Neither Suited for the Home
nor for the Fields
Inclusion, Formal Schooling and the Adivasi Child
Sarada Balagopalan
 

'My child studies day and night but I don't understand it when he still continues to fail. The reality is that my child is not able to learn.' This lack of ability that Kaluram, an adivasi (tribal) father, is troubled by here, is an intrinsic absence of skills that might have enabled his child to perform better in school. As educational practitioners and researchers, this internalisation of innate failure by an adivasi father would be troubling and we could potentially analyse this lament through two varied though interconnected processes. In India, research on the schooling experiences of poor children have largely focused their analysis on quality of education issues that include costs of 'free' schooling, teacher's ability to transact curriculum and resource equity issues. The disparities in educational quality that these studies have revealed have helped explain why children are 'pushed-out' rather than 'drop out' of school. The second lens -less used in the Indian context - to probe Kaluram's lament would be to focus on the processes that affect the creation of schooled identities among marginalised children and utilise this to understand the complexities that underpin this feeling of lack. Given this felt absence of skills, what would `inclusion', integration into this school space continue to signify for Kaluram's son? To what extent do existing discourses on social exclusion problematise 'inclusion' and its effects on the identity-creation of marginal, formerly 'excluded' individuals and groups?

The effort in the article is to engage discourses of social inclusion and exclusion through experiences from the field that push our present understanding of these concepts out of a convenient dichotomised categorisation, into a complex, more subtle reading of the experiences of marginalised children in school. I utilise the experiences of adivasi (tribal) children in government schools in a village in Harda district, Madhya Pradesh on to discuss the complex and often interrelated factors that affect an adivasi firstgeneration learner's experience in school. The article argues that while some of the overt discrimination that the first-generation learner continues to experience in school can be addressed through certain policy reform processes of the modern state, there are certain fundamental exclusions that get reinforced for this learner through his/her deeper insertion into formal schooling. These exclusions are intrinsic to the history of Indian modernity and its reliance on the institution of formal schooling to exercise a 'civilising' role among marginalised populations.

2 'These children are slow': overt discrimination within formal schooling practices

This article draws on the research reports and field diaries of the two researchers based in the village Yogesh Malviya and Bal Kishen Sharma - who focused on the primary and middle schools in this village. This predominantly tribal village in Harda district of Madhya Pradesh serves as the market hub for the 20-30 smaller tribal villages in its vicinity.
In addition to the Korkus, the village has a small percentage of Gonds (another tribe), Muslims, brahmins (upper caste Hindus) and Kahars (an OBC caste). While the tribal populations are mainly engaged in agricultural work, the non-tribal populations own local provision stores and tea shops. Most of the land owned by Korkus is not irrigated, forcing them to migrate twice in a year, thereby disrupting their children's schooling. The primary school in this village was started in 1961 and the middle school in 1984. Most of the teachers in both schools are non-tribal upper-caste Hindus. The primary school does have an adivasi principal, but her influence in making the school an `inclusive' space for these adivasi children is minimal if not non-existent.
Field reports from both schools discuss the multiple levels at which overt discrimination against adivasi populations takes place and affect not only teacher-student relations but also peer interactions. Teachers have particular perceptions about the 'educability' of adivasi students that influences their attitudes towards these children and adversely affects the amount of corporal punishment these children receive. In this village, teachers' narratives are unanimous across primary and middle schools about the 'slowness' of the adivasi child, on their being 'unclean' and on their parents 'drunkenness'. A teacher discussing adivasi children says:
These adivasi children do not have the time to bathe nor the ability to learn. Teaching them is not something everyone can do easily It is not that they cannot learn. If man has to, he can even teach cows but it is just that it takes an immense amount of effort. First we need to stop these children in school from speaking the Korku language they speak at home. The things that we have to explain once or maybe twice to other children we need to explain these same things at least eight to ten times to these adivasi students. They are very slow. So even despite trying hard a large number of children still can't understand what is being taught and meanwhile the entire class has been slowed down because of them. Their parents are not able to help them at home, they don't even tell them to study. They just drink too much and send their children to the fields to graze the cows.
These above constructions of adivasi students affect the discursive practices that govern the everyday functioning of the school. These students are delegated the responsibility of keeping the school clean, which includes sweeping and swabbing the school on a daily basis. The discrimination underlying the specific tasks being allocated to adivasi students becomes apparent when we consider that these students are not allowed (within what is constructed as a privileged task) to serve water and tea to the teachers. Moreover, it is a brahmin boy who has the responsibility of locking up the middle school at the end of the day. There have been incidents in which the adivasi students have been publicly bathed by force by the teachers at the tube-well adjacent to the school. In addition, teachers very often explicitly deride students when they use the Korku language to communicate among themselves, forcing them to speak in Hindi instead. Within classroom transactions in which the main pedagogic technique utilised is reading aloud from Hindi textbooks, adivasi children seldom read in class and their homework often remains incomplete, which leads to excessive corporal punishment in the hands of the teacher.
The non-adivasi students at the school mostly eat and play among themselves; in their own endogamous groups, and they quite naturally and very often target adivasi children to ridicule with the teacher remaining a silent spectator. Within the classroom as well these children usually sit in their own groups and seldom help each other across groups with classroom work. The teacher does not lead the class in any activities that would force them to engage outside of their own cohorts and there exists no extra curricular activity in both schools that might have brought about some forced integration amongst students.
Within the above narratives, the teachers come across as discriminatory and insensitive and the analysis of such behaviour lends itself to devising suitable policy responses to ensure better quality of schooling. These could potentially include making teachers more accountable for their actions as well as responsible for taking certain institutionalised proactive steps to make students feel included. However, we need to recognise that previous research has already made known the prevalence of teacher bias and that educational policy documents do contain language in which teachers as state functionaries are made conscious of their responsibilities to ensure equal rights and equal respect for all its citizens. Given this, are these research findings just a case of non-implementation of particular state policies? Or are these discriminatory practices intrinsically tied to ideologies that are constitutive of modern schooling? By this is meant that schools have historically functioned, and continue to do so, as spaces within which the state carries out its modernisation functions to make citizens out of its 'populations'. And in doing this as the following section makes clear - it ideologically validates certain ways of being, while devaluing others. This devaluation, as the selfconstructions of Korku students and their parents make clear, exceeds our present understandings of inclusion as intrinsically linked to social policy reform.

3 'Neither suited for the home nor for the fields': the disjunctions between formal schooling and the everyday lives of the adivasis

Normative constructions of 'tribal' populations take for granted their inhabiting different lifeworlds, distinct cultures that are in large part outside of modernity and its attendant political and economic imperatives. This has often generated research around tribal children that has highlighted their childhood socialisation experiences and is persuasive about how the preservation of their cultural practices would require their continued isolation. However, given that tribal populations in India are already entrenched in or are in increasing danger of becoming enmeshed within market economies of exploitation and opportunity; how do we begin to articulate and understand tribal children's experiences with formal schooling beyond narratives of their cultural distinctness?

Although the large-scale entry of adivasi children into formal schooling is very recent and has been facilitated by state efforts to universalise elementary education, parents in the village recognise the significance of sending their children to formal school. The interview-narratives' of several parents reveal a local, historically nuanced rationale for school education as succinctly summarised by Kalu, a Korku parent, when he says, 'The speech of the school-going child changes and that is good. In school Korku children learn to speak in Hindi. They will be able to help with doing calculations while at home. If a person does not know Hindi then the mahajans [traders] will more easily exploit him.' Despite their interest, however, the quandary that confronts all of these parents -similar to what Kaluram narrates at the start of the article - is that their children are innately unable to learn and perform well in school. Therefore in this section, I would like to analyse Kaluram's narrative through exploring the 'cultural' space of the school. I do this in order to further problematise the social inclusion paradigm beyond the realm of evident policy prescriptions, as well as to critically shift the theoretical lens from its existing articulation of the distinctness of tribal traditions to recognising the distinctness of school culture and its attendant affects on the creation of subjectivities among tribal students and parents. This would require understanding the specific nature of Indian colonial modernity and democratic practice as one that is not premised on bourgeois hegemony as well as understanding the historical role the formal school plays in trying to rectify this absence.

Several post-colonial historians and anthropologists have discussed the social realties that govern democratic practice in India, pointing to the absence of a hegemony of bourgeois and liberal practices considered essential for the traditional functioning of a democracy (Chakrabarty 2002; Chatterjee 1997). Both cultural technologies of rule during colonialism as well as the nationalists' reactions to these' engendered the rise of a small indigenous elite who were part of civil-social institutions, wellversed in the norms of civil society, while the rest of society existed outside of this and were ushered into modern democratic norms through the independent nation's adoption of a modern, liberal Constitution. Therefore, while electoral politics have allowed certain groups to challenge older hierarchies, the everyday functioning of Indian social relations has not become liberal in any recognisable way. In large part the cultural codes for the expression of Power and authority in everyday life are enmeshed in relations of domination and subordination that are far from civil.
This pedagogical mission in relation to the rest of society that the nation's elites are engaged in, has extensively made use of the apparatus of the formal school to reach members of political society.' This pedagogical mission that characterises the functioning of Indian modernity is crucial to understanding the historical role that schools, as institutions of state, have been required to play in creating modern, bourgeois citizens out of its various `populations'. The history of modern schooling in India is intrinsically tied to the creation of a modern liberal self and can be traced to the policies of the colonial state and its need to create `a class of interpreters' who would function between the state and the masses.

This 'filtration theory' which focused on providing a modern liberal education to a few of the colony's indigenous elites was achieved through a deliberate neglect of the vast network of vernacular schools that existed in colonial India. According to the 1837 Adam Reports on Indigenous Education there were at least 100,000 of these schools (DiBona 1983). These vernacular schools were usually a two-tier network which included patshalas which were community-based schools for the lower classes, and the sanskrit schools or tols (as they were known in Bengal) for the upper-caste brahmins or the upper classes. While the lower castes were excluded from the learning of the Sanskrit and Arabic-Persian learning of the tols, the patshalas functioned as independent schools with their primary responsibility being to the community, and the teacher exercised control over what was to be taught as well as determined when a child had adequately learned a particular subject matter. However, the subsequent bureaucratic control of these vernacular schools by the colonial state in 1854, ushered in a modern uniform system of education which expanded, made natural and helped underpin the cultural space of formal schooling within modern, liberal understandings of the individual self.

By this is implied that underlying the culture of formal schooling in India are certain modern ideals of rationality and progress, within which adivasi populations get viewed as non-modern, or traditional. The dominant culture of modern schooling implicitly assumes that a school-going child is nurtured and inserted within a particular socio-cultural axis prior to his/her presence in school. This cultural axis, immersed as it is in this pedagogical function of the state, is interested in the child incrementally acquiring certain civil-social skills; absorbing a particular bodily discipline; becoming increasingly self-regulating and rational, and imbuing a work ethic that is invested in an imagined future career. The privileging of the above manifests itself in the school space through the functioning of a norm on the basis of which teachers acquire the legitimacy to delineate and classify students in relation to a 'natural' order (Foucault 1977).

Nakun, a young Korku girl studying in the third grade at the primary school, rationalises this lack saying, `Muslims and upper castes study well. Everybody in their community is educated. My parents are not educated. If my parents were educated perhaps I could have learned much more. But people in my community don't study well.' Nakun's selfconstruction as a student is deeply entrenched in the inferiorisation of her adivasi community The modern school space quite naturally presumes that the 'ideal' human self is one that is intrinsically tied to modern world views and livelihoods and therefore anyone outside of these constructions is ascribed an identity within an axis of deviation even prior to his/her presence in school.

The hegemonic functioning of the idea of being modern as progress allows these upper castes who are more inserted into capitalist relations of production (as traders, shop owners), without being necessarily liberal, to construct the adivasi community as primordial. The 'culture' of the adivasis becomes a familiar trope that is produced among upper-caste teachers, students and their parents to understand the incapability of the adivasi child and the concomitant burden they are perceived as exercising on this institution.

This failure of the tribal child to do well within the school space has further ramifications schooling. This is namely that colonial modernity -devoted as it was to creating 'a class of interpreters'-helped constitute modern schooling as a space that privileges mental labour over manual labour. The qualifications formal education awards are popularly viewed as the conduit to ensuring the transformation of lives from exploitative physical labour to formal employment. While inferiorisation of manual labour, needless to say, fits in well with traditional caste hierarchies, what is important to take note of here is the ways in which the modern formal school sediments these dichotomies fairly deeply as well. This divide also has its effects upon the self-constructions of tribal students with dire consequences for the adivasi community given both the increasing impoverishment of these communities and the larger power and financial networks that gaining a formal sector job involve.

In this village - in the past 40 years of the history of the school in the village - not one Korku has been able to get a job in the formal sector. Adivasi parents don't have the money to educate their children that is why villagers are scared of sending their children to school. Even if you spend money on them, teaching them, they do not get a job and they do not want to work in the fields anymore. They are neither suited for the home nor the fields.

In the village economy in which the mahajans, or traders, continually exploit tribal labour in multiple ways, the teacher symbolises for Kaluram a formal sector job that is prestigious, secure and that which he would like his children to gain from an education. But the lived reality of these jobs being non-existent to tribal graduates generates his critical analysis about why Korku parents fear sending their children to school.The symbolic distance that formal schooling creates from the world of manual labour is severely detrimental to adivasi populations, because their increasing dependence on short-term migration for subsistence requires their children to contribute to the work of harvesting grain twice a year.'

The argument in this article is that the equity issues that existing theories on social inclusion bring to the fore do not fundamentally question the discourses of modernity that underpin formal schooling nor the mental-manual labour divide inherent to it. The argument here is not that adivasi children should be kept outside of formal schooling given this historical trajectory. Rather, it is to point to a situation whose complexities cannot be easily classified into policy guidelines unless we begin to take seriously the larger power frameworks that shape the self-constructions, lives, and livelihoods of the very populations we seek to include within the space of the school. Nor should this adivasi need for their children's productive labour imply support for what is a very common refrain in middle-class India, namely that these poor children need basic education and then vocational training. The choice of vocational training beyond elementary education is conceptually not in itself a flawed solution: the problem lies in it becoming within the current power nexus the naturalised solution for only poor children. Given that these children's lifeworlds are already indexed in physical labour this would only mean systemically ensuring their, as well as formal schooling's, further entrenchment within this manual-mental divide.