Abstract
Our obsession with education as the magic bullet to India’s economic growth has produced a library of reports, commentaries and studies that tell us how poorly India fares on educational indices, such as, enrolment rates, completion rates, learning competencies and the like. An excessive number of these reports are funded by aid agencies, NGOs and government bodies that stand in for scholarship. Within this surfeit of policy-oriented writing on education, Veronique Benei’s ethnographic account, Schooling India, is a breath of fresh air. It is a rare pleasure to read an account that is as elegantly crafted, richly detailed and theoretically sophisticated as Schooling India. There are two challenges to doing good ethnographies of education. The first is that those reading an ethnographic account of schooling have ‘lived’ it first-hand and have strong views on what schooling is all about. The writer therefore has the challenge to make the familiar appear unfamiliar. Second, there is nothing spectacular about mundane routines of a school day and it takes an especially talented scholar to narrate the quotidian practices of schooling in a manner that is engaging and intriguing. Benei does both admirably and provides us with a vivid illustration of how ‘banal nationalism’ is produced in the regular schedule of a school day. The ethnography is located in Kolhapur town in south-western Maharashtra, with a major part of the book focused on a Marathi-medium school, with a chapter each on an Urdu-medium school and a newer military boarding school in the town. The schools are fairly typical of the spectrum of government schools in the country, and thus while the ethnography stays true to the cultural politics of Maharashtra, the descriptions could just as easily fit any average government school in the country. In her wonderfully lively descriptions of the school assembly, morning prayers and calisthenics, recitation and rote learning in class that function as pedagogy, annual events that showcase culture, school trips and picnics, Benei masterfully depicts the elisions between religious expression, cultural pride and patriotic fervour produced in the ordinary humdrum of pedagogical routines and authoritative relations. Her theoretical palette interweaves linguistic anthropology and psychoanalytic theory that is attentive to the affective and emotive dimensions that produce the loyal, devout and agentic national subject. Though biopolitics is implicit in the ethnography, she avoids the heavy-handed theorisation of governmentality and favours a far more nuanced and empathetic reading of her informants with their anxieties, insecurities and capriciousness intact. Benei deploys an interesting literary device common to fiction writing, where sometimes the author, at other times her informants ‘speak aloud’ their thoughts. Through these brief pieces written in the first person we bear witness to the interplay of agency in equally banal ways. The brilliance of her analysis and form of writing is that she is able to convey the maleficence of ‘banal nationalism’ and the subliminal residue of fascism that is ever present while at the same time showing how it is not a foregone conclusion and that the subject is never fully interpellated by the nationalist project.
Benei shows how ‘banal nationalism’ in the Indian context is produced through the intersection of gendered norms and injunctions that are especially tied to the female body and a Hindu majoritarian ethos that suffuses public and private spaces, and familial and institutional relations. She illustrates how nation as mother and attachment for the ‘motherland’ along with regional patriotism (that is, being Maharashtrian) are seamlessly produced through teacher-training courses, lessons in government approved textbooks, posters that adorn classroom walls and similar portraits at home, clothing that teachers choose to wear, through speech, proverbs, limericks and popular movies. More importantly, Benei shows how the embodied performance of ‘national belonging’ undergirds the affective and the sentimental and that ultimately serves to cement ‘banal nationalism’ as common sense.
Set against the backdrop of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, the nuclear tests and the Kargil war, the chapters on the Urdu-medium government school and military boarding school are relevant and insightful. The two cases provide a more layered understanding of how a majoritarian nationalist discourse articulates with minority anxieties, as in the case of the Urdu school located in an impoverished ‘Mussalman’ area, and with Hindu nationalist anxieties about Hindu boys not being ‘men’ enough and having to be ‘toughened up’. In the chapter on the Urdu-medium school, Benei very skilfully and deftly depicts the ‘othering’ of the Urdu-speaking teachers and students and the pressure this places on the Muslim community to overcompensate and insist on fidelity to the language and culture of the majority community and to erase difference. The book disappoints however in its negligible treatment of caste and the absence of an ethnographic account of ‘schooling the Dalit community’. This is a major gap in the book especially given the over-representation of Dalits in government schools and their conflicted relations with Hindu majoritarian politics. That said, this does not detract from how well the book depicts the psychic violence wreaked by ‘banal nationalism’ and the tragic loss of humanity that stays with one long after one is done reading.