Abstract
This paper offers gendered accounts of girls’ schooling and childhood from urban India. It challenges global ‘girl effect’ narratives by grappling with the interplay of poverty and caste patriarchy and how it shapes families’ struggles and concerns and girls’ (re)productive labour, (un)freedoms and classroom experiences. Moving beyond the notion of ‘multiple childhoods’ it develops a conceptual framework that accounts for the way the state, the market, economic inequalities and local patriarchies inscribe poor girls’ schooling and work. Drawing upon ethnographic work with Class VIII students in a state school it also unpacks girls’ negotiation of classed and casted patriarchies.
Keywords
Introduction
This paper offers accounts of girls’ schooling and childhoods which subvert (inter)national development narratives that posit ‘girls’ education as a ‘commonsensical’ solution to issues as wide-ranging as poverty, fertility, human trafficking, and terrorism in the global south.’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2015: 87) In theorising the gendered nature of ‘childhood’ in urban India, it opens up both schooling and childhood to much-needed analyses of the interplay between economic informality, liberalisation, the changing role of the state and caste patriarchy (Khoja-Moolji, 2015; Sriprakash, 2016).
Balagopalan (2014, 2019) has long argued that the school/labour binary, that is, the narrative of schooling as the ‘antidote’ to child labour, needs to be scrutinised in the context of the (post)colonial Indian state’s refusal to end marginal children’s engagement in labour. On the one hand, children’s ‘non-family based capitalist labour’ began with colonial economics which broke the link between children’s work, education and socialisation in former colonies (Muriithi, 2016). On the other, the post-independence Indian state also systematically excluded large sections of the population from economic growth both before and after liberalisation; indeed, large-scale economic informality, rising disparities and marginal children’s labour are ‘constitutive’ of Indian’s growth, not aberrations (Balagopalan, 2014). It is only recently that formal schooling has been explicitly spelled out as the means to resolve child labour. However, post-independence, and especially post-liberalisation, the state has also deliberately produced educational differentiation and stratification 1 (Velaskar, 2010).
Even as the Indian state has taken steps to guarantee free and compulsory education for eight years, from Class I to Class VIII, it has also deregulated child labour. The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act 2016, while eliciting praise for banning children under 18 from working in ‘hazardous’ occupations and processes, has not only decreased the number of occupations listed as such, but also allowed children to work ‘after school hours or during vacations’ in ‘family or family enterprises’ (Balagopalan, 2019: 232). Significantly, the state has tended to hold the family responsible for children’s work rather than addressing the structural conditions within which children’s work becomes imperative for their own and their families’ survival, or acknowledging the link between this deregulation and the reproduction of educational and socioeconomic inequality.
It is important to note that within the neoliberal world view propagated by the World Bank, ‘investment’ in education is linked with ‘economic growth and poverty’ (Shain, 2013) rather than questions of social justice or equality, even though it is clear that despite faster growth in recent decades, India has seen inadequate reduction in poverty even as disparities have intensified (Kohli et al., 2003). It is within this context that feminist scholarship has problematised the focus on the girl child’s education in postcolonial contexts, and the broader ‘girling of development’ in the global South (Khoja-Moolji, 2015). One, the entire question of gender and development is now centred on poor girl children in the global South, imagined as particular kinds of ‘beneficiaries and agents of progress’ (Shain, 2013); and two, her schooling is seen as the necessary and sufficient condition for change in entire families, communities and countries (Khoja-Moolji, 2015).
This discourse has been perfectly encapsulated in the ‘girl effect’ movement that was launched by the Nike Foundation and the NoVo Foundation to target poor girls in ‘third world’ countries as beneficiaries of western aid and investment. Ideas and slogans like, ‘poverty ends with her’ and ‘invest in a girl and she will do the rest’ (Shain, 2013) showcase the girl child as a specific kind of economic agent and justify the ‘marked policy and investment shift towards girls and their access to schoo[ling]’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2015: 94) as ‘smart economics’ (Shain, 2013). Schooling is expected to produce this girl as a more productive wage labourer and entrepreneur, and a smart mother and wife who will have fewer children and manage the household budget despite low wages and shrinking welfare. Thus, girls’ schooling aids the projects of ‘feminisation of labour’ and the production of efficient workers and mothers in the context of relentless globalisation, informalisation and privatisation (Nagar et al., 2002; Shain 2013). Within these narratives girls are simultaneously ‘victims’ of poverty and patriarchy in ‘backward’ communities and ‘heroines’ for trying to overcome these constraints to access schooling. But there is a studied refusal to acknowledge or address larger historical and structural conditions that create and sustain families’ dependence on girls’ productive and reproductive labour.
That meaningful equality and social justice are not the goals of education policy is evident in the limited nature of ‘investment’ in girls’ schooling: only the first eight years of school education being guaranteed by the Indian state, state’s refusal to problematise the deeply stratified schooling available to poor girls, targeted nature of policies and provisions which continue to exclude large numbers of marginalised girls, and lastly, the continuing focus on enrolment despite two decades of feminist critique of the content and process of education (Balagopalan, 2010; Saxena, 2012; Manjrekar and Saxena, 2012; Velaskar, 2010). Therefore, drawing upon ethnographic work in an urban, co-educational government school in central India, this paper grapples with girls’ classroom experience and their (un)waged labour and locates these within wider caste patriarchy, caste and class based economic inequality, liberalisation and economic informality. Unwaged work refers to all the unpaid productive and reproductive work in which girls engage.
Literature and framework
Contrary to the world-view circulated through the school/labour binary and ‘the girl effect’, existing research on girls’ schooling and childhoods (cf. Balagopalan and Subrahmanian, 2003; Jha and Jhingran, 2005; Morarji, 2014; Pappu and Vasanta, 2010; Saxena, 2012; Saxena et al., 2009) in India underscores the importance of engaging with local socioeconomic issues in order to address the question of their education. It shows that a community’s socioeconomic marginalisation centrally shapes girls’ educational experience and that caste-based socioeconomic exploitation, insecure livelihoods, low wages and lack of employment opportunities are serious impediments. As Jha and Jhingran (2005: 24) argue, it is also crucial to recognise the multi-faceted nature of deprivation including: ‘food insecurity, illness, lack of choices and opportunities, forced livelihood options, vulnerability to crises and lack of access to basic services such as safe drinking water, school or health facilities’. Further, historical im/possibilities of upward mobility shaped by deprivation and disparities also influence marginalised pupils’ and families’ decision to invest in schooling (Balagopalan and Subrahmanian, 2003). Specifically, lack of employment for girls acts as a ‘disincentive’ for rural parents to support daughters’ schooling (Saxena et al., 2009). More broadly, for rural communities, education tends to hold out a complex and incomplete promise, owing to the disjunction between the modernist worldview inherent to formal schooling and the existing life-worlds of these communities, especially those lacking economic opportunities (Morarji, 2014).
Research also emphasises how the wider sexual division of labour is reflected in young girls’ gendered burden of productive and reproductive work, and consumes their time and energy. Since the relative burden of this work is determined by a family’s poverty, which is, in turn shaped by caste and class-based economic inequalities it becomes crucial to address intergroup differences between girls’ access to and levels of schooling. However, scholarship also shows that the state supports girls’ schooling in very limited ways, as evident in the inadequacy of infrastructure, curricular content and pedagogic practices, unfair working conditions of teachers and other staff and the class and caste biases shaping teachers’ relationships with marginal girl children (Balagopalan and Subrahmanian, 2003; Saxena, 2012). Long-standing caste-based economic and educational exclusion has ensured that while the majority of teachers are from dominant castes, most first-generation learners are not. However, effects of these historical inequalities are often recognised and articulated by teachers as ‘moral’ inferiority of pupils and communities; and this conflictual relationship is further exacerbated on the one hand, by teachers’ roles as agents of the ‘developmental state’, and on the other, by the lack of support available to them in working with first-generation learners from backgrounds very different from their own (Balagopalan and Subrahmanian, 2003; Morarji, 2014).
Though existing research offers powerful analyses, it has not adequately theorised the relationship between socioeconomic inequalities and girls’ schooling; specifically, feminist analyses of state, market or family and their intersections have not been brought to bear upon classroom processes and pupil experience (Manjrekar and Saxena, 2012). Therefore, building on existing work, this paper also offers a possible conceptual framework which locates girls’ work and classroom experiences within contemporary social and economic logics and subverts the ‘commonsense’ of the ‘girl effect’ movement and more generally, the school/labour binary. In developing such a framework the paper avoids the cultural essentialism of the ‘multiple childhoods’ framework (Balagopalan, 2014) and the universalisms of the ‘girl effect’ discourse (Shain, 2013). Thus, this paper also challenges the broader understanding implicit in (inter)national policy discourses that marginal children are ‘easily isolatable from the poverty of their families and communities’ who are to blame for these children’s exclusion from schooling (Balagopalan, 2010: 296).
I draw upon Rege (1995, 1998), Chakravarti (2009) and Geetha (2002) to critique ‘caste patriarchy’, a system of interlocking gender and caste relations, and the way it shapes the institution of family. This analysis is combined with feminist critiques of capitalism, liberalisation and globalisation to understand the historically specific forms of girls’ labour and their experience of schooling in contemporary urban India. Nagar et al. (2002) argue that dominant narratives of globalisation exclude the gender-based exploitation of women’s work while relying upon their traditional roles as wives and mothers within the bourgeoise, patriarchal institution of family. Significantly, the Indian state has always maintained a ‘women in the family approach’ (Rege, 1995: 25); indeed, as it shifts from a ‘planned economy’ to a ‘market economy’, the state colludes with the market to ‘valorise’ and exploit the institution of family and the specific forms of gender relations it enables (Vasavi and Kingfisher, 2003: 2, 3).
Significantly, the instrumentalist view of girls’ education encouraged by the ‘girl effect’ narrative similarly reinforces a ‘girl in the family’ approach as Khoja-Moolji (2015: 88) succinctly describes: ‘Specifically, it is assumed that if girls in the global south can obtain schooling, they will marry at a later age, delay childbearing, participate in the wage-based economy, take good care of their children and families, and ultimately bring their nations out of abject poverty and vio[lence].’
This approach is also problematic because within the framework of caste patriarchy, family has been the site of production and maintenance of mechanisms that ensure endogamy and through it, caste distinctions and hierarchies. This is sought to be achieved through control over women’s sexuality, desires and decisions as well as their productive and reproductive labour (Chakravarti, 2009; Rege, 1998). Thus, despite the problematic nature of the institution of family, the neoliberal Indian state perpetuates girls’ dependence on their families through its refusal to support their education within the constitutional framework of equality and social justice.
Research context
This paper is based on work done in Indore, the commercial capital of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Madhya Pradesh has been one of the most underdeveloped Indian states; yet, Indore has historically been an important centre for trade, and in post-liberalisation India, it is an important centre for finance, IT, service sector and education. Its economic significance ensures that Indore attracts large numbers of migrants from less developed neighbouring states as well as districts within the state. The families of all the 60-odd children who participated in this project had migrated to Indore from in and around Madhya Pradesh; further, many students and parents of almost all pupils were engaged in low-paid work (casual labourers, self-employed) in the informal economy.
Most parents worked as construction workers (men and women), domestic workers (women) or in small manufacturing units (men and women). Other men were self-employed – tailors; garage-owners; owners of wedding bands, and offering maintenance services like whitewashing, carpentry, plumbing and electrical-repair; auto rickshaw drivers; vendors selling vegetables or street food; and salesmen in small local shops. Boys usually worked in local shops or readymade garment manufacturing while the few girls who worked for wages were domestic workers or in garment manufacturing. Individual wages ranged from the £30 per month that a woman sticking labels on steel kitchenware earned, to the £70 per month that an oil mill worker earned, or the £150 that a self-employed bread vendor made. Net family incomes ranged from £70 to £200 per month. 2 Sometimes, work and incomes varied substantially from one month to the next depending upon availability of work and/or family crises.
To define informal workers, I use the definition favoured by Rina Agarwala, who has done pioneering work on informal workers’ politics: The informal sector consists of economic units that produce goods and services legally, but engage in operations that are not registered or regulated by fiscal, labor, health, and tax laws. Informal workers include the self-employed, who own and run a business in the informal sector with few or no employees, as well as casual labor, who work through subcontractors either for an informal or a formal sector enterprise. The primary difference between informal and formal workers is that the latter are protected and regulated under state law while the former are not. (Portes et al., 1989 cited in Agarwala, 2006: 420, 421)
After liberalisation most new employment opportunities opened up in the informal sector characterised by lack of ‘decent wages, social security and job security’; even within the formal sector it is informal employment that has expanded across sectors (Srija and Shirke, 2014: 46). The informal sector employs upwards of 92% of the labour force in India; while India always had a huge informal sector, post-liberalisation economic informalisation has become the ideal and as such actively encouraged by the state (Agarwala, 2013). The lowest paid, informally employed workers are usually from groups that are educationally, politically and socioeconomically marginalised: Scheduled Castes or Dalit, that is, former untouchable communities; Scheduled Tribes which are officially recognised economically and culturally marginalised Adivasi/tribal groups; and women. Educational fates of poor children, especially girls demand even greater scrutiny in Madhya Pradesh as the state pays some of the lowest minimum wages in India (International Labour Organization [ILO], 2018); and with its low sex ratio, low levels of female literacy and women’s rights to reproductive health in dismal condition (Directorate of Census Operations, Madhya Pradesh, 2011; Ministry of Finance, Government of India, 2017–2018) has been identified by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA, 2019) as one of the four Indian states where the ‘most vulnerable and marginalised young women and girls’ live.
The school where research was conducted between September 2014 and April 2015, was a coeducational, Hindi-medium, state government-run Middle School, comprising Classes VI, VII and VIII and had around 250 students. 3 It was located in a mixed neighbourhood, home largely to poor families, interspersed with a small number of middleclass ones and dotted with small mills and manufacturing units. The school was housed in a pucca building with a wall protecting the premises. It had three classrooms, one each for Classes VI, VII and VIII and a staff room shared by teachers and the Head-Master, two separate toilets for girls and boys and a playground. Class VIII is where I conducted ethnographic work. It had 79 students (aged 13–16 years) when I began fieldwork, of which 38 were boys and 41, girls; 21 students belonged to Scheduled Castes (SC), 10 to Scheduled Tribes (ST); 31 to Other Backward Classes (OBC) and 17 to Upper Castes (UC).
The school staff comprised the Head-Master (UC), five regular, full-time Upper Divisional Teachers (three UC women, one UC man and an OBC man), all in their late 40s or early 50s. There was a Guest Teacher (UC, woman), employed at the rate of £1.50 per day as the school did not have permission to appoint a regular, full-time teacher to teach Mathematics. There was only one member in the support staff, a part-time worker and a Dalit woman casually appointed at £5 per month as the Midday Meal Helper.
Poor girls and classed femininities in the classroom
I begin with examples from teachers’ talk which show how they understand the educational aspirations and motivation of their girl-pupils. Of the seven teachers, the Head-Master, Manish Tiwari (UC) and the Science teacher, Usha Pandey (UC) rarely policed girls’ appearance or their friendships and were always dignified in their interaction with girls. Usha Pandey was also the only teacher who saw pupils’ (hetero)sexual and romantic interest in each other as ‘natural’ and believed in ignoring it. The Sanskrit teacher, Prabha Shinde (UC), the Hindi teacher, Pramod Bhargav (UC) and the English teacher, Jyoti Gupta (UC), regularly lectured and policed students and used very undignified language sometimes. Following are field notes taken during Jyoti Gupta’s English class when she was teaching a lesson on Kalpana Chawla, a woman astronaut of Indian origin, a rare representation of a woman role model in the curriculum.
‘You read the lesson, especially girls, did you feel anything? How did she become an astronaut? By studying. And then she had dreams as well? We also dream. . . what have you dreamt of? I ask every year, don’t I? [Your dreams are] just that you should get married, [have] children and all that. . .?’ Many girls including those in the front row, shook their heads but the teacher failed to see this and continued: ‘Only if we have dreams, will these come true. [. . .] start making efforts now, start memorizing, all problems will get solved. . . God will also help you.’
Pramod Bhargav tended to especially mock SC and ST girls for being more interested in boys, marriages and appearance (e.g. hairstyles, jewellery). He and Jyoti Gupta were known to especially police two of the SC girls (Rashmi, Chhaya), an aspect of the classroom discourse I revisit shortly. They and Prabha Shinde also made frequent references to parents’ perceived lack of interest in children’s education. One afternoon Prabha Shinde angrily asked Taruna (SC), ‘doesn’t your mother do anything at home?’ implying that the girl’s mother made her work at home thus preventing her from doing well at school. Such comments denied pupils’ and parents’ struggles, constructed poor girls’ perceived lack of engagement and academic ambition in specifically gendered ways and denied the classed nature of their (re)productive work.
These teachers saw poor girls as more interested in ‘morally worthless’ activities like shopping, or getting married and having children, rather than the ‘morally commendable’ goal of academic success. Such disapproval not only entails the perception that early marriages are a sign of ‘backwardness’ of poor and lower caste communities, but also a reference to the ‘untamed’ sexuality of girls from these communities. Thus, their comments invoke and circulate notions of distinctly classed and casted femininities in a classroom where only a fifth of the girls were upper caste (Brahman, Rajput). In seeking to shame the girls for desiring a married life, there is a privileging of traditional notions around chastity which derive from caste-based notions of girlhood/womanhood. There are underlying ‘presumptions about the accessibility and sexuality of lower caste women’, which, derive from these women’s work in the ‘public’ sphere and are used to justify the ‘impurity’ of these groups (Rege, 1998: WS44).
Secondly, the privileging of norms of chastity and virginity within middle class contexts also accompanied processes of ‘embourgeoisement of patriarchy that followed colonial domination’ (Rege, 1995: 25) as well as the dominant response to it within the broader nationalist framework of India’s freedom struggle (Liddle and Joshi, 1989). More recently, older norms around chastity and sexuality have been reworked as ‘respectable femininity’ in the context of the new middle class, professional women in post-liberalisation India (Radhakrishnan, 2009). Thus, the poor girl pupil is evaluated against middle class, upper caste notions of femininity and expected to be(come) a model of chaste femininity uninterested in her appearance and sexuality. The school ‘girl’ must only be interested in studies; and schooling is not only to ‘save’ poor girls from early marriage, but also delay all sexual activity and expression, not the least because marriage is the only acceptable channel for these.
How poverty and endogamy shape girls’ schooling
Mirroring (inter)national discourses around poor girls’ schooling, classroom discourse also ignores the complex relationships between poverty, caste patriarchy and girls’ (un)waged work and schooling. However, a critical engagement with girls’ stories shows that their schooling is tied up with the (im)possibilities of upward mobility for their families and communities. For example, when I asked Preeti (SC) if she wanted to find work after completing school, and whether girls in their community are allowed to work, this was her response: In our community, girls are married off. Let’s see what my mother has thought [about my future]. My mother says, ‘what will you do anyway [with education]? You have to go and cook for the husband only.’ This is what she says. . . ‘you also study if you want to, otherwise don’t.’ So I said, ‘after Class VIII I will quit school, I don’t want to study!’ I said, ‘if you keep saying such things, how will I study?’ My mother said, ‘okay, let us see. . . First you complete Class VIII.’ But these days there are so many fights at home, I just can’t focus on studies. My sister-in-law and brother fight sometimes, my mother and father fight. . . we are not able to find money for my sister’s wedding, it has to be done this year.
Like Preeti, Ratna (OBC) and Radha (ST) also spoke of stress and conflicts due to lack of money and their adverse impact on their studies. Under these circumstances, families could hardly find resources for children’s schooling beyond Class VIII. Whilst boys planned to work over the summer to make money to pay for next year’s schooling, this was not an option for most of the girls in the classroom. Almost all the boys were in waged work, but girls went out for work only as a last resort. Thus, parents’ incomes and the unavailability of free education after Class VIII has far greater implications for girls’ schooling than for boys’.
I found that the poorest girls – Radha (ST), Payal (SC), Ratna (OBC) and Arpita (UC) – faced the greatest difficulties due to the insecurity of their parents’ informal work, low wages and inadequate social cover. For example, Arpita’s parents had worked in a local garment production unit but her father had had to quit after a heart attack and her mother, after her fourth pregnancy and a stillborn baby. The interview excerpted below captures her everyday life:
I come back at nine [from work], make chapatis for papa, then eat, wash up and go to bed.
So, you have again quit work? You were going because your mother couldn’t go, right?
My mother is still at home only. I go back at three [from school]. Change my dress and then immediately leave [for work].
Arpita, what work do you do?
(to Sarita) Stitching . . . (to me) And come back at nine.
How much do you get for six hours?
I’m not given [the money]. My older brother is. . . Now, whatever is right, [that’s what] we get. Then too we only get a week’s living expenses.
Why aren’t they paying properly when you are going to work?
You see, madam, already we’ve taken so much [loan] from the owner. . .
Indore is one of the 20 Indian hubs that manufacture garments for domestic and global markets (Mezzadri and Srivastava, 2015), but workers lack reliable health cover or sick leave. Therefore Arpita and her older brother, Arun, had to take their parents’ places in the unit. Though gender determined who took care of household responsibilities, it was the education policy that determined who quit school first: Arun had to, because schooling beyond Class VIII is not free. However, gender did imply that despite her crucial contributions to her family’s survival Arpita lacked access to her wages and freedom to dress or move as she pleased. Radha’s (ST) bitter lament reflected the same gender-based restrictions: ‘[I] do the work too, and can’t even go out to play!’ These girls’ stories subvert dominant classed and gendered narratives of childhood wherein pre-marital girlhood is marked by sexual innocence (discussed earlier) and unburdened by waged or unwaged work.
It is crucial to recognise that women and children’s unpaid and unrecognised ‘reproductive’ work is the fundamental condition for entire families’ productive work (Mies, 2014). It is this work that allows markets to lower costs when they shift production from the ‘developed’ to the ‘developing’ world; and compensates for reduced social spending and privatisation of services like healthcare and education by neoliberal states (Mies, 2014). As Nagar et al. (2002: 263) rightly point out, it is the (re)productive work undertaken by these girls within the informal economic and domestic arenas that ‘underwrites and constitutes globalisation.’ Yet, wilful ignorance of the exploitative character of this wider economic logic allows ‘girl effect’ discourses to lay all blame at the family’s door.
Further, the relationship between familial poverty and girls’ schooling is mediated in important ways by caste patriarchy. Conversations with Preeti (SC) and Ratna (ST) revealed that young men in both their communities are married off as early as legally possible, and that these men are usually educated up to Class VIII and engaged in contract work, like driving goods vehicles for local companies, or running small grocery shops or snack stalls. In poorer families, boys also tend to quit school earlier if family crises require them to earn. Therefore, just like in rural areas (Saxena et al., 2009), in cities too, finding grooms within the community becomes difficult if girls are educated to higher levels; even if suitably qualified grooms could be found dowry demands would also rise. Interestingly, Jha and Jhingran (2005) found that if girls could complete education and access jobs then dowry demands may well go down as has been the case with the urban middle class.
Thus, the question of girls’ schooling needs to be located in the continuing centrality of endogamy to the Indian social order rather than in the ‘backwardness’ of socioeconomically marginalised families. Though the upper castes and the middle classes also practice endogamy and dowry upper caste groups are over-represented in regular salaried work (more so in white-collar jobs) and households reliant on such work are far less likely to be poor (United Nations Development Programme [UNDP], 2004). Whereas, SC/STs and the poorer half among the OBCs are disproportionately in low paid informal work (Deshpande and Sharma, 2013; Unni, 2006) and would therefore struggle much more to assemble daughters’ dowries and find suitably qualified grooms.
Moreover, challenging endogamy is also crucial to challenging caste based hierarchies. Elaborating a dalit feminist standpoint, Rege (1998: WS42) points out that endogamy is ‘the essence’ of the caste system and operates through ‘controls on women’s sexuality’ turning them into ‘the gateways to the caste system’. Geetha (2002: 90–91), drawing upon anti-caste icon and activist, Periyar, criticises the institution of marriage itself, arguing that it ‘regulates and disciplines women’s familial and reproductive labour, even as it actively denies their desires and rights to a self-respecting life of their choice.’ Girls in the classroom were well aware of this and spoke of the control that parents-in-law would exercise over their decision to go out to work. However, they believed that education would help them if they were allowed to work; even if they worked as tailors, teachers or policewomen, or ran beauty parlours instead of becoming astronauts.
When a family faces rising poverty, girls and women tend to suffer the most (Saxena et al., 2009) and I found this disadvantage shaping access to food, healthcare, domestic workload and freedom of movement. Despite the continuing correlation between caste location and economic power, the economic status of a family emerged as a crucial factor in shaping girls’ wellbeing and (un)freedoms and as such, also worthy of being considered independently of caste/tribe/religion locations in interrogating girls’ schooling. Samina (General-Muslim), Nilofar (OBC-Muslim), Smita (UC), Renuka (OBC), Rashmi (SC), Chhaya (SC), all of whom had fathers or uncles (in the case of joint families) who were in regular salaried work, reported having fewer household responsibilities, financial support to complete schooling, access to private coaching if possible and some even had support for working afterwards.
Further, the assumption that girls’ parents form an independent unit that can take decisions regarding daughters’ schooling, marriage, or dress must be interrogated in the context of urban poverty and economic informality. Ratna (OBC), Radha (ST), Preeti (SC), Poonam (SC), all narrated stories of how their parents had sought help from the girls’ grandparents, aunts or uncles in difficult times. At the same time, the girls agonised over the pervasive surveillance to which extended families and communities subjected them. Therefore, if economic need required poorer families to depend upon kin, this dependence spelt lesser freedom for the girls as parents were forced to be more accountable to the extended family. Secondly, for internal migrants from economically marginalised groups it is even harder to manage without help from kin already living in the city or migrating alongside them. Despite these constraints and complexities of urban survival, I found that girls perceived cities to allow them greater access to schooling. Based on my findings, multiple reasons suggest themselves: education helps families find urban grooms for daughters, it becomes indispensable in negotiating urban institutions and life, and lastly, there is a far larger number of girls from diverse class-caste groups accessing higher education and jobs in cities to serve as role-models.
Girls’ investments in school and patriarchy in the classroom
Despite teachers’ lack of understanding of girls’ and their families’ circumstances and struggles girls liked coming to school and preferred being at school rather than at home for a number of reasons, some of which are documented in existing research (Jha and Jhingran, 2005; Saxena et al., 2009): girls use schooling as an escape from drudgery and conflict at home, as well as valuing it as a rare leisure and social space to which they have access, albeit conditional. Some girls also found that daughters’ academic success also brought parents social recognition. Even the girls who expected Class VIII to be their last year, saw education as valuable and as an end in itself; for example, Radha and Payal found it useful to be able to read off details of grocery items they bought, read letters and documents for family members and neighbours and teach their parents to read and write. In every neighbourhood there were also some girls accessing schooling beyond Class VIII, private coaching and employment in call centres and schools; this explained the hope that girls harboured regarding possible continuation of education and why they were willing to accept a number of restrictions and intense policing by families and communities in exchange for the freedom to attend school.
Girls like Renuka (OBC), Chhaya (SC) and Rashmi (SC), who had greater freedom at home to dress and make friends as they pleased also attended school regularly because of the importance of credentialing and opportunities for socialising. Other girls also used schooling as a means to push back against everyday constraints: for example, Preeti’s interview excerpted above shows that she uses it to resist talk of marriage. Similarly, Radha refused to stay at home to look after her younger sister and would even lock up the kid to come to school. The fact that girls were able to push back somewhat successfully also shows that education is valued enough by families. In fact, contrary to policy discourses and teachers’ views, some parents do support girls’ schooling in multiple ways: ensure resources to continue studying as far as possible despite financial difficulties (Radha, ST), sending them for private coaching if possible (Nilofar – OBC-Muslim, Rashmi – SC), mothers refusing to work longer hours despite low incomes in order to minimise daughters’ domestic workload (Priya, OBC); and most significant, women resisting male family members’ and neighbours’ attempts to police their daughters’ dress and actions (Radha, Seema, both ST).
Unfortunately, despite the importance of schooling for girls and their parents, classroom discourse often sought to reproduce the same patriarchal tropes of honour, chastity and innocence that inscribed girls’ lives outside. Many girls were also very aware of and angry about discrimination and constraints at home and school. The recognition and negotiation of conditions which allow them to access schooling and survive in the classroom need to be seen as an important aspect of their negotiation of patriarchal restrictions across these spaces. Moreover, attending to their views and practices of negotiation helps understand the complex reality of girls’ schooling in urban India and challenge the binary oppositions between ‘conservative’ communities and ‘empowering’ education presented in (inter)national discourses around education.
Girls responded to the policing in different ways: (a) tried and stayed under teachers’ radars (Chhaya, SC), (b) argued and brazened it out (Rashmi, SC), (c) ignored teachers’ remarks, did not argue and continued acting the way they liked (Renuka, OBC), (d) played the role of teachers’ aide in the matter of policing (Dipali, Rani and Roopa). Dipali (SC), Rani (ST) and Roopa (OBC) were close friends who kept Jyoti Gupta informed of any activities of the girls in their classroom that may be perceived by the teacher as ‘transgressive’. This policing must be understood in the context of institutionalisation of upper caste and middle class worldviews in (post)colonial India (Balagopalan and Subrahmanian, 2003). Girls who identified and performed the ‘good girl’ in the classroom could gain teachers’ approval despite their social locations in non-dominant castes; in other words, ‘upper caste’ and ‘middle class’ operate not only as identities but also as attitudes and attributes. Within the wider logic of caste patriarchy, and ‘girl effect’ narratives, ‘the figure of the girl continues to operate as the site of our desires and anxieties’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2015: 103) and therefore, being a good girl and a girl pupil entails being chaste and ‘innocent’.
Further, Dipali and Rani’s practices served the dual purpose of raising their status in teachers’ eyes and protecting them from their own families’ surveillance. Rani’s brother tended to beat her up on the slightest suspicion of her having interacted with boys in her class. After one such incident, he came to the school to talk to Jyoti Gupta and others and find out if Rani had been behaving ‘properly’ or not. Dipali’s mother also kept in close touch with Jyoti Gupta and often discussed her daughter’s academic performance and general behaviour with the teacher. Therefore, policing other girls helped Dipali and Rani establish themselves as ‘good girls’ and deflect attention onto others. Most significantly, these practices of policing ended up reproducing the notion of ‘honour’ in complex ways:
Gupta Madam now thinks that everyone is flying too high, everyone’s grown wings. (Meaning that the girls were doing things they had not dared to do earlier, in terms of dress, relationships with boys.)
If from our classroom. . . even two or three girls turn out to be like this then. . .
Dipali: Yes. . .
. . . then the entire classroom will earn a bad name.
Such conversations imagined classrooms in the image of the patriarchal family whose ‘honour’ depended on the behaviour of girl pupils. However, there were also girls like Renuka (OBC), themselves ‘good girls’ in every way, but friends with a quintessential ‘bad girl’, Rashmi (SC), who wore tight-fitting salwar-kameez and attractive jewelry to school and befriended boys in the classroom. In ignoring her teacher’s explicit construction of Rashmi as a ‘bad girl’ and strictures on staying away from her, Renuka can be seen as rejecting class and caste-based discourses of ‘honour’ and ‘good’/‘bad’ girls. As the foregoing analysis shows this complex negotiation of gender roles is also simultaneously a contestation over classed and casted nature of the femininities upheld as ideal in the classroom. Thus, instead of seeking to isolate the question of poor girls’ schooling from wider social logics it is useful to engage with how social relations shape their classroom experiences.
Conclusion
This paper drew upon feminist analyses of caste, patriarchy, globalisation and the neoliberal state to theorise girls’ classroom experience and their (un)waged labour and showed that in addition to expanding provision and enrolment classroom processes must also be systematically interrogated. Challenging (inter)national ‘girl effect’ discourses it argued that girls’ educational experience is shaped crucially by material aspects of poverty which entail (re)productive labour that tends to be obscured and devalued in classrooms even as it is exploited by global capital. Drawing upon girls’ stories of everyday survival and schooling, the paper asserted that poverty must be acknowledged as a structural condition embedded in historical class and caste relations, and being reworked within the contemporary context of liberalisation and informalisation. Here the shifting role of the state is central to (im)possibilities of social justice and equality for girls in and through education, both in ensuring availability of quality schooling beyond Middle School as well as addressing the pervasive poverty and deprivation that form the context of their schooling. Thus, accounts of girls’ life at home and school presented here enrich sociological understandings of both gendered childhoods and girls’ schooling.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This paper is based on my PhD fieldwork which was funded by the University of Warwick, UK, through the award of the Chancellor’s International Scholarship (2013–2017).
