’ of gender is undertaken by men and women in order to remain competent members of society. It involves a web of activities in which perceptions, rules of interaction and power relations provide expressions of masculine and feminine natures. West and Zimmerman showed in their formulation that gender is at work in all interactions of human beings, and they drew attention to the active process by which gender differences are produced by men and women. This work gives a great impetus to the conceptualization of gender as a social construct. Conway et al. (1987) offered a conceptual understanding of gender in their introduction to a collection of writings on gender. Their postulation was that social authority produces culturally appropriate forms of male and female behaviour, mediated by the complex interactions of economic, social, political and religious institutions. Once created, these forms of behaviour constitute gender boundaries which serve to reproduce political, economic and social relations in a gendered form. The norms of gendered behaviour are not stated explicitly in any society; language, symbols, signs and codes of conduct convey those norms implicitly. The authors made the point that a gender-based inquiry is actually an inquiry about social and cultural systems which constitute a society. By undertaking studies in gender, scholars contribute fresh perspectives to understand humanity and its crisis.

Pierre Bourdieu (1990) extended the understanding of his own concept of ‘habitus’ to argue that gender relationship involved domination. Habitus is a social practice which results from the regularity of social action. It is a capacity that produces socially accepted behaviour and nature which are given the shape of motor schemes and body automatisms. Habitus shapes the body, its gestures as well as stances; it makes the body a medium of expression for itself. Bourdieu argued that through the habitus, gender relationships institute body experiences, sensory perceptions and the form of the body. His theoretical construct led scholars to conceptualize gender as the action of the individual as well as a pre-structured social practice. The habitus is determined by a pattern of classification that constructs male and female as absolute opposites. This classification, according to Bourdieu, is hierarchical in which symbolic violence constitutes the central aspect of male domination. The oppressed (women)identify themselves as inferior and internalize the worldview of the dominant (men) along with a self-image appropriated by the dominant. Beate Krais and Jennifer William (2000) have extrapolated from this argument and presented their observation in the following words: ‘Men’s view of women – their positioning of the male as universal and of the female as particulars, as deviant – and the dichotomies and classifications that have developed from this vision – also determine women’s thinking and perception’ (ibid.: 59). In everyday interactions and acts, a constant force of symbolically violent activities of men keep women positioned in the gendered classification as inferior. Bourdieu’s concepts and analytical categories took the understanding of gender to yet another level with the point that male dominance gets stored in the human body and is then reproduced in the actions and perceptions of individuals.

Gender is now conceived as a system of social practices in which men and women constitute two unequal categories of social relations. There are cultural beliefs which define the inequality between men and women, and their distinguishable behaviour. According to Cecilia Ridgeway and Shelley Correll (2004), ‘the core aspects of gender beliefs consist of both a hierarchical dimension that associates men with greater status and instrumental competence and a horizontal dimension of fundamental difference that associates each sex with what the other is not’ (ibid.: 527). These beliefs get operationalized in social relational contexts. A social relational context is the one in which individuals relate to others in order to act in person or virtually. These contexts evoke hegemonic cultural beliefs which form the background in which behaviour of the self and others is perceived in ‘gender-consistent directions’ (ibid.: 512). The division of labour in the household, sex-based segregation of jobs and gender-based status determine the systemic features of gender.

Gender scholarship in India

Scholarly works on gender in India were inspired by the feminist movement of the West. Although women’s involvement in a public (including political) life in India goes back to early twentieth century, feminist scholarship is a relatively recent phenomenon. A major initiative in this respect was in the form of a report titled Towards Equality (GOI 1975a) of the Committee on the Status of Women in India (CSWI). This committee was constituted in 1971, under the chairpersonship of Professor Vina Mazumdar, by the Ministry of Education and Social Welfare, to study the problems faced by Indian women. The additional objective of CSWI was to strengthen the policies concerned with Indian women in order to integrate them in the process of national development, ensuring thereby an improvement in their overall status. The members of the committee were feminists from different academic disciplines, including economics, anthropology and sociology. The CSWI reviewed and evaluated data on various aspects of women’s status and also the directions of change in women’s roles, rights and opportunities brought about by planned development. Mazumdar, who chaired the committee, later wrote an analytical commentary on the report. In her words:

The Committee’s investigations revealed that changes in women’s roles are the by-products of many events viz, changes in the mode of production through commercialization, capital sanction, and technological developments; shifts in the value systems through the process of modernization, urbanization and the rising standards and costs of living, as well as legislative reforms, expansion of education, demographic transition and political developments. (Mazumdar and Sharma 1979: 116)

The committee faced significant obstacles in gathering experiences of working women because they mostly worked in the unorganized sector of the economy. A major conclusion of the committee was that the indicators used to measure women’s position in the changing social process did not reflect Indian social realities, especially of the rural society, because the contribution of women to the economy was largely invisible. Women were not visible as workers, and so it was difficult to take stock of their lives and analyse their conditions. The CSWI found that from the perspective of women, the process of change was moving in a direction opposite to the goals of the nation and its development. A major finding of the study was that disturbing trends in the general demographic indicators represented the groundswell of a process of devaluation of Indian women. Its manifestations could be seen in the increase in dowry deaths, commercial use and trafficking of women.

At the behest of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), a nationwide study (GOI 1994) of female children and the family in rural India was carried out in the year 1993. The objectives of the study were to generate indicators on the situation of female children, to identify their major problems, to suggest programmes to resolve them and to assist women and communities ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Abbreviations
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Identity, self and religion
• 3 Ethos as a gendering device
• 4 Articulated discourse
• 5 Four facets of identity
• 6 Conclusion
• References
• Index