Book review: Papia Sengupta (Ed.),Critical Sites of Inclusion in India’s Higher Education

The phenomena of inclusion and exclusion in the education system of postcolonial India, especially in higher education, have been the subject of several epistemological and ontological debates. Since India’s judicial independence, its governing bodies have been making efforts to decolonise and indigenise the education system. Such efforts have led to the formulation of several education policies to date. But these education policies are underpinned by structural and practical loopholes that have been meticulously exposed by every contributor to Papia Sengupta’s edited volume, Critical Sites of Inclusion in India’s Higher Education.

Although a lot of books focussing on the different dimensions of India’s higher education system have been written, this book is unique in terms of the diverse pedagogical, curricular, structural and infrastructural issues it addresses within specific contexts. To elaborate, most books on India’s higher education exclusively focus on policymaking strategies and how to make them inclusive. Such an approach appears to be superficial because policies are often objectively proposed, without taking into account either empirical studies or the complex diversity of contexts such as gender, sexuality, caste, class, race, religion, economy, geography and topography. As a result, despite manifold documentation of problems and solutions, the challenges for India’s higher education remain intact.

The contributions in this book deviate from such generalised and non-contextual approaches by unpacking lesser addressed concerns. The chapter by V. Biju Kumar examines the violent impact of the neoliberal market economy on the functioning of private and public universities in India. Malavika Menon focusses on the exploitation of minorities in the name of inclusion, equality and diversity. Other concerns taken up in the book include the linguistic exclusivities as practised by India’s English-centric higher education system, by Ramanujam Meganathan; the challenges that women encounter in universities with regards to participation in intellectual events, by Shivani Nag; the question of inclusivity of the LGBTQIA+ communities, by Shailja Tandon; and the flawed pseudo-inclusive agendas of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, by Papia Sengupta. Besides engaging with these issues, some contributions—such as Abdul Matin’s and Gagandeep Bajaj’s—empirically demonstrate the ways in which indigenous traditional models of education can be interwoven with mainstream education patterns.

Another unique aspect of this book is its inconclusive nature. Every chapter opens up multidirectional possibilities of understanding the contemporary challenges of India’s higher education within the wider socio-historical perspectives of Eurocentrism. To elaborate, the book invites us to investigate how the present education system of India continues to acknowledge the parameters of European/colonial education systems. The spectre of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education continues to haunt, regulate and manipulate the contemporary higher education system in the country. A British historian and politician, Macaulay had declared the 1835 Minute in order to systematise the domination of the teaching and learning of English language and European sciences, literature and philosophies over native languages and knowledge systems in India. The domination of English language not only questioned the linguistic value of native languages but also dehumanised, marginalised and distorted native knowledge systems of science, literature, mathematics, history and philosophy. The effects of the expropriations and appropriations that were shaped by Macaulay’s Minute are reflected in the curricular, pedagogical and infrastructural hierarchies of educational institutions. As rightly pointed out in the book’s introduction, a massive problem of the Indian higher education system today is the strategic systemisation of various structures of epistemological, ontological and hermeneutical violence and the masking of these structures under the rhetoric of modernity, progress, discipline and collective welfare.

This is why student protests against fees hikes, communal propaganda, caste-based hierarchies, racial abuses, gender violence, poor infrastructures and harassment by faculties are silenced by educational institutions in the name of justice and discipline, and the victims of such violence are dehumanised, demonised and criminalised on a habitual basis by educational institutions. The protests against fee hike in 2019 in Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Millia Islamia, both central universities in New Delhi, and the recent protests against serving non-vegetarian food at dining halls in these institutions on the occasion of Ram Navami are burning examples. These incidents outline how educational institutions systematically violate the social, cultural, moral and ethical rights of students. These agendas and ideologies not only manifest in the forms of physical clashes between students and the state but are also invisibly embedded through hierarchical syllabus structures, exclusive pedagogical patterns and biased grading practices. In Chapter 3, Malavika Menon talks about various infrastructural, curricular and pedagogical challenges faced by minority institutions and possible ways to overcome them. In Chapter 6, Gagandeep Bajaj talks about the challenges of inclusive education and how these can be addressed by bringing in various curricular and pedagogical transformations. In Chapter 7, Shivani Nag unpacks the institutional norms that normalise gender hierarchies in academic institutions and in Chapter 8, Shailja Tandon discusses the normalisation of gender hierarchies and the issue of gender inclusivity in a more diverse way by engaging with the inclusivity issues of the LGBTQIA+ community.

These divisive methodologies of knowledge production in higher education institutions provoke us to make a paradigmatic shift from the phenomenon of ‘inclusivity’ to ‘critical inclusivity’. Some of the chapters categorically interrogate the existing practice of inclusivity in a selective manner and invite the readers to critically understand the notion of inclusivity. The issue of selective inclusivity has been interrogated by analysing the infrastructural hierarchies within neoliberal higher education institutions (Chapter 2); discussing the curricular hierarchies in the public Madrasas of West Bengal (Chapter 4); exposing the linguistic hierarchies in India’s higher education system (Chapter 5); and examining the hierarchies in education policies (Chapter 9). Critical inclusivity invites us to understand the paradigm of inclusivity not as a universal phenomenon, but within diverse sociocultural and geopolitical contexts. The paradigm of critical inclusivity also allows us to engage with knowledge frameworks that do not necessarily fit within specific ideological compartments but instead embrace the porous and transitional narratives of ‘in-between’ knowledge systems. The critically inclusive narratives of the book help us theoretically and methodologically realise the necessity of building ‘critical inclusive literacy’ as an academic and research paradigm.

The methodologies used to generate the arguments in this book highlight the necessity of intersectionality and critical diversity as regular modes of knowledge production. The aspect of intersectionality can be observed through the thematic and theoretical ways in which each chapter addresses others and the aspect of critical diversity gets reflected through how chapters establish ‘“an enabled” mode of existence, congruent with the requirements of the emerging social imaginary of the twenty-first century’ (Steyn, 2015, p. 381). Based on the perspectives of intersectionality and critical diversity, the academic and research paradigm of critical inclusive literacy can be developed, in which individuals would understand inclusivity through the complexities and entanglements of daily life experiences. This volume outlines some possible pathways for developing critical inclusive literacy as a habitual pedagogical and curricular approach.

However, the arguments in the book would have gained further momentum were contributions from diverse geographical locations included. In its current version, the contributors are mostly scholars from New Delhi; as a result, many geographically marginalised spaces lack representation in the volume. Moreover, the book also does not address another widely ignored aspect of the Indian educational system, which is related to issues of social, cultural, communal and anatomical racism. The book’s editor may think of these perspectives as the initiating points for yet another volume.