Abstract
In this article, we engage with the experiences of students in a government-run residential secondary school that enrols girls primarily from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds. Through an exploration of the history of the programme, secondary evaluations conducted over the years and a month-long engagement with one such residential school, we probe how the categories of disadvantage—caste and gender— continue to operate, even as the state tries to obliterate them in this space. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theorization of ‘practices’, we describe daily informal interactions in the space, highlighting their role in reinforcing and sometimes challenging extant social differences. Drawing attention to the diversity that lies even within the formal category of ‘disadvantaged’, we describe the potential and the limitations of targeted residential schooling. Our work points to the need for greater sensitivity in the planning and implementation of state-run programmes targeted at the most marginalized and a re-imagination of efforts to offer an ‘alternate field’.
Introduction
Educational spaces promise the hope of a more progressive society, in which individual experiences and outcomes are freed from socio-cultural and economic backgrounds (Duncan & Murnane, 2011). They are often hoped to be ‘liberating’, imagined as potential ‘interventionist tool(s)’ (Jain & Rajagopal, 2012), for ‘removal of disparities’ (MHRD, 1986, p. 6) and as tools for ‘political awareness and transformation’ (Ghose & Mullick, 2012, p. 148). In this regard, residential schools take a step further as they physically separate students from their social origins, bringing them into new shared spaces that they co-inhabit with others, under greater supervision. We probe one such effort in the context of a large, national-level programme that, in its stated objective and design, seeks to challenge norms that are informed by one’s caste and gender (Dutt, 2010; Jain & Rajagopal, 2012; Pappu, 2015).
As spaces, separated from the society and governed by the state, societal disparities are often believed to be residing largely outside the schooling system. Under these imaginations, the value of education lies in simply ‘bringing and keeping’ (Kumar & Gupta, 2008) girls in schools. Such imaginations can be deeply problematic (Balagopalan, 2012; Bhog, 2016). While some grassroots educational initiatives have invested in critical transformative pedagogy (for example, ones developed under Mahila Samakhya), the prevalent ‘mainstream delivery system’ of schooling (Jain & Rajagopal, 2012) has often been critiqued as a means of reproducing social and economic inequalities (Bourdieu, 1977a; Raveendran & Chunawala, 2015), with spaces and textbooks offering limited challenge to the social institutions of gender and caste (Majumdar & Mooij, 2011). As Bhog (2016, p. 71) cautions, girl-specific interventions ‘can often replicate the family in becoming safe spaces for appropriate socialization of girls’.
Gender is ‘inextricably intertwined with other critical markers including region, religion, class, caste, sexual orientation and disability’ (Pappu & Goswami, 2015, p. 160). For a girl child from a backward community, disadvantaged along the lines of caste and gender, there are at least two struggles she has to face and any sincere effort to empower has to enable them to fight both (Kumar & Gupta, 2008). As several social movements, efforts of feminist groups and state initiatives have demonstrated, educational spaces can potentially serve as such a space. However, as efforts to adapt them into more formal state systems have revealed, there are tensions between the imagination of gender and caste that have emerged under government educational programmes and the very feminist movements they draw on (Bhog, 2016).
In light of policies attempting integration of educational spaces, prior studies have tried to understand integration among students falling in the socio-economic categories of the ‘advantaged’ and the ‘disadvantaged’ (Ashley, 2005, in the context of out-of-school children; Sarin et al., 2017, in the context of the Right to Education (RTE); Ramachandran, 2018, in the context of Dalits and Tribals in schools). In contrast, there has been limited examination of spaces that exclusively cater to students from disadvantaged backgrounds (see Ross et al., 2011; Shah, 2011). This is despite the push for higher enrolment for girls and ‘backward communities’. Spaces that are only inhabited by girls, or those belonging to ‘disadvantaged’ communities, are often assumed to be ‘naturally’ sensitive to gender and caste (Balagopalan, 2010). We interrogate this assumption in our study, by critically examining the diversity that comes to be typically subsumed within the category of ‘disadvantaged’.
Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas (KGBV) is a residential secondary school programme, run by the Government of India (GOI). It was launched ‘for setting up residential schools at upper primary level for girls belonging predominantly to the SC, ST, OBC (Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Other Backward Class) and minorities in difficult areas’ (NITI Aayog, 2015, p. i). In the article, we try to understand the state’s imagination, articulation and the lived experiences of students in one school as they negotiate residential educational spaces under the programme, seeing it as an effort to offer an alternate ‘field’—a space that possibly has rules and norms that are different from, and hopefully challenge, the prevalent norms of the society. Seeing it as a site of schooling and state interventions, we trace the history of the programme, its evaluations and document informal daily interactions between the inhabitants of the educational space.
Methodologically, we emphasize detailed observation and experiences of practices in only one school, and to spaces within the school, and there is no attempt to evaluate the KGBV programme in toto. Disadvantages that lie outside, such as access to these schools itself (see Bhatty & Dongre, 2016; Jha et al., 2015), remain outside the scope of this study. With these limitations, we hope that a detailed analysis of a school helps bring to the fore the role of informal interactions in challenging/reinforcing extant social differences. A historical analysis further allows an exploration into the possibilities that a space like the KGBV provides.
We next describe the framework that serves as our conceptual lens. After discussing the methodology of the article, we subsequently elaborate on the experiences of girls at the KGBV in the light of the theoretical frame. Our discussion suggests that even as there are instances of challenges offered, the social inequalities may continue to be reproduced. We argue that relying on simplistic categories such as ‘backward castes’ or ‘females’ and considering them as monoliths not only is insufficient to guide the implementation of these policies, but also ignores the complexity and may adversely impact the participant’s experiences.
Understanding Daily Practices of the School Space
A residential school is more than just a site for curricular instruction. It also serves as a space where students and staff interact and live their daily lives. To interrogate how these interactions act on the lived experience of these spaces, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework for making sense of what we observe. With a focus on day-to-day ‘practices’, which we bring to the study of educational space, Bourdieu’s conceptualization helps us ‘incorporate the most mundane details of everyday life in our analysis’ (Moi, 2001/1998, p. 268), a task that we see as useful for our inquiry.
Bourdieu understands interactions or ‘practices’ in spaces, such as the one we examine, as being governed or influenced by both the social setting/rules (‘doxa’) and the historical socialization of the body (‘habitus’) (Bourdieu, 1977b/1972, 1984/1979, 1993/1984). Some of these ‘rules’ that are in play include those that have been laid down in policy documents, evaluations, their histories and are negotiated and contested between the actors of both the ‘state’ and the students in the ‘field’. The state actors in this field include those who interact with the students both directly (teachers, warden, cooks, security guards) and indirectly (through policies and design of the space). Student actors include the girls who come from different backgrounds. In addition, there are other actors, such as the watermelon seller from whom the girls would buy fruit through the window, as well as the warden’s husband.
Like any theoretical lens, Bourdieu’s lens examining the school space foregrounds certain elements while putting others in the background. Our purpose is not to assess the validity of the lens, but instead employ it for what it might reveal to us. We understand caste and gender as socially constructed categories that bodies are socialized into and at least some ‘practices’ on the ‘field’ are shaped through their intersections on a student (Thorpe, 2009). We are conscious of not treating the social categories as either exhaustive, or essential. Rejecting them as objective categorizations, we see them as having emerged from a shared history (genealogy) (Moi, 2001/1998; Stone, 2004) among the members of groups. We, however, continue to use them as analytical categories and consider them ‘an appropriate target for social critique and political transformation’ (Stone, 2004, p. 3).
Primary Data Collection Process: Methods and Positionality
We use a phenomenological approach to understand the experiences of the students, as is lived by them (Crossley, 2001). In the ethnographic spirit, the study was exploratory in nature, and did not have a pre-framed structured research design (Atkinson & Hammersley, 2007, p. 3). The objective of the study, when we set out, was broadly to understand the experiences of students in the residential school. Over the time of the fieldwork, the objectives evolved, and we came to focus on informal interactions in a residential space. We sought to study these through observations and accounts of students in ‘everyday contexts’ (ibid, p. 3).
The field research was conducted by the article’s first author, who stayed at the school in the months of April–May in 2016, and involved over 150 hours of observations, informal interactions. These included participating in activities such as playing, chatting, eating, conversational interviews with students. Some informal interactions were also held with teachers, cook and warden in the school. These were very limited in nature due to circumstantial reasons. We therefore refrain from making substantive arguments based on them. The broad purpose of the research was communicated clearly to the participants and permissions were sought. The identities of our research participants and exact location of the school have been concealed or names have been changed. Field notes were taken daily in a physical notebook and were digitized, shared and discussed between the authors regularly during the field visit.
We are reflective of the presence of the field researcher on the field. We believe that making her positionality explicit would inform our theorizing and allow us to reflect on ‘the ways in which the researcher’s positionality may impact the accessing, generating, and analysis of data’ (Yanow & Schwartz-Shea, 2015, p. xiii). The field researcher got access to the space by virtue of falling into the category of a female and that of an outsider, who needed accommodation in the rural area. Access was granted informally, after conversations with the block officials and a short conversation with the principal about the research. The permission was granted with the assumption that she would not be in the residential space during formal school hours. She was engaged in other fieldwork in the villages in the block during the formal school hours. After the initial permissions, the field researcher lived with some students and her interactions were not mediated by the initial gatekeepers of the space.
On the first day, the field researcher was met by a grilled gate of the school building and struggled to communicate with the students, who mostly spoke in the local language. The gate was unlocked by one of the students who got the keys, and another came forward, raised her hand and said, ‘I know Hindi, come here (Mujhe hindi aati hai na. Aap idhar aao).’ She helped the field researcher communicate with several others (students, teachers, helpers) and led her to the room where she along with her other friends slept at night. While direct communication subsequently occurred with other students, teachers and staff who came from other backgrounds and knew Hindi or English, it was the first group—ninth graders (15–16 years old), belonging to the social category of STs—who played a primary role in mediating the field researcher’s access to this space. While this might ‘bias’ the lens through which the field researcher experienced the space, this affinity also privileged a closer understanding of the experiences of at least one group of students.
The observations, informal conversations were not only constrained by language but also influenced by the identity of the researcher. Her position as a researcher was a privileged one. Although the researcher was much older to the girls, participants often compared her life with their present and possible future lives. The students knew she was travelling alone in another state, far from her hometown and studying further away, something they said, ‘we would never be allowed (humko nai jane denge).’ While these girls themselves were staying away from their homes, home was not very far from the school. Although many of them did have smartphones in their homes, cell phones were not allowed in the school. Consequently, being able to talk to her parents daily was also a privilege. She found herself trying hard to hide these signs of privilege. Never opening her laptop that she carried in her bag and speaking to her parents when the girls were not around were few things, she caught herself doing to this end.
KGBV: Changing Imaginations?
Recognizing that gender disparities exist in ‘rural areas and among disadvantaged 1 communities’ (MHRD, 2004, p. 1), KGBVs, in the current form, were launched in 2004 with enrolment disparities in mainstream government schools and school dropouts being core concerns. First launched in educationally backward blocks 2 (EBBs), the programme was extended to other blocks with high minority concentration from 2008 onwards with the objective of ensuring ‘access and quality education to the girls of disadvantaged groups of society by setting up residential schools at upper primary level’ (MHRD, 2004, 2007b). While it started off as an independent scheme working in parallel with Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), National Programme for Education of Girls at Elementary Level and Mahila Samakhya (MS), it was placed under the SSA in 2007.
Historically, the idea of targeted residential schooling in India is rooted in ‘condensed courses’ run by Durgabai Deshmukh, Soundaram Ramachandran and the Kasturba Gandhi Memorial Trust in the 1950s (Ramachandran, 2007). The program continued under the Central Social Welfare Board and was later re-moulded into several educational programmes (for a list see Ramachandran, 2007, p. 6). It featured prominently in the initial design documents of MS 1989 (MHRD, GoI, 1989, cited in Ramachandran, 2007), in which it was to serve as a response to the voiced need for the programme (Jain & Rajagopal, 2012; Jandhyala, 2004; Ramachandran, 2007). Over the years, several educational interventions such as Mahila Shikshan Kendras (MSK), Kishori Kendras, Jagjagi Kendras in Bihar, Balamitra Kendras in Andhra Pradesh, Balika Shikshan Shivir and Mahila Shikshan Vihar, and Lok Jumbish (LJ) in Rajasthan have inspired the KGBV programme (Ramachandran, 2016; Ramachandran et al., 2004; Saxena et al., 2004). Some of the elements that have been inspired from these programmes include setting up residential centres only for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who have dropped out or would be vulnerable to dropping out; creating a curriculum towards their special needs to enable catching up (Jain & Rajagopal, 2012); the inclusion of several activities such as cycling and self-defence (Jain & Rajagopal, 2016).
In 2007, there were 916 KGBVs across the country (MHRD, 2007a) and by 2018 the programme was scaled up to 3,697 KGBVs, in which 3.78 lakh girls studied (PIB, 2018). Some scholars involved in MS were also involved in designing the KGBV (Ramachandran, 2016) and MS continued to act as a partner in overseeing and running KGBVs in some states. The collaboration of MS with the state has often been seen as a ‘successful collaboration’ between feminist and state objectives (Menon-Sen, 2012).
The KGBV formally borrows some of these design elements—such as the concept of a residential school targeted at the disadvantaged communities from earlier educational programmes run under MS. But researchers involved in the MS such as Bhog (2016) have said that pedagogical and teacher training have been ignored (Ramachandran et al., 2012). However, ‘practical fallouts’ (Menon-Sen, 2012) of mainstreaming, such as ‘little autonomy’ (p. 180) and standardization of textbooks (Ramachandran, 2016), have also been highlighted.
Some have expressed anxiety in regard to protecting the ‘feminist essence’ (Menon-Sen, 2012) of interventions from ‘dilution into apolitical’ ends (Sarin & Chand, 2019). For example, the curriculum of the MS educational programmes (such as MSK) was imagined as ones that could provide a ‘secure and safe’ learning environment (Ramachandran et al., 2012), encourage an understanding of social power structures such as gender, caste and class (Ghose & Mullick, 2012, p. 150), be ‘learner-centred’ and informed by a ‘feminist perspective’ (Ghose & Mullick, 2012, p. 311). However, past research on KGBVs has noted the marginalization of these pedagogical concerns (Bhog, 2016; Saxena & Mehrotra, 2012).
Nevertheless, the programme, in its current form has been celebrated by the government for its achievements (MHRD, 2017). Since the inception of KGBV, multiple evaluations and discussions have been conducted (MHRD, 2007b, 2013; NCERT, 2008; NITI Aayog, 2015). The evaluations serve as markers of a potential change in the imagination of the government towards the KGBV and a move away from the spirit of critical inquiry.
The first evaluation in 2007 describes the initial challenges and achievements of the programme. While noting some appreciable aspects in the running of the programme, the second evaluation, conducted in 2013, provides a scathing account of the situation of KGBVs. The first two evaluations were conducted by independent researchers with extensive experiences in education. In contrast, the most recent evaluation of 2015 (NITI Aayog, 2015) was led by economists from within the bureaucracy. Perhaps reflective of this, there is also a shift away from personal accounts and qualitative details in the previous evaluations, to a report packed with graphs and numbers using data collected in forms of standardized surveys, abstracting the experiences of girls into measurable outcomes.
Apart from the notable exceptions discussed here, there has been little engagement with the diversity in the backgrounds of the students attending the programme in these and other policy documents. Expressing concern about ‘biases and stereotypes’, the national consultation for KGBVs (NCERT, 2008, pp. 12–13) recommended adoption of a gender-sensitive approach and the ‘inclusion of girls from different socio-economic backgrounds’ so that ‘further exclusion’ is avoided (NCERT, 2008, p. 21). Likewise, the first evaluation called for a ‘…holistic teacher training that combines technical competence with a strong gender and cultural orientation’ (MHRD, 2007a, p. 13) in response to the absence of gender training and concerns of gender stereotypes being propagated through curriculum and extra-curricular activities. A concern was also echoed in the evaluation conducted in 2013 (MHRD, 2013). One of the stated objectives of the third evaluation was to ‘verify the contribution in promotion of national integration/social integration…’ However, beyond this (admittedly ambiguous) paragraph, there is no reference to national/social integration in the evaluation document.
To the extent that evaluations and reports of the government programme (MHRD, 2007a, 2013; NITI Aayog, 2015) have recognized the reproduction of notions of disadvantage in school spaces, the responses have focused on ‘planned activities’ (both curricular and extra-curricular). While we share the concerns raised, there seems to have been very little attention paid to the substantial time spent by students in residential schools in non-planned activities such as eating, playing and informal interactions, activities that we observe.
Understanding ‘Practices’ in the Residential School
A Background: Understanding the School Space
The studied residential school is in a rural block, in a state in southern India. While the school was managed directly under the SSA, there were collaborations for two-week-long internships that were run during the summers with an NGO. Other states have a combination of NGOs, SSA, MS and societies that manage the KGBV schools (MHRD, 2007, p. vii). While the state government website referred to it as being run by the state government, the teachers themselves were unsure about who ran it. In the block where the school is located, the population consisted of 20% Scheduled Castes (SC) and 5% Scheduled Tribes (ST) (the national-level statistics are 16.6% and 8.6%, respectively) (Census, 2011).
The walls of the compound were under construction, and there was no gate to the school premises. The building inside the premises, however, had a grilled iron door/gate, which could be and was locked throughout the day. The large space outside the school building within the premises was consequently inaccessible to the students. Another way out of this space was a door from the kitchen. Students were not allowed to use that door. The school was a single-storey building, in the shape of a polygon, with a courtyard in the centre, with a continuous corridor running parallel and classrooms arranged around it. The courtyard was divided by an elevated cement walkway, which divided it into roughly two-thirds and one-third. The larger side had underground water storage in the centre. The students drew water from it, with buckets that were actually used paint containers. In the morning, they spent time sitting along it, tying each other’s hair into braids after they would freshen up. They also played their games in the area in the morning, and in the evening. There were classrooms, a staff room, kitchen and washroom along the courtyard. The classrooms served as learning spaces in the day and as hostel rooms at night.
In the other half of the courtyard, there was a huge sink with small trees planted. The water from the kitchen and open bathing area drained into this area (without pipes). Students also brushed their teeth—some used it as a sink (standing on the cemented walkway) while some found it more comfortable to land themselves inside the area, squat down and brush their teeth. After meals, utensils were washed using this space as the sink for water. The corridor looked freshly painted with various drawings, e.g. a heart, a map of India, Vivekananda. The corridor was a shared space, and students often ran and fought amongst each other here. The terrace also played an important role in the spaces that these students inhabit. On mornings and evenings, the students could be seen drying/collecting dried clothes. Some younger children would play games, and some older ones would join them, and some just stood there, talking amongst each other.
In a typical classroom, there were small tin boxes lined against the walls. The field researcher was staying in the eighth-grade classroom with ninth-grade students. There were two tube-light holders, one empty and another with a non-functional tube light. A not-so-bright bulb lit the classroom. The students and the field researcher found it difficult to read when sitting at the other end of the class. The classroom was littered with paper and dust. There were charts up on the walls too high to read clearly from. Some of them were made on hard boards. The topics on the charts were homonyms, parts of the body, microscope, the district and the state map, number line and flowerpot drawn on top of the blackboard. There was also a map of South America in the classroom. Most of these charts seemed very old.
The KGBV here, started in 2011, runs for girls from sixth to the 10th grades. There were 189 girls registered in this school. Formally, 25 students were categorized as ST, 105 as SCs, 58 as Backward Castes and one student as Other Caste. There were four teachers, a cook and a caretaker, all females. During the day, a school was run on the first floor where boys were studying, although their access to the space inhabited by the girls was limited. They were present during the day. The caretaker’s husband, who stayed with her just outside the school, accessed the girls’ space regularly until the evening. At night, in addition to the students, a teacher also stayed at the school, along with the caretaker.
The residential school can be seen as a ‘field’ in a social setting. In governing the lives of girls in this ‘field’, the state seeks to demarcate the space with rules that are distinct from the ‘field’ that the girls come from. We understand this space as broadly defined by some physical structures—the walls surrounding the school, the kitchen, classrooms, a large space in the middle (that was divided into two functional spaces) and the terrace. Each of these smaller spaces can be understood as ‘sub-fields’, run by different rules, but broadly under the scope of the rules that govern the residential school. For example, school hours, curriculum and formal activities refer to the formal ‘rules’ followed in the school, satisfying the logic articulated by policy makers. In contrast, a different (but not entirely independent) logic governed informal activities, such as standing in a line for food in the kitchen. Although physical structures provide boundaries and facilitate interactions, they do not solely define the fields. The space also interacts with time to form a field. For example, the same physical space used as a classroom during class hours allowed for a different field at night, when it was used as a space to eat food, to share stories, play games and also to sleep.
Notions of Difference
The school space was inhabited by only female students. Overt markers of gender were easy to spot—gendered dresses, ribbons tying mostly long hair into two plaits. These markers were also visible in the space—with hairpins, ribbons and large combs—kept below the small mirrors on the wall of every classroom. The school uniform given to the students was commonly worn even after class hours and on holidays. This points to a lack of material resources, a common characteristic of all students. All switched between two dresses (only one of which was the school uniform). Very few students had a spare set of clothes that they would wear sometimes (again usually on holidays). Even as there was a ‘visible’ shared position of disadvantage, there were also salient sub-categories that we describe below. In contrast, overt makers of caste, unlike dress in the case of gender, are not very visible.
As one enters the school, outside the principal’s office was a board with the number of students belonging to different categories within the ‘SC, BC, ST, and OC (Other Caste)’. These categories were possibly important for policy makers who wished to ‘reserve’ seats in the school for certain communities, even as they were all clubbed into the category of the ‘disadvantaged’. However, these categories were not of interest to the state alone. The differences between the castes, we found, were also prevalent among the students.
During the day, the students were sorted in the classrooms based on grades. However, ‘fields’ were oriented and roughly segregated along caste, after the formal schooling time. Students, sorted by caste, occupied specific classrooms and defended it. One student told the field researcher—‘they can’t come here, it is not their place (Wo yahan nahi aa sakte..ye unka jagah nai hai).’ The sleeping spots in the classroom had also been passed down within given caste groups, passed on from one batch of the same caste to another. The little interactions between students of different castes groups were often in the form of verbal fights, and sarcastic remarks, driving each other out of their spaces.
A strong sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’ along the lines of caste strengthened notions of difference in a space that had hoped for social integration. In one case, a few students introduced the younger students to the field researcher as ‘see, this is our ST gang (ye dekho humara ST gang).’ From another conversation—one student narrated a story: ‘two girls belonging to backward caste were asked to leave the school. Boys had called them on auntie’s (the caretaker) phone. We STs don’t do this.’ During the conversation, the field researcher tried putting forth her thoughts saying that talking to boys possibly had nothing to do with their caste. Some of them giggled and smiled. On being asked if they spoke to the girls belonging to the backward castes, the students said, ‘they are our enemies.’
Although religion does form a part of the policy documents, it did not form a part of the blackboard in front of the principal’s office, laying out the different social groups in the school. Religion, however, did seem to be an important part of a student’s identity. A student introduced herself as ‘Akka, my name is Misha and I am Christian.’ Another seventh-grade student said, ‘Akka, I know English, because I am Christian’; soon after she introduced herself. One morning, there was a watermelon seller who came outside the school. The students procured the watermelon through the classroom windows. The field researcher bought a plate too. Soon, a student said, ‘this uncle is also Muslim (ye uncle bhi Muslim hai)’. There were also some heartening instances of solidarity between girls from different backgrounds. For example, one of the students with whom the field researcher shared the sleeping space with, Shanti, was a Christian, and read the Bible every night before sleeping. Even on days when it got late, the students did not insist on switching off the lights or show any sign of exasperation. They went to sleep anyway, and Shanti would switch off the lights after reading for about 10–15 minutes.
Students belonging to different castes, across age groups, often fought with one another, drove each other out of rooms that had informally become segregated on the basis of caste. The girls belonging to the ST community reported that they were often called names and verbally abused ‘even by younger girls’. One evening, when the girls were playing with the field researcher, the girls (STs) asked if they could play a game named badkamma. It is a dance in a circle, with hands on the waist of the neighbouring girls while singing a song with increasing speed over time. At the time, she was not aware of the castes of the students. The students were heterogeneous in the way they looked and spoke, and she was drawing a rather promising picture in her head of a hostel as a site of integration and friendships between students of different backgrounds. Most of the students in badkamma came from the ST background. There were another group of students, sitting on the stairs. They had been invited by the field researcher to come and join, but they had politely refused. The refusal was initially understood as an independent choice not to join. However, later, realizing the caste dynamics of the place, the field researcher discussed this with some students (directly/in Hindi/English/through translations), from the different groups who then discussed that the girls usually played in groups differentiated by their castes.
These differences, however, cropped up much later during the fieldwork. Our own discomfort in asking this explicitly possibly reflects our own ‘habitus’. We had not seen the students through the caste lens for a bulk of the time spent there. In contrast, the understanding that only girls inhabit the space was immediately visible to the field researcher. This differential invocation points to the distinct ways in which the categories of caste and gender manifest themselves. The understanding of the category of gender is shared by a larger number of people, as compared to that of caste, where the understanding in some cases may be limited to only a village. While Gorringe and Rafanell (2007) argue that, contrary to widespread belief, people can make guesses about other’s caste on the basis of appearance, it is often not the case. Features such as languages spoken and games played can similarly distinguish identities, but outsiders (and external policy makers) are typically not privy to this knowledge.
Notions of Disadvantage
The formation of groups on the lines of caste (even cutting across grades) within the school and the differential treatment of girls by the actors of the state typify how the social category of caste shaped the experiences of girls. By virtue of falling into the social category of ‘girl’, and the social category of ‘disadvantaged’, they have been marked for differential treatment by the state that might also put them in more advantaged positions relative to peers. However, this has also isolated them from their families, in a small space that they are not allowed to leave (Balagopalan, 2010): in rooms, a small veranda, at best the terrace, away from cell phones (‘lest they talk to boys!’). In contrast, as one student mentioned, their brothers likely stayed in homes, in their communities, with presumably access to larger spaces and cell phones. Gender sensitivity was sought to be achieved through gender training. But among other things, the training included poems and texts in English, a language they little understood.
Actors of the state also shaped the experiences of girls in the space, not always without creating or reinforcing hierarchies of disadvantage. For example, the cook, who was otherwise a cheerful lady and smiled and spoke to students as they took the food, did not look or smile at the girls who belonged to the ST category. When the field researcher asked, the girls reluctantly told her that she would at other times call them names and abuse them verbally. One of the girls said, ‘if we make any mistake, she verbally abuses us and calls us STs’. The body of the cook and her practices played a significant role in this space. Her expressions of agitation and verbal abuse towards the students seemed to encourage the behaviour of looking down upon the students who fell into the social category of STs among other students. The socialization of the cook is likely to have influenced the values that she held for these social categories of caste and shaped her habitus. This in turn is socializing the students into similar categories. Although the students said that the teachers never explicitly abused them like the cook did, the students claimed that teachers were aware of these dynamics, but ‘they never say anything’.
We interpret these experiences, first as re-affirming notions of disadvantage, of difference and of polarity (irreconcilable differences which had led to feelings of enmity). These experiences also suggest that the ‘field’ had not effectively challenged their notions of difference or has drawn new lines of difference that they had acquired by socialization before or in school (Kumar & Gupta, 2020). However, we would like to refrain from and even be wary of framing these girls as victims of discrimination. The disadvantaged students were not passive recipients of disadvantage and difference, and in some instances, students did engage in verbal fights with other students.
Discussion
Schooling has long been looked at with optimism and hope to ameliorate social inequalities (Duncan & Murnane, 2011). Studies on residential schooling are, however, more contested (Balagopalan, 2010). Conversations over residential schooling in several other countries, such as Australia, Canada, the United States (Au et al., 2016; Edwards, 2010), have largely been around the culturally isolating effects of the schooling. KGBVs in India have a unique history, as one that emerged from needs and demands from communities and not as a state-sponsored project (Jain & Rajagopal, 2012). When it was taken up as a state project there was possible ‘domestication’ (Cornwall, 2016, p. xii) or ‘disciplining’ (Mukhopadhyay, 2016, p. 19) of feminist activism into bureaucratized projects. Yet, its history gives hope in looking for opportunities for ‘disruption’ and ‘subversion’ of the dominant hierarchies (Mukhopadhyay, 2016). The study hopes to inform both existing residential school programmes and new initiatives such as the Dalit-only residential schools (Mohanty, 2020).
Our findings suggest that, even as they challenge them, ‘state-sponsored modernizing’ (Balagopalan, 2012, p. 320) spaces are not devoid of the threat of reproducing the very social inequalities they challenge. These lead to two suggestions for policy. One, that relying on simplistic categories such as ‘backward castes’ or ‘females’—considering them as monoliths—not only is insufficient to guide implementation of policies but also ignores the complexity of engaging with socially disadvantaged communities. However, in doing so, we do not advocate for spaces with more homogeneous groups, but to call for sincere efforts of integration in spaces inhabited by children from diverse backgrounds. Second, the study points to the role of ‘unplanned’ activities in the reproduction of social inequalities. We, however, do not suggest that the time of ‘planned’ activities should increase, but to highlight the significance of the ‘unplanned’ in the analysis of an educational setting.
There are at least two further questions for further research. How does the management of the school influence practices within? The school we studied was directly run by the state government with little participation from local communities. The organic linkages between the school and community structure that preceded the national-level programme under MS and LJ were given little significance here. Second, could one possibly also see the findings as inevitable fallouts of scaling up? Does the bureaucratic imagination reduce or transform the imagination of women students ‘from aspiring citizens’ to being ‘populations’ (Bhog, 2016, p. 64)?
The MS and the schools under MS had a distinct pedagogy that focused on the understanding of power structures in society—explicitly contained content on women’s rights. It included several activities such as cycling, gardening and self-defence (Jain & Rajagopal, 2016). These are usually not an explicit focus in mainstream government schools. However, it may not be enough to borrow some of design elements from these initiatives and scale them up. Several of the earlier initiatives came in the context of broader institutions such as the MS and LJ that laid foundations for the education interventions. In the words of Jain (2016), it possibly leads to the ‘replication of frame and not the spirit’ (p. 316).
We contend that interventions such as the KGBVs have the potential of presenting an ‘unfamiliar field’, but it cannot simply be supplanted by the enforcement of formal structures. Instead, it needs to be created by an engagement with practices and contestation of ‘rules’ already in play. Although ‘habitus’ is historically developed and depends on early socialization, it is ‘adjusted’ (Moi, 2001/1998) through experiences in fields with different rules (Bourdieu, 1990/1980). The malleability of both leaves scope for hope and possible change. As we have discussed, the origins of KGBVs can itself guide us towards an education that strives to be emancipatory in nature. We point to the historical associations and inspirations from efforts such as MSK and others, with a hope that the programme could remind itself of its origins and more meaningfully engage with the lives of the students it enrols.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the students at the KGBV for sharing their stories and their space with the field researcher. We would like to thank Harsh Mittal for comments on previous drafts of this article; Vijaya Sherry Chand and Navdeep Mathur for their insightful discussions and Sebastian Morris for his comments on the proposal of this study. The article has benefitted from the meaningful comments and feedback of anonymous reviewer(s). We would also like to thank those who attended our presentation at the XII International Conference on Public Policy and Management, at Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore in 2017 and at Monk Prayogshala Conference in 2018 for their comments and feedback. Any errors are our own.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The research has been supported by a doctoral fellowship from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. No other financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.