Abstract
This special issue on Re-imagining the Contemporary in Indian Education addresses select aspects of the emergent debate in Indian education combining both granular sociological analyses and broader historical and political-economic perspectives. As always, the debate animating the contemporary educational landscape in India is intensely polarised foregrounding contending visions of its present and future. This is hardly surprising as the field of education in India, as elsewhere, remains in essence an ideologically fraught domain consisting of conflicting visions of nation, state, citizenship, good life and secular emancipation. Many issues which were once thought to have been settled are being examined afresh with renewed vigour and sharper analytical acuity. Sure enough, the National Education Policy of 2020 (NEP 2020) has provided a congenial context to this persistent debate on a host of issues concerning education in India. Whereas there is a concerted effort to implement the policy in its entirety at the national level, and in most of the states, the NEP 2020 has also attracted criticisms regarding its inherent assumptions, lofty ideals, institutional templates, implementation strategies and contradictory impulses from a multiplicity of quarters. In fact, the NEP 2020 has turned out to be the fulcrum of contemporary discourses on the scope, nature, content and future of education in India.
For a diverse post-colonial society like India, the quest for an ideal education policy necessarily opens up a range of questions that have a bearing on the internal positioning of variously defined groups and communities constituting the nation. The way a policy envisages future pathways towards augmenting equitable access to quality education has the potential to alter entrenched social structural hierarchies. Conversely, a badly designed policy can further reinforce existing hierarchies and throttle the opportunities for upward mobility of the aspirational groups coming from hitherto disadvantaged sections of society. The concerns surrounding access, equity and quality ultimately boil down to the democratisation of educational institutions. The relative role of the state and the market ends up shaping the content and pace of this much sought-after democratisation. Moreover, a national policy also brings into focus more expansive questions about the nation’s vision for belonging in the broader international community. Should the nation aspire to be a ‘Viswaguru’ on the terms inherent in the contemporary configuration of global geopolitics? Should it question the misperceived universality of global knowledge in relativistic nativist-xenophobic terms? Or, should it aspire for strategic autonomy in terms of knowledge production and dissemination by drawing upon plural indigenous traditions in non-parochial ways? How should it reconcile the demands of global standards of excellence and the expectations of national relevance?
At the national level, education remains the ultimate touchstone of the inclusionary politics of a given regime. In contemporary India, the politics of inclusion is rendered exceptionally complex for it is more than ensuring institutional presence of a wide array of aspirational groups and communities. It is also about creating a space for their knowledge traditions, languages and variegated cultural ensembles in the official repertoire of legitimate knowledge as articulated in curricula and media of instruction. Put differently, it connotes a kind of institutional-ideological facilitation which insulates different types of disadvantaged groups from the hegemonic knowledge systems of the day while providing them avenues for social mobility, economic empowerment and identity preservation. The challenges of such negotiation with the ‘dominant’ can be seen quite clearly in relation to the issue of language in education. This special issue contains two papers that frontally engage with the language question in the context of the medium of instruction debate in the country. Manoj Kumar’s ‘Bringing English Back in School Education: English in Government Schools of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh’ maps out the medium of instruction debate in post-Independence India. Drawing upon Pierre Bourdieu, Kumar situates the debate in the power-laden framework of linguistic competition wherein a language has much more to do than merely conveying and receiving meanings. Instead, a language is about gaining value and profit in a particular linguistic market with accumulated symbolic capital. Arguably, a language is a strategic asset privileging certain groups with the requisite capital in an ever-contentious field of relative dominance and subordination. This possibly explains the aspirational surge for English-medium education in India to which some of the state governments have fitfully responded. However, Kumar cautions us that the choice of English as a medium of instruction is neither a strategic move of a maximising individual nor an outcome of a democratically informed rights-based framework. His theoretically informed paper helps us understand the processes which are at the centre of the apparent reversal of the official approach towards English as the medium of instruction in the last two decades or so.
At the same time, Kumar unpacks the prevalent understanding of multilingualism as evidenced in everyday practices of school education. While the Indian state—both at the centre and in states—promoted Indian languages as media of instruction, the official three-language formula underpins a particular version of multilingual ideology. This ideology assumes each language to be a distinct and definite entity thereby rendering multilingualism as an arithmetic aggregation of standardised languages. It is an altogether different matter that even this version of multilingualism did not get much acceptance in the institutional practices in many parts of the country. The languages like Hindi/English or Bhojpuri/Hindi have often been perceived as dichotomously placed. As a consequence, two languages in these binaries are symbolically perceived as representing home and the world. In other words, acquiring one language in the school by students requires conscious shunning of the other language. Evidently, in such a scenario, other languages as school subjects appear as an additional burden to the students, and learning of languages becomes a zero-sum game. In the ultimate analysis, as Kumar stresses, linguistic competence is intimately linked to social competence. Viewed thus, the medium of instruction debate is neither a debate about linguistic feasibility nor about social efficacy. Noticeably, the issue of English as the sole medium of instruction gets embedded in the dominant understanding of mother tongue-based multilingual education. The denouement to this language conundrum lies in the politics of the day rather than in the prevalent scientific linguistic expertise.
In a way, Shivani Nag’s ‘Language as a Tool for Inclusive and Equitable School Education: A Critical Review of NEP 2020’ compliments Kumar’s paper. Whereas Kumar’s paper has particularly focused on the relationship between English and other dominant Indian languages at the state level, Nag investigates the intricacies of the relationship (and their pedagogic implications) between standardised Indian languages such as Hindi, Urdu, Marathi and the minority languages including tribal languages. She presents a nuanced reading of the NEP 2020 and finds it no different in its orientation towards the language issue than the much-celebrated three-language formula which has been in vogue since the first National Policy on Education in 1968. Notwithstanding NEP’s emphasis on ‘promoting multilingualism and the power of language in teaching and learning’ as one of the guiding fundamental principles of education system and the provision of ‘high-quality learning materials’ in various Indian and foreign languages, its conceptualisation of multilingualism remains wanting on several counts. Most importantly, it remains anchored in a hierarchical understanding of languages. As Nag succinctly points out, such an assumption has implications for democratisation of access to production of knowledge and its dissemination. Languages placed at the bottom of such a hierarchy like tribal and minority languages by definition are rendered inadequate in terms of their participation in the advancement of knowledge. In effect, this has the potential to create an exclusionary imperative in the education system whereby ‘home’ languages get delinked from other legitimate languages taught in schools.
Nag is unequivocal that for a policy that emphasises on equity and inclusion in education, it is important that upholding of multilingualism is based on equal respect for all languages without pitting them against one another. Nag rightfully asserts that an understanding based on the hierarchy of languages does not serve the aims of democratic and socially just education. While NEP 2020 appears to encourage hope for an education that promotes multilingualism and is informed by an understanding of the mutually constitutive relationship between culture, language and cognition, a closer reading reveals its problematic and hierarchical view of languages, and its refusal to commit to an equal education. This leads to conceptual disadvantage faced by students whose home language does not match the school language. NEP 2020 thus does not envisage inclusion of languages based on recognition of every language as an effective pedagogic resource and tool. Nag suggests that recognition of mother tongues/home languages must extend beyond the official languages of the states (including the hundreds of tribal languages) with a promise to include, maintain and strengthen all these languages across the stages of education. Lastly, it is also important to acknowledge that the conceptual disadvantage and problems of access are not caused by languages alone. The language question is not insulated from the larger inequities posed by class, caste and other socio-economic and cultural hierarchies. This insight is of a piece with Kumar’s paper mentioned earlier.
Rajesh Bhattacharya’s paper ‘New Education Policy and Higher Education Reforms in India’ is a tour de force of the current status and future of higher education in the country. Employing a political economy perspective, Bhattacharya brings out the implications of the asymmetrical centre–state relations in the realm of education. While the supercilious pursuit of excellence has increasingly led to ‘centralisation’ in education, much of the burden of democratisation of higher education is being shouldered by the state universities. Ironically, most of the state governments are short of resources to invest in public universities. Paradoxically enough, NEP emphasises the ‘local’ with the tendency to centralisation. Equally, it conflates the search for institutional excellence with corporate-style governance of individual higher education institutions (HEIs). It makes a valiant attempt to tie up the concerns of equity and access with the much-vaunted public–private partnerships in higher education without outlining a clear roadmap of public financing of education. Bhattacharya underlines the total lack of acknowledgement in NEP 2020 of the political economy of higher education in India which has played out at the level of centre–state relations. Strangely enough, the popular aspiration has coalesced at sub-national levels of government while reform-seeking agenda pushed by international agencies, foreign and domestic private actors have crystallised around central government. The NEP 2020 appears to be masterfully silent on these processes even as it eloquently seeks to address the problems unleashed by them.
Bhattacharya avers that NEP 2020 correctly identifies much that is wrong in India’s higher education system today. However, the solutions to the problems of higher education proposed in NEP 2020 are not in sync with its own diagnosis. This is because somehow NEP 2020 gives in to laissez faire approach to higher education without problematising the very role of the state in higher education. After all, millions of young people—and India has history’s largest number of young people in the labour force today—look at higher education as the privileged pathway to economic mobility and social recognition. On this count, higher education is much more than the perceived rates on return in the job markets. It is also a potent channel for the articulation of the aspirations of the poor and the marginalised. In Bhattacharya’s reading, the privileging of the HEIs as autonomous agents of change appears to bypass the dynamics of centre–state relation altogether. In this sense, NEP 2020 seeks to depoliticise the discourse on higher education altogether by making it a matter of governance reform rather than what it really ought to be—a matter of political choice by a democratic society. Bhattacharya beautifully invokes the term ‘ersatz normativity’ to demonstrate the NEP’s emphasis on the ‘local’ with the tendency to centralisation.
Shilpi Shikha Phukan’s paper ‘Educating the “Adivasis”: Understanding Ekal Vidyalayas inside the Tea Gardens of Assam, India’ is based on her fieldwork conducted in 2019 as part of a larger academic project in the Doomdooma region in the Tinsukia district of upper Assam. In her paper, she looks at the proselytising activities of the Rashtryia Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) in the context of Ekal Vidyalayas in Assam. In her ethnographically rich paper, she documents the minutiae of the activities of the RSS, and its various affiliates, and the way they cumulatively contribute to the furthering of the regnant Hindu Nationalist vision among tribals.
Individually, and collectively, these four papers provide us with important vignettes in the contemporary Indian educational landscape. Undoubtedly, they offer us provocative ways of thinking about pervasive ideals of national belonging, social identities, public–private antinomies, civilisational claims and tropes of inclusion/exclusion. Ultimately, what they allude to is the re-imagination of the future under India’s unfolding modernity even if that re-imagination is often propelled by the headwinds of history. In their totality, they bring in multiple disciplinary and methodological perspectives while illuminating some aspects of the larger question of education in the country: institutional practices, ideological contestations, nationalist designs, identity issues, access, equity and justice, social transformation, evolving notions of sovereignty and spaces of democratisation, withdrawal of the state and the increasing hold of private capital.