Gender and Education in India

A Reader

Nandini Manjrekar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000414028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Examining the complex linkages between gender and education in the Indian context forms part of a wider matrix of inquiry related to understanding gender and its intersections with class, caste, religion and region. The sixteen essays in this Reader by eminent scholars offer critical feminist perspectives covering many issues related to these linkages, examining ideologies, structural contexts, knowledge, pedagogy and experiences through a socio-historcal lens. They point to the range of sources and methods that can be used to uncover the linkages between gender and education such as quantitative data, literature, autobiographies, oral histories and ethnography.

This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

1 Masculinity and Femininity

Ideas are Real

V. Geetha

Before we go on to discuss gender as history, we should perhaps pause and reflect on what we have discussed so far. Ideas of masculine and feminine virtues are not fiction. They are real, they exist in the world we live in and affect our lives in very fundamental ways: the clothes we wear, the food we eat, sexual relationships, our very thoughts. They help us make sense of our experiences, understand and formulate our views on ourselves and others in particular ways. These ideas affect men and women differently. Yet these ideas are not static imperatives which human beings receive passively—they struggle with them, re-work them, subvert some, discard others— in every instance the idea becomes real, becomes an aspect of practice in specific contexts.

Secondly, masculine and feminine identities are not the only socially pertinent categories in any society. There are other identities which are important and relevant, and which are as subject to restrictive norms and expectations. Religious strictures, for instance, are as discriminatory against certain kinds of men, as they are with respect to women. For example, in India, only brahmins can claim and perform legitimate priestly functions. Likewise, categorical thought recognizes and defines other sorts of innate characteristics besides masculinity and femininity—it divides human beings on the basis of skin colour and temperament. Thus in racially divided societies, black people are imagined to be innately crude and primitive. Every society possesses a range of social roles and functions, besides those ascribed to men and women. In India, certain castes are fixed into certain functions—scavenging, washing and so on. They are also expected to perform certain roles, for instance, be official mourners, drum-beaters at funerals. People belonging to these castes fulfil the duties assigned to them, for not only is this linked to their survival, but also others, especially higher castes, consider it their vocation and punish them if they do not carry out their prescribed tasks.

It is important to see how gender and other differences intersect and criss-cross in a given social context. Let me explain these two notions with reference to the three sets of ideas I have outlined.

Religion as Process

Most world religions enable men to attain positions of authority in religious matters. Such men alone are deemed capable of interpreting scriptural texts and laying down rules which other men and all women are to follow. Religious definitions and explanations of sexual difference are often used to justify every kind of discrimination and cruelty against women, including practices such as enforced widowhood, sati, witch-burning. Very few women are allowed to read and interpret scripture on their own. But in most religious cultures, women are under greater pressure than men to observe customs and practise rituals and suffer greater punishment, if they do not. When men turn religious zealots, they exhibit their zealotry by forcing women to follow religious strictures in the strictest imaginable way. This may mean observing fasts, wearing a veil, and so on.

But religion does not empower all men equally. It is important to keep in mind that discrimination sanctioned by religion is also directed against powerless men or groups of men such as slaves, or in the Indian context, the shudras and the so-called untouchable or dalits. In fact the Manusmriti lumps together animals, shudras and women and considers all of them equally unclean, polluting and fit to be included and controlled by the men of the upper castes. Other world religions, Islam and Christianity, for example, do not consign an entire group of men to the low status they reserve for women, unless these men are nonbelievers, or considered sexually deviant. Homosexuals, for instance, have been castigated as unnatural and sinful.

It is clear that women and certain groups of men are both subject to restrictions and deliberately dis-empowered, at the behest of powerful men, who control access, among other things, to culturally significant experiences and resources, such as those to do with religion. But women, nor men, simply receive and accept these restrictions—they react to them, respond in specific ways and, in doing so, alter and transform them.

Religious Change

In medieval south India, owing to complex historical reasons, several men from the lower castes and a few women understood religion as an existential personal experience of faith. They overlooked and in some cases eschewed the meditations of brahmin priests, responded to the spirit of religious texts, rather than to their formal significance, defied restrictive social taboos of caste, and most important, yoked a deeply felt devotionalism to notions of liberation. Significantly, women bhaktins transgressed given gender roles and identities —Akkamadevi, a Kannada poet, chose to discard her clothes, grew her hair long, thus deliberately flouting gender norms which require women to be clothed and modest, and sexually contained. Nudity and long hair, in this case, represented a certain disregarding of norms, which Akkamadevi clearly felt to be irrelevant to her existence in a world of faith. Similarly, lower caste devotees transformed their humble status into marks of spiritual into marks of spiritual fervour—they cast away felt notions of lowness and claimed, as Chokamela and Nandan did, the heavens for themselves.

It must be pointed out here that religions themselves get altered as they seek to root themselves in specific historic contexts. In the process their structures with regard to gender and morality produce contradictory and, sometimes, unintended effects. Consider the role of Christianity in the Indian context. It came here to proselytize, convinced of the rightness of imperial British rule. But devoted missionaries of faith were anguished by the horrors perpetrated by caste. They felt that the ideology of caste contradicted the spirit and messages contained in the gospel. Thus, missionaries took to educating dalits and other lower castes. In doing so, Christianity, with its schools, hospitals and notions of a common brotherhood in Christ granted to dalits and other despised castes a measure of self-worth. Women who converted to Christianity had access to learning. Besides, they were also inspired by the Christian notion of good work. That is, they could aspire to be of service to suffering humanity, be teachers, nurses. Christianity enabled them to experience a sense of vocation that took them beyond their designated roles as wives and mothers.

Challenging the Basis of Science

I argued earlier that the language of science was not particularly critical or objective when it came to the question of sexual difference. As a result, we have scientific notions of male and female beings which more or less reproduce arguments that assert that women are unequal to men. This has led to the sciences remaining essentially male domains, and scientific thought refuses to concede that its own conclusions often rely on unexamined notices of masculinity and femininity. Even those women who pursue science seriously have to work within a system that refuses to acknowledge both the facts of sexual difference, as well as the meanings that we have attached to them. Science establishments demand a degree of concentration and absorption which women cannot bring to their vocation, should they be pregnant or lactating mothers. While maternity leave is granted to women, many demur from accepting long maternity leave and some are known to fill in these hours of rest, writing and researching papers! Women scientists find they have to function in a context where unless they work twice as hard as men, and prove themselves three times as good as them, they are likely to be discouraged.

Until recently science has played a role in perpetrating theories of racial superiority and inferiority. For several decades, scientists lent their names and credence to theories which maintained that non-white races are innately irrational and cannot be taught the ways of modern science. Though most of these theories stand discredited today, they exist at the level of commonsense, and are invoked from time to time in the service of things such as intelligence quotient tests or in genetic research. It is surely not accidental that science has remained not only a male domain, but also one dominated by white men.

None of these disadvantages have prevented non-white races and women from engaging in scientific research or theory-making. While the scientific establishment remains a white male preserve for the most part, women—and non-white men—have challenged the theoretical assumptions of science in different ways: historians and philosophers of science from non-white contexts have argued that science is as much a product of culture as anything else and that Western science reflects the biases of Western culture. They have pleaded for a more inclusive and catholic view of science, and one that accommodates different notions of truth, objectivity and verifiability than those specified in science as most of us know it.

A New Politics

The idea that women are unequal to men and therefore cannot be granted citizenship rights continues to dominate political thought and action. Today, unlike in the days of the French Revolution, women have been granted equal citizenship and legal rights in most countries. Yet in many of these countries, women are not at all adequately represented in political parties, legislatures or the courts of law. Even if women are admitted into the higher levels of government, they are entrusted with responsibilities which may be characterized as ‘feminine’. They are put in charge of social welfare, mother and childcare and family planning.

The few women who find their way into positions of greater authority do so because they have the support of powerful male politicians—usually fathers, husbands, brothers. They are often viewed as wives (or widows), daughters or sisters of eminent leaders and not really as political persons in their own right, Political leaders, legislators, lawyers and others in the public realm continue to think and act, as if women’s sexual difference implies that they are subordinate and unequal to men. Modern democracy does not demand that a woman be active in the public realm or that she exercise her rights as a citizen. Most democratic institutions are of a public kind and do not really affect or even attempt to influence domestic and familial life. When they do, it is in the form of laws, which, again, are interpreted through a haze of ideas that have to do with masculinity and femininity.

In societies like India and the United States of America which have divided people on the lines of caste and race respectively, lower caste and black men—like women—may be legally equal to all others. Yet only in political formations which are solely devoted to their good, do we find large numbers of these men in prominent or in leadership positions. In so-called mainstream parties, they are almost always consigned to a minority or considered a special interest group. In India, for example, every major political party has a women’s cell, a minority cell and a dalit forum—as if these identities cannot be brought into the central agenda of parties and must be necessarily treated as ‘special cases’. That is, neither women nor dalits, or, for that matter, minorities can claim a representative, public status—in other words, in themselves they do not constitute a legitimate public and become part of one, only when a political party designates them a particular space and identity.

Clearly, democracy has defined itself in fairly restrictive terms: it allows for formal equality but obviously this is not enough. The mere granting of rights does not help to alter people’s attitudes and perceptions regarding those they consider inferior, whether these are women, black people or dalits. But the notion of rights has served women and others who do not possess a public voice and identity to demand that their points of view be heard. In India, for example, the guarantee of formal equality has encouraged dalits and women from claiming equal rights in several ordinary instances. Dalits have demanded rights of equal access to public spaces, have fought against discrimination which follows them, because they are considered ‘untouchable’.

Women’s encounter with equality has been equally dynamic. The idea that they are equal to men has led them to demand that they be considered as a significant constituency when politicians and bureaucrats make plans—whether this has to do with the budget, or the census or elections. That is, women do not want to be seen as appendages of or as dependent on their husbands. They are becoming increasingly aware that the work they do at home, or on the family plot of land, constitute productive labour. This is just one instance of how perceptions can alter once a new idea finds its place.

In recent years, Indian women have been able to experience a sense of the public, feel themselves an active part of it, because of the constitutional amendments which reserves 33 percent of seats in local government for them. Every panchayat today has a significant number of women—while it is true that many of them are timid, mere alibis for their husbands or brothers, the fact that their presence is required in a panchayat, that they possess the power to decide on village concerns, have enabled the more articulate women actually to participate in the democratic process. It is possible that women’s sense of themselves, their roles and functions may undergo a gradual transformation over the next decade or so, should the system of local government continue to function.

Limits of Categorization

Categorical thinking about men and women is commonplace and part of our everyday lives. Its effects are to be found in many things around us. Spaces are sharply divided into masculine and feminine: the space of home is identified with women, and the outside world is considered an exclusively male sphere. It does not matter that women too engage with the outside world, as workers, consumers, citizens; or that men are active in the family and home, as fathers, husbands, decision-makers. Women’s identity rests on their roles as wives, mothers, as home-makers, whereas male identity is linked to productive work, public visibility and power.

This division of spaces reflects the division of work or labour. Women’s work at home, whether for the family or at a task that fetches her money, is not considered work at all. It is instead seen as an extension of her duties as a wife and a mother. By definition, the household space cannot be a site for productive activity. The logic of feminine and masculine spaces works in other insidious ways as well. Most women who work outside their homes are confined to those work sectors such as the export garment and electronics trades. Here low wages are the order of the day. It is assumed that a woman’s work is supplementary to the family’s income, for after all, her real duty is performed at home and anything else she does is gratuitous. Men’s wages alone represent a living wage and their work is ‘real’ work; primary and necessary.

A significant number of men, especially from the poorer and more deprived classes, are as subject to low-wages work as women and, like them, are often disallowed from protesting for better wages, but they are likely to be more mobile than women. They also are more likely to learn new skills or upgrade existing ones. More men than women work in the organized trades or the services sector, subject to wage revisions and where the learning and upgrading of skills are important.

Though a certain sort of feminism and environmentalism have utilized categorical thinking to the advantage of women, throughout history, this mode of thinking has worked to keep women away from male preserves: higher education, economically empowering jobs, political visibility and power, intellectual life and art. It has effectively confined women to the cramped spaces of the home, to low-paying jobs, denied their mobility, curtailed their desire to go about the world, meet new people, experience life in all its detail. On the other hand, men have derived a great deal of advantage from the simple and seemingly irrefutable logic of categorization. Being male is a condition that exudes power and confers privilege, even if not all men are powerful or endowed with resources to affirm their claims of masculine prowess. Masculinity is, of course, interpreted differently by different groups of men, and to very different purposes. Yet it is seldom dissociated from expressions, enactments and practices of power.

What about racial or caste categorization? Are they as much part of our commonsense as ideas of gender? And do they operate in the same way? Until a century ago, in India, caste divided people up in such a way that they occupied different social and living spaces and remained well within the social roles and work assigned to them. Different castes performed different occupations, and these occupations were arranged in a hierarchy, a system of what Dr. Ambedkar referred to as ‘graded inequality’. Each caste was thought to be of a certain temperament, as if qualities were embedded within the bodies of people born into a certain caste. There even existed different legal systems for different castes—brahmins and shudras, for instance, were not bound by the same laws.

Race and caste categorization, however, have received challenges throughout the twentieth century. The doctrine of equal rights as well as the struggles waged by dalits and blacks have helped unpack all those assumptions which constitute categorical thought. The epistemological guarantees which once underwrote expressions of categorization no longer exist, or if they do, they are perceived as prejudicial. Categorical thought with respect to men and women continues to endure, though, as we have seen, it has its transformative aspects—when feminine characteristics of empathy and tolerance are invoked during anti-war protests. But these moments of transformation and subversion run the danger of confirming categorization and do not really produce those attitude changes some feminists hope for.

Categorical thought with respect to gender remains active even in contexts that have actively confronted other sorts of categorization. For instance, anti-race and anti-caste activism have not always recognized the pertinence of gender equality and justice. Dalit men or black men do have a stake in maintaining that as men they deserve privileges and power which women are not to expect for themselves—these demands may not be articulated directly, but they exist in the way men view themselves and women, and in the manner women play out the roles which are defined as theirs. Thus a dalit woman who prefers to remain silent about sexual harassment in the community may defer her anger, because she knows ‘boys are like that, and anyway, they are our boys’. Her maternal role and identity come into play here, though in a transfigured manner. A dalit youth who is angry and sorrows over the rape of dalit women may experience anguish, pain, hurt, but often this is at the behest of an emotion that demands that he, as a father or a brother, avenge or at least mourn, as he should...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright Acknowledgements
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Masculinity and Femininity: Ideas are Real
• 2. Growing Up Male
• 3. Through the Looking Glass: Gender Socialisation in a Primary School
• 4. Bound by Norms and Out of Bounds: Experiences of PAGFB (Persons Assigned Gender Female at Birth) Within the Formal Education System
• 5. Men, Women and the Embattled Family
• 6. Strishiksha, or Education for Women
• 7. Role Models: Educated Muslim Women—Real and Ideal
• 8. Partition and Family Strategies: Gender-Education Linkages Among Punjabi Women in Delhi
• 9. Unequal Schooling as a Factor in the Reproduction of Social Inequality in India
• 10. From Access to Attainment: Girls' Schooling in Contemporary India
• 11. Negotiation and Compromise: Gender and Government Elementary Education
• 12. The Contested Terrain of Reproduction: Class and Gender in Schooling in India
• 13. Serving the Nation: Gender and Family Values in Military School
• 14. Chhadi Lage Chham Chham, Vidya Yeyi Gham Gham (The Harder the Stick Beats, the Faster the Flow of Knowledge): Dalit Women's Struggle for Education
• 15. Gender and Curriculum
• 16. Education as Trutiya Ratna: Towards Phule-Ambedkarite Feminist Pedagogical Practice