mukta salve in ncert

8/10/2019 Mukta Salve in NCERT

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CONTENTSEditors Note 3

Education as Tritya RatnaTowards Phule-Ambekarite Feminist Pedagogical Practice 5SHARMILAREGE

Participation and Consequences of Education of 37Scheduled Castes in Andhra PradeshP. ADINARAYANAREDDYand E. MAHADEVAREDDY

Teaching of Social Science 52A Situated Cognition Perspective

SANDEEPKUMAR

Translating Social Constructivism into 64English Language TeachingSome Experiences

A.K. PALIWAL

Curriculum Implementation in Rural Schools 71Issues and Challenges

SHANTOSHSHARMA

Acquisition of Concept of Conservation of Length in 83Elementary School Children through Piagetian Teaching Model

REENAAGARWAL

Helping to Learn Science 97A.B. SAXENA

Resilience in Promotion of Schools as Learning Organisations 104Reflections on Karnataka Experience

RASHMIDIWAN

JOURNAL OF

INDIANEDUCATION

Volume XXXV Number 2 August 2009


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Examination and Assessment Principles 114Integrating Assessment with Teaching-Learning Processes

RAVIP. BHATIA

Evaluation of Inclusive Education Practices in 125Sarva Siksha Abhiyan(SSA) Primary Schools

AMITAVMISHRAand GIRIJESHKUMAR

Some Problems of Human Rights Education 139SHANKARSHARAN

Book Review 150Growing Up as a Woman Writer by JASBIRJAINREVIEWEDBYKIRTIKAPUR


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EDITORS NOTE

Ever since India got Independence, the search for quality in school educationhas been on the agenda of policy-makers and authorities at all levels.Institutions like NCERT, SCERTs and DIETs have been continuously makingefforts for that. The NCERT has been engaged for years in curriculumdesigning and development process for school education along with variousstakeholders including policy-makers. The Journal of Indian Education inthis issue highlights various aspects pertaining to the curriculum

implementation and also different approaches of teaching and learning inrural and urban areas.

Children are the pillars of the Nation is a common phrase but in orderto fulfil this slogan we need to build a constructive approach. Sharmila Ragein her article Education as Tritya Ratna: Towards Phule-AmbedkariteFeminist Pedagogical Practice emphasised for the needs of equality basededucation irrespective of which caste he/she belongs. Her article alsoprofoundly provokes the readers regarding the prevalent issues of genderbias in education and the relationship between teachers and students. Nextin this series, an article by P. Adinarayana Reddy and E. Mahadeva ReddyParticipation and Consequences of Education of Scheduled Castes in AndhraPradesh brings out the progress in terms of enrolment in the school and

their participation amongst scheduled caste. The study also finds out thatparents do realise the usefulness of education.

Once students enrol and start their study in schools, the issue of learningand understanding stands before us. In this regard, Sandeep Kumarhighlights how the knowledge and understanding of children develop. Hisarticle Teaching of Social Studies : A situated Cognition Perspectivedemonstrates various methods of teaching and learning. Further, A.K. Paliwalin his article Translating Constructivism into English Language Teaching:Some Experience discusses how constructivist approach leads childrentowards better learning of language.

Efforts to design new curriculum, syllabus and textbooks to improveteaching-learning process and address diverse groups of students arecontinued in many countries including India. An article by Santosh Sharma,Curriculum Implementation in Rural Schools : Issues and Challengesauthentically pointed out the loopholes in the implementation of curriculumin rural areas. For effective implementation, she emphasises the need fornumber of interacting factors which can influence each other. The studyconducted by Reena Agarwal on Acquisition of Concept of Conservation ofLength in Elementary School Children through Piagetian Teaching revealson the designing and development of appropriate teaching-learning strategy


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for children. She uses Piagets work where explanations are based on theprocess of assimilation and accommodation.

Each subject has its own pedagogy. Teachers need to realise this fact. Inthis regard A.B Saxenas article Helping Learn Science briefly explainspedagogy of science for teachers and teacher-educators. Resilience inPromoting of Schools as Learning Organisations : Reflections on KarnatakaExperience by Rashmi Diwan is an article that provides an idea about thelearning experiences and the activities that can be carried out within thecurriculum. She also emphasised the need for the educational institutionsto be free from the bureaucratic framework.

People who are concerned with the education of countrys children feelthat unless Assessment and Examination system will change educationreform will not take place smoothly. Taking up this very aspect of schooleducation Ravi P. Bhatia in his article Examination and AssessmentPrinciples Integrating Assessment with Teaching-Learning Processesreminds us the need to go beyond the traditional examination system basedon assessing the students performances.

India is a country with an extraordinary complex cultural diversity whichrequires a curricular vision which promotes flexibility, contextual andplurality. The attempt to improve the quality of education will succeed onlyif it goes hand in hand with steps to promote equality and social justice.Amitav Mishras and Girijesh Kumars article takes an analytical look at theprogress towards Indian education system. Their case study shows us how

the school children got benefitted from the government-sponsored educationalschemes like Sarva Siksha Abhiyan. Democratising education is fundamentalto addressing the diversity in optimistic way. Wherever issue of diversityemerges, it joins with the issue of Human Rights. Shankar Sharan in hisarticle Some Problems of Human Rights Education explores some of theHuman Rights issue in Indian educational system. Finally, the issue ofJournal of Indian Education concludes with a review essay by Kirti Kapurentitled Women who Write in which she has highlighted the potential ofwomen in literatures which many of the developing countries including Indianormally ignore.

We believe that this issue will enlighten our readers to criticallyre-examine education system, and also motivate them to contribute their

ideas in the endeavour of educational reform in India.

Academic Editor


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Education as Tritya RatnaTowards Phule-Ambedkarite Feminist

Pedagogical Practice*

SHARMILAREGE**

Abstract

It is now well-accepted that colonial knowledges in India were structured on

binaries that distinguished India from the West, Orient from the Occident, thus

homogenising the Indian experience into a Hindu brahmanical one. The nationalists

too, imagined alternate knowledges within these binaries, reversing them to claimover the West, a civilisational superiority located in the Vedas. This normalisation

of knowledge as Hindu and brahmanical structured by both the colonial and

nationalist binaries had/has implications for curricular and pedagogical practices

in our classrooms.

In this lecture, with an apology to the innumerable modern day Shambhukas

and Eklavyas, and to students reduced to cases of suicides on campuses, I shallmap some of the hidden injuries caused by the violence of these pedagogical

practices. In the last decade and more, there has been a welcome change in the

gender, caste and class composition of students. But this, as we know, is happening

in a context constituted by the conflicting demands of discourses of democratic

acceptance of social difference, conservative imposition of canonical common cultureand of marketisation of higher education. Invoking Phule-Ambedkarite feminist

perspectives which envision education as Tritya Ratna and are driven by the

utopia of Educate, Organise, and Agitate, I seek to dialogue with fellow teachers

on the different axes of power in our classrooms; more specifically to explore

modes through which inequalities of caste are reproduced in metropolitan

universities and classrooms. How may we as teachers and co-learners address

questions of pedagogy and authority, pedagogy and transformation by throwingback the gaze of the invisible and unteachable students in our classrooms on

our pedagogical practices?

* This is the written text of a lecture delivered during Savitribai Phule Second MemorialLecture Series at SNDT Womens University, Marine Lines, Mumbai on 29 January 2009,published by NCERT.

** Sharmila Rege is the Director, Krantijyoti Savitribai Phule Womens Studies Centre,University of Pune.


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6 Journal of Indian Education August 2009

Education as Tritya RatnaTowards Phule-Ambedkarite

Feminist Pedagogical Practice

O learned pandits wind up the selfishprattle of your hollow wisdom and listento what I have to say

(Mukta Salve, About the Grief ofMahar andMangs, 1855)

Let me ask you something oh Gods!... Youare said to be completely impartial. Butwasnt it you who created both men and

women?(Tarabai Shinde, A Comparison of

Men and Women, 1882)1

I begin this lecture with wordswritten by Mukta Salve, a fourteen yearold girl student of the mangcaste in Jotibaand Savitribai Phules school andTarabai Shinde a young maratha womantrained in the Satyashosdhak(Society ofTruth Seekers) tradition. For what bettertribute can one pay to the greatestteachers of modern India than the words

of fire with which their students talkedback to the injustice of their times? I amdeeply honoured to be delivering theSavitribai Phule Memorial Lectureorganised by the NCERT in collaborationwith SNDT, Mumbai. Savitribai in herwritings and practices addressed thecomplex relations between culture,knowledge and power and sought not onlyto include girl students and studentsfrom the ex-untouchable castes but alsoto democratise the very processes of

learning and teaching. This memoriallecture is particularly special because itis instituted in the memory of this greatwoman vi si onary and inst itut ion-builder. I am grateful to the NCERTfor deeming me worthy of deliveringthis lecture instituted in her memory. Iwould also like to place on record my

sincere thanks to the faculty, staffmembers and students at KrantijyotiSavitribai Phule Womens Studies Centreand the Department of Sociology at theUniversity of Pune, as also the Phule-Ambedkarite, Le ft and feministcommunity for providing meaningfulcontexts for the practice of criticalpedagogies.

This lecture in many ways is a

collection of stories of our classrooms,relationships between students andteachers and the political frameworkswhich constitute these stories. Like allnarrators, I have selected some andignored or postponed other stories;interpreted them in one way rather thananother. As narrators, we imagine thatwe shall achieve something by telling thestories the way we do to the people. Thesestories, I imagine, are a dialogue withfellow teachers on addressing caste andgender in the metropolitan classroom.

The present set of stories are put togetherfrom diary notings made on teaching,discussions with colleagues andstudents, notes written by students oftheir experiences often in moments ofdisruptions or departure, commentsmade on formal course evaluationsheets, the comments they half scratchout from these sheets, questions raisedin class and those asked hesitantlyoutside the class, their silences that onerushes past in the business as usual

mode during peak periods of thesemester and gestures that defynarrative expression.

Many of these emerge as narrativesof betrayal laced with temporality andplace betrayal by the system (this isnot what I expected of this place; it wasnot like this earlier), betrayal of students


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Education as Tritya Ratna 7

by teachers (I did not think that someonewho waxes eloquent on democracy wouldbe so selective in practice, teachers oftimes bygone, or in other places were/are committed to practicing what theypreach) ; betrayal of teachers by students(I thought at least students would standwith me against the in just ice byauthorities; it was not so in the magical70s/is not so in other places). Often

these narratives of betrayal and ofdecline in plurality and of standards ofour university become cynicalannouncements of the impossibility ofpracticing critical pedagogies in ourtimes or place. The present state ofuniversities then comes to be explainedeither in terms of incompletemodernisation or the modern universitybeing an alien concept in our culture.The explanations are thus framed withinbinaries that distinguish India from theWest, Orient from the Occident, and

thereby often equating Indian culture tothe Hindu brahmanical practices. Thatis to say the liberal voices bemoan theloss of pluralism arguing that the din ofparochial identities of caste,community, gender on our campuses isthe result of bad modernity; theindigenists call for gurukul likealternatives that may better suit ourculture.

It is not a coincidence that thesenarratives of decline come in times or

places where the entry of a newgeneration of scholars and students fromvulnerable sections in Indian society isposing challenges to the socialhomogeneity of the classroom, boards ofstudies and other academic bodiesleading to obvious frictions on issuesrelated to decline of standards and merit.

A new generation of dalit scholarship forinstance, drawing upon the modern dalittestimoniol, has underlined the limits ofpluralism of the Nehruvian era andbringing to centre the violence of thebleeding thumb of Eklavya and death ofShambhuka; rejected the regime of thegurukul as an alternative. Thisscholarship, following the ThoratCommittee Report on AIIMS, suicide of

Rajani (a dalit girl student whocommitted suicide because the banks didnot find her credit worthy for a studentloan) and Senthil Kumar (a dalitPh.D.student whose fellowship was stopped)has raised questions both about theaccessibility of higher education and thelimitations in making it enabling forthose who struggle to gain entry into it2.The nexus of networks of exclusion thatoperate formally and informally oncampuses in the absence of transparencyto reproduce caste inequalities in the

metropolitan university are beingdebated3.

While there are at present severalefforts at talking/writing back4, I wouldlike to mention a few by way of examplesInsight: Young Voices, a journalpublished by students and researchersfrom Delhi, the work from Hyderabad ofresearch scholar like Murali Krishna,who employs his autobiography totheorise educational practices, IndraJalli, Swathy Margaret, Jenny Rowena

who bring caste to centre to interrogatefeminist practices in the academy, thefilm Nageshwar Rao Star which startswith reflections on the star/asterix, themarker of caste identity in the admissionlist and moves to reflect on and recovernew knowledge on the Tsundurumassacre, Out-caste an informal, public


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wall-journal which looks at caste as acategory that structures both exclusionand privilege, discussions on caste oncampuses on several list-serves like Zest-Caste, and on-going M.Phil. and Ph.D.thesis across campuses in India. Closerhome, in Pune University, mention maybe made of Dilip Chavans caste-classcritique of the debate on reforming theUGC-NET, the efforts of Sajag(conscious)

students research group to reinvent therelationship between social movementsand the academia and the ResearchRoom Diaries put together byresearchers in womens studiesreflecting on their diverse histories ofhidden injuries and privilegesexperienced as students on teachersday5.

These and several other efforts areseeking to challenge disciplinary regimesof caste, opening up new ways of lookingat the present of our disciplines and

pedagogical practices and suggest thatcritical teachers should be listeningrather than bemoaning the loss of bettertimes. I wish to argue that these are newtimes in the university, the suicides andother forms of routine pedagogicalviolence notwithstanding. Men andwomen from vulnerable castes andclasses are entering higher education forthe first time and those for longconsidered unteachable are talking/writing back. This makes it possible to

throw back the gaze of the students whohave long been invisible and namelessin the classrooms onto disciplinary andpedagogical practices. Is it that years ofconfidence and certainty of teaching inour areas of expertise makes usembedded in certain kinds of argumentsso that we foreclose other possible ways

of looking and listening?6 Do we asteachers become used to ferreting outinconsistencies in stories offered to usby students and prematurely discardthem as irrelevant? This lecture is anexercise that is both restitutive andexploratory; I seek to re-listen, reflect andassign new value to stories and voicesignored and discarded earlier as also topresent recent experiences from the

classroom for exploration.Recently, a young dalit researcherand colleague narrated to me hisexperiences of the school and theuniversity, the ways in which thecurricular, extra-curricular andacademic success (lesson onDr Ambedkar in the textbook, elocutioncompetition, becoming a UGC-JRFscholar) were all instances thatreproduced caste by reducing him to astigmatised particular7. Pointing to aparadox, he asked why do even

sociologists whose object of analysis iscaste, believe that caste identities do notmatter in academic practices? I wish totake this question for consideration inthe next section, reframing it a littleprovocatively to ask Why are we afraidof identity? Why do we assumeneutrality when it comes to identities ofcaste, ethnicity, and gender andpresume that they do not affect thecontent and practice of our discipline?Do we disavow caste say it does not exist

in our context and talk of it in other termsand codes like standards, language andso on? It is common for many of usteaching in state universities andcolleges not only to categorise ourstudents into neat categories of Englishand Marathi medium or English andGujarati medium but also reduce these


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students to this singular identity (forinstance in a local college where I taughtit was customary to ask students to addan EM or MM when they introduced theirnames in any gathering). However, wemay not always be open to discussing thedifferent and contradictory identities ofteachers, students and other players inthe social relations of teaching andlearning. In the next section, I want to

explore this issue of medium ofinstruction the language question soto say and fear of identity on a ground Iam familiar with, namely the practice ofsociology.

Hidden in the Language Question Tracing the Fear of Identity 8

The hierarchy of standards betweencentral and state universities, it mighthelp to recall, draw not only on superiorinfrastructural facilities but also onEnglish being the medium of teaching

and research in the former as againstthe local/regional language in the latter.As teachers in state universities andlocal colleges, we may counter this logicthrough an opposition that assumes allsocial science practised in English to beelitist and that in the vernacular to bemore down to earth. At other times, wemay respond to the language questionthrough efforts to find quality readingmaterial in Indian languages and developEnglish language proficiency through

remedial classes. Interestingly, thislanguage question appears quiteprominently in some of the discussionsthat sociologists have had on theirdiscipline being in crisis.

Sociologists more than other socialscientists in India, have from time to timedescribed and reflected upon the crisis

in the discipline, with a moreconcentrated debate happening in the1970s and 1990s. If we revisit some ofthe articulations of crisis in thediscipline in 1970s, it is apparent thatthe language question is stronglyimplicated in the salient features, causesand solutions suggested to the crisis. Thecrisis is described in terms ofunrestricted expansion of sociology at

the undergraduate level and in Indianlanguages, market-driven textbooks andtakeover of pure pedagogies by politics.The script is one that narrates the storyof expansion of sociology at theundergraduate level and in regionallanguages as provincialisation of highereducation, in general, and sociology, inparticular. Re-reading this debate, oneis struck by two rather paradoxicalanxieties of the sociological community.On the one hand, is the angst withacademic colonisation (why do not we

have our own theories and categories),while on the other is the apprehensionabout the new and diverse expandingpublic (what will happen to standards,if teaching and learning is no longer tobe done in English). The new publics ofsociology are denigrated and assumed tobe residual, those who are in sociology,not because they want to because of apolitically imposed expansion of regionaluniversities/colleges.

The calls of crisis in the discipline

surface again in the 1990s withcomments on the increasing number ofstudents registered in doctoralprogrammes and their ignorance ofelementary facts and concepts. It comesto be argued that both teaching andresearch are in a deplorable conditionbecause most of our universities and


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other centres of higher learning havebecome cockpits for caste, regional andlinguistic conflict and intrigue. As theenrolment rates of the upper caste9,middle class metropolitan students marka relative decline and the sociologyclassroom comes to be more diverse interms of caste, region and linguisticidentities, the anxiety about theexpanding public turns into a script of

accusation. The accusation operates attwo levels; the upsurge of identities inIndian society and politics is seen ascausing the demise of merit and anyappeal to questions of identity andlanguage on the campus and in theclassroom come to be viewed as alwaysand already interest group politics. Intimes of Mandal, these narratives ofdecline of the discipline from its goldenage have to be contextualised in thebattle between the pan-Indian Englisheducated elite and the new regional elites

moving on the national scene.Interestingly it is practioners located

on the institutional and organisationalmargins of national sociology whoshifted the axis of the debate fromstandards to questions of equality;inquiring into the legitimacy ofsociological knowledge and thepronouncements of decline. Further, the1990s were marked by prominentnational sociologists lending support tothe anti-Mandal position which

dominated the middle class urbanperception of the issue. Additionally, thedebate on dalits joining the DurbanConference against discrimination basedon race and caste underlined the waysin which sociologists in the name ofobjectivity valued the opinion of expertswhile rejecting perspectives emerging

from the lived experience of caste and thehorror of atrocities. If in the 1970s, asseen earlier, national sociology describedthe expansion of sociology in regionallanguages as provincialisation of thediscipline; in the 1990s the claims ofNational sociology stood provincialised.National sociology was provincialisedas it failed to say anything beyondpopular commonsense on the Mandal

controversy though its identity hingedupon theorisation of caste; as alsobecause several questions came to beraised about nation as the natural unitfor organising sociological knowledge andabout selective processes that equatedhappenings in the elite set of institutionsin Delhi to Indian Sociology.

So if we go back to my colleaguesquestion with which we began why doeven sociologists assume that theseidentities have no consequences for thecontent and practice of their discipline?

Why was there an expectation on his partthat sociologists would be different fromother social scientists? Probably becausecaste, gender, and ethnicity are theirobject of study and they have been thefirst to include courses and modules onwomen, dalitsand tribals in the sociologycurriculum? Yet as we just saw, it issociologists more than others who seemto be afraid of any claims to caste orgender identities. They appear to assumethat avowal of gender and caste identities

will lead to feminification of theory ordemise of merit in other words topollution of academic purity. It mighthelp here to focus on the ways in whichsociological knowledge and practice areorganised by the professional bodies andthe curriculum. Women, dalits, adivasis,may be included as substantive research


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areas of sociology and in optional coursesbut this inclusion keeps the cognitivestructures of the discipline relativelyintact from the challenges posed by dalitor feminist knowledges10. Thus goodsociology continues to be defined interms of the binaries of objectivism/subjectivism, social/political, socialworld/knower, experience/knowledge,tradition/modernity and theoretical

Brahman/empirical Shudra.So every time, the problem ofexpansion of the discipline in Indianlanguages or the language questioncomes to be discussed, we gloss over theseveral layers of identities and assumesimplistic binaries of sociology practisedin English being national and rigorous,and those in Indian languages beingprovincial and simplistic. Alternatively,indigenists and nativists assumesociology practised in English to be elitistand incapable of grasping our culture

and that in regional languages down toearth and applicable to our culture.While the former position seeks to resolvethe tensions through remedial Englishcourses, translation of textbooks or asimple commitment to bilingualism; thelatter proposes teaching and writing inIndian languages as a cultural duty.These posi tions though they seemdifferent are similar in that they seelanguage only in its communicativeaspects as if separable from power

relations and the cultural and symboliceffects of language. In contrast, dalitimaginations of language, wedge openthe symbolic and material power oflanguage. In the next section, I shallbring to centre some dalitimaginationsof language to underline ways in whichcaste and gender identities remain

hidden in what we discuss as a languagequestion.

DalitImaginations Wedging Openthe Language Question

Now if you want to know why I ampraised well its for my knowledge of

Sanskrit, my ability to learn it and to teach

it. Doesnt anyone ever learn Sanskrit?

Thats not the point. The point is that

Sanskrit and the social group I come from;

dont go together in the Indian mind. Againstthe background of my caste, the Sanskrit I

have learned appears shockingly strange.

That a woman from a caste that is the lowest

of the low should learn Sanskrit, and not onlythat, also teach it is a dreadful anomaly

(Kumud Pawade, 1981 : 21)

In a word, our alienation from the Telugu

textbook was more or less the same as it

was from the English textbook in terms oflanguage and content. It is not merely a

difference of dialect; there is difference in

the very language itself. What difference

did it make to us whether we had an English

textbook which talked about MiltonsParadise Lostor Paradise Regained, orShakespeares Othello or Macbeth orWordsworths poetry about nature in

England, or a Telegu textbook which talked

about Kalidasas Meghasandesham,Bommera Potannas Bhagvtam. . Wedo no share the content of either; we do not

find our lives reflected in their narratives

(Kancha Ilaiah1996 : 15)

Through his initiatives, Lord Macaulay was

to re-craft a new intellectual order for India

which threatened the dominance of the

Brahmins and questioned the relevance ofthe Varna/caste order. This was to give

Dalitsa large breathing space Shouldwe know our past the way we like to, or

we know the past as it existed? Or should

there be any distinction between History

Writing and Story Telling? Those whocondemn Lord Macaulay for imposing a

wrong education on India do never tell us


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what kind of education system which

Macaulay fought and eventually destroyed.(Chandra Bhan Prasad2006 : 99

and115)

While giving calls of Save Marathi, the

question I am faced with is which Marathi

is to be saved? The Marathi rendered

lifeless by the imprisonment of the oral in

the standardised written Word? The Marathi

with its singular aim of fixing meaningwhich loses rhythm, intonation, emotion,

Rasa? The Marathi that generates inferioritycomplex in those speaking aani- paani11?The Marathi that forms centres of power

through processes of standardisation oflanguage? . Or the Marathi sans the

Word that keeps the bahujan

knowledgeable?

(Pragnya Daya Pawar 2004 : 45)

I dream of an english

full of the words of my language

an english in small letters

an english that shall tire a white manstongue

an english where small children practice

with smooth roundpebbles in their mouth to the spell the right

zhaan english where a pregnant woman is

simply stomach-child-lady

an english where the magic of black eyes

and brown bodies

replaces the glamour of eyes in dishwater

blue shades andthe airbrush romance of pink white cherry

blossom skins

an english that doesnt belittle brown or

black men and womenan english of tasting with five fingers

(Meena Kandaswamy2007 : 21)12

Kumud Pawades story of herSanskrit, Kancha Ilaiahs comment onthe sameness of the English and Telegutextbook, Chandra Bhan Prasadscounter commemoration of Macaulay,

Pragnya Daya Pawars interrogation ofthe power of the printed word over thespoken word and Meena Kandaswamysdream of a global English in small lettersoffer immense possibilities for wedgingopen the language question.

Kumud Pawade, a dalit feministintellectual in her testimonio ThoughtfulOutburst (1981), reflects on her journeyinto Sanskrit, teasing out in the process

the complex character of the languagequestion in our academia. KumudPawade foregrounds memories of herschool teacher Gokhale Guruji, aprototypical Brahman dressed in a dhoti,full shirt, a black cap and the vermilionmark on his forehead; who she expectedwould refuse to teach her Sanskrit.However expected responses standinterrogated as he not only taught herbut also became a major influence in herlife. People in her own community oftendiscouraged her from pursuing a Masters

degree in Sanskrit arguing that successat matriculation need notembolden herto this extent. At college the peons as alsothe higher-up officials usuallycommented on how they were takingstrides because of government moneyand how this had made them too big fortheir boots. At the university, the headof the department, a scholar of fame tookgreat pleasure in taunting her. Shewould find herself comparing this manapparently modern in his ways to

Gokhale Guruji.However, on successfully completing

her Masters digree in Sanskrit achievinga place in the merit list, her dreams ofteaching Sanskrit received a rudeshock as she could overhear thelaughter and ridicule in the interviewroom about people like her being


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government-sponsored Brahmans. Thosepassing these comments, she recallswere not all brahmans, many of themwere from the bahujan samaj whothought of themselves as brahman-haters and even traced their lineage toMahatma Phule and yet the idea of aMahargirl who was a part of this bahujansamaj teaching Sanskrit made themrestless. After two years of meritorious

performance at the Masters level,unemployment and her marriage toMotiram Pawade, a KunbiMaratha, shefinally got an appointment as anassistant lecturer in a governmentcollege and in later years went on tobecome a professor in her alma mater.However, a thought continues to troubleher it was Kumud Pawade and notKumud Somkuvar who got the job.Pawades critical work of memory unfoldsthe complex gender and caste parametersin the language question and lays bear

the dynamics of a dalitwoman acquiringan authorised tongue. Importantly sheunderlines the operation of language asa marker of subordination and exclusionin our academia and thus theimpossibility of viewing the languagequestion as a matter of communicationseparable from power relationships andcultural and symbolic effects oflanguage.

Ilaiah comments on the sameness ofKalidasa and Shakespeare, despite the

former appearing in the Telegu textbookand latter in English. He draws attentionto the difference between brahmanicalTelegu and the bahujan renderingslocating the difference in the latteremerging from production basedcommunication. He argues thecommunists and nationalists spoke and

wrote in the language of thepurohit. Theirculture was basically sanskritised; wewere not part of that culture. For good orill, no one talked about us. They neverrealised that our language is alsolanguage, that is understood by on andall in our communities. (p. 14). Ilaiahfurther underlines the sameness of theEnglish and Telegu books in being aliento the bahujan; their only difference

being that one was written with twenty-six letters the other with fifty-six. Ilaiahsreflections problematise the secularvernacularist position, underlining thecomplete domination of Hindu scripturesand sanskritic cultures in vernaculareducation. Any easy equation betweenEnglish as alien and Telegu as ourlanguage yielding our categories ofanalysis stands interrogated. Further,Ilaiah suggests that the question ofculture mediates between the axis ofequality and the academia and the

language in which education takesplace is an epistemological issue morethan a matter of mere instruction.

Prasads celebration of Macaulaysbirthday on 25th October 2006 andinstallation of a DalitGoddess of Englishto underscore the turn away fromtradition has been brushed aside oftenas an attention seeking gimmick. Thiscounter commemoration of Macaulayhas significance for destabilising thehegemonic memory of Macaulay as the

villain who declared that a single shelfof Shakespeare was worth more than allthe Sanskrit and Arabic literature of theEast. Prasad re-reads Minutes onEducation to underline Macaulaysargument about the British having to givescholarships to children to study inSanskrit and Arabic, even when they


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were ready to pay for English education.This re-reading disrupts the ongoingprocesses of collective remembrance oflanguage and education in colonialIndia. Prasads act of countercommemoration renders Macaulaysargument as not directed against thevernaculars; but against the outmodedliterature of the Vedasand Upanishads,and thus an important moment in the

history of Dalitaccess to education. It isimportant to note Prasads comments ondiscovering the top secrets of thelanguage politics of Macaulay in hisexplorations into the tensions betweenhistory writing and story telling;thereby suggesting that an engagementwith the language question is alsoessentially an engagement withreinventing the archive the verymethods of knowledge.

Pragnya Daya Pawar (2004) talksback to those giving calls in Maharashtra

to save Marathi; asking them thepertinent question which Marathi? andteases out the collusion of state andelites in framing the language question.Interrogating the processes ofstandardisation of the language, shepoints out to the homogenisation ofmeaning constituted by the processes ofstandardisation. She draws attention tothe efforts of the Maharashtra state toempower Marathi as a language forscience and technology which freeze and

de-root the diversity of words into thesingular Word. Standardisation on onehand brutalises/marginalises/fails thedalit bahujanwho bring into the systemthe non-standardised languagepractices. On the other hand, moreviolently, it wipes away the epistemicvalue of all oral forms of knowing of the

bahujan. She recalls that the dictum ofthe liberal humanists society willimprove when its people gain wisdomfrom education was first called intocrisis in India by Jotiba Phule. That abahujanstruggling against all forms ofcultural colonisation, should have beenthe first to call this liberal agenda intoquestion she observes is logical andnot coincidental. The language

question thus opened up, traces thepolitics of internal fragmentation andhierarchisation of the vernacular in post-colonial Indian states and sees theseprocesses as inseparable from those thatmonitor the differential epistemic statusof different knowledges particularly ofthe printed and the oral.

Meena Kandaswamy inMulligatawny Dreams dreams of anenglish full of words selected from herlanguage, an english that challengesboth the puri ty of standardised

vernaculars and the hegemony of English.It is an english in small letters, alanguage that resists imperialist racismand casteism of both English and thevernacular. Such hybrid formations oflanguage are seen as enriching Englishby opening it up to appreciate brownbodies, black eyes and eating with fivefingers. English as the language ofmodernisation, is disrupted suggestingthat in the present conjuncture spreadof English has gone beyond the worldwide

elite thus opening up possibilities ofchallenging the hegemony of imperialistEnglish with many resisting englishes.Further, the dreams of english point tothe limitations of framing the languagequestion in terms of proficiency inEnglish language, leaving little space forplayful radical innovations in pedagogy.


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It is not coincidental, that dalitimaginations engage with the powerrelations that are glossed over in debateson language question discussed earlierand thus wedge open and interrogate notonly the Right-Wing and state agendasof the language question but also thatof the liberal-humanists. We can see thatthe liberal humanist fear of identity, ofdecline in standards comes from a

commitment to a particular idea ofdemocracy. It is not as if those whocomplain of decline in standards areopposed to including all others in theirsystem of knowledges be it theuniversity or the cognitive structures ofthe discipline. Within this idea of ademocratic university, the masses willhave to wait until they receive a degreeof formal training (learn to speak like us)to comprehend requirements of a pluraland democratic university. However,since the 1990s, those considered

incapable of comprehending democraticrequirements have come to the fore todefend democracy, even as it pertains tothe knowledge of democracy, while theimagined champions of democracy beganmoving away from processes that informit13. All others are entering theuniversity with new vocabularies andmoral economy, and as the dalitimaginations on language suggest areinterrogating the assumed hierarchy ofdifferent knowledges, archives and

methods of knowledge. For criticalresearchers and teachers, fear of identityand masses can no longer be an optionas the radical instability of the manylanguages of the subaltern citizens ofmass democracy calls for carefullistening. If we as teachers are toparticipate in the new times, exercises

in re-imagining the content and methodsof knowledge becomes inseparable fromthose in reinventing pedagogicalpractices. In the next section, I arguefor reinventing pedagogies throughPhule-Ambedkarite-Feminist (PAF)perspectives; asking why theseperspectives came to be excluded indebates on education in post-colonialIndia.

Phule-Ambedkarite-FeministPedagogies Location and Exclusion

Having neither the expertise nor theintention to draw a set of guidelines forPAF pedagogies, what I seek to do in thissection is to historically map thedifference of Phule-Ambedkariteperspectives on the project of educationand the probable reasons for theexclusion of these perspectives fromimaginations of alternative perspectives

on learning and teaching. If followingPaulo Freiere14we see critical pedagogyas contesting the logic and practices ofthe banking method for a moredialogical and transformative project ofeducation, then PAF pedagogies, simplyput, may be seen historically asconstituting one school of criticalpedagogy. Historically, we can read in thecolonialist and nationalist discourses onIndian society, a battle over the functionand nature of knowledge. While thecolonialist project represented India asthe spirit of Hindu civilisation andtherefore distinct and disjunct from theWest; the regime of classification andcategorisation of Indian traditioncreated norms for colonial ruleenhancing the status of brahmans asindigenous intellectuals. While, colonial


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knowledges were structured on binariesthat distinguished India from the West,Orient from the Occident; thenationalists imagined alternateknowledges by reversing the claims ofsuperiority of the West, locating thesuperiority in the Vedas. Thus, thoughthe colonialists and nationalistscontested the function of knowledge incolonial India, for both, the nature of

knowledge of India was essentially Hinduand brahmanical. After the Second WorldWar, social science discourse refashionedthe binaries of Orient/Occident throughthe tradition/modernity thesis orindigenous approaches; both of whichglossing over the structural inequalitiesin Indian society normalised the idea ofknowledge and the educational projectof/in India as Hindu and brahmanical15.

Phule and Ambedkar in differentways, by weaving together theemancipatory non-Vedic materialist

traditions (Lokayata, Buddha, Kabir) andnew western ideas (Thomas Paine, JohnDewey, Karl Marx for instance) hadchallenged the binaries of Westernmodernity/Indian tradition, privatecaste-gender/public nation and soughtto refashion modernity 16and thereby itsproject of education. Phule andAmbedkar in severa l wr it ings andspeeches but more particularly theformer in Gulamgiri (1873), and thelatter in Annihilation of Caste (1936),

The Riddles on Hinduism (Compiled andpublished in 1987) and The Buddha andHis Dhamma (1957) undertake a rationalengagement with core analyticalcategories emerging from Hindumetaphysics which had been normalisedas Indian culture and science17.

Throughout the text of Gulamgiri,Phule stresses that Hindu religion isindefensible mainly because it violatesthe rights and dignity of human beings.He turns the false books of the brahmanson their head by reinterpreting theDashavataara of Vishnu to rewrite ahistory of the struggles of the shudrasand anti-shudras. He moves swiftlybetween the power and knowledge nexus

in everyday cultural practices, mythsand history. In his Memorial Addressedto the Education Commission (1882) fora more inclusive policy on education andin his popular compositions like theshort ballad on Brahman Teachers inthe Education Department (1869), Phuledemonstrates how state policy anddominant pedagogical practices areintrinsically interlinked. He comments atlength on the differential treatment tochildren of different castes and thecollusion of interests of the Bombay

government school inspectors andteachers. He calls for more plurality inthe appointment of teachers and theneed to appoint those committed toteaching as a truth-seeking exercise.Ambedkar in Annihilation of Caste(1936) argues against the absoluteknowledge and holism idealised bybrahmanical Hinduism and critiques thepeculiar understanding of nature and itslaws (karma) in the Shastric texts. BothPhule and Ambedkar underline the

preference for truth enhancing valuesand methods through an integration ofcritical rationality of modern science andthe skepticism and self reflection ofancient non-Vedicmaterialists and theBuddha. It is clear both in and throughtheir works that they see organisation of


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knowledge as complexly related to theinterlocking connections of differentidentities. This leads them to valuesituated knowledge but such that theydo not collapse all experience intoknowledge but do highlight how certainexperiences (oppression based on caste,gender) do lead people to certain kindsof knowledges.

Phule in the first modern Marathi

Play Tritya Ratna draws complexlinkages between religious-cultural andeducational authority and re-imagineseducation therefore as the Tritya Ratna(third eye) that has the possibilities toenable the oppressed to understand andtransforms the relation between powerand knowledge. Ambedkar in a speechin Nagpur in 1942 at the All IndiaDepressed Classes Conference, advisesthe gathering to Educate-Agitate-Organise (a motto that became centralto the Ambedkarite movement and

community) arguing that this was centralto the battle for freedom. Phulesconscious adoption of the dialogical formof communication and Ambedkarsinsistence in the Bombay University ActAmendment Bill (1927) to move beyondthe examination-oriented patterns oflearning and teaching underline theirconviction on the centrality of dialoguein the project of education. Ambedkar,debating the Bombay University ActAmendment Bill, highlights the linkages

between issues otherwise thought to bedisjoint namely understaffing, dictationof notes and the lack of adequaterepresentation of backward castes onadministrative bodies such as thesenate. Countering arguments regardingexamination-centric education as asafeguard for promotion of standards; he

underscores how this exam-centric modein fact reproduces caste inequalities inthe university. He underlines thesignificance of combining efforts toincrease access to education forvu lnerab le sections with those toreconceptualise administrative andcurricular practices of higher education.

Both Phule and Ambedkar, as maybe apparent from the discussion above,

seek a rational engagement with thepedagogy of culture to see how powerworks through the product ion,distribution, and consumption ofknowledge within particular contextsand re-imagine a culture of pedagogybased on truth-seeking. The differenceof Phule-Ambedkarite pedagogicalperspectives lies in a double articulationthat conceives education then not onlyin terms of cultures of learning andteaching but also dissenting against thatwhich is learnt and taught by dominant

cultural practices. This entailsconstituting teachers and students asmodern truth-seekers and agents ofsocial transformation who seek to becomea light unto themselves. The methodsare those that seek to integrate theprinciples of prajna (criticalunderstanding) with karuna(empatheticlove) and samata (equality). Thisdemocratisation of method of knowledgemarks the difference of Phule-Ambedkarite perspectives from methods

based on binaries of reason/emotion,public/private, assumption of neutralobjectivity/celebration of experience thatinform much of our teaching andresearch. One sees significantintersections with Black feministpedagogies that directly link pedagogywith political commitment in envisioning


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education as the practice of freedom andthereby seek to challenge the assumeddivide between mind/body, public/private and reason and emotion18. Whythen have social scientists in search ofalternative pedagogies rarely turned toPhule, Shahu or Ambedkar? Why did thesearch for alternatives usually end withGandhi, Aurobindo and Nehru? Howmight this DalitPhobia19or exclusion

in the academia and its cognitivestructures be explained?Baburao Bagul, the revolutionary

dalitwriter has explained the exclusionof this discourse in the formation ofknowledges in post-colonial India interms of the intelligentsia turning thenational movement, into a form ofhistorical, mythological movement andancestor worship thus reducing the othermovements to a secondary status20.The nationalist labelling of the dalitdiscourse as anti-national, ideologically

particularistic, specific to certain castesor as emergent from the British policy ofdivide and rule resonated in thepractices of higher education in post-colonial India. In the 1970s the ideologyand practices of the DalitPanthers anddalit literature including thecompositions of the mud-house culturalactivists the shahirs (composers ofballads) foregrounded the experience ofcaste to challenge the feudalbackwardness of Hinduism normalised

in educational practices21

. Thischallenge was co-opted in the academiathrough frames that included dalitsindisciplinary knowledges while keepingintact the core of disciplinaryknowledges. Since the 1990s, asdiscussed earlier, tensions betweendifferent forms of modernities in Indian

society are being played out and a newscholarship is making convincingarguments about appeal to caste notbeing casteism and of claims unmarkedby caste made by the dominant torepresent and classify the modern asbeing situated, local and partial.

Since the 1990s, this secularupsurge of caste at the national levelinterfaced with local dalit movements

and international contexts like the U.N.Conference against Racism is shapingvaried trajectories of dalit studies indifferent regions in India22. PAFpedagogies are enabled by thisconjuncture and the assertion of dalitfeminism which have opened uppossibilities of new dialogue betweenPhule-Ambedkarite and feministperspectives. PAF pedagogicalperspectives are critically different fromthe two much discussed projects inhigher education of the same decade, viz.,

value education and autonomy. They aredifferent in that they contest the logic ofprojects based on essentialist apriori setof morals or on neo-liberal rhetoric ofchoice that comes without freedom. Thepractice of PAF pedagogies thus seek todevelop cultures of dissent throughanalyses of the various categories ofoppression underlying the structuresand organisation of knowledge, butwithout reducing them to a mere additivemantra of caste, class and gender

differences and inequalities. The practiceof PAF obviously needs more than asimple transplantation of the guidelinesthrough which PAF perspectives work toour situations. In the next section, I shalltry to grapple with some of the issues thatemerge in the practice of PAF pedagogiesin our academia.


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Phule-Ambedkarite FeministPedagogies Issues in Practice

PAF pedagogies, as argued earlier viewthe pedagogical as a cultural practicethat cannot be separated from thecontexts of articulation. This requiresthen analyses of the ways in which casteand gender organise knowledge in oureducational setting, not as some

unchanging essence but rather asinterlocking connections of differentidentities and the articulations betweenthem. Therefore differences of caste,class and gender do not becomereadymade answers to which allpedagogic practices may be reduced butthe history of their intersections,formation within particular historicalevents and spaces are the problems thatpropel the pedagogical practices. Thiswould require us to be historicallygrounded in the contributions of the

oppressed to creating a democratic world,in general, and the anti-caste feministstruggles, in particular, and to thinkthrough not just the classroom but alsothe academy. The academy as a part ofthe larger socio-political arena bothdomesticates and manages differencesand inequalities and enables strugglesagainst domination. If education, asdiscussed earlier is the space betweenthe pedagogy of cultural practices andculture of pedagogy, our practices have

to be located in specific historicalconjuncture and institutional contextswhich both enable and constraint thearticulation23. One may make a modestbeginning by delineating crucial featuresof our present and developing methodsto ground historically and theoreticallythe organisation of relations of power and

knowledge including the expectationsand demands made on us as teachersand on relations with colleagues andstudents.

The present conjuncture is markedby intense scrutiny and attack on highereducation constituted by conflicting andcrisscrossing demands of severaldiscourses more specifically those ofpost-Mandalmass democracy, state with

token acceptance of social differences,reactionary brahmanical elitism seekingto impose canonical notions of commonHindu culture and privatisation,economic and technological rationa-lisation of higher education. On ourcampuses we see this unfold through theeveryday events like changing socialcomposition of students and facultymembers, instrumental rationalisationand Hinduisation of curricula in thename of vocationalisation andindigenisation, opening up of centres/

cells for study of socially excluded groupswhich remain at the margins of theinstitutions, shortage of hostel facilitiesfor students, privatisation of messfacilities, greater pressures to combinework and studies, increased surveillanceby authorities to regulate student politicsand an increasingly intolerantmeritocracy that expresses itself througha rhetoric of choice and freedom withoutany reference to power and inequality.

The struggles of the feminists, dalit-

bahujans, tribals and religious minoritiesin the 1980s and 90s have enabled tosome extent formerly silenced groups toreassert and reclaim experiences andknowledge in the educational setting.This identity politics has covered complexand diverse terrains of theoreticalpractices and not all positions move


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unproblematically from resistance tobroader politics of democratic struggles.Yet it would be simplistic, as discussedearlier to dismiss all claims to identitiesas separatist, reactionary anddetrimental to academic standards. Thecampuses at present are a site of violentand hidden breakouts, skirmishes andinjuries over forms and ownership ofcultural capital. Many faculty members,

administrators and students who seethis as a decline of standards and spiritof real debate are turning to privatecolleges and universities. Some othersstay back but withdraw from theeveryday of academic bodies andclassrooms for the new cultures theyargue have scant regard for civility24.What does this conjuncture produce interms of positions and practices for thepedagogical, in general, and for PAFpedagogical practices, in particular?Drawing upon Ambedkars notion of

history as being crucial to the recoveryof hope in future; the presenteducational setting becomes anopportunity for drawing up a moralimagination beyond the existingconfigurations of power.

Many of us who see education, ingeneral, and the classroom, inparticular, as a site of struggle do oftendiscuss several of the issues that havebeen raised in this lecture so far. Yet, inpractice the challenge seems to be to

move beyond personal blaming or/andfeelings of guilt and to design and developpedagogies as a political project. Thechallenge is to develop a method ofreflexive analysis, employing self-questioning as an analytical andpolitical process to see how experiencesare socially constructed. To review how

a normal/good teacher, student andclassroom are socially and politicallyconstructed and thereby interrogate ourdifferent and contradictory locationswithin the social relations of teachingand learning. Thus understanding andtransforming the social relations oflearning is a struggle that is bothpersonal and political. What we do nothave as a resource for such an exercise

and need to put together is a sustainedproject to collect, document and analysethe diverse life stories and everydayexperiences of teachers in differentcontexts. This will allow biographisingof the social structures and processes ofeducation and structuralising ofbiography of those engaged in teaching25.

The search for new subject positionsas teachers and students is constrainedby the gi ven educational set tingsand therefore cannot be entirelystraightforward. Even as we search for

new subject positions, we may still desireapproval within the given terms, estimatea cost-benefit analysis of takingpedagogical risks or sometimes realisethat interests are served better byremaining within the dominantdiscourse. In the relative absence ofcritical pedagogies as an issue fordepartmental or college staff meetings,many of us turn to making notes fromthe lives of great teachers, scan theburgeoning lite rature on femini st

pedagogies or make observations aboutthe pedagogical atmosphere in renownedcolleges and universities in order tounderstand the possibilities andlimitations of our own teaching practices.Often, one is disappointed, for efforts andexperiences of others seem so farremoved from what is happening in our


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classrooms. The first response to this gapin experiences often is to gloss over theunease with justifications related tomaterial settings of the educationalsettings differently equipped facilities,difference in number of similarlyinterested colleagues, difference in thelevels of intervention by academic bodies.While these material settings do matter,these are a part of the problem of the

political project of unsettling therelations26 in the university and wecannot as if postpone question ofpedagogies until the material setting isset right. The tensions between what onethinks is good teaching and whatstudents expect from us; desire to bepopular/is accepted/to be madepermanent and to challenge dominantpedagogical practices is as much a partof the material setting.

Both as teachers and students weenter the institutional space of education

as persons with a set of experiencesrelated to social location and informedby set of discourses of educat ion.Practices of academic training andknowledge production generally ignorethese social relations of the teacher andstudents and create an illusion of acommon academic ground. This has atleast two immediate and seriousimplications for our educationalsetting actual relations of power areglossed over and social differences get

articulated in ways that reducedifference to a singular identity. Considerfor instance the case of a dalitcolleague,an engaged teacher of Political Sciencewho despite his on-going research intoAmbedkarite thought finds himself optingto teach courses other than Ambedkarthought. As he explains he is uneasy

with the tensions between what he callsreservation of certain courses for facultyfrom the reserved categories and thepressures to prove that these facultymembers have the more universal andtheoretical knowledge that teachers ofthat discipline are supposed to possess.The actual relations of power are glossedover as the difference; the social locationof this teacher becomes not a lens

through which the normative/assumeduniversal of the discipline has to beinterrogated but rather a ground to makesuspect his commitment to universal.

As feminists teaching courses ongender, participating in the organisationof academic life we have often contestedsimilar assumptions about womenteachers and criticised the rulingpractices of our institutions whichexclude women from the theoretical andthe universal. As upper caste, middleclass, women teachers, while naming

ruling practices which regulate oureducational settings; we may often namegender but evade interrogating ownpower and privileges (caste, class, region)through practices of non-naming (weoften claim that we do not even talkabout caste, it is they who talk about itall the time). The ways relations of powerand knowledge are organised its quitepossible to live these relations withoutreflecting on the power of non-namingand ways in which academic success and

failure are produced. As feministteachers we cannot rest with themultiplication of seminars, workshops,modules and courses on women/genderin our academia. We need to interrogatethis success of gender in the academyand to ask if these are driven merely bystate policies and/or market imperatives.


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Furthermore, we need to give up thecomfort of working with the homogenouscategory woman; for though the liberalhumanist subject of feminism standschallenged the feminist imagination inthe classroom continues to assume themodel of unitary student and feministteacher27. Consider for instance theaccount by Jenny writing as a researchscholar from a Backward Caste,

analysing her complicated relationshipto womens studies Today I know thatit is not enough to open up research tofeminist frameworks. If feminist researchcannot open itself up to the problems ofcaste and religion in a casteist-patriarchal society like India, it willforever close the doors of research to somany women who are molded by theexperience of gender and castereligion.28 This account disrupts anysimplistic understanding of alternatespaces like womens studies; once again

drawing attention to the ways in whichpower and knowledge come to beorganised even within alternate spacesin the academy. From the significance ofunderstanding contexts and differencesin our relationship to the academy ingeneral, in the next section, I move to themore specific but related questions aboutthe relationship between teachers andstudents.

Interrogating Teacher as God orSaviour Pedagogy, Authority andCannon

In the present conjuncture how is therelationship between the teacher andthe taught performed? How does theintersection of generational and otherdifferences between them disrupt thisrelationship? We may as practitioners of

PAF pedagogies reject the Hindu principleof teacher as god embodied (Gurusakshat par brahma) but then do engagedpedagogies such as PAF instal teachersas the new saviours of the students?Since the classroom seems to be the bestplace to start to discuss these issues, Iwould like to put for your considerationhere two autobiographical notes ondisruptions from the classroom29which

I believe are situations commonlyencountered by teachers. The first refersto the shock, anger, disgust and painthat one recognises in the body languageof a student who has just been handedher test paper with the marks or grades.The student often lets some time elapsebefore contes ting the eva luation,probably checking the marks, grades ofothers in the class comparing andcontrasting, thereby estimating the level ofinjustice (imagined and real), done to her.

Two students and not by co -

incidence, one from a Nomadiccommunity in Maharashtra and anothera tribal student from Manipur, musteredenough courage to encounter me andasked in different ways if their lower gradehad anything to do with the less spacethey had given in their answer to Phule-Ambedkarite critiques of mainstreamperspectives on caste. As a teacher, I hadat that point at least three options respond in terms of some absolutes (itsnot really good, you have not covered it

all, your expression could have beenbetter) thereby exercising my authorityas final judge of the standards.Legitimise my authority as an evaluatorby making transparent the parametersof my evaluation. Most difficult of alloptions seems to be the third option thatof calling into question my judicial


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authority as a teacher-evaluator bytranslating the students contestation ofgrade into an opportunity for dialogue.Dialogue here is not suggestive of astrategy of appeasement (of increasingthe marks) but of listening to thecontestation and reflecting upon andreviewing in this context the veryparameters of evaluation and possiblytransforming them. Obviously these

students were raising questions thatmoved within and outside the classroom,for one they were raising questions aboutthe possibilities of an evaluationremaining fair in the context of theteachers avowed commitment to a Phule-Ambedkarite politics and about their ownalienation from a curriculum that hardlyengaged with their histories andexperiences.

The second autobiographicalnarrative relates to the comments of atribal girl student from one of the most

underdeveloped regions in Maharashtrawho had opted for three of my courses inconsecutive semesters and who I saw asbringing considerable enthusiasm andintensity into the classes. However, at theend of the Masters Programme, she toldme, to my dismay, that the classroomexperiences had been profound buttroubling because of the immense lossof certitude of definitions that she hadexperienced. That sometimes I seemed toher (and probably to many others) like a

person who does not know the basics ofthe discipline (for instance when I replyto a query with another query ratherthan give a definition/definitive answer).For the student, the unlearning andproblematising of much that she hadgrasped through undergraduatetextbooks and excelled in, was rendered

into a state of confusion. As Phule-Ambedkarite fem in ist teacherscontesting the cannons, one has oftencome up against similar criticism fromcolleagues who argue that students getconfused in our classes because weintroduce critical debates before studentshave mastered the cannons of thediscipline.

These cases of students contesting

evaluation and efforts at building criticalthinking in the classroom raise questionsabout the relations between pedagogy,authority, cannons and transformation.The second narrative allows us to askawkward questions do we as teachersof particular disciplines haveresponsibility and accountability to thecannon so to say initiate the studentsinto the discipline? When is the righttime at which the critique can be as ifintroduced? In other words are we sayingthat the initiates in sociology must know

G.S. Ghurye, Louis Dumont, M.N.Srinivas on caste before engaging withthe critical perspectives of Phule, Periyarand Ambedkar and Andre Beteille andDipankar Gupta before reading morecontemporary dalit-bahujan-feministwriters on caste? Does such a move notgloss over the ways in which through thedesign of courses, assignments, list ofprescribed and supplementaryreadings, selection and elimination oftopics as legitimate for classroom

discussion; knowledge comes to becategorised and organised intolegitimate/canonical and illegitimate/non-canonical. At the level of practicesof teaching it means attributing value tothe canonicalper se and not to the labourof interpretation. Am I then suggestingthat the Phule-Ambedkarite feminist


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teachers do away with the canon? Farfrom it, the canon to be deauthoricisedand demystified must be seenrelationally; so that the canonical andthe non-canonical emerge inoppositional confrontation at thehistorical level.

The first narrative pushes us toquestion the canon built on theconviction of the radical teacher does

she too build a cannon to render hertruth as natural and beyond theconflictual politics of interpretation?There is a desire for a stable saviourideology and easily identifiable home30,or fixed truth; but as Jennys accountdiscussed earlier more than bears out,a Phule-Ambedkarite feminist teachermust guard against the exclusions andoppressions which such a desire wouldentail. The problem, therefore, is not onlyabout teaching the canon butcanonicising whatever we teach and the

challenge is to make the learning processalways uncertain and contingent. Oftenthe most difficult question for progressivepedagogies like PAF pedagogies is toretain passion and partnership of theoppressed and yet breakthrough thecanonical compulsions that exist at theheart of all pedagogy.31

While the rel ations of powerorganised by the curriculum and theapproaches to the curriculum have beendiscussed to some extent, those related

to the organisation of college-universityclassroom as a physical and intellectualspace have been relatively unaddressed.Discussing pedagogies requires that wediscuss the ways in which power isenmeshed in the discourses andpractices of the more mundaneeverydayof the classroom. The classroom is a

relatively autonomous space which canboth empower the teacher and renderher vulnerable. The everyday of thisclassroom is routinely managed throughthe regime of time-tables and rulespublished in the handbooks. But on thefield so to say the real questions are How do we manage the conflictualimperatives of quiet and talk,responsibility and control, risk and

safety? Often these conflictingimperatives mean that classroomlearning comes to be achieved throughissue of threat (threat to cut marks, freezeon classes) competition and point scoring(setting groups or individuals againsteach other to get them to be responsible)and status consciousness (sanctions forthose who talk and interact within givenparameters and achieve learning withinapproved terms). Intentionally orunintentionally our strategies of gettingthe immediate done may often conflict

with strategies of PAF that seek toencourage collaboration and fosterdemocratic and social justice values. Arethere models of progressive pedagogythat may guide us to move beyond thesebrahmanical-patriarchal practices ofdiscipline and control in the classroom?In the next section, I will address someof the issues emerging from thisquestion.

Circuitous Relations betweenEducate-Organise-Agitate

The Risky Paths of Tritya Ratna

Generally speaking, teachers who believethat learning is linked to social change,struggle over identities and meanings,may practice variants and combinationsof three possible models of progressivepedagogical practice32. The first model is


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the one in which the PAF teacherbelieves that she understands the truth/the real relations of power and impartsit to the students. The second modelbelieves in a dialogical mode and makingthe silenced speak. While in the third thefocus shifts on developing skills so thatstudents are enabled to understand andintervene in their own history. It ispossible that different combinations

emerge from these models, for commonto all three are a set of similarassumptions. The first model believesthat the teacher can and does know thetruth the real interests of differentgroups brought together in the classroomand has to just impart the truth to them,the second overlooks the real materialand social conditions which maydisenable some from speaking and othersfrom listening to silences, and the thirdassumes that the teacher knows andcan impart the universal skills. These

assumptions become problematic, for asPAF pedagogues, we agree that studentsare neither cultural dopes that have tobe brought to predetermined positionsbut this is not to say that the dominantinstitutions do not seek to dupe them.There is then a loss of certainty for theteacher, she does not have a readymademantrato save the world nor can this bereplaced with a set of relativistcelebration of different voices andexperiences

This kind of a rendering of the PAFpedagogical model which rejectsconvincing predefined subjects to adoptthe teachers truth; draws upon not aunilateral but circuitous understandingof the Phule-Ambedkarite principle ofEducate, Organise and Agitate.Education, organising struggles over

recognition and redistribution identitiesand social transformation related in acircuitous path; are constitutive of eachother and as such the possibilities andconstraints on agency as it intersectswith soc ia l formation cannot bepredefined. If we look again at MuktaSalves essay with which we began, it isclear that education becomes TrityaRatnain Jotiba and Savitribai Phules

school because what was demanded fromstudents was not conformity to someimage of political liberation but of gainingunderstanding of their own involvementin the world and its future. This makesthe task of the PAF pedagogues slipperyand hazardous since the focus is oncontextual practice, one of multiplyingconnections between what may seemapparently disjoint things.

This returns us once again to thequestion of authority in the pedagogicalprocess to ask if the critical pedagogue

practicing such a model needs to makea difference between abandoning allclaims to authority and offering newforms and positions. The teacher stillremains responsible for production ofknowledge in the classroom but isrequired to traverse risky grounds thatinterrogate the binaries of knowingteacher/ignorant students, public/private and rational/emotional. Sherecognises that often the students areuninterested in the classroom not

because they do not want to work orbecause of the difficulties of jargon ortheory but they do not see reason.Probably the questions being asked andanswered are not theirs. This realisationcannot be followed up with a simpledictum that from now on students willdefine the questions. The challenge is to


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discover the questions on the terrain ofeveryday lives and popular culturalpractices.

Such a model throws open toquestion then a simple model ofauthority one that poses an oppositionbetween mind and body as also authorityand affection. Black feminists33 haveunderlined the ways in which the bodyis erased in the process of learning.

Entering the classroom is as if aboutgiving up to the mind and making thebody absent. It is assumed that denial ofpassion and Eros as if is a preconditionfor learning to take place. They remindus that Eros is the moving force thatpropels life from a state of potentiality toactuality and therefore central to theenergy of the classroom. It is often arguedthat there is no place for the affective inthe classroom because this may affecteffective control or neutral evaluation ofstudents. And yet all of us know there

have always been teachers favourites there have been and are affective ties thatare exclusive and privatised. The Eklavyanarrative is a reminder of the violentconsequences of selective, exclusiveaffective ties between students andteachers.

The pedagogical power in criticalpractices cannot be wished away bygiving up claims to authority andfollowing Black feminists like Hooks34

persuasion of students may be seen as

an option. In a diverse classroom, Hooksargues there will always be students whoare afraid to assert themselves as criticalthinkers. Counter to several feministclaims that the silenced come to voice inatmosphere of safety and congeniality,she prescribes a confrontational styleof dealing with this. This can be very

demanding, painful, frightening andnever makes the teacher instantlypopular or the classes fun to be in.Hooks problematises the rather easyopposition between risk and safety, affectand authority by putting at centreprocesses of democratic persuasion ascrucial to the goal of enabling allstudents and not just the assertive fewin the classroom.

How do we understand the multipleand contradictory positions that we playout in the classroom? It has been pointedout35that there are tensions between thethree competing selves of the teacher the educative, the ideological/moral-ethical and personal. How may wediscover these tensions, the gapsbetween what we think we do and whatwe actually do? Student evaluations ofteachers with all their limitations can bean eye-opener. Going over recordings ofclass discussions can sometimes be a

verit ab le discovery ! Recordings ofclassroom proceedings, ways in whichwe as teachers moderate a discussion,interrupt it or let certain questions passcan point to the tensions between themultiple and contradictory positions weoccupy and our dilemmas. For instance,a PAF pedagogue introducing a powerfultexts like Ilaiahs Why I am not a Hinduhas to address on one hand theuncomfortable silences or resistance ofstudents (articulated through passing

notes or nudging that seems to suggesthere she goes again on her trip) who mayfeel interpellated in the identity of theoppressor. On the other hand, thepersistence of silence of the subalternstudents who, one imagines wouldexperience instant identification with thetext and find voice also needs attention.


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The hesitance in naming and reclaimingidentity in public; the tears shed inprivate conversations, the unease withemotionally charged classroom poseseveral dilemmas.

I am in no way arguing for reflexiveexplorations by teachers on eitherstudent evaluations or classroomrecordings as ways to bring balance inpositions for balance as we know has

became a dirty word ever since hindutvasought to denigrate all engaged left andfeminist thinking as imbalanced. Rather,the effort is to reflect on the manyintended and unintended omissionsbetween the conceptual and materialterrain of PAF pedagogies as producedpartly by attempts to create a democraticspace within an undemocratic academyand society but also by our owninvestments in particular subjectpositions.

Critical pedagogies do not in

themselves constitute a method, andmicro level pedagogical implications ofPAF which are crucial to the everydaywork of the classroom need to bediscussed and developed throughdialogues in and across classrooms. Weneed to dialogue more on our efforts inthe everyday of the classroom to developdifferent tools, methods, strategies tocombine social critique with skills ofdoing critical work. In the concludingsection, I would like to share some notes

on implementing PAF and collectiveefforts to develop tools and methods.

Pappu can Dance . (?)Possibil it ies and Limitations ofPedagogical Experiments36

In the present of our academia, anyeffort to develop new courses,pedagogical tools and methods have to

as if prove their applicability andemployability value. Many of us seekingto develop new courses ininterdisciplinary fields, such as womensstudies, dalitstudies and culture studiesencounter these demands to proveentrepreneurial value on one hand buton the other are faced with the seriousongoing intellectual debates on therelevance of practices of these fields in

the academy. Courses in womensstudies and dalitstudies which are oftenseen as fields naturally linking theoryand practice, knowledge and power mayin practice face the risk either of creatingalternate cannons or emptying politicalcontent in applying theory to the field.While those in cultural studies, morespecifically the study popular culture,face another kind of risk, that of not beentaken seriously for they are not easilyrecognised as a site of the political37.In this section, I shall limit the exchange

of notes on experiments in developingpedagogical tools to a course onPopular Culture and Modernity in India.

In the concluding section, I detailsome of the experiences of teaching acourse on Popular Culture andModernity in India least because I oranyone else involved imagine it to be anarrative of success. This detailing is byway of opening a dialogue with fellowcritical pedagogues on the nuts and boltsof developing pedagogical methods and

tools for our present. This course onPopular Culture and Modernity in Indiawas floated over two semesters inclassrooms that were socially verydiverse and where the co-learnerssometimes shared very little in commonby way of nationality, region, languageand also in terms of their investment in,


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desire and pleasures of what they sawas constituting and constituted by thepopular (the range included motorcycleclubs, annual village fairs, SharukhKhan films, old Hindi film songs, the newMarathi cassette cultures, culturalpractices of movements and collectiveactors, particular newspaper columns,blogs, days celebrated on campuses andso on).

The course began with threereadings one by Bell Hooksinterrogating the binaries that operatein the cultures of teaching and the otherby Samata Biswas38on caste and cultureas it unfolds on the seemingly mundanesite of the notice board in the studentsmess and selections from PhulesGulamgiri. These readings made way forseveral discussions on interrogating thebinaries of history and memory andcultures of teaching and the teaching ofculture in the academy and had

implications for the conduct of thecourse. The course it was mutuallyagreed would be constituted throughintegrating dialogue, participation,experience39the important elements ofPAF pedagogies. At the level of practiceit meant being open to multipleviewpoints, learning to listen so as tobetter understand what others aresaying than just stick to words they say,to suspend judgement to create anenvironment where participants could

reflect, communicate and interact.More specifically the dynamics of

learning and teaching was sought to berethought and reinvented through aresearch-based approach to the course.This posed challenges for both thestudents and the teacher and in ourcase, the teaching assistants40(Research

students and students who had recentlycompleted their Masters Programmes)became very important resources inenhancing dialogue and participationthrough a research-based approach. Theteaching assistants in this course didmuch more than the prescribed role ofgetting together course, readings, andcorrecting tutorials and in the processfractured the assumed divide between

teacher and student. They translatedthe teachers classroom discussions tothe students when required but in doingso pushed the teacher to become astudent by seeing how and why thestudents found them more accessible.They became research and writ ingconsultants for students who wereframing researchable themes for thepaper and in the process could revisitand redraft their own on-going researchand writing.

The course sought to bu ild in

experience, dialogue and participationthrough conscious selection of resourcesmaterials and therefore the questionsbrought to the classroom that came fromthe everyday/ordinary of students lives(tamasha, local museums, Hindi films,newspapers, documentaries, musicvideos, magazines, commemoration ofdays on campus), continuous group workand intra-group evaluation, anddeveloping writing and research as amethod of classroom learning. Group

work and evalua tion me t withconsiderable resistance as groups weredrawn once by lots and another timethrough introducing a diversity quotient.There was pessimism and resistance toworking with given groups, severalstudents were very uneasy grading theirown and group members work and there


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was much frustration, tears and angerover group processes. But what wasnovel and was that they were oftenviewing their own culture (youth/village/city) critically and it was the teacher whowas on their territory.

The group work sess ions wereconceptualised, designed and conductedby the group members in the classroom;sometimes in the process driving the

content of the course. Group work onlocal museums for instance propelled theway in which the course interrogated theassumptions of the nation/national inour everyday life. Some groups forinstance compared and contrasted thepolitics and aesthetics of the Gandhi andAmbedkar museums to interrogatereceived notions of history of the nation.Yet others drew attention to the tensionsbetween nation and region, the publicand private, tribal and Indian in thearrangement of artifacts at the Raja

Dinkar Kelkar Museum or to theinteresting museumisation of moderncity life in the most unexpected ofplaces the toy railway museum. Groupwork on the contemporary culturalpractices of counter commemoration ofthe anti-caste movements propelleddiscussions on the significance ofpopular in the formation of counterpublics. Several individual papers on therecasting of caste and gender relationsin the local annual fairs propelled

discussions on caste in the constitutionof the popular.

In the process of this group work,there were disruptions in dialogue andparticipation between students andbetween teachers and students. Oftenconversations came to be controlled byexpectations of what each thinks the

other should say or in forcing studentssometimes to talk against their will. Theteacher, teaching assistants andstudents despite efforts were not alwayslistening and pre-judgement of otherswas continued through bodily gesturesthat discarded some issues whilevalidating others. However, sometimesdisruptions in dialogue were taken up asan opportunity to view the complex

linkages between practice and content for instance impatience and tensionsbetween group members (emerging fromdifferences of language, investment indifferent genres of popular, access andease with using audio-visual equipment,ways of reading a text and discussing it)became a ground to reflect on the centraltheme of the course namely ourmodernity/ies. Heated discussionssought to address how courses onModernity in India could not push theexperience of the epistemic wound of

colonialism, the messy patterns of Indianmodernity, the exciting instability offorces of mass democracy in ourclassroom to the backyard.

The course sought to shift the focusfrom students as consumers ofknowledge to producers of knowledge bydeveloping writing and research as amethod of learning. Reinventing theteaching-learning nexus throughresearch was also envisioned ascountering the logic of vulgar

vocationalisation and applicability.Students were expected to submitregularly written responses to eventsand to develop independent andcollaborative student research projectsthrough the semester. Writing ofresponses to films watched or thecelebrations in the city of the nation on


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15th August or a music video of Kings XIPunjab among others became sites fordeveloping critical thinking skills andsocial critique. Writing response pieces;the format for which was kept relativelyopen became a recursive process asstudents admitted that writing requiredthem to reflect, assess value andappropriateness of argument,reconstruct and rewrite.

Individual and collective researchprojects not only reinvented thepedagogic space but helped establishmutually rewarding links with academicsinside and outside the university andexternal community groups. One batchof students (2007-08) produced a film onCell phone Cultures; researched andproduced collaboratively. The processinvolved developing new intellectual,practical and technical skills as studentsresearched the biography of the product,its travels to different constituencies,

SMS as cultural consumption, theperceived dangers and anxieties relatedto the product, celebrity scandals withcamera phones and so on. The filmfocused on how cell phones wereorganising and conducting students ownlives. The second batch of students(2008-09) wrote and published a book; acollection of researched articles inEnglish and Marathi on Exploring thePopular: texts, identities and politics.The papers though individual were

discussed right from their conception inthe classroom

mukta salve in ncert

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