Schooling and Aspirations in the Urban Margins: Ethnography of Education in the Indian Context 9780367903657, 9781032004785, 9781003028017

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SCHOOLING AND ASPIRATIONS IN THE URBAN MARGINS

This book presents a detailed ethnographic study conducted in an urban slum in India. It explores how a State school, as a social and pedagogic institution, shapes the aspirations and worldviews of children in the urban margins. The volume engages with the children’s experience of marginality and exclusion as they negotiate the intersecting axes of caste, class, gender, and citizenship. It further explores how their everyday school experience is mediated by the power asymmetries between the teachers and the community. In this process, it makes sense of the political dynamics between the State and its margins while highlighting the role of schools and locating childhood in this context. Based on ethnographic feldwork, the book will be of interest to researchers, students, and teachers of education studies, sociology and politics of education, teacher education, childhood and youth studies, and urban studies. It will also be useful for education policymakers and professionals in the development sector. Gunjan Sharma is a faculty member at the School of Education Studies (SES), Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), India, since 2011. She teaches courses at the research, postgraduate, undergraduate, and professional development levels, in the areas of education studies, education policy, teacher education, curriculum studies, child rights, and action research. Her research and professional focus is on education policy–politics particularly at school and teacher education levels. Her doctoral research examined educational aspirations in the urban margins in a post Right to Education Act context in India. During 2016–2017, she completed her FulbrightNehru Postdoctoral research on policy implications of publication networks in teacher education in the United States and India, while exploring teacher education as a special sub-set of higher education. Dr. Sharma has worked with various government and non-government organisations on matters of education policy and served in various capacities on the national-level teacher education policy framing process in India.

SCHOOLING AND ASPIRATIONS IN THE URBAN MARGINS Ethnography of Education in the Indian Context

Gunjan Sharma

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Gunjan Sharma The right of Gunjan Sharma to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-90365-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-00478-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02801-7 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Foreword by Shyam B. Menon Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

vi viii ix

1

Introduction

2

Education and urban marginalisation: international comparisons

13

Studying the non-linear: ethnographic explorations in education

23

4

Constructing and deconstructing the slum

39

5

The idea of sarkari school: negotiations and aspirations

65

6

The teachers and the school culture

84

7

Experiencing childhood in the margins: meanings and aspirations

98

3

8

1

Concluding thoughts

127

References Index

135 144

FOREWORD

The economic growth that India has seen since liberalisation, particularly in the frst decade of the millennium, is linked critically with large-scale migration of labour from rural hinterlands to urban centres. Most of the migrant workers, being in the unorganised sectors that account for more than 90 per cent of India’s work force, are grossly undercompensated and pushed into the margins of urban spaces with not even minimum civic amenities extended to them. The emergence of the phenomenon called urban slum is a consequence of this. Much as the slum continues to be held as a problem in the popular imaginations, there is now an increasing acceptance to reversing this perspective and looking at slum as a creative, albeit grossly suboptimal, solution that the poor have devised for themselves. What is notable is that this project is with minimum support from governments and none at all from the organised sectors of the economy, although the economic activities associated with the slum are critical to their sustenance. There is a growing body of research literature in India on slums. Public policy studies have paid a great deal of attention to the provisioning of services and interfaces with governments. Health, sanitation, and livelihoods have evoked considerable research interest. Many of these are by way of surveys that paint the big picture with broad strokes of the economic and demographic aspects of slums. Life in slums with all its complexities is made sense of by a relatively new genre of research characterised by a methodology that adopts ethnography and other qualitative methods. There are not many studies of this kind. Yet, whatever body of work, it brings up interesting insights into the complex social dynamics in which caste and gender structures and relations get played out. There is very little in the literature by way of understanding the child and the school in an urban slum location. This is the critical gap that this fascinating book by Gunjan Sharma seeks to fll. The book is an outcome of a painstakingly and patiently conducted ethnography that extended for more than a year. The author has had to go past an array of gatekeepers within both the governmental and non-governmental spaces to access the child and the school. The world that reveals itself to her in this process is a complex and diffcult one, all the same a fascinating one. vi

FOREWORD

She has been both effective and elegant in communicating through this book some interesting glimpses of this fascinating world to the readers. School is essentially a creature of the imagination of the privileged. The book shows a clear disjunction between the school and the community that it purports to cater to. It is almost as though the compound wall of the school separates two distinct worlds. The child transits between these two worlds day after day, and this is hardly seamless. There is always the lurking possibility of the child being forcibly weaned out of school anytime and pushed into the world of work, but the irony is that she also looks at that possibility as inevitable and sometimes even as a kind of deliverance. All the same, the child assimilates the messages of the school, some overt and much hidden, and struggles to make sense of the horizons that the school seems to open up for her, located as she is on the margins and given the limited aspirations that her socialisation permits her to have even at an ideational level. It is this delicate and troubled complexity of the child’s fractured world that this book tries to capture. Gunjan Sharma’s perceptiveness, patience, and perseverance make it possible for her to gain access to the otherwise inaccessible niches of the school–slum interface. She also gets to engage with others in the community, particularly women as well as some critical actors in the governmental spaces who do the gatekeeping. The book comes across as a sensitive rendering of the perspectives of the critical informants. The rigour and the eye for details are its essential characteristics. The book will be a signifcant addition to the growing scholarship in the area of education of the urban poor. It will be an essential reading for scholars and practitioners in education, childhood studies, urban studies, and public policy. Shyam B. Menon Central Institute of Education, University of Delhi

vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been supported by several individuals and institutions. Foremost among them are Professors Shyam B. Menon and (Late) Gaysu Arvind, who mentored me during this study. They introduced me to ideas and questions that helped in shaping the work and how I think about education and marginalisation. Professor Menon’s continued interactions with me as a colleague for now over a decade have been critical in writing and refning this volume. My interactions with Dr. Jayshree Mathur and Professor Rama Mathew were also critical in developing this work. I have also learnt immensely from Drs. Geeta Menon and Ajay Kumar Singh, both of whom facilitated several opportunities for a close engagement with the feld and practice of education. My association with my alma matter, the Department of Education, University of Delhi, was immensely facilitative in developing this manuscript. It was only because of my association with the Department that I could meaningfully situate myself in the feld. Ambedkar University Delhi, where I work, was very supportive in the course of writing this book. AUD provided me access to scholarly discourse and academic resources for completing the work. Both these universities hold a special place in my life and learning. I am indebted to the informants of this study, especially the children of M Block and Sitapuri, whose contribution to the work is equivalent to, if not more than, mine. My experience with the children, teachers, and NGO workers continues to shape my intellectual growth as an individual and a professional in education. This book is dedicated to them. Gunjan Sharma October 2020

viii

ABBREVIATIONS

BLO EWS FCRA FGD GAIL GNCTD GoI IFCI JJ LIC MCD MHRD NCERT NCF NFE NGO NLF OBC PTR RtE SC SSA ST UEE/UEEM UNESCO UNICEF

Booth Level Offcer (Election Commission) Economically Weaker Section Foreign Contribution Regulation Act Focus Group Discussion Gas Authority of India Limited Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi Government of India Industrial Finance Corporation of India Jhuggi Jhompri Life Insurance Corporation Municipal Corporation of Delhi Ministry of Human Resource Development National Council of Educational Research and Training National Curriculum Framework Non-Formal Education Non-Government Organisation New Light Foundation Other Backward Classes Pupil Teacher Ration Right to Education Scheduled Castes Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan Scheduled Tribes Universalisation of Elementary Education Mission United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization United Nations Children’s Fund

ix

1 INTRODUCTION

The education sector in India has undergone unprecedented changes especially since the introduction of the economic reforms in the 1990s. In this duration, there has been a massive rise in the social and economic aspirations leading to a multifold increase in the demand for education across the unequal social fabric of India. There has thus been expansion and diversifcation of education at all levels – also seen as having been shaped by the pressing demands of the global “knowledge economy”. This expansion has been accompanied with concerns about “quality” of and “equity” in education across levels – at the school level in particular. Balancing the demands of quantitative expansion with the needs of maintaining quality and equity has been the dominant concern of education policy and programmes (Sharma, 2019). In these past decades, elementary education has come to be a fundamental right through the 86th amendment in the Constitution of India. This imagination of education as citizens’ right has been drawn from the long-standing discourse on education as an equalising force and being essential for social justice. Simultaneously, it also bears the neoliberal impressions of the global education policy as espoused by the Education for All Declaration (UNESCO, 1990) and Dakar Framework (UNESCO, 2000). At the same time, there has been growing empirical evidence demonstrating how education continues to legitimise social inequalities and reproduces social hierarchies mediated by social axes of class, caste, religion, region, and gender, which often refect in the indices and experiences of education (Raina, 2020; Ramachandran, 2018). An increasingly urbanising demographic landscape has further interacted with these axes and presented new forms of marginalities. Much against the popularly held belief that social hierarchies and distinctions become obliterate in urbanised spaces that foster modernity and meritocracy, there is an increasing acknowledgement of the intersectionality of social categorisations in these contexts (Deshpande, 2017; Madan, 2017). Against this backdrop, this book is based on an ethnographic feldwork in a State-run girls-only primary school located in a slum cluster in Delhi. Dalits comprised a substantial percentage of the population of the cluster. The book addresses the question of how a State school as a social and pedagogic 1

INTRODUCTION

institution shaped the aspirations and worldviews in the margins of an urban centre. More specifcally, the fndings of the work relate to the nature of the children’s experiences in the margins of the city with a focus on their negotiations with the State school in a post-Right to Education (RtE) Act, 2009, context. The explorations also bring to the fore the complications involved in making sense of marginalisation in an urban educational space, where one fnds an obscure confuence of a variety of identities and intertwined axes of caste, class, religion, region, citizenship, and gender. In this context, the nature of “relational ethos” between and among the various actors in the school and outside (especially the teacher, families, and children) became a prominent aspect of this inquiry. These dimensions of education have been studied to some extent in the rural contexts in India mostly using quantitative or mixedmethods frameworks. In contrast, this manuscript explores this politics of exclusion and marginality in an urban centre (while contributing to a growing body of similar literature) as it presents the outcomes from a critical ethnographic inquiry. In this process, the work also narrates the refexive dimensions of my engagement with the feld. This chapter introduces the study. It begins by presenting the context in which the work was situated and explains how the idea of the study emerged. In doing so, it walks the reader through the developments, events, and literature and perspectives that facilitated in formulating the work. This is followed by an overview of the structure of the book.

The context of the times The study (completed in 2014) was situated at a juncture where the right to free and compulsory elementary education and the questions pertaining to the quality of State schools were at the centre of education policy discourse. The RtE Act, 2009, was in the frst few years of its implementation. It was being seen and propagated as an instrument towards a more equitable, nondiscriminating, and socially just provisioning of education. A framework for curricular and pedagogic shifts in school education had already been proposed (NCERT, 2005) and the State agencies and institutions were carrying out the work on its implementation. It was also a time when the centrally sponsored fagship programme for universalisation of elementary education, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA), had completed a little over its 10-year term, and a similar programme for secondary education was being geared up. While this was the broader direction of the State’s policy in school education, some fuxes could be seen in practice. On the one hand, the State implemented the RtE Act 2009, which at least apparently had emerged from the constitutional framework of rights and values of justice, equality, and fraternity, and that had a deeper meaning for the economically weaker sections (EWS). On the other hand, there were contestations to it. One contestation came from a private unaided schools’ society – on the particular matter of their inability to bear the fnancial burden of the EWS quota (Society for 2

INTRODUCTION

Unaided Private Schools of Rajasthan vs. Union of India & Anr [WP 95 of 2010]). The second came from the scholars and activists, who critiqued the Act for restricting in a “strategic” manner the entitlements that the constitutional framework would have otherwise provided (Sadgopal, 2010). Some also debated the “compulsoriness” of the right (Singh, 2009; Sood, 2012). It was a time when the State was publicising the near achievement of universal elementary education (UEE) goal. The enhancement in enrolment of children from the marginalised social groups was being underscored, as if the issue was almost “resolved”. However, a closer look at the data concerning the transition and drop-out of marginalised social groups alluded to critical gaps. For instance, the average rate of exclusion from schooling for primary school-age children from Scheduled Castes was 5.6 per cent and Scheduled Tribes 5.3 per cent compared to the national average of 3.6 per cent. Girls from Scheduled Castes had the highest rates of exclusion at 6.1 per cent (UNICEF, 2014, p. iv). Until recently, disaggregation of out-of-school-children (OOSC) data by social group showed that the maximum proportion of OOSC in India was comprised of Scheduled Tribes (4.20 per cent), followed by Scheduled Castes (3.24 per cent), Other Backward Classes (3.07 per cent), and others (1.87 per cent). A large proportion of urban OOSC was in the slum areas (about 34.6 per cent, i.e. 4.73 lakhs of 13.68 lakhs) (Menon & Sharma, 2020). There were debates about the actual number of OOSC. For instance, the IMRB (2014) estimated 204.1  million children in the age group of 6–13 years of which about 6.1 million were OOSC. However, the number estimated by the National Sample Survey Organisation for the same year was 20 million (Menon & Sharma, 2020). The long-standing issue of reliability of the data and the methods, and considerable gaps between school enrolment and attendance shaped these contradictions (Bhatty, Saraf, & Gupta, 2015, 2017). Further, amidst talks about the achievement of the UEE, non-government actors (such as ASER Centre, 2019; PROBE, 2011) were highlighting the poor “quality” – a much-contended term – of education in the government schools. In these contradictions, the ideas of low-cost schooling, the voucher system, school choice, Public–Private Partnership (PPP), and the debates on the EWS quota were also traversing. These were contextualised in the much talked about withdrawal of the low-income group from the State schools and increasing enrolment in the affordable or low fee-charging private schools (Jain & Dholakia, 2009; Tooley, 2009; Tooley, Dixon, & Gomathi, 2007). Over a short span of time, these ideas gained an unsaid legitimacy in the policy as well as academic discourses. While there is a fair agreement on the abysmal state of affairs implicating the quality of education in the public system, the quality of budget and private schooling is also intensely debated (Nambissan, 2012, 2014; Sarangapani, 2009). Central to these debates is the positionality of the stakeholders in relation to the argument that elementary education is essentially a public good and thereby must be entirely state-funded. These debates are not new, but the way these 3

INTRODUCTION

have made inroads (over the past three decades) in the offcial and public discourse on and social aspirations from school education is a-historic. The normalisation of these ideas in the policy landscape appears somewhat paradoxical when seen with the State’s obligation to provide quality education for all and the concern for the inclusion of the marginalised social groups in schools. The nature of the debates around the RtE indicated how the politics in education was developing in the contemporary social, political, and jurisprudential scene in India. These fuxes, when unpacked, highlighted the fundamental contestations on the aims of education and quality of education in the Indian context: Is the primary aim of education to prepare global knowledge workers or is to nurture a socially just democratic society? Is it to deliver “quality” educational service to those who can afford it or is it to foster equity? Is quality primarily defned in terms of measurable performances or is it a much holistic concept? It was in these contexts that I was beginning this inquiry and sought to explore how children in the margins of an urban space are placed in a public school context and how they experienced the institution.

Situating the perspective The idea of this study was developed in engagement with both empirical and literary works, which focus on marginality in education with a particular reference to class and caste. Theoretical literature helped in grounding these understandings further. The empirical works included research reports and studies on the experience of social exclusion in the school context. The literary works comprised autobiographical narratives of Dalit authors, specifcally three selected works that lay a special emphasis on school experiences. The theoretical perspectives were drawn from critical theory in education and new sociology of education to engage with the questions of power and school knowledge. Social theory, particularly the works of Das (2010) and Das and Poole (2004), also helped in making sense of citizenship in the urban margins. While there were several other scholarly perspectives that I engaged with, I present only a selection of those that substantially shaped the work. Social exclusion and schooling Education and exclusion is among one of the empirically well-explored areas in the Indian context with quantitative as well as qualitative researches on the education of marginalised social groups. There are studies, like Jha and Jhingran (2002) and PROBE (1999, 2011), which have explained the situation of elementary education in the villages in selected Indian states. These studies have also brought to the fore a general perception among the teachers and others that the poor are uninterested in educating their children. Both the reports contradicted this perception, indicating a high educational 4

INTRODUCTION

aspiration among the disadvantaged social groups. Doing so, these studies made visible the attitude of the public functionaries (especially teachers) towards the marginalised. However, Jha and Jhingran (2002) indicated a “diversity” in the responses or willingness of Dalit parents and children towards schooling. The report explained this by suggesting a correlation between poverty and social marginalisation that aggravated the educational deprivations among Dalits and laid emphasis on child labour as a reason for not attending school or dropping out, particularly in villages with a feudal ethos. While exploring a similar situation, PROBE signposted that child labour may not necessarily keep the children away from school and suggested a need to re-inquire child labour and its relation with education. This problematised what constituted the “choice”, decision, or willingness to go to school. In this respect, PROBE also talked about the stark differences between the caste profles of the teachers and the children at the State schools (in the survey villages), which shed light on the socio-political– cultural context of elementary schooling in the country (p. 54). In a similar spirit, the works of Nambissan (2009), Subrahmanian (2005), Majumdar (2004), Ramachandran, Pal, and Jain (2005), and Ramachandran and Naorem (2013) further elaborated the practice of what may be called the “social distances” at schools. These works pointed to the composition of the population that attended government schools and how distanced the teachers’ cadre was from this group in terms of caste and class. Ramachandran et al. (2005) stated that it is now “offcially accepted” that a majority of children attending government schools are from very poor families – mainly from socially disadvantaged sections and SC and ST communities (p.  11). This reality highlighted the complexity of the school–classroom and indicated the increased vulnerability of children from the marginalised groups – underscoring the larger context of poor quality of schooling. A commonality between all these works was that they were based in rural settings in India. (This is with exception to Subrahmanian (2005) that also included in its sample a few urban locations.) However, some recent reports (Centre for Equity Studies, 2014) have touched upon the questions of exclusion and education more broadly to include urban India as well. There is also a growing body of qualitative studies (such as Dalal, 2015; Ganguly, 2018; Gupta, 2015; Iyer, 2013; Majumdar, 2017; Menon, 2017) that explores intersectionality(/ies) of varied axes of social categorisation in the semi-urban and urban Indian contexts that will be discussed in Chapter 2. These works highlight the character of marginalisation in urban spaces, which assumes forms that are more unnoticeable than manifest/overt. Such character of urban marginality is also explored in the discourse in the area of sociology of cities and/or urban geography that will be discussed in Chapter  4. Most of these works were simultaneous with my study. While I could not draw from them at the conceptualisation stage, the fact that similar questions were being pursued by researchers around the same time, points to how thinking 5

INTRODUCTION

around urban marginality has been evolving and becoming a pertinent concern in the contemporary educational literature in India. Experiencing marginalisation: At the intersection of class and caste Broadly diverging from the works on exclusion and education that I surveyed – while my work set out to engage particularly with the intersecting axes class and caste in urban classrooms – I did not group or select children based on their social identities. Nor did I specifcally “talk about” individual experiences of caste or class. Instead, I attempted to engage in the context as it were. To a considerable extent, the literary texts that I read – Dalit autobiographical narratives – aided this process. The autobiographies enabled me in understanding the experiences of Dalit children at school. In the literature, while on the one hand, one fnds the category, Dalit, being applied in the context of the ex-untouchables, on the other, there are broader interpretations of it to include converted minorities, tribals, and women (Das, 2004). “Who comprises or qualifes as a Dalit” in an urban context is even more debated (Das, 2004). I surveyed the various Dalit autobiographies, but more closely engaged with the works of Valmiki (1997, 2007), Morey (2001), and Pawar (1980). In these works, the schools and the process of institutional education assume the central place. The authors have narrated how schooling was negotiated in their lives – how the decision for schooling was taken, how meaningful it was, and how the experiences at schools shaped their lives and the idea about the “self” and the “other”. The authors have stressed the role that their teachers played in this process. While expressing how education changed their lives economically and socially, they also presented its selective politics and the identity conficts it generated. The narrations have brought out how the nature of this confict differs in the urban scenario, where (as per their accounts) discrimination rarely took overt forms. In this narrative, the migration to a bigger centre rendered explicit forms of discrimination weaker. Pawar (1980) shared how his upper-caste friends in a taluka stole his non-vegetarian lunch, but made sure that he did not stay hungry and got their vegetarian lunch. He writes, “The difference between my village and the taluka immediately became clear. These upper caste friends maintained a relationship of equality with me. . . . I could move around anywhere in their houses freely . . . even after my friends came to know about this they continued eating” (p. 69). However, marginality took subtle forms. Pawar (1980) portrays how the infrmities within the civil society permeated with caste and class distinctions, specifcally in urban centres (Beth, 2007). In a similar sense, Chauhan (2002) called caste a bramharakshasa – a shadow that followed him wherever he went. Interestingly, the Dalit autobiographical movement of the 1980s–1990s itself started when an urban educated class 6

INTRODUCTION

of Dalit thinkers began articulating their voices and refected on their experiences in the “modern” contexts (Beth, 2007). While reading this literature, I also engaged with Ambedkar’s (1979, 2002, 2004) writings. These supported me in developing an understanding of exclusion in a framework of ethics. Exclusion is generally understood in a framework of deprivation of capabilities that have economic, political, and social implications (Sen, 2000). However, such understanding removes it from an ethical realm. Ambedkar’s thoughts develop a case for arguing against exclusion as an unethical phenomenon, and as an economic and social one as well. Velaskar (2012) also highlights such quality in Ambedkar’s thoughts as she attempts to draw an educational philosophy from his works. In doing so, she identifes morality, equality, justice, social–democratic liberalism, modernity, and emancipation as core ideals. While equality, justice, and liberty, which underlie Ambedkar’s idea of democracy, are usually considered to be the centrepieces of his philosophy (Omvedt, 1994; Pantham, 2009; Thorat & Kumar, 2008; Velaskar, 2012), a somewhat different understanding supported this work. This concerned the constitutive value of fraternity in this framework. Fraternity comes across as the core constituent of the ethics of a civil and human life that Ambedkar (2004) imagines when he himself identifes a fraternal bond among fellow humans as an alternative to an exclusionary order of human society. He says, Without fraternity, liberty would destroy equality and equality would destroy liberty. If in democracy, liberty does not destroy equality and equality does not destroy liberty, it is because at the basis of both there is fraternity. Fraternity is therefore the root of democracy. (p. 126) Therefore, while he sees democracy as an ideal state of social life, it is conceptualised in a relational ethos based on compassion and empathy among individuals and groups. In this, it is critical to note that his concept of “fraternity” is not derived in absolute from its French genesis. Rather, he uses the term maitri (“fellow feeling”) and prefers this meaning over “brotherhood” (p.  223). Ambedkar’s thoughts and works are regarded as seminal in the domain of exclusion, but an engagement with his thoughts in the educational context remains limited (Velaskar, 2012), and thus, is diffcult to develop here within the scope of this study. Politics of school knowledge Theoretically, this study was situated in the area of sociology of education. It evolved particularly while reading the literature pursuing the question of power and school knowledge – broadly located in new sociology of and critical theory in education perspectives. The works of Kumar 7

INTRODUCTION

(1991, 1992) and Apple (1993) were signifcant in the formulation. The central thesis of these works revolves around the political character of offcial knowledge and education. How the worthiness and legitimacy of school knowledge are shaped is the subject of concern in both these works. Kumar outlines the questions pertaining to school curriculum by exploring – What is worth teaching? How should it be taught? How are the opportunities for education distributed? How is school education (in India) socio-historically shaped? Apple considers similar questions (from a different vantage point though) as he presents educational policy and practice as political acts resulting from struggles by powerful groups and social movements, “to make their knowledge legitimate and increase their power in the larger arena” (p. 10). While these works engage with the character of school knowledge, they also refect on the nature of school as a socio-political institution. In that, despite raising critical questions on institutional politics these works maintain a critical faith in public schools. More particularly, Apple’s (2009a, 2009b) works argue that the schools could potentially be visualised as spaces for critical subversive and democratic practice, particularly because they have performed other ideological functions as well. These works build upon and further the new sociology of education literature that brought about an intersection between the sociology of education and sociology of knowledge, and examined the “received” view or the “given” nature of the social reality that gets represented in the school processes, relationships, and knowledge (Young, 1971; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). The central premise was that the reality is socially constructed and that knowledge must always be knowledge from a certain position (Berger & Luckman, 1966, p. 22). Probing on these lines, Willis’s (1977) ethnographic work further helped in grounding the problem that I explored. The question that his work pursues – how working-class children get working-class jobs? – defned the problem of class and its reproduction in a way that suggested that “working-class boys do not simply take up the falling curve where the better-off kids leave off” (p.  1). Studying the counter-school culture among school boys (“lads”), Willis highlighted that class culture comprises experiences and relationships that structure particular “choices” – or “aspirations”. Although I engaged with this work only after I began visiting the feld, it helped in refning several aspects of the study, particularly the method and the manner in which I had articulated the questions. Such explorations in the area of sociology of education helped in making problematic the taken-forgranted view of school knowledge, the relation between the social structure and the school, and in thinking about the purposes that schools serve. These also helped in broadening the understanding of school knowledge beyond the codifed curriculum and situating it in social relationships, choices, dispositions, and aspirations. 8

INTRODUCTION

Citizenship in the margins Citizenship was not initially a central concern for this thesis. However, the feld observations made it impinging to consider the nature of relationships between people and the State in an educational context. The concepts of citizen and citizenship are not new in educational thinking and discourse. Institutional education as a State enterprise in itself entails a project of citizenship, whereby it focusses on the creation of good citizens. However, how the relationship between the State and the people is “negotiated” in everyday life spaces fnds only a limited theoretical space in this discourse. The ambivalent categories, like illegal citizens, marginal citizens, and semivisible citizens, do not seem to theoretically get addressed in how citizenship is understood in educational literature. Thus, I drew from social theory in this context particularly from the works of Das (2010) and Das and Poole (2004). These works enable understanding the State–citizen dynamics, the processes in which these are negotiated, and how such marginality is constructed. These works while researching the margins focus on the State as an anthropological subject (Das & Poole, 2004, p. 8). Therefore, instead of understanding the margins as spaces where the control or the politics of the State is fragile or weak, the focus is on the constitutive value of margins in the political category called the State (p. 3). Das and Poole (2004) conceptualise margins in three ways: (1) Margins as peripheries seen to form natural containers for people considered insuffciently socialised into the law; (2) margins as constituted in spaces in which the State is constantly experienced and undone through the illegibility of its own practices, documents, and words; and (3) margin as a space between bodies, law, and discipline (p. 10). This theorisation was used to make sense of the feld and the politics that undercut the ordinary. From the understandings that these works propose, I draw on three particular ones in this book. The frst is the perspective that the power of the State is constituted primarily not through the “law”. Its power lies in defning the states of exception to the law or norms. It is in these exceptions that the arbitrary power or illegible politics of the State is located. Thus, it is the illegibility much more than legibility of the practice in which the ordinaries are negotiated in the margins. The second is Das and Poole’s (2004) analysis of instruments or the documentary proofs (such as birth and caste certifcates) through which the State–citizen relation is negotiated. These proofs are seen as the technologies through which the citizens and the margins are defned, and so is the ability of the State to enter the psychological and biopolitical realms of everyday life in the margins. Das and Poole (2004) see the use of these proofs at “checkpoints” for entry from the margins to the mainstream. These documents, through which the State claims to secure identities in practice, become the instruments through which the same identities are weakened or put under threat. The third relates to how the people 9

INTRODUCTION

in the margins negotiate or claim citizenship. In these works, the people are not visualised as passive or inert, or as simply “excluded”. Das and Poole (2004) highlight a paradox when they say, “these spaces of exception are also those in which the creativity of the margins is visible, as alternative forms of economic and political action are constituted.” (p. 19). Das (2010) explores a variety of forms in which the people negotiate with the State and engage in creating incremental rights. She situates this in the particular case of how jhuggi dwellers in a slum incrementally construct their dwellings. To explain this, she draws an analogy to the popular narrative of the camel incrementally pushing out the master from the tent. In a broader sense, these ideas enable formulating a perspective on how State–citizen politics plays out as situated in the ordinary and routine practice in the margins.

Organisation of the book The study continued to become more nuanced as the feld and theoretical engagements deepened and transited from one phase to another. The spatial and conceptual category of “the slum” came to assume a signifcant place in the inquiry – as it appeared to shape and frame the experiences/ lives that I was studying. The iterative nature of qualitative research also became legible in these processes. This iterative process has also refected in the organisation of the book. The chapters are therefore not chronologically organised. This book is organised around a set of broad questions: How is a State school situated in an urban slum context? How do the various actors in the context perceive schooling and school? How are the children positioned in the school? How does the school as a social and pedagogic institution shape the aspirations and world views of the children in the margins of an urban setting? How do class–caste dynamics undercut these processes? Keeping these questions in mind, this book is organised into eight chapters, including this introduction and a concluding chapter. The structure logically tapers as it progresses to the last chapter. Chapter 2, Education and urban marginalisation: international comparisons, presents how the concerns central to this study are engaged within the contemporary discourse in the area. It discusses the contemporary studies published in the past one decade in India that qualitatively explore education in the urban margins. To understand the development of this discourse in a larger context, it maps the broad trends that emanate from the international literature (mainly from the United States) in the area. While the chapter traces the link between power, school knowledge, and social identity, which is a core concern in the literature, it also brings out how making sense of “the urban” in urban education discourse is challenging and remains a gap in the literature. Chapter 3, Studying the non-linear: ethnographic explorations in education, presents how this ethnographic inquiry is imagined and the context and need for this inquiry. The chapter outlines not only the method and 10

INTRODUCTION

the feldwork but also locates the researcher in relation to the process of research. The intention is not only to describe the method but also to make explicit the non-linear nature of inquiry and subjectivity inherent in studying the social. In this process, the chapter explains how the method evolved and introduces the key informants. Chapter 4, Constructing and deconstructing the slum, presents a description of the feld and life of the people. It traces the social history of the feld site through offcial records and the narratives of the informants. In doing so, based on the literature drawn from urban geography and social theory, it makes sense of how the slum is socially located in the city. In the course of describing the feld, the chapter constructs and deconstructs the feld from two perspectives – that of an outsider and an insider. This is an attempt not with a plain descriptive purpose, but to bring out a picture of the space, place, and its inhabitants from different vantage points. Chapter 5, Idea of sarkari school: negotiations and aspiration, brings out the complex negotiations of the various actors in the feld with the school. It focusses on the functions that the school is seen as performing by three different categories of actors including the state and non-state educational functionaries, parents, and children. It explores how the common sense about education is shaped in the interactions between these actors. As a case in point, the chapter describes how the notion of children’s right to education is restructured to focus on tangible incentives and schemes provided by the State and non-government organisations. Chapter 6, The teachers and the school culture, explores how the teachers are situated in the school context and how they construct or shape the “quality” or experience of education for the children from the slum. While the focus is on the teacher, the aim is also to engage with the relational ethos or culture of the school. In the process of reconstructing the relational culture at school, the chapter explores the social distance between the students and the teachers while making sense of how a teacher’s predicaments are constituted and how this dynamics impinges upon the quality and experience of education. Chapter 7, Experiencing childhood in the margins, is the main chapter of this book. It focusses on the narratives and life worlds of the children and presents how the children made sense of complex social categories, and applied this understanding spontaneously to deconstruct or engage with a set of stories narrated to them. The chapter is organised into three sections. First section focusses on the school’s pedagogic environment as it presents the social distances in the school from the children’s perspective. Second section focuses on how the children engaged in making sense of the experiences around the social categories of caste, class, and education. Third section presents selected accounts of the children working as rag-pickers as it explores their educational and future aspirations. In this process, the chapter critically examines the linear relationship between social mobility and education from the children’s perspective. 11

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 8 concludes the book by presenting the main understandings that can be drawn from this study, which explored life in the margins of an Indian metropolitan through the prism of education. The key understandings drawn revolve around the themes of urban slum and social identity, the purposes that the state school serves in the margins, social distances and the question of quality of education, and aspirations of the children.

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2 EDUCATION AND URBAN MARGINALISATION International comparisons

This chapter examines how the academic discourse on urban education and marginalisation is framed in India. The chapter takes selected contemporary qualitative, mostly ethnographic studies that explore school education in the urban margins. In this selection, only those works have been included that pursue questions similar to those that are central to this book. To make better sense of the trends in the Indian context, the chapter engages with systematic and conceptual analyses of literature published mainly in the Unites States and United Kingdom while also drawing from systematic reviews from a somewhat wider context. The focus on the United States and United Kingdom is primarily because of the concentration of the literature in these countries, which also infuences thinking in the area globally. In doing so, the chapter explores urban education in the margins as a larger phenomenon embedded in complex patterns of ordinary life at school. It is organised in two main sections. First section focusses on selected international literature to identify broad trends in the study of urban education and marginalisation. Second section concentrates on India while etching out the broad trends in the literature and the recurring fndings related to power and school knowledge, pedagogic relations, and aspiration framing refracted through the social axes of class, caste, and gender.

Contours of urban education and marginalisation: Mapping international literature Education and marginalisation or exclusion is a well-explored area internationally.There is a well-developed discourse in the area including quantitative and qualitative research studies conducted in varied spatial contexts – rural, periurban, suburban, and urban. However, a spatial focus on “the urban” in educational literature, or urban education as a specialised feld of study, is of a relatively recent origin. As the feld is growing, meta-analyses and systematic reviews of literature are mapping the development of the feld. While the developmental trajectories of the feld vary internationally, some broad

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trends relevant to understanding urban education and marginalisation can be mapped. Four of these have been discussed here. First trend relates to the geographical concentration in the research studies in the area. Given the history of geopolitics of economic development and urbanisation, it can be said that study of the interface between the urban and education is in relatively advanced stages in the economically developed countries. A substantial part of the literature is located in the developed “western” countries (except to some extent in Mexico, Columbia, and China) and is especially concentrated in the United States (SilvaLaya, D’Angelo, Garcia, Zuniga, & Fernández, 2019). The spatial focus of research on education and marginalisation in the developing contexts has been the rural that is mostly inhabited by a larger proportion of population and refects varied socio-cultural and historical challenges that interact with education. While there have been studies on schooling in the urban areas in developing countries as well, it is observed that either the focus is not on urbanity or the criteria and indices developed to study rural education are deployed to study urban education (Silva-Laya et al., 2019). With rapid urbanisation coupled with neoliberal economic restructuring in the development contexts or developing countries, diverse meanings and challenges of the urban (that also refect in education) are being experienced especially since the 1990s (Lipman, 2010). This has led to the emergence and advancement of urban studies (that includes study of educational inequality) in the development contexts. Second trend concerns the focus of the literature. A substantial part of the works on urban education is focussed on the “urban poor” (defned in diverse ways) that partly refects the infuence of Marxian thought on urban sociology wherein the questions of global capitalism, inequality, and social justice have been central. With this focus, certain space–place categories associated with the urban poor become the default sites for researching urban education and marginality. The literature deploys varied contextspecifc vocabulary to denote these sites such as the “inner city”, “working class neighbourhood”, “low-income neighbourhood” or “ghetto”. This terminology camoufages varied kinds of intersectionality of class, gender, race, and other social axes. Contemporary analyses of urban education literature also point to how this focus on the urban margins is an outcome of a perspective that pathologises the urban (Grace, 2007; Milner, 2012). Most literature, especially in the United States, is focussed on the problems of the urban or urban education while engaging with varied school reform (especially school choice) initiatives to turn around the situation. These works are based on the imagery of a “struggling” urban school that is lagging in terms of standardised test scores and harbours “student culture”-related issues. In most instances, these struggling schools are attended by a sizeable student population comprising people of colour (or other marginalised groups depending on the context), even when the schools do not meet any other 14

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criteria generally associated with being urban (Milner, 2012). Grace (2007) argues that this trend of pathologising urban education particularly obtains in the US literature (and further transfers to the other contexts, especially the United Kingdom) as the discourse is framed from a “policy science” perspective that is solely committed to making the existing system work by controlling and manipulating the urban population, especially the marginalised. In this context, Grace (2007) concludes, “whatever was presented as the contemporary problems of urban schooling, could not be properly understood unless those problems were located in the larger framework of historical, social, cultural, economic and political relations in any given society” (p. 960). A meta-analysis of the international literature on education and urban poor, conducted by Silva-Laya et al. (2019), identifes certain recurring themes. These fndings include (a) relatively low learning achievement among the urban poor students as compared to their socio-economically better-off counterparts – that also show reversible trend with relevant interventions; (b) limitation of opportunities and aspirational capacities indicating that education is not necessarily an instrument for socioeconomic mobility for the urban poor; (c) relatively higher risk of failure at school mainly due to a defcit perspective of varied stakeholders on students’ capabilities, which is refracted through class and racial prejudices; (d) a non-conducive school culture and tensed interpersonal relationships especially between students and teachers; and (e) inter and intraschool segregation of urban poor children and youth, based on factors such as location or performance that banishes the students to poor quality education. These recurring themes are found in both quantitative and qualitative research studies. In particular relation to ethnographic works in the area, it is evident that the questions of differential educational success and gains for the marginalised children and youth, racial segregation of schools, politics of school choice, and how power mediates school experience and knowledge continue to be focal concerns (Chapman, 2018; Lundberg, 2015; Nolan, 2011; Reay, 2004). The scholarly traditions initiated with the new sociology of education (Young, 1971), social reproduction theories (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), study of school culture and counter-culture (Willis, 1977), critical theory in education (Anyon, 1997), and critical race theory in education (Bell, 2004) remain major infuences on the contemporary research problematising the perceived linear linkage of social mobility and schooling in urban contexts. Third trend is linked to the concept of urban education as articulated or latent in the literature. While the engagement with the questions of inequality and challenges of school reform cuts across this literature, it is diffcult to make sense of a unifed conception of urban education (and of marginalisation or exclusion) in these works. A large part of the literature remains empirical that does not clearly theorise urban education. 15

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This indicates that conceptual engagement with the urban in education is still in its developing stages relative to the other domains in urban studies even in the contexts that have a more elaborate body of works in the area (Grace, 2007; Milner & Lomotey, 2014). Also, the question “what makes urban education a special case” remains unanswered in the literature in most international contexts. In the United States and United Kingdom, where the literature is more developed, this question operates in the subtext of the works that conceptually analyse the trajectories of the discourse in the area. Milner (2012), Irby (2014), Grace (2007), and Price (2017) etch out the issues in the prevalent understanding of urban education that lacks a clear articulation of its unifying features. Milner and Lomotey (2014) identify the varied basis on which urban education is defned that include (a) the size of the city of location of the schools (densely populated metropolitan areas); (b) the diversity (racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, and socioeconomic) in the student population in the schools; and (3) the extent of resources available in a school such as technology and fnancial structures. At the same time, Price (2017) argues that the location and signifcance of the city are the most defning aspect of urban education for most researchers “as it is the production of place and space that mediates the production of inequality in global capitalism” (p. 779). Beach, From, Johansson, and Öhrn (2018) also indicate a similar issue in defning urban or rural education in three Nordic countries – Norway, Finland, and Denmark. As an implication of under-theorisation of the urban–education interface, marginalisation in urban education is also explored empirically only with limited conceptual analysis. Fourth, there are also emerging critiques of the narrow and restricted interpretation of the urban in education. In the Canadian context, Daniel (2010) critiques the current practice in the literature of an insulated imagination of the urban that leads to urban–suburban or urban–rural binary creation. This binary is entrenched in an oppositional subjectivity where the identity of one is highly dependent on the construction of the Other (p. 823). Daniel (2010) problematises this rigid impervious categorisation that is refracted through the notions of class and race and makes a case for a more fuid dialectic understanding of the urban. While not stated overtly, this issue of rural–urban binary can also said to have been implicit in the Nordic countries where literature indicates a metrocentricity and spatial injustice towards rural areas where more underprivileged populations are located (Beach et al., 2018). Thus, on the one hand, the literature points to the problematic inherent in the current discourse on urban education and the lack of clarity over what constitutes urban education. On the other hand, it also brings out how questions of identity and marginality in terms of class, race, and gender occupy the core concerns of urban education. 16

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Neoliberalism, urbanism, and education: Trends in the Indian literature In India, a specialised focus on the urban in education literature or urban education as a feld has started developing only in the past two decades since the late 1990s. This coincides with the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and education as discussed in the frst chapter of this manuscript. The restructuring of the economy (and education) under the liberalisation reforms to a service sector-based economy also brought forth a geospatial focus on the urban. While the transforming dynamics in the urban areas offered means to “progress,” these developments simultaneously presented understudied and more complex patterns of inequality and marginalisation. This transition also manifested in an increased demand for education across the unequal social fabric of India and a compounding stratifcation in the educational provision or system. These experiences triggered the discourse around politics of neoliberal urbanism in the domain of sociology and further encouraged sociological studies on issues of urban education. Kamat (2011) has empirically and conceptually engaged with this neoliberal urbanism in relation to higher education in Hyderabad. The focal concerns explored in urban education include provisioning of education, differential educational outcomes and achievement, educational aspirations, and the experience of marginalisation in urban stratifed schools. Like in the case of international literature, in this discourse lower income habitations or “slums” have frequently been the feld sites of research studies. Interestingly, most of these studies are located in the metropolitan cities. This is a likely outcome of the concentration of research institutions and universities in the Indian metropolitans to which the interest in urban studies could be traced. In this context, for this section of the chapter, a selection of ethnographic works and some conceptual works on urban education in India have been reviewed to map the broad trends. These works include Dalal (2015), Farooqi (2017), Ganguly (2018), Gupta (2015), Iyer (2013), Kumar (2014), Menon (2017), Majumdar (2017), Nambissan (2017), Rampal (2007), and Prasad (2017). The selection comprises only qualitative and mostly ethnographic works published in the past one decade that engage with questions similar to those pursued in this book (so as to draw certain meaningful understandings for this manuscript). The intent here is not to draw point-by-point comparison with the international context – as this makes much less sense given the differences in the stage, scope, and extent of the literature. The aim is to only note the patterns and trajectory of the literature. Three broad understandings drawn from this review are discussed below. Firstly, unlike in the case of the United States and United Kingdom, in the Indian context, conceptual engagement with or meta-analysis of literature on urban education is diffcult to locate. This is a likely outcome of a relatively smaller number of publicly available or published works in the area. 17

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Very few works, such as Nambissan (2017), engage (in a restricted manner though) with how the interface between urban and education may be understood in the Indian context. Nambissan (2017) notes that the urban in India offcially comprises a range of spaces classifed in varied ways (mega cities, small cities, small and medium towns, census towns, and urban villages) depending on their population, and the proportion of labour force engaged in non-agricultural activity. While this diversity makes it diffcult to identify unifying trends, the connecting feature of urbanity is the infuence of global capitalism or neoliberalism on the city life. This political economy of urban contexts makes income inequality starkly evident in the cityscape and in the varied aspects of the social system such as schooling. However, in general, urban areas are perceived as being more “modern”, egalitarian, and educationally advanced as compared to the rural areas in India, whereas the rural is generally seen as symbolising “backwardness” (Kumar, 2014). Better educational indices – in terms of provision of schools and resources, and enrolments and attainment across social categories (by gender, caste, ethnicity) – in the urban areas also allude to this imagery especially in the case of metropolitans (Nambissan, 2017). However, the literature also indicates immense pressure on the urban education system, particularly on the public system that caters to the underprivileged masses, as the number of schools is not growing at a rate that could accommodate the increase in enrolment (Singh, 2015). In this scenario, there is a growing body of works that engages with the nature and extent of inequality and lack of social justice especially in terms of caste, class, gender, and religion in urban education. Secondly, like in the international context, the literature also indicates a nascent trend towards questioning the rural–urban binary or the imagination of rural and urban spaces as socio-historically and culturally watertight (Menon, 2017; Ganguly, 2018). In a conceptual refection, Kumar (2014) problematises this binary as having been created by modern education. He states, One contribution of modern education and its curriculum has been to reinforce a polarity between rural and urban living. Such a polarity hardens prevailing stereotypes by projecting onto the village what the city has supposedly left behind. The reality of both villagers and city dwellers may offer far greater evidence of an overlap than a polarity. (p. 43) Making a similar argument with a focus on the urban poor, Rampal (2007) notes that the rural–urban binary further relegates the urban poor to the periphery in the discourse on education interventions. This is mainly because the urban poor continue to have organic links with their rural roots and cultures. Without engaging with these organic connections, it is diffcult to 18

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develop a holistic understanding of the multiple dimensions of the identities of the urban poor. With these discourses in the backdrop, qualitative works on urban education in India focus on the social axes of caste, class, gender, and religion in the urban margins. Thirdly, based on a review of these works, it can be said that the link between power, school knowledge, and social identity is a core concern in this literature. How school knowledge continues to serve or reproduce the culture of the powerful groups while constructing a social Other whose social identity is framed by their social origin and location – is explored in this literature. Here school knowledge signifes a wide variety of aspects of schooling and its culture – the stated and hidden aims and ideological agenda of school education, representation in textbooks, classroom discourse, and pedagogic practices. These in turn shape the educational aspirations. The understanding on these aspects that can be drawn from the selected literature is discussed in the following pages. Constructing the uncivil Other The studies problematise the underpinning agenda of education vis-à-vis the urban poor and explicate how school knowledge visualises or constructs the urban poor as uncivil by creating a nuisance discourse around them. Dalal (2015), in her study in a state-run urban school in a low-income neighbourhood in Delhi, notes that the “offcial adults” who are socially distant (in terms of caste and class) from the schoolchildren “consider their own cultural practices to be superior and normative, deriding any deviations as marks of being uncivilised, uncouth and immoral” (p. 37). The work further argues that the school gives a legitimacy to this cultural capital of the offcial adults, thereby validating the reproduction of social inequality in the school. This becomes the pretext to impose a “civilising agenda” on the children in most marginal of the public schools in the city “where the discipline of school is meant to be contrasted with the chaos and squalor in their homes” (Rampal, 2007, p. 288). Cultural reproduction and construction of the uncivil Other take place in overt ways through the offcial curriculum and in covert ways through the school’s cultural expectations and pedagogic interactions. Representation in the offcial curriculum In relation to the offcial curriculum, the studies have noted that school knowledge and textbooks do not represent the lifeworld of the urban poor and undermine their knowledge and experience. Rampal (2007) notes that school textbook deals “with the issue of water or housing in a sterile manner, assuming that everyone lives in a brick and mortar bungalow provided with tapped water” (p.  287). She further states that the textbooks also 19

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“evades any conficting issues seen as ‘uncomfortable’ by its middle-class urban authors, and unabashedly pontifcates on what ‘they’ – the poor and the unclean – must do to keep themselves and the city clean” (p.  287). Similarly, Farooqi (2017), in her work with a public-aided school in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood (mostly comprising labourers) in Old Delhi, explicates that the Muslim students are relegated to the margins in the offcial curriculum. Not only does the curriculum “omit” their religious and cultural reality, in subtle ways it also undermines it thereby alienating the students.

Pedagogic discourse and alienation These processes of marginalisation and alienation continue in the pedagogic discourses and relationships at school. Labelling schoolchildren by their social location (place, family occupation, caste, religion, and gender), “disciplining” by punishment and silencing, and a general apathy towards their experience are noted as common school practices that contribute to the construction of an uncivil identity. Dalal (2015), engaging with classroom discourse, observes how the pedagogic style of the teacher frequently goes against the aims of the prescribed textbooks. The teacher’s indifferent and biased view about the children made teaching “counterproductive as the content appears to provide ammunition for the teacher to pass hurtful remarks about the children’s milieu” (p. 37). Similarly, Farooqi (2017) argues that the teachers lack an awareness of the challenges of the children and make demeaning comments that “convey to the children that their social reality is not worthy of cognisance, let alone refection in the curriculum” (p. 80). In her work on discipline and pedagogic practices in a government school in Delhi, Iyer (2013) notes that the teacher–student relationship in the school was determined by the agenda of disciplining the students for reforming them to be “good children”. Disciplining by punishing, sometimes corporally, was instrumental in creating docile and obedient bodies. Such practices are not frequently observed in the elite and other private and government schools that are accessed by better-off students in the city. The schoolchildren were “ranked along an axis of ‘achche – gande’ [good–bad], in which the moral-disciplinary dimension of their selves was confounded with their scholastic performance” (Iyer, 2013, p. 180). While the study does not directly engage with the larger social context of this practice, such pedagogic framing is often founded on teachers’ notions of class, caste, and gender, and the social distance between the teacher and the students (Dalal, 2015). This points to one of the most compelling challenges of urban classrooms – to transform teacher practice to become more democratic and socially just. 20

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Aspiration framing In these contexts, the literature explores how educational aspirations are framed in the urban margins. One of the clear trends that have been noted in the ethnographic studies is that the urban marginalised aspire to access quality education in the hope for social mobility. However, this aspiration is not linear. Ganguly (2018) notes, In urban areas, the ambitions and strategies of Balmiki youths to get ahead merit an in-depth study, especially in terms of the role and importance of formal education. It is quite possible that the emancipatory and mobility potential that formal education is believed to hold may not in reality translate into well-paying jobs for disadvantaged groups like Dalits . . . thereby forcing such groups to look for alternative paths to upward mobility. Nevertheless, a majority of residents value education. (p. 69) Farooqi (2017) presents a similar account where the students who have graduated from school believe that school education did not prepare them for higher education and that others who understood the opportunity cost of formal education have been able to do well by working on alternative pathways made available by the market. However, the students also do not entirely discount education and point to its advantages. Some of these “advantages” include individual independence and identity particularly visà-vis caste, religious, and gender hierarchies (Menon, 2017; Gupta, 2015). The complexity of educational aspirations in the urban margins is also alluded to by another trend of shift in the school choice patterns. On the basis of a study in Vijaywada, Andhra Pradesh, Prasad (2017) notes that while most of the students in government schools are from the scheduled castes and minorities (and by default poor), a small proportion of students from the slums accessed the private schools. The socio-economically disadvantaged classes often sold their land and assets to access “good quality” education. This is seen as an outcome of the “new aspirational culture” of the city shaped by the increasingly neoliberal and commercial education (p. 412). Majumdar (2017) understands this shifting school choice among the urban underprivileged as having been shaped by what the middle class defnes as “good education”. This defnition of good education is noted as having three elements – private English medium education, acceptance of the education market, and a “test-intensive culture of education” (p. 328). Both these trends are mapped as an outcome of the neoliberal action on the educational aspirations in the urban margins. The broad trends and fndings of the literature on urban education in India also match and explain the context of this book. While some of the 21

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fndings may be repetitive, it is important to note that most of these works are simultaneous in terms of the time when these were carried out or published. The locations of the studies have varied to some extent. In this sense, repetition of fndings validates the emergent patterns. Broadly speaking, this book extends the discourse on educational experience in the urban margins from the lens of children’s experience. At the same time, it does not claim to theorise urban education and marginalisation. What makes urban education a special case continues to be a question that crosscuts this book especially as the fndings make the rural–urban dialectic evident. To conclude the chapter, it can be said that similar trends in the discourse on urban education (and placement of marginalisation within it) in the Indian and other contexts can be mapped. The shared patterns that emerge from the literature include (a) diffculty defning the urban and limited conceptual engagement with urban education, (b) focus in the literature on the issues of the urban poor and socially disadvantaged groups, (c) similar processes of social exclusion or marginalisation, (d) neoliberal infuence on urban education that refects in the aspirations and policy action especially in the margins, and (e) the emergent critique of imagining the urban as culturally insulated. There are also geospatial slants in the literature both internationally (with most works located in the United States) and in India (with most studies conducted in the metropolitans). These similarities can also be seen as an outcome of the conceptual dependence of most of the urban education literature in India on the literature in the United States and United Kingdom – also pointing to how global discourse(s) on urban education is geopolitically produced and transferred globally. However, the challenges of urban education vary by the context and so does the scope of literature, given the asymmetries in its development in different regions.

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3 STUDYING THE NON-LINEAR Ethnographic explorations in education

In this chapter, I attempt not only to outline the method and the feldwork but also to locate myself as a researcher in relation to the process of research. I will attempt to bring out the dilemmas, the confusions, and the experiences that I went through in the process of this study. In doing so, I will present the approach to research, the selection of the feld, an initial sketch of the feld, rapport and relationships, and the ways through which I “collected data”. The intention is not only to describe “what I did” but also to make explicit the subjectivity inherent in the work. Keeping in mind the implications that this work could have on the lives of the people living at the sites that were selected for the feldwork, the names of the places, people, and institutions have been changed to pseudonyms to ensure confdentiality. However, the name of the city (Delhi) and some selected broader markers, which were essential to communicate the ethos and develop a context in which the fndings could be situated, have been retained. This has been done in a manner that would not adversely implicate respondent confdentiality. This study was conceptualised and completed during 2012–2014. It was designed within the tradition/conventions of qualitative methodology. This was not only because the nature of the problem that I was studying would have been better addressed in a qualitative mode but also because the problem itself was articulated in a qualitative frame of understanding. It was based on the assumption that understanding “experience” and lived realities is central to making sense of marginalisation, and that this would demand an immersion in the everyday life in the “feld”. While thinking about the method, two questions that persisted were: How would I know the “real”? How would I know that the meanings that I make are “true”/“correct”? These questions may not have straightforward answers. However, in the process of doing research, these were central in propelling the inquiry and delving deeper. These questions brought out the meaning of “thick description” in social research. Retrospectively, these questions now appear to me as naive versions of the dilemmas that social researchers grapple with – What is “true”? What is “evidence” or a pattern in the social world? What

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would be the nature of evidences or patterns when knowledge and production of knowledge appear to be inseparable from questions of values and politics? And in that would these be “true”? (Pascale, 2011, p. 4). While thinking through these questions, pragmatic constraints particularly that of time and opportunity or access also had to be kept in mind. It would not be wrong to say that nebulousness in the methodological framework and the broader questions about social inquiry in general continued to persist during the feldwork. However, there was relative clarity regarding the modes and approaches of collecting data. Yet, I learnt their methodological spirit only when I engaged in the work. In these processes, the method and techniques evolved iteratively through interactions between the theory that I referred to and my deepening engagement with the feld. In many ways, the process of inquiry made it necessary to seek a balance between the broader questions about social inquiry and the pragmatic constraints, which I thought was essential in a qualitative research tradition. As Pascale (2011) puts it, All research is anchored to basic beliefs about how the world exists. For example, to what extent is the world objectively real? Subjectively constructed? What is the relationship of the unconscious to social life? The answers to these, and other ontological questions, constitute the foundations of social inquiry. Yet dominant social science protocols generally direct researchers away from such philosophical pursuits and towards more pragmatic concerns of systematic data collection – as if data exist independently and need only to be collected properly. (p. 23) It was in these negotiations between the pragmatic and the philosophical that the method of this study evolved. However, the pragmatic and the philosophical were not neatly separable.

Beginning the work What would the feldwork of this study be like? How much work would it involve? What would I observe? How would I “select” data? What would constitute data? Where should I start from? How would I talk to people? Who should I talk to? Would people engage with me? How do I begin data collection and note taking? How would I know I have enough data? All these and many more questions persisted until the initial phase of work in the feld. While in the beginning these sounded like pragmatic doubts, as the work intensifed I realised how these questions relate to the manner in which I perceive the social world and the mode of studying it. These questions generated anxiety and fear of a lack of quality to begin with. The fact that I 24

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wasn’t formally trained as an anthropologist or a sociologist was a greater source of self-doubt and it continues to be so, particularly when I consider the neat and sophisticated prosaicness that sociological researches convey in the context of method. As Srinivas (2002) says, “Anthropologists usually write reports which are impersonal . . . the reports convey a sense of objectivity which they do not, and in my opinion, ought not to have” (p. 28), the works that I had surveyed presented a clear (and a more-or-less linear) picture of the process of feldwork (Sarangpani, 1997; Thapan, 2006; Chapman, 2007). While I read through these and similar works, it appeared as if the feld developments were very rationally designed, delimited clearly and carefully, and were executed in the way they had been planned. Whereas, except for the major questions – which underwent refnement during the study – most of the aspects of “method” were not clear in my mind until I progressed through the initial phase of the work. If I think retrospectively on what I had planned while writing the proposal, it emerges that except for the feld and the nature of the inquiry, almost every aspect of what was proposed as the “research design”, became more feshed-out, nuanced, and logical as I struggled to enter the feld and engaged in the process of research. The nature of the experiences that I had while researching also helped me refect on what “messiness” in the context of a qualitative inquiry may mean and how it constructs the “systematic-ness” of such inquiries. Qualitative researchers (such as Whyte, 1943; Geertz, 1973; Srinivas, 1976) have presented this messy character of qualitative/ethnographic inquiries. However, this became legible only when I underwent such an experience. At the same time, I also came to understand how every researcher’s experiences would lead to a different meaning-making in the context of these methodological categories. This is not to say that the study followed an “anything goes” mode, rather, it is to indicate that designing a method and executing it in a linear fashion in itself appeared problematic when the study began. In the following pages, I attempt to present the approach to the inquiry, while highlighting this experience.

Approaching the feld As I began to think about the categories of observations and the theoretical framework, it appeared that some initial feldwork would be essential. This initial inquiry itself began propelling the research, wherein the serendipity and the spontaneity implicit in the nature of the inquiry emerged- and so did the idea of how a feld may guide a research and the method, rather than a predesigned model guiding the feldwork. In these processes, the categories for inquiry emerged and continued to get refned until the middle phases of the work. Somewhere after the initial 3 months, the work became rigorous and focussed – which became evident through the nature of feld notes that I was taking. 25

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Since the aim was to research with the people (particularly the children) who comprise the margins of the urban social set-up, the nature of the site where the work would be located was relatively clear. I had thought of locating the work at an urban slum where I could understand the people’s perspective about institutional education and knowledge, engage with children (those who attend school and those who did not), and become familiar with the aspirations with which the people sent their children to school. In this process, I wanted to understand how they articulate or make sense of their experiences. A part of the work was to be situated in a government school in the neighbourhood of the selected locality, so as to understand the institutional practices and how these interact with and shape children’s experiences. Yet, things didn’t fow in order so neatly. There were several situations of confusion, phases of fux, diffculties in decision-making, and changes – some of which will come across in the chapter sections that follow. The urban location While the work was conceptualised in an urban education context, on several occasions (particularly during informal interactions with peers), there emerged a need to rethink the rural–urban distinction. Peers with whom I interacted opined that it would be more plausible to focus on a rural setting – especially given that there are several aspects of the rural that shape the urban experience. Also, as I engaged with the question further it became increasingly clear that urban and rural are not binary categories in the context of Delhi. There are varied hues of urban–rural on a socio-cultural-spatial continuum that are relatively underexplored. As mentioned in Chapter 1, a survey of relevant literature indicated that although there were several qualitative works on education and exclusion/marginalisation in the rural contexts, I could trace fewer works that explored this experience in the urban spaces in India – as several were simultaneously being conducted with this study (as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2). There were several writings and research studies that explained caste–class relations in the rural context (notable among them being Srinivas, 1976; Dube, 1955), and those which explored the relation between experience of social exclusion and education in the rural ordinary (Jenkins & Barr, 2006; Nambissan, 2009; Krishna, 2012, and the like). The Dalit autobiographies I read, very explicitly narrated the experience of caste–class nexus in the rural context, the experience of exclusion did not come across very clearly in the context of urban lives. The authors highlighted (though not explained in-depth) that the migration from a rural setup and the hard-earned affliation to an urban educated middle-class did not convert into emancipation from caste. Thus, this literature also indicated a need to explore urban life on these lines. Along these lines, the work of Das (2010) further strengthened the need to explore State and citizenship relationship in the urban margins. These aspects have been discussed in greater 26

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detail in Chapter 1. In this context, the idea based on which I intended to situate the work in an urban context was refned and articulated in the form of a rationale. What became clearer through this pursuit was the social group with which I would engage during this study. Site selection The selection of the site for feldwork took much more time than I expected. It was also because I had to work in several situations: with people in the community, children in school and outside, teachers, and parents of schoolchildren. The work had to be thus situated at multiple sites (even within a locality) – the community, the school, and the workplace of children. Working in a setting where I could engage with families and children who were out of school demanded that I explore the demographic profles of various disadvantaged locations in Delhi, including jhuggi jhompri (JJ) colonies, resettlement colonies, and unauthorised settlements. The records, which could describe the demographic data that I was looking for, were neither maintained by any public agency nor were they available in a locality-wise disaggregated form. An idea about the demographic data could only be developed through in-person visits and engagement. Thus, I started visiting various clusters and other locations in Delhi for being able to begin the feldwork. Most of these visits were made with the help of both professional and personal contacts who were working or residing near/in the various potential sites. These visits spanned over 2 months. Through these, I could only generally observe the sites and begin to familiarise myself with the geographies of some of the slums in Delhi – an aspect that will be discussed in the next chapter. I also mapped some of the demographic features of the locations that I had visited, and these appeared to be much more meaningful than the aggregated accounts which were available publicly (electoral records, city development plans, and data from earlier censuses). I began to learn about how to “be there”. That is, what should I not do, how should I not begin a conversation, how to fnd routes, whom to approach to fnd out something, and the like. Along with this I also got a sense of the physical and emotional strength such work would demand, and the nature of the problems that it may generate. I also came to refect on my identity and the impressions of gender, age, class, caste, and region that it bore. However, such visits were not leading me beyond this to “accessing” the locations and the people. I refected on questions like – What should I do while visiting? Why would people talk to me? Even if they do, what should I talk to them about and how? All these questions were converging into one broader category – at the site that I select for the feldwork, how would I justify my presence to the people living there. I started thinking about and discussing the question of access with more informed peers. 27

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Approaching NGOs It was after several debates and discussions with my peers, it appeared that approaching selected feld sites with the help of NGOs working there would possibly not only enable understanding the demographic details but also facilitate initial entry. This was much in contrast with the initial decision of not going through an NGO – so as to maintain an independent relation with the feld. I was looking for NGOs which not only worked in the area of education but also visited the community regularly. Given these requirements, I approached some NGOs working at the sites where I thought it would be meaningful to situate the work based on a rough sketch of the demographic profles that I had developed during my initial site visits and interactions. I approached eight organisations of which four responded. The NGOs that responded to my request were at advanced stages in their interventions. The work that they were doing was situated in the local community, but it did not involve regular visits to the community or interactions beyond limited range of contact. Furthermore, the organisations were assuming that I would only make a few visits, talk to a few people, and acknowledge their work in my academic networks. A prolonged “feldwork” did not sound reasonable to the NGOs. With the help of my professional contacts, I was able to identify, approach, and “convince” two other NGOs. These were the New Light Foundation (NLF) and Prakriti.1 The former was working in several settings in the NCT of Delhi but the project coordinator suggested that I work at Sitapuri. Prakriti that was introduced to me as a “government NGO” (which meant that it was relying to a large extent on government funding) was located in Rabindra Garden and was intervening in M-Block, Shiv Puri, and K-Block. My independent visits had indicated that these three sites in terms of demographic features were more suitable for this study (as I will be describing later). Both these organisations were more receptive in facilitating a prolonged inquiry. This was particularly because I had approached these through the insiders working in the organisations and therefore there was a certain degree of “trust” in the association – at least apparently (which later did not turn out to be the case with one of them). I worked at both the sites for a little more than a month. From this experience, I was able to gather a sense of the profles, particularly educational profles, of the two sites. However, caste profles were still unclear or rather I should say that caste itself was a confusing category. People working in both the NGOs said that they had “no conclusive data” about the caste profles of the people. However, informally the members of the organisations could tell that the sites where they were intervening had more people from the oppressed castes. How they (and many others with whom I interacted with during the work) “intuitively” made sense of the caste profles was a question that kept emerging through the feldwork. 28

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The feld sites Sitapuri was inhabited by people who were often referred to as Bangladeshis. However, most people living there called themselves migrants from Bengal – some claimed that people from their native villages had come to the city many decades ago and several followed their footsteps. The reason for migration cited most often was search of better economic opportunities. There were roughly around 2000 households situated in the locality. Most of the houses were semi-permanent dwellings and some were jhuggis. Junk dealing was a major source of family income. As per the estimate of the NGO workers, around 90 per cent of the people from “the colony” depended (at least partly) on three local unauthorised Kabaadis (junk dealers) for their incomes. The NGO workers told me that almost all the children living there worked as rag-pickers and aspired to become small peddling junk dealers (chote kabaadi). Somewhere around 70 per cent of the people living there were Muslims and the remaining 30 per cent, as I was told, were “backward” Hindus, though no offcial records were available. During these interactions, it also emerged that NLF had a strong presence in the locality. The NGO had been there from the past 3 years and had set up two learning centres, which were called non-formal education (NFE) daytime and NFE afternoon. The organisation was “mainstreaming” children from the community into State schools – while providing bridge courses. Through a continuous door-to-door campaign, in which NLF employed members from the community as well, the organisation had convinced almost all the parents to send their children to the NFE centres. The campaign appeared to be so strong that there was a complete match in the narrative of the children, families, and NLF workers about education, schooling, and the organisation – even the linguistic expressions were the same. The NLF workers did not see much meaning in my presence and always treated me as a “researcher”. They were forthcoming in sharing a variety of information “about the people” with me, but they acted as flters in my interactions with the community. It seemed that most were not comfortable with my engaging with the people on my own and directly. They cautioned me about the people and their criminal associations, addiction, lack of cleanliness and the possibility of contracting tuberculosis or other diseases, and most importantly about my safety as a woman. The NLF workers also asked some senior people and women from the community to “explain to me” the dangers involved in visiting the locality. In many ways, in due course, it appeared that much more than facilitating my feldwork, the NLF was acting as a gatekeeper that regulated my access to the people. The experience with the NGO, Prakriti, was more ambivalent. In fact, its own status and the understanding of the roles it would assume were themselves at a nascent stage. It had started working only a year back and had not 29

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been able to establish a relationship with the community of concern. It was still in the process of mapping and generating a dependable database for the site through the newly appointed feldworkers. After a lot of negotiation (as Ms. Kavita, the project in-charge, told me), the organisation had found a space (a room and a porch) to run its centre in a government school situated in an elite neighbourhood. Ms. Kavita was herself working as a guest teacher at the school – an offer she said she had made to the school “to place a foot in the premises”. There was considerable chaos in the day-to-day functioning and a sense of urgency within the members of the organisation to produce some tangible results. Although I did fnd it diffcult to locate myself amidst this ethos, such a situation also prepared a space in the organisation where someone new could have been accommodated. In this process, I began interacting with the feldworkers in the NGO and was able to understand and be a part of their daily work. How I engaged with the NGO may not be meaningful to describe here. However, it is relevant to state that in this process the people at the centre (particularly Ms. Kavita) came to regard me as an additional resource in their pursuits and began making use of my presence for their work. It appeared as though they had begun to count me as a community worker and were expecting me to perform some functions. They did not probe much about my research. In the phase they were passing through as an organisation, my presence would not have been threatening for them. Given this context, it was relatively easier to engage with the people in the locality while working with Prakriti. It was because of this nature of association that I could develop a more meaningful rapport with people and in due course fnd informants, at M Block, K block, and Shiv Puri, and could gradually begin working more independently. What was popularly identifed as M-Block was a diverse habitation with respect to the regional and religious profles of the people, with a relatively mixed concentration of “migrants” from Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar. A study based on a sample survey of the slums located in the zone and the NGO, both stated a high concentration of SC population in this setting (GOI & CES, 2008, p. 8). The occupational profles were also mixed, with a variety of vocations being practiced by the people (see Chapter 4). It had adjoining areas of K-Block, Shiv Puri, and Saraswati Park, which looked like one huge location without any physical separation. It stretched over a little less than 2 kilometers and merged almost unrecognisably with another similar setting at the other end. It ran across one section of the Najafgarh drain, which had a special place in the life of the people living there (which I will describe in Chapter 4). It comprised two JJ colonies, three resettlement colonies, and several unauthorised squatters (including sidewalk dwellings). As per the NGO’s estimate, there were a substantial number (but not clearly estimated) children who were not attending school or had dropped out early. 30

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After working at Sitapuri and this site for about a month, it became clearer that it would be more meaningful to situate the work at M-Block, Shiv Puri, and K-Block. I continued to visit Sitapuri and M-Block simultaneously over 2 months, until I arrived at a decision about the site, and then focussed on the latter and made visits to the former to corroborate the data. During this process, I also developed an acquaintance and rapport with the community workers and with some people from the community as well. It was during this phase that I met most of the people who became my informants in due course – this was another crucial element in deciding the site. Entering the school A large part of the feldwork also had to be situated in a school. Therefore, a similar access to a neighbourhood school was also needed. Since Prakriti’s centre was located in a government school, I also at least physically entered the school. Entering the school later, that is, after beginning to interact with the people (or community) in the context of their ideas about education, was a conscious decision. This was guided by the aim to be able to understand the school from the perspective of the people. Instead of engaging with people on the lines of perspective from the school, it appeared more meaningful to be able to understand the people’s aspirations and perceptions about schooling to begin with – and then begin exploring the life at school and everyday experiences of the children from the community there. This approach helped in contextualising school in the lives of the people and making sense of it as a State or public institution. In due course of time, this brought the State– citizen relationship in the margins as a dimension to the fore. Accessing the school was much more diffcult than approaching the NGO. There was a strong gatekeeping by the various actors in the school system. There were diffculties in getting permission to work in the schools located in the neighbourhood of M-Block, at the administrative levels as well as from the teachers. I began the work in the government school where Prakriti was located with due permissions, but my presence was reported as being a source of “disturbance” among the teachers. This was particularly when I actively ensured that I presented myself in a non-intrusive fashion. It was emerging that it would not be feasible to continue the work at the school – as the purpose was not to disturb the daily routine but to participate in it. Until I engaged with teachers as the study progressed, I was unable to understand the displeasure that the teachers of the frst school communicated and experienced. Working with primary schoolchildren was essential for my work to be able to understand the initial experiences at school. I was thus open to locate the feldwork in a State-run primary only school. While I was exploring these aspects, I met a Consultant working with the SSA’s Delhi chapter, Mr. Mehta, at a workshop where I was presenting a paper. He expressed interest in my study and offered to help in accessing some 31

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government primary schools. He also suggested some questions2 for inquiry that he was interested in. I had also been engaging with the SSA (national level) on a documentation work relating to quality improvements in government schools. This enabled Mr. Mehta and me to relate to each other professionally. Eventually, Mr. Mehta became one of the principal informants for this work, who not only interacted with me on a variety of matters (at times debating extensively) but also facilitated the feldwork. Through his assistance, I sought permission to work in the government primary school, E-5 M-Block. When I approached the school in-charge through Mr. Mehta, she also agreed to facilitate the feldwork. This school became my feld site. A signifcant number of children in this school came from the resettlement and JJ clusters I was visiting more frequently and where I was able to develop connections with the people living there. The school operated in two shifts, one in the morning for girls and the second in the afternoon for boys. I observed both the shifts in the initial phase of the work. However, later I focussed on the morning shift school for in-depth engagement with children and teachers. My gender enabled me to develop a rapport with the teachers and children in the morning shift much more easily (where all teachers were women and the school was girls-only school) than in the afternoon shift (where all teachers were males, excepting one – who was seeking a transfer to another school). I went to the school on all working days (excepting a few occasions). I continued to stay back intermittently for the second shift of the school – at least thrice a month. I shall further describe the school and the work that I did there in the later chapters. As per the account of Mr. Mehta, NGO workers, and the teachers, the E-5 primary school was a “good school”. Good meant that classes took place, the children scored good marks, there was less corporal punishment, and English was taught in the school. The school was recently given a “Pratibha” status and English was taught in the school right from the frst class. There were 622 children on-roll and most came from sawa-barah-gaj3 – a resettlement colony. The classes I to V had three sections each and an average of around 40 children in each section. However, classes I and II were seeing a steep increase in enrolment during the course of this work. There were around 50 children in each of the sections of Classes I and II. Out of the 622 on-roll, only around 350 attended the school regularly (more than 50 per cent of the school days). There were two sections of nursery classes in the school that were supported by the UEE Mission.

Rapport, relationships, and roles The process of approaching and working with various agencies and actors in the feld was the most challenging aspect of the entire feldwork. While my professional identity as a researcher made the NGOs, and the schools that I approached sceptical about my agenda, my social identity as a young 32

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middle-class woman generated confusion among the people from the community. It was relatively less challenging to initiate interactions with the children at school to begin with but challenging to refrain from coming across as a “teacher” and to develop a rapport. The naturalistic character of inquiry became prominent through the roles that I assumed (NGO worker, informative function, helping the schoolteachers, acting as a proxy teacher, relationship with the children, working for SSA) in the feld to justify my presence. In these processes, I was also able to identify the principal informants of the study. In the process of interactions at NLF, I was able to develop a more informal relationship with some of the feldworkers. One of the feldworkers, Zahid, became a principal informant – particularly because of the similarity in our educational background and affliation to the University of Delhi as students of the social sciences. I helped him in identifying books for his master’s degree. He took keen interest in my work and shared his experiences of work and understanding about the community. At Prakriti, the community workers of the project were young women who had completed their schooling recently and were pursuing other degrees and diplomas through the distance learning mode. Though initially I was treated as a guest and a “senior” person, as I continued visiting the community and assisting in the everyday work at the centre over a period, my presence became normalised as a member of their project. My presence and the work that I did were taken for granted and at times I was “taken to task” (the way a community worker would be) for absenting myself from work without prior information. Even I felt apologetic and guilty when I did so. It was in this process that I began to make sense of the term “participant observer” and experienced the oxymoronic character of the method. The work involved going for feld visits door-to-door and searching for out-of-school-children. I visited the neighbourhood with two community workers, Jagwati and Neetu. Interactions with Jagwati, who was a principal informant for the study (probably the most indispensable one), and with Neetu, were also signifcant in developing understandings. The project coordinator, Ms. Kavita, was critical in facilitating and informing this study, but my interactions with her were limited. I connected with the community in multiple ways – through the NGO, through the children, through the school, and independently when I began visiting the feld without the NGO’s help. The relationship with the community transited and took various forms through the duration of the feldwork. When I was visiting the various sites in Delhi during the feld selection phase, I felt as though I was being “gazed” at throughout. People took note of my being around and stared at me. I felt strange, awkward, and at times vulnerable as a woman. However, when I started the visits along with the NGO staff, people from the community did not take notice of my presence, and almost ignored me. Even when I asked something or attempted to talk, most people did not reply to me directly. This was similar to the experience that Geertz (1973) described in his work. 33

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The experience at M-Block, K-Block, and Shiv Puri was different. This was because at M-Block I was visiting door-to-door, and also because during these visits, I mostly met women at home or at work. The women soon began taking interest in my presence as I began introducing my research. The men were neither available at home until late evening nor was it a norm for them to interact much with “outside” women, other than when essential. However, I could talk to the men when they visited the school to pick up their children. Gradually, I was also able to interact with some other men and one of them became a principal informant (Teekam). I always addressed the men with whom I interacted as Bhai or brother – to ensure that I did not fout the unsaid “code of conduct”. In a similar manner, other rapport and relationships were developed, or I should say unfolded, where I had to make sense of what may not be acceptable and balance my “ambitions” about the inquiry. As and when some members of the community began to interact with me, I was able to approach others and talk to them by myself. This enabled me to gradually separate my identity from the NGO and go beyond the restrains that the organisation’s work imposed. Gradually, my presence became more acceptable and then usual. Thus, from being invisible, I transited to become “conspicuous” and then ordinary. Being a source of information was something that particularly enabled a meaningful relationship between me and the women in the feld. The women asked about a variety of schemes, schools for vocational training for adults, janampatri [birth certifcate], caste certifcate, medical facilities, jobs, NGOs, discounted sewing machines, and the like. One of them said, “Jankari [‘knowledge’/information] is a big problem; we don’t get to know many things. .  .  . I thought you would know everything but you have also come here for jankari. . . . [T]his seems to be everyone’s problem!” The mutual exchanging of information transformed into being able to relate to each other with a purpose and then gradually progressed into a more “natural” relationship. It would be naive to say that I became one of the participants in the feld; the divide of “us” and “they” continued to exist through the strong impressions of the social worlds to which we belonged. Nevertheless, I was able to interact with the people in a manner that had a quality of informality and ordinariness. My institutional affliation also enabled in developing rapport with the teachers at the E-5 school. I helped one of the teachers (principal informant), Shivali, to write sections of her MA Education assignments, particularly because (as she said) she could trust my “knowledge”. There was already a set of shared meanings through which I could relate to teachers. These meanings, more than our common educational background, came from our social positions (shaped by our gender, economic class, and caste). With the teachers at the E-5 school (morning shift), it did not take a long time to connect because the teachers complained of being short of staff, and they saw me as a helping hand in their work. The school in-charge permitted me to do my work in any one of the classes available irrespective of whether I was 34

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transacting the prescribed curriculum. The only condition was that no child should move out of the class and that the “normal” working of the school should not be disturbed. Initially, I was treated like a guest at the school – I was offered tea and biscuits in the offce, which was very unusual. However, within a few days, my presence in the school became a matter of routine and there wasn’t anything “special” that the teachers saw in my being there. Of course, my absence created issues, as the Class V-B had to be “attended to” by me almost every day due to the frequent absence and later on transfer of the class teacher. My gender and my age both helped in developing a rapport with the teachers, and being a part of their everyday context. The rapport with the children was central to this work. Observing, interacting, and working with children to understand their experiences were thus critical for the inquiry. On the one hand, I regularly interacted with the children of class V-B. On the other hand, I also engaged with children outside the school, especially at the special training/NFE centres of both the NGOs I worked with. In particular, outside the school, I engaged with children who worked as rag-pickers and who also attended the centres of the NGOs (an aspect which will be described in Chapter 4). These included around 40 children, of ages 7 to 14 years, both boys and girls (though the majority were boys). However, I interacted more regularly and consistently with 14 children. It would be diffcult to delineate children into those who were the principal informants and those who were not – as all of them were critical in this work. The rapport with the children also transited over a period. During the initial visits, some of them would run up to me and shake hands with me, which appeared very out of the ordinary. However, all these reactions withered away shortly. What remained was a more casual way of associating, where handshake did not matter or rather was not something “special”. My bag and the things that I carried in it were another source of curiosity among children. I carried a big “schoolbag type of” bag which the children found very intriguing. Some would ask me what I was carrying in it, and opening and inspecting it were something that they appeared to like. They found books, short story books, pens, papers for rough work, pen caps, coins, an empty water bottle, an empty lunch box, a broken mobile charger, and several scrap papers in the bag. The “rag-picker” children exclaimed that I was also like a girl kabaadi. A child once exclaimed, “You already have so much of kabaad in your bag, why don’t you come along to sell it with us?” Children, specifcally those at the school, also showed curiosity to know my background – the kind of house I lived in, about my father’s job, and my religion and caste. They described me as a “teacher” at home; however, a “special teacher who was not a teacher and did not beat”. In my interactions with them, they initially called me ma’am, then they drifted to Didi [elder sister], then with my name together with one of these. In the process 35

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of relating to children, I learnt several aspects of an adult–child dyad and about how to work with children. In this process, stories and narratives emerged as a way of deepening such relationships and situating meanings in a common frame. Listening to what the children had to say was also critical in developing a rapport and training oneself in the meanings and logics. With the older children, conversation worked better to understand their perspectives on issues; some of them began conversations and debates themselves. However, it never took the shape of dominating their points of view, instead involved listening much more than speaking. The older children vented their thoughts and feelings on me – complaining about their families, employers, school and society. The children taught me the “method” of listening and empathising, which I now understand are powerful ways of “participating and observing”. In the case of children, I also realised how listening demanded from me an ability to understand a different kind of logic, imagine with them, and understand what they wanted to communicate beyond the limits of the vocabulary, while at the same time, it posed a challenge to “objectivity” in research.

Stories as a way of engaging with children Participant observation (combined with interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs)) was the mode of engagement in the feld. Yet, I also drew upon other of ways of collecting data that are not conventionally associated with this mode. One of these was storytelling. In the process of feldwork, I encountered the challenge as an adult to “dialogue” with children. Along with this, the limitations of social research or of “systematic” inquiry into children’s experiences came to the fore. While attempting to engage particularly with children who were out-of-school, I recognised the inadequacies and impossibilities of using the available techniques of research. The concept of sitting together in a group and discussing something started looking irrational, the idea of interviewing didn’t seem plausible, and conversations did work but not in the manner in which I had wanted them to. Another consideration in working with children related to the ethics of research. As I thought about the ways of working with the children, the notion of “taking consent” and not “disturbing” the participants in their everyday contexts was turned on its head. What does taking consent mean in the context of children? How does an adult conduct a “non-intrusive” research with children? What would participant observation mean in the context of children? These were some of the prominent dilemmas that emerged. Although I continuously articulated and rearticulated the possibilities that were available in these contexts and devised ways of working with the help of theory, these dilemmas themselves were much more than pragmatic concerns and introduce the problematic of “research” as an enterprise 36

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of the adult world. In such experiences, I started searching, in what may be called an introspective manner, for ways of engaging with children – where my adulthood would at least become less important, if not redundant, in my relationship with the children. Although not read in the context of children, thoughts and the work of Freire (1970) helped in questioning my own position in relation to children and thinking about “dialogue” as a method. Storytelling and discussions on stories, completion of stories, jointly constructing or “distorting” stories and constructing representations (drawings) based on stories, in this context, appeared as some ways of engaging with children. It would be more worthwhile to present this in Chapter 7 but here it is important to state that story narration did not happen in a teacher-taught mode. It is diffcult to reconstruct a complete picture of the environment during storytelling sessions, but the classroom environment did undergo a shift during these sessions – the classrooms which were otherwise “noisy” and where children did not listen to each other, appeared more composed and children participated in a more self-directed way. The discussions following the stories made the ethos resemble to that of a social– science classroom where people jointly analysed and described and deconstructed social categories and meanings that are encountered in everyday social interactions. To conclude, I can say that this study is not an ethnography in the traditional sense of the term. This is given the fact that a neat pre-determined theoretical and methodological framework for this work did not exist. There was a clear understanding that the inquiry would be qualitative in nature, that the questions would involve a deeper and prolonged engagement with the feld, and that the thesis would be a reconstruction of the engagement. However, a priori descriptive categories were present only at an intuitive level, and underwent refnement and deepening as the engagement with the feld developed in the process of study. Through these processes, the research questions were framed more clearly and objectives were articulated. This further gave a direction to the study with respect to how to intensify the feldwork.

Notes 1 NLF is a 25-year-old organization and receives its grants from three nongovernmental sources. It works primarily in the slums in East Delhi situated on the Delhi–Uttar Pradesh border. Its Sitapuri project was among the relatively newer ones (3 years old) and its offce was located in a Government Girls’ Senior Secondary School, in one section on the frst foor. Prakriti was a relatively new organisation and had started its community outreach project only a year back. It hadn’t been very successful and was therefore fnding diffculty in getting funds from the government. It relied completely on the government for its funds and hadn’t yet received its Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) certifcate and was thus unable to get funds from other sources.

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2 One question related to how enrolment of children at school took place in practice vis-à-vis what the guidelines suggest. The second related to the problem of teacher motivation – he asked, “How do we motivate and inspire our teachers? All attempts seem to fail”. The third was a broader question which matched the question I was pursuing – “Why, despite so many provisions and schemes, do children not come to school?” All these questions were critical to my study. Not in a sense that I was attempting to fnd immediate solutions to these or had them in mind from the beginning (excepting the third question), but these emerged later on during feld immersion and became prominent concerns for the work. 3 It is known this way as each house was built on 12¼ yards (sawa-barah-gaj) of land. The offcial records call it Resettlement colony, while the sawa-barah-gaj is a name that the people had given. A school child’s (Shabnam’s) grandmother told me that the people were given this land when they were removed from another site (around 20 years ago) in Delhi. She says, “When these people came here they occupied the land, fghting with each other over every inch of it”. Not that anybody residing there had witnessed this, but this narrative went around and was talked about.

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4 CONSTRUCTING AND DECONSTRUCTING THE SLUM

This chapter presents a description of the feld, life of the people, and certain contextual local meanings. It begins by tracing the social history of the feld. In the process of describing the everyday life in the feld setting, it etches out two perspectives – that of an outsider and an insider. The purpose here is not only descriptive but also of exploring different vantage points of constructing life in the city slum. These vantage points enable deconstructing the “us” and “they” politics that shapes up in the urban space and frames the context in which education and the children’s experience are located – an aspect that would be discussed in the subsequent chapters. One latent intention of the chapter is also to reconstruct how my own ideas about “the slum” were shaped in the interactions with its inhabitants. In this sense, the descriptions and analyses take a more refective/introspective form in some sections. This modality was central to the process in which I was oriented to make sense of the social world from an insider’s standpoint.

Tracing social history of the feld Understanding an urban slum which is constantly in transition (Antony & Maheshwaran, 2001) not only is challenging but also brings out the limits of the means of knowing that are available to a researcher in education. In an attempt to trace a history or histories of the sites, M Block, Shiv Puri, and K Block, I explored various offcial sources (such as electoral records, city development plans, economic surveys of Delhi, and the census of India) but did not fnd much useful information. Though data pertaining to the particular wards and the zone were available, I could not trace specifc disaggregated information regarding the settlements. Researchers working on slum, resettlement, and unauthorised settlements in Delhi have often pointed out these data gaps and their complex meanings and implications (Bhan, 2013; Dupont, 2008; Truelove, 2018; Zimmer, 2012). This is partly because the manner in which the settlements are located and spread or rather “behave” does not ft into the data categories for planned cities. In offcial documents and narratives, “slum” is seen as a standard category but researches 39

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constantly encounter complexities and diversities (in types of housing, standard of living, demographics, and way of life) that constitute the ways of life there (Dupont & Gowda, 2019). Given this scenario with offcial records and data, slum settlement in metropolitan cities of India, especially in Delhi and Mumbai, has emerged as a special case of inquiry in urban studies. With the limited information available on record, the understanding thus had to be developed through interactions with informants who could reliably provide such details. The description that I present in the subsequent sections has been developed through the accounts of six informants – two of whom were living at the site for the past 10–15 years (Anjum and Teekam), two schoolteachers (Sarita and Shivali), and the NGO in-charge (Ms. Kavita) and two feldworkers (Jagwati and Neetu – both born and brought up in a settlement in the feld and shifted to another location after completing schooling). A local police offcial also informed the work – though he continued to “warn” me of the dangers of working in the area. A neighbour from an upscale residential complex in the vicinity, Mrs. Aggarwal – a former teacher in one of the schools in the neighbourhood, who has been living there for the past about three decades – was also a source of information about the development of the site. Finding informants, who could provide insights into the history (or histories) of the feld and the clusters that constitute it, was a challenge. This is particularly because of two reasons. Firstly, all the three major clusters into which the area is divided have gradually emerged over a period of time and continue to be in transition. The clusters within the three settings that constituted the site were established or emerged at varied points in time as make shift arrangements – authorised or unauthorised. Therefore each had a history of its own that connected with that of the other. Secondly, the site is populated by people migrating from and to various neighbouring states for work frequently changing their homes – and thus in a continuous state of transition. When a household acquires suffcient resources to shift to a better setting, they leave the place. Therefore, there was a variation in the accounts of people – the accounts were more about their individual histories than about the setting. These had to be corroborated in different ways including fne verifcation with the most recent offcial records available at the time the study began (GNCTD, 2006; GNCTD, 2008; CGDR, 2011; GOI & CES, 2008) and based on the studies analysing the nature of urban settlement in Delhi (Bhan & Jana, 2013; Dupont & Gowda, 2019; Ghertner, 2015; Joseph & Goodman, 2008; Singh & Shukla, 2005; etc.). What I present in the next section is a picture that emerges from these reconstructions. Initial development of the site The feld site is situated amidst a mix of villages, urban housing settlements, and vacant plots of land. Many of these vacant plots, over a period, have been taken over by malls and coaching centres. When one passes through 40

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the inroads of the settlement, it appears as if it’s undifferentiable spatially as it utilises every single inch of land and still appears to starve for space. But unlike the present, about four decades back, the site was a vacant land located besides (on the south side of) a prominent drain that passes through Delhi and fows into the river Yamuna. There were villages and unauthorised settlements on the north side of the drain and in the neighbourhood of this empty patch of land that touched what was known as the “Outer Delhi” until 2008. Like many other slums, resettlement, and unauthorised clusters in Delhi, the settlements on the south side of the drain started developing in the 1960s when the zone of Delhi where it is located saw rapid urban development (Zimmer, 2012). In the process of urbanisation and land regularisation, the villages and connected non-agricultural land came under the Lal Dora and Phirni.1 The unauthorised settlements of the north side, in the process of land acquisitions by the government, were temporarily shifted across the drain – the present M Block – to transit camps/resettlement colonies by Delhi’s urban development authorities during this phase. The land vacated on the south side was used for the housing development plans (and the related infrastructure) for government employees. As a result, most of the housing clusters located there carry the names of public sector institutions like State Bank of India, Life Insurance Corporation, Gail, and Industrial Finance Corporation of India. However, this was only the initiation of the resettlement process. Another phase of marked urban development activity in the zone was in the early 1980s. In this second phase, the earlier establishments of M Block became more elaborate and a few squatters emerged. These squatters were mainly inhabited by migrating labourers, who came to work in the further infrastructure development plans. Among them were the relatives and village folks of one of my principal informants, Teekam. Teekam described the experience of his folks: My father and his brother were staying in a jhuggi . . . temporarily assembled bricks with a plastic overhead . . . the family came later. . . . I was a child, but I remember that many families took shelter in the huge drainpipes that were lying around to be laid underground . . . you would have been very young; you may not remember. All over Delhi many of us lived in these pipes – wo to ghar hi ban gae thhey [they became homes]. Having spent my childhood in the same zone of Delhi in the late 1980s, I could categorically recall the huge sewer pipes which Teekam was referring to. These were seen at several places – on the roadsides, beside the drain and in parks, waiting to be laid. I also remember seeing people living in them and using them for defecation. I was warned in school and at home to not to go near these pipes and to stay away from the “thieves and beggars” who reside in them. I was told that the government was going to develop a good 41

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sanitation system for the houses being built in the region, of which my family’s house was one. Those sections of M Block that developed earlier appear a little more “planned” and “better” established than the others. Most housing settlements in M Block are authorised/regularised (including a notifed JJ colony). M Block has several State institutions located there including a government hospital, a water treatment plant that caters to a part of the zone, a post offce, a training centre for the visually disabled, an electoral offce, and a disaster management cell. It has six schools including four Municipal Corporation, and two Delhi government schools. One of the only two preschools for children under 6 years of age is located at M Block E-5 Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) school premise – the feld school for this study. The police station for the entire area is in M Block. Such “legality” of M Block and its relatively older existence were the main reasons for which the entire settlement (including areas beyond it) was popularly referred to as “M Block”. Shiv Puri and K Block came up during mid-1980s to 1990s in part as extensions of M Block, and also as the Delhi government resettled different communities and groups – including those that suffered in the 1984 riots, those who were moved from the banks of Yamuna, and the migrant labourers. The contemporary context M Block is now separated into three municipal wards – two urban and one rural. Some segments of the rural ward, though not physically distinguishable now from the other areas, were there before the rest of the area developed and are now economically much better off (which becomes visible through the nature of socio-economic conditions like the construction of houses and ownership of vehicles). M Block is most sought after, and the most expensive location after the rural ward – even the JJ colony houses there have much higher rents2 (as high as Rs. 1300 per month for a room, excluding the cost of civic amenities) than the sites in K Block and Shiv Puri (varying from Rs. 900 to 700 per month, excluding any kind of civic amenity). This matches the market rent rates for jhuggies (Centre for Global Development Research Private Limited, 2011). However, Teekam tells me that in cases where people are unable to pay for security deposit or where the tenant is a relative or someone from the village of origin of the jhuggi owner – renting comes as a more economical option. The economics for resettlement colonies and transit camps is different. For a two-room house, the rates go up to Rs. 7000 per month. Most children from M Block (as per the accounts of Ms. Kavita, the schoolteachers, and the in-charge) complete at least the frst few years of schooling. Most of them gradually start helping their parents in their work, as a substantial proportion of people in the area are in some form of self-employment. The E-5 school where I located the  work 42

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Note: The hand-drawn sitemap depicts only those constituents of the site that have been described in the work at some point.

Figure 4.1 Sitemap of M-Block, K-Block, and Shiv Puri

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was situated on the periphery of M-Block, and catered to children coming from the JJ colony, sawa-barah-gaj, and other resettlement colonies, along with the children from K Block whose houses were nearby. The set-up of Shiv Puri and K block is different from that of M Block. Shiv Puri includes two transit camps, which are now increasingly being rented out to people migrating from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. It has one smaller slum squatter that is not recognised in the offcial records. However, the police station has several First Information Reports registered against people living in that squatter. The police personnel (an informant) said, It is like this; if you check our records and match them with that of other institutions you will be shocked. There are so many contradictions regarding these slums and all these areas. No offce will be able to show you any record. They will ask you to go to the website and check. Unko order hai ye bolne ka [They have an ‘order’ to say this]. What he said turned out to be the case when I attempted to explore the records. I was never denied any information, and was dealt with very politely. But I could not fnd the information I was looking for at the local MCD offce or the electoral offce. The NGO workers shared the same experience when they mapped the area. Thus, the NGO had initiated the process of developing its own record by a door-to-door survey, which had its own problems. The workers who were collecting data were neither trained in seeking information from people nor did the people share complete information with them. Thus, the NGO records were at best “rough estimates” only. K Block is the biggest site and has four phases, which fall under three separate municipal wards. One of these wards is recognised as an “urban village” in the offcial records, while the rest are urban. The urban village has a higher proportion of the Sikh residents. Many houses in this village have turned out to be small factories for spare parts, compact disc manufacturing, timberwork, chemicals, and dyes, with turnovers as high as 25 lakh rupees per annum. There is a private school located in this village, which most of the neighbourhood children attend. This was one setting where I could not interact with the people due to logistical reasons. The urban wards of K Block have a JJ colony and several slum squatters (three, excluding the several small patches of houses on the pavements) that do not fgure in the list of authorised or unauthorised settlements in the area. These squatters do not have a “legal” water connection, have temporary electricity arrangements, and no toilets. The police offcial told me that these squatters of K Block have populations belonging to the “Denotifed Tribes” or “criminal tribes” enlisted in the colonial Criminal Tribes Act (1871). While it may be essential for a social researcher to verify the claim, it was one of the frst presentations of the perception or “knowledge” of the State offcials about the people in the most marginalised habitations in the feld.

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Non-enrolment in school in these settlements was high. Barring few families, none had enrolled their children in a school. These were the squatters where most people did not have any proofs of citizenship (birth certifcate, caste certifcate, voter cards, ration cards, or any other document from the government). I located a part of work in the one of these clusters called the Tanki Wali Jhuggi. The entire area comprising M Block, K Block, and Shiv Puri is spread out in around a little more than 2 kilometers – not in a straight stretch, but in two L-shaped stretches. However, it merged almost “naturally” on the western end with similar localities, and if one ignored the signposts it was not possible to make a distinction where the area ended and a new one began. Further, the manner in which the setting was established within this more than 2 kilometers stretch was convoluted and complicated – in the sense that not only was it densely populated but also “planned” or “developed” in a fashion that was different for each of the settlements. Those of its resettlement clusters, which fgure in the offcial records (GNCTD, 2006), are low concentration clusters (each with a population less than 15,000–20,000, which as per the observations of the NGO and the police offcial seems to be an underestimation by at least 20 per cent). A resettlement colony and a notifed JJ colony (both “legal”) and other dilapidated squatters (unauthorised/illegal) do not fgure in the plans/reports of the Delhi Government. Despite several attempts, I could not trace offcial data about them. As per the NGO records, observations and interactions there were around 2500 households of this kind in the area, excluding the pavement dwellings. In this context, Zimmer’s (2012, pp. 89–90) observation appears meaningful: These forms of social exclusion are predicated upon different (and differently structured) felds of visibility that frame the approach to various types of urban settlements. The State “sees” residents in informal settlements differently from other citizens – if it chooses to see them at all. In fact, the literature suggests that despite their large numbers, informally living (or working) populations are (semi) invisible to their governments, and especially to the administration. A stark example of this invisibility in India is the fact that for example, slum residents were not enumerated in the census until 2001. What Zimmer (2012) calls semi-invisibility unfolded when the local administration by itself wasn’t clear about what stand to take about it. The offcials from the State administration (including SSA, police, election offce, and the MCD) I interacted with, could not offcially state or on record share information about the sites. But as people who “saw” these habitations, and “dealt with” their dwellers, they could not deny that the offcial records did not match the common sense.

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Prominent features of the settlements Population The total population of M Block, K Block, and Shiv Puri taken together was roughly around 90,000 (as per the estimates of the NGOs and informants). There were 2500 houses in the slum squatters, around 5000 houses in the resettlement colonies/transit camps and other undocumented pavement settlements. However, the electoral rolls indicated the population to be only 49,650. This data did not include foating population, people who had no citizenship proof, those who did not have their votes transferred to the Delhi, and children. The census data were only available for the tehsil level and diffcult to disaggregate further. If one goes beyond the site to map the entire stretch beside the drain in around 5 kilometers, these estimates go up to 6 lakh. Structure of dwellings in different clusters There were visible inter-cluster variations in the socio-economic statuses of the households in terms of the nature of houses, occupations, and education. However, each of the clusters was relatively homogenous in terms of cultural, socio-economic status, and even with reference to schooling. The structure of the settlements in various clusters differed in terms of the nature of the construction of houses, ranging from permanent (brick and cement) two-storeyed buildings, single-storeyed (single room) kuchcha building, temporary jhuggi, mud-jhuggi with temporary roofs, pavement dwellings settled under some arrangement on bamboo sticks, and those who slept on the pavement without a roof. However, what was common among the habitations was the manner in which the space was (maximally) utilised. Even in the relatively more planned resettlement colonies, the gap between the houses was very less. The frst foors of the houses bulged out in such a manner that there was less than a foot of space between the walls of their two houses, so much so that neither of the two could open the windows outside. Even that one-foot gap was flled by electricity cables loosely tied to the poles on which at times bags or clothes were seen hanging. The lanes in the clusters were so narrow that only one person could walk at a time (that too by moving sideways at times) and two persons abreast were simply not possible. Also, these lanes ran in irregular spirals through the clusters, and an outsider would lose his/her way very easily. Regional affliations, languages, religions, castes People from Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar populated the settlements. Although Gujarat does not form a prominent magnet 46

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area for Delhi (GOI & Consulting Engineering Services, 2008), there was a considerable population from the region living there. Hindi was the most commonly spoken language in the day-to-day affairs, given the regional variation in the area. Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism were the religions that were practised by the people, whereby around 32 per cent of the population practised the latter two religions (as per the NGO records). There were two mosques, three main temples (and many smaller ones), and one Gurudwara. One of the temples was said to be “belonging to” the Vaghari (also pronounced as Bagri/Baghari) caste – which is a scheduled caste from Rajasthan and Gujarat (Singh, 1993, p. 71). According to the principal informants, a signifcant proportion (20 per cent) of people residing in the area is constituted by the Vaghari caste. The temple is a popular major landmark for M Block. There was a Balmiki samaj temple in the area as well, and Balmiki was another prominent caste group in the area. According to the informants, about 70 per cent of residents were from disadvantaged caste groups (including backward classes) cutting across religious and regional lines. As described in the previous chapter, based on estimates available from offcial records, it can be said that the slum or JJ clusters in the zone had a high concentration of the scheduled castes population. However, these estimates cannot be reliably stated. The offcial records inhered several contradictions making population composition by caste illegible. In the context of the slums in Delhi, the Planning commission (Centre for Global Development Research Private Limited, 2011) states, From the distribution of households by caste & religion it is observed that among Hindus 53.5 per cent of the total households belong to SC, 30.5 per cent OBC, 2.9 per cent ST and the remaining 13.1 per cent in General category. In case of Muslims, OBCs account for the majority of the households at 70.2 per cent, SC only 0.7 per cent, ST 0.4 per cent and General category 28.7 per cent. . . Among the Sikh’s 34.5 per cent are OBC, 12.4 per cent SC and 53.1 per cent in General category. (p. 47) Work and economy A variety of occupations were practised in the area. There were daily wage workers (many now joining as security guards with private agencies), contractual labour, blacksmiths, cobblers, carpenters, MCD contractual staff, plumbers, and rag-pickers. A signifcant proportion of people were vendors or self-employed – about half of the households had their own small home based, peddling or street corner businesses, or worked as independent service providers. Though there was explicit homogeneity in the occupations within each kind of settlement, as per the accounts of Anjum 47

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and Teekam it was changing in nature – in the sense that people were increasingly looking at starting some small “business” even if they were already employed. There were several instances where people living in a cluster, with the help of neighbours, took up a common vocation. For example, in the tanki-wali-jhuggi a family that did the work of sticking soles to shoes for a sports shoe contractor, helped fve of their neighbours in getting a contract for the same job. Similarly, a car mechanic took on his neighbours’ sons as apprentices. The outer periphery of M Block that borders the main connecting road in the area has several shops. These shops are owned or rented by merchants dealing in a variety of goods – utensils, second-hand wooden furniture, second-hand clothes, and white-wash material. On the opposite side of the road, one fnds a fruit and vegetable mandi (that becomes very dense and covers the entire road area leading to the outer ring road on Thursday evenings and mornings of the festive seasons). There are several butcher shops that go down into a lane where bigger animals are slaughtered. The owners of most of these shops did not reside in the vicinity – they had homes in the economically better-off neighbouring areas. However, as per the police offcial’s and Teekam’s accounts, the employees working at these shops were from the locality. Apart from this, there were small shops within the residential clusters also – mainly of eatables and confectionery. One of the distinguishing features of M Block was its weekday morning market that operated from 3 am to 8 am. On the main road that passes through the site touching both M Block and K Block, a daily morning market was set up in a sheltered market area built about 40 years back. Now administered by the MCD, it had cement sheet shelters placed over pillars and was open from all sides. If one had to see the market being set up, one had to be there at 3 am in the morning. One would see several autorickshaws loaded with sacks and people, cycle carts, and men and women with huge potlis, gathering at M Block road much earlier. They waited to set up their stalls in the sheltered market by 3 am, and by 4  am, the area was completely covered with sellers and buyers. The market reached its prime by 6 am, and was wound up by 8 am. The main attraction of this market was sale of the second-hand garments collected from middleclass localities, in exchange for new utensils or bartering new utensils for second-hand clothes. The people, mostly women, in this business are popularly referred to as “bartanwaali” and the work could be understood as recycling of used clothes. This trade was a pillar for the household economics of around 10 per cent of the families in the locality. What was central in this economics was that the women led it (with men mostly only assisting women); and that this trade was practised primarily by the Gujarati Vaghri women. Norris (2010) has documented this trade tracing its history. 48

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Apart from this trade, a range of household consumable items were traded in the market including second-hand mobiles. One could hear loud voices shouting out the prices and competing with each other, and a large number of buyers bargaining for every rupee. Most buyers were people from M Block, K Block, and neighbouring areas; however, I was told that apprentices of fashion designers from Delhi-NCR also visit the market especially during the festive season – mostly in search for sarees. Anjum, one of the old residents of the neighbourhood, told me that until few years back the market was much livelier, but now it appears to have been decentered. Many buyers and sellers have started going to other markets or even transited to other professions. She shared that this market came into being along with the place. One of the vendors, Saraswati (30 years), also told me that this market has been there since she was a child – earlier she used to come with her mother, now she comes with her husband and children. Although barter doesn’t seem to ft into the manner in which the trade happens in Delhi, in the midst of big malls and upscale markets in the vicinity, this barter was a means of livelihood for a large number of “citizens” in the city. Beside the drain The drain, alongside which the settlement existed, had a peculiar space in the lives of the people. Indirectly, it was also a source of clean water – it was the only place where an underground pipeline for treated water supply came to the surface. While the public offcials working at M Block said that the mechanics from the squatters in the vicinity loosened the nuts and made a leakage, the local informants said that the pipeline had not been repaired in time. The water was used for bathing and washing clothes. Some years back, until the MCD got a boundary wall constructed along the sides, the drain was used by people for defecating, dumping garbage, and rearing pigs. The garbage dumps brought an “opportunity” for another kind of recycling business in the locality – rag-picking. Gradually, a cluster of illegal squatters came up with people engaged in the garbage sorting and selecting business – popularly known as Kachra jhuggi. The NGO employees and the police offcial told me that most people living in the cluster comprise of Dalits, Muslims, and Bangladeshi migrants. Teekam shared that earlier the drain had cleaner water, which was used for washing clothes and bathing animals – and that fshes, and water plants were found in the drain until about two decades back. In search for verifcations for this account, I found out from offcial sources that what is now called a “drain”, was earlier the Sahibi river – a tributary of the river Yamuna. With the development of the city, the river became a point where untreated sewage pipes were drained. From 1980s, it has become increasingly polluted, so much so that in some habitations people had no option other than to take useable water from pipes and the water-tank in the area. 49

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In fact, the tanki-wali-jhuggi got its name for the reason that it is near a water tank – such that people can easily access water by fnding formal or informal ways around the system. Hazari (13-year-old), who resides in this jhuggi cluster, makes a living for himself and his family by supplying water to the nearby homes and shops – those which are not “legal enough” to get a legitimate water supply. He was once caught for stealing water. Hazari says, “I don’t know about the river but if I could fnd a river I would supply water from it; nobody would call me a thief . . . humko chor kehte hain; hum paani kahan se laaen? bade log ke ghar se? [. . . they call me a thief; where do I bring water from? From rich people’s homes?]”. The river was fooded in 1977–1978, a moment that still bears an impression in the community memory or the stories passed on from the older generation. Jagwati tells me, “My grandmother and her neighbours used to perform religious rituals on the drain to prevent the food. They told us that there was a severe food before I was born and one of the children in the neighbourhood had died”. As per the account of the MCD offcials, there were similar foods earlier as well which were caused by the releasing of a more than notifed amount of sewer waste during the rains by the Haryana government. To check the foods, the government dug up both the sides of the drain to broaden it. The drain is so broad now that in summers it looks wider than the river Yamuna. The river before entering the city is much cleaner. It links to a lake, the area around which has been declared by the government as a bird sanctuary. How the life of the river and the lives in the margins are impinged upon and shaped in the process of the development of a “modern” city became a pertinent point of refection through this narrative. On the one hand, the slums manpower the planned development of the city while serving the globalised and capitalist urban economy. On the other hand, the space of the slum in the city governed by a “rule by aesthetics” (Ghertner, 2015) has increasingly become fragile or precarious with this development. Examining this scenario, Dupont and Gowda (2019, p.  2) state, “In Delhi, while a population of around three million lived in squatter settlements in 1998, accounting for about 27 per cent of the city population, it was estimated that ‘close to a million slum dwellers have been displaced’ from 1997 to 2007”. The State and the classes that constitute it see the slum dwellers as aberration or trouble makers and continue to fnd ways to de-legitimise their livelihoods as a part of their slum-free city narrative shaped by a neoliberal infuence (Ghertner, 2008; Singh & Shukla, 2005). In an examination of the “legal discourse” behind slum demolitions in Delhi, Ghertner (2008) says, the rise of court orders to demolish slums is occurring not simply because the judiciary is suddenly “anti-poor,” but rather because of a reinterpretation of nuisance law, the main component of environmental law in India . . . Nuisance has thus become the key legal 50

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term driving slum demolitions and has been incredibly infuential in resculpting both Delhi’s residential geography and how the city’s future is imagined. (p. 57) In the process of the feldwork of this study, the relation between the slums and the capital city, and the negotiations between the two, continued to unfold as I attempted to map experiences and relationships in the context of schooling. While the purpose was to study educational experiences, these negotiations and relations emerged as a frame in which the school got situated. In this understanding of the “life beside the drain”, I was also introduced to the different perspective on the geographies of marginalisation in the urban space. Works of Sibley (1995) and Srivastava (2015) help in understanding how marginalised groups are rendered invisible or deviant to the “affuent” by the separations of city centre development which keep the underclass at a distance. The works identify the composition of this “underclass” as being refracted through their socio-cultural identities. Doing so, they refect on the emergent relations between middle classes, the State, and the market. Similarly, Duneier (2000), while living with the black men who make their livelihood selling petty items on the sidewalks of Greenwich Village, explores how they come to be deemed/perceived as threatening or unseemly, despite actually “saving” it. In tune with such thinking, the following section locates how I began understanding the “relationships” of the margins to the city.

Orientations: inside and outside As stated earlier, in the process of locating the feld, I interacted with some informants that were outsiders to the feld (Ms. Kavita, Jagwati, Sarita, Shivali, and Mrs. Aggarwal). The everyday lives of these informants demanded some relation with M Block, for reasons concerning their employment and/or household needs. Therefore, all of them had to interact with the people from M Block. All of these informants were from better socio-economic strata, and given a chance they would have preferred not to work or live in the vicinity of M Block. As I did not have informants from the feld in the initial phases, I began to interact with these insider–outsiders. In these interactions, I got a glance of how they perceived and the people living at M Block. The following section documents the prominent constituents of this image. Describing the Other Cleanliness Among the most frequently used descriptor that these informants used in the context of the feld comprising the three localities was flthy or dirty. The 51

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site was described in terms of gandagi, or lack of cleanliness in and around. Mrs. Aggarwal said, This is a very big slum and stretches along the entire nalaa [drain]. . . . [I]t’s so very dirty; people make a mess and continue to live on it. . . . [T]here is such a huge population living there that no matter how many facilities you may provide they will fall short; this is because these people produce one child after another even when they can’t afford them. Sarita felt, The major issue is that I have to travel by rickshaw to the school or at times even walk. . . . [T]here is so much gandagi [flthiness] around that I cover my nose and mouth. . . . [P]eople don’t have the culture of using the toilet; all of them are in the habit of ‘going’ on the footpaths. Not that there are no toilets; but it’s all about culture and education. Jagwati having lived in the area thought a little differently, People would feel that this area has a lot of gandagi and that people don’t care about cleanliness. But there are a few colonies where people keep the surroundings very clean, people are more educated there . . . but yes, by and large it is dirty and you feel it all the more during the rains . . . one gets a flthy feeling while walking by. The description was not a plain qualifer of the state of sanitation in the area. Although these informants were referring to the unclean surroundings, they also were defning something beyond that. The manner in which gandagi was narrated made it seem as a marker of a perceived way of life or a culture that has many more markers than just lack of sanitation (like lack of education which in itself connoted a large number of children and less income). A sense of revulsion also came across in the narratives of these outsiders. Jagwati, describing her experience of feldwork at M Block, said, “Earlier I wasn’t used to this. I felt awfully bad; the whole area is so dirty that I would go covering my nose. But if we did so, people would not listen to us. Now I don’t even note it. Several times I go inside the houses and dress children to bring them to our centre”. Ms. Kavita, while addressing the children who came to the NGO’s centre for the frst time, announced, “From tomorrow you all have to come to the school at this time; you have to bring a plate, a spoon, a pencil and a copy from home. All should bring their water bottles, and take a bath, dress well, wear clean clothes and come”. On a visit to a child’s home, Jagwati 52

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complains to the mother, “You should send her a little neat and clean, she comes so dirty to the school, it doesn’t look good”. The narrative of the schoolteachers and the NGO workers matched on this aspect. Crime The informants expressed their disturbance on the state of affairs that implicated their everyday lives and thought that this was an outcome of living around a poor neighbourhood – in that they were referring to another descriptor – a lack of safety. Sarita says, The area is so unsafe that you cannot walk alone . . . all the more for women . . . many drunkards and addicts all around the place. . . . Prostitution, theft, murders, and abduction are all common leave alone petty snatching incidents. I cling on to my purse while sitting in the rickshaw and never carry much cash; and most importantly never wear a [gold] chain. . . . Many of our teachers have experienced such incidents. . . . I wonder what the future of these children will be? The children at our school are girls, so it’s a little better for us. Otherwise I would have gone in for a private job. Being around lower-class is not safe. The outsiders understood crime as another feature of the way of life of the people. The description of the feld as a place where the “lower class” resided brought forth poverty as a condition of life for the people. Poverty was not seen as a circumstance but as an explanation of the perceived moral pathos of the people living in the feld – a rationale for the people to commit crimes. It created a basis of homogenising the people as deviant or as nuisance makers. Having a large number of children in every family was seen as the major reason for poverty leading up to crime. Resistant to change Another descriptor used for the people residing in the three sites was their lack of willingness for what the informants called the change or progress. Unwilling to work hard, to come out of illiteracy and access education, and to change their way of life were frequently used for describing the people, especially the children and the adolescents. Shivali, while describing the diffculties of her job, often said, “What would anyone do when they themselves do not want to change . . . if they don’t come to school, what to do?”. Ms. Kavita said, “Education changes the way we live and how we behave .  .  . this place from the very look of it tells one that the people are uneducated”. It was therefore also implicit that there was a need to change and that the things weren’t the way they should be or the way they normally are. Thus, 53

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the informants described the deviance. This description had less to do with the conditions and constraints, and more with the attitude of the people living in the area. That is to say, had there been a will to change for the better, things would have changed. In this way, the external pathos was also attributed to something that was intrinsic to the attitude of the people living. Sarita differed in her views about the potential implications of education in this scenario: [W]hat can education do? It can do only the minimum; it can only enhance what is already there and must be supported continuously. .  .  . [W]hen the environment at home is bad then how would school do anything? Rather, the child would not even learn the minimums. It is all about interpretation of education. . . . [Y]ou can use the same education for good and bad; even terrorists could be educated people. This perception regarding education or schooling for children will be dealt with in detail in the next chapter. Here, it would be important to highlight that education was seen as having a “reformatory” function in the lives of the people by the outsiders – although it was also debated as being only minimally important and playing an incremental role in how the child is being brought up on the whole. Caste doesn’t matter Caste was also a part of this discourse that the outsiders constructed about the insiders. However, it was not very clearly framed. Although Jagwati (along with all the community workers and Ms. Kavita), the teachers, and Mrs. Aggarwal were of the view that “the slum” is mostly populated by lower castes, they did not see caste as being a signifcant factor in the lives of the people. Jagwati says, “Caste doesn’t matter here; it would matter in the village but here it is nothing like that . . . there is no caste discrimination”. Mrs. Aggarwal says, “Whatever be the caste, they are all the same. I don’t think there is any caste factor at work here.” This was a view which was maintained by the teachers as well. This was despite several observations that were contradictory to the claims made. As the work progressed, the manner in which the concept of caste mediated in the everyday meaning-making and interactions became more legible for me. I will discuss this in subsequent chapters, while sharing only some contradictions here. Mrs. Aggarwal kept the servant’s utensils (a glass and plate) separate, and used disposable glasses to offer water to the domestic help who did various kinds of work. She says, You never know who is who; who suffers from what disease is also not known to us. . . . [T]hese people are non-vegetarians and drink and smoke while we are pure vegetarians – we don’t even have onions. 54

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These weren’t seen by her as forms of practice of some form of conscious social distancing from a particular social group. These practices were understood as essentials of a basic “hygienic” routine. She explains, As if you don’t know, as Baniyas we don’t have non-veg and maintain purity in the kitchen. . . . [W]hen I gave her [the house help] the job, I ensured that she is clean and doesn’t eat non-veg; she says she isn’t a lower caste but you never know . . . what options do you have? Mrs. Aggarwal was never ambivalent (nor expressed a compunction) about such views concerning caste and poverty, and the manner in which she presented the ideas appeared as if they form a “legitimate” part of everyday common sense. She shared these views with me openly knowing the commonality between her and my “social location”. Yet, she thought of herself as what she called a “modern” person. She said, “I have been a teacher and am well educated – my family has been super-modern in its thoughts and culture – even my grandmother was educated up to class fve”. Such contradictions, in the how the informants understood themselves and the Other, became all the more prominent as the feldwork progressed. This narrative provided a glimpse of how the concept of “hygiene”, interacts with the traditional practices of “purity”, and constructs a “scientifc, rationale, and modern” foundation for justifying social distances that one social group continues to maintain with another. Further, even having resided at the setting, Jagwati did not seem to consciously register the fact that the slums which she “surveyed” everyday also showed some patterns with respect to the caste affliations of the people living there. She and her co-workers also were not very articulate about the struggle they faced while mapping people’s caste affliations (described in the next section). They had somewhat memorised the idea that practise of caste is restricted to villages. Jagwati said, “Untouchability is illegal in the city”. However, at a later stage, Jagwati highlighted how caste intervenes in the relation between a teacher and a child, based on her experience at school. Ms. Kavita had a slightly different opinion, “If you ask us, we all would know that these children who come to us [the out-of-school-children] are largely SCs but one cannot say that till one has to do something with this fact [register children for schemes]; in our work it doesn’t matter but for the rich, it is important”. These narratives highlighted how a sort of wilful “ignorance” or a taboo on acknowledging caste discrimination shaped the everyday lives of the people. As Joseph and Goodman (2008) say, Delhi is “one of the richest cities in India and the great gap between the newlyempowered middle classes, its reactions and fears, and the poor constitutes an interesting phenomenon to observe” (p. 4). To sum up, it can be said that the outsiders whom I interacted with etched out some kind of a “culture” that was attributed to the people inhabiting 55

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the feld. In the outsiders’ perception, poverty was the overarching framework that held together this culture of crime, addiction, perversions, flthiness, and uncivility. This perception allowed the outsiders to identify the people living in the slum as a “community”. For them, this culture reproduced itself through a strong socialisation of the children and did not allow people to progress and change. Such a view resembled the one that was “empirically established” by Lewis (1964) in his concept of “culture of poverty”, which may be stated as: It has a structure, a rationale, and defense mechanisms without which the poor could hardly carry on. In short, it is a way of life, remarkably stable and persistent, passed down from generation to generation along family lines. The culture of poverty has its own modalities and distinctive social and psychological consequences for its members. It is a dynamic factor which affects participation in the large national culture and becomes a subculture of its own. (Lewis, 1964, p. 150) The concept of culture of poverty has several problems for which it has been thoroughly critiqued (Coward, Feagin, & Williams, 1973). However, not very explicitly stated in the critiques, the problematic is also situated in the phrase “culture of poverty”. Such a view attempts to offer an all-encompassing explanation of varied human experiences. It not only views the people in a unidimensional frame but also authenticates a singular explanation of the experience of “poverty”, which does not considers the nature of cultural diversity and dialogues between cultures. Normalisation of such a view of “the poor” also supports the discourse that increasingly makes it possible to de-legitimise the claims of the people on the city; particularly when such a discourse fnds space in the State policy and the ideology of the public systems in the city. The conceptual category of poor is associated with a particular morality which is based on images like that of nuisance makers, anti-social, and illiterate (Ghertner, 2015). While such views constructed the social a-moral Other (Said, 1978), these views also implicated the manner in which the people of M Block conceptualise themselves. The people also presented a view of the world that is based on these shared experiences of marginalisation and humiliation, and a set of alternative meanings and ways of “coping”. Life inside As a researcher, I continued to understand how the “insiders” responded to, or contested, or adapted to these narratives. In this process, it emerged that there were powerful counter narratives that the informants living in the feld presented. Instead of presenting the sketch in a vis-à-vis manner 56

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against the above descriptors, in the following pages, I present the categories that emerged from the people’s narratives about themselves and their lives. These may not describe in totality what the people thought about themselves but may provide a glimpse of the experiences and lives of insiders, the meanings they construct, and their way of negotiating with the social world. These observations and discussions took place throughout the work with the NGO, particularly in the unauthorised slum clusters/squatters located in the area where fewer children were accessing the school, and with the families dwelling on the footpaths. Memory In the interactions, particularly when I was inquiring about the local history of the area and the journey of the families residing in the area, it came across that the informants living at M Block had a specifc way of describing, noting, recalling, or remembering events – especially in terms of time. Most events in the memories and recalls were not elicited through dates, days, months, years, and use of calendars. They were described lucidly and were related to an important local event that most people at M Block would know. For instance, to describe ages of children, several parents did not state the birth date. One mother said, “She is around 12; she was born in the year when the next door jhuggi was pulled down”. Here, the mother was estimating the age of her child based on an event that was important to her – so much so that she relates to this event the birth of her only child. Similarly, there were descriptions like: “We came here in the year next to the one in which there was a food in this drain, and left when the new police station was being built”, and “She left the school in the year in which the doctor told us that her father had TB [tuberculosis]”. These events had a certain peculiar, localised character, and had a bearing on individual lives till date. In this process, as a researcher, I also began understanding that the categories of inquiring about the demography of M Block that were of concern to me were not really signifcant in the memory and lives of the people. The age of a child, the date of marriage, or the date of coming to Delhi were not as consequential for the people as pulling down of the neighbourhood settlement, fooding of the drain, and diseases were. These critical experiences were in the centre of the lives of the people, and served as the instruments through which meanings were made, or the context in which the meanings were situated. Sarkar In this line, certain events and occasions also appeared to hold a very different meaning for the people. For example, 15 August, came as a haunting for the footpath dwellers and those who are labelled as “nuisance makers” 57

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and “petty criminals”. Many footpath dwellers were pushed-off coercively to outskirts of Delhi, and their houses were pulled down. Those living as tenants in the squatters were asked to produce proofs of identity and “detained” on petty charges, which otherwise hardly mattered to the police. For example, Teekam’s neighbour, Chauvey, a rickshaw puller, went to defecate a little off the road, when his fellows sounded alarm that the police had come to remove or chase them away from a nearby metro station. As Chauvey wasn’t there, his rickshaw was ceased by the police and was returned only after a lot of “begging”. He said that he had to pay fne that was equivalent to his day’s earning. Thus, in the moment when the police was ensuring “safety” of the public transport, the “illegitimacy” of another form of city transport was also being defned. It is only during this time around the year that the morning markets and the weekly markets do not function properly as the people are “asked too many questions” and a lot of “checking” happens. The police presence also amps up. Another resident in Chauvey’s neighbourhood was thrashed for being drunk and loitering on the road after midnight. Around this time, hawkers and stall keepers are harassed and their goods are forfeited by what is called by them as “committee ki gadi” (MCD surveillance/patrol van). One of the informants, Hazari says, “They pretend that they don’t accept bribe during this time; but other times they keep loitering around and troubling us for commission”. The people remembered 15th August particularly for these reasons rather than any other. Teekam says, “Chauvey’s rickshaw was ceased last year . . . every year this happens. We men folk are troubled and then after some days, things are back on track. Otherwise, what do we have to do with 15 August?” None of the children and most women who I interacted with during the feld visits had known the occasion. The politics of outsiders’ “legitimate” meanings and ways of making sense became visible when seen vis-à-vis these narratives of the insiders. Through the duration of the feldwork at M Block, I observed the negotiation of power around these legitimate and marginalised meanings and how the margins are compelled to accept the offcial meanings. For instance, every child’s date of birth is a must for entry in the school despite the RtE Act. The NGO’s dealing with this situation recorded the date of birth by “rough guesses” and one cohort of children was attributed the same birthdate. Several children who did not use a last name were given a common last name. The people negotiated with this demand by devising their own mechanisms, and using their experiences as groups to agree-upon standards. In order to access any institution of the State, including school (though now changed), the State machinery demands a documentary proof of identity – birth certifcate, ration card, voter card, and so on. Even having these proofs does not guarantee access in the real sense of the term. For instance, having a proof of citizenship and therefore access to say government’s health services does not ensure access to treatment. More often than not, the informants did not willfully get these documents prepared. They were made 58

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under compulsion and psychological coercion from the State functionaries. In the next chapter, I will discuss in the context of school how a birth certifcate or an affdavit is made, not because it is a legal requirement but because the school functionaries make it indispensable. Not having a permanent residence, besides rigid bureaucratic mechanisms, makes it even more challenging for the people to gather these proofs. Zahid (NGO worker) says, They have to be at times told about all this as we try to help them by linking them to an employment prospect . . . sometimes when it is not possible to get a regular janampatri or residence proof made, we get fake ones made for them. . . . [I]t’s for their beneft but they have to be told about these things otherwise they will say something here or there . . . not even once have the fake ones been objected to; this is because fake in this case is real! It hardly matters as no one looks at these documents . . . these are only a requirement of the personnel even when government doesn’t make these necessary. In various observations, it seemed that several personnel in the public institutions used their discretionary power to read the rules in an exclusive manner rather than interpreting these to facilitate access. They held the community members answerable for not accessing the public institutions and not following what the law makes semi-obligatory – and thereby deeming this as an act of nuisance or apathy. In this way, exclusion from these institutions also created a psychology of guilt and shame among the informants from the community. This is another manner in which State institutions, and the culture they propagate, gain even more worth and legitimacy. Despite being absent from the lives of these people, these mechanisms still exercise a socio-psychological control over them by creating a sense of deprivation (Illich, 1971). While there are people who have the awareness, necessity, time, and networks to get these documents made, there are many others who resist the idea of these papers. Against the requirement of documentary proofs for claiming citizenship, the people assert their existence by rejecting these exclusionary processes and institutions, including schools. Daya (Teekam’s sister) says, We chose to go to the hakeem . . . he does not distinguish between one with janampatri and one without .  .  . he doesn’t also charge money for our children and treats all; he doesn’t have magic in his hands, but at least he treats us. These experiences shape meanings that the State and its institutions hold for the people and their purposes of accessing them. State or Sarkar, as a governance structure, seems to be non-existent in the everyday lives of people – particularly in the illegal squatters – in the sense that it does not come across 59

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as a system to which people look up to as a support or governance mechanism (Das, 2004, 2010). Sarkar is rather seen like a gatekeeper, which regulates access to the institutions it claims to have established for the public; and in doing so, it defnes the “public” or the people it would cater to or deem ft to be in the mainstream. In a discussion with Teekam and Chauvey on their notions of sarkar (though I could not probe beyond a point), I came across expressions like: “Sarkar can do whatever it wants to; it will use the stick twice, everything will happen”. The source of this construction of sarkar is located in the visual media, experience, and local gossip. Sarkar appeared to be perceived here as an authoritative and monolithic entity, which is almost like one person. Teekam did not have a vote in Delhi, like the many others in the slum where he resided. Some were registered in the electoral rolls in other states, while others (mostly women) said that they were not registered anywhere. While the functions that sarkar plays are seen as being coercive, the distance from the system made it an intriguing concept for Teekam. Through a variety of such experiences, as I discovered a different relationship between the State and the people in the socio-spatial setting, I attempted to make sense of the latent meanings – particularly of the lack of visibility of the State and its apparent distance. Das and Poole (2004) offered a frame (which I shall continue to follow through the chapters) to understand the situation: Our analytical and descriptive strategy was to distance ourselves from the entrenched image of the state as a rationalized administrative form of political organization that becomes weakened or less fully articulated along its territorial or social margins. Instead, . . . refect on how the practices and politics of life in these areas shaped the political, regulatory, and disciplinary practices that constitute, somehow, that thing we call “the state”. (p. 3) Aspiration and challenges of schooling The people I visited during the survey of the feld phase also included those who engaged in begging as a means of livelihood. They were the ones who were the poorest among those living in M Block, and resided on footpaths – most being homes headed by women. I visited around 20 such families and found that it was most diffcult to engage with these families on the matter of sending their children to school. They either refused to talk or said that they would not send the children to school. I interacted with two such families (Lachhi’s and Asaas’s) in-depth and continued to visit them until they shifted their location. My relation with these two families (particularly with the women heading them) developed through a peculiar incident. While I visited door-to-door to “trace” out-of-school-children while working 60

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with  the  NGO, I approached these two families residing on the footpath across one of the temples at M Block. Both the families had tied a tent to the footpath railing and balanced it in front with the help of bamboo sticks. Except for boxes, utensils, and a mat, there wasn’t anything that these shelters could accommodate. Both the families had four children aged between 4 months and 12 years. After three visits, Jagwati was able to convince both the families or rather the two mothers (Lachhi and Aasaa) to enroll their children in the NGO centre. On the day when Jagwati and I were escorting them to show them the centre – the mothers who were initially agreeable suddenly started resisting. It was around noon when Lachhi said, “Didi we won’t be able to go at this time. . . . This is when our food van comes; if we go we would lose our day’s meal”. Both the mothers informed us and turned back. The idea of the “food van” was new to me and therefore I tried to talk to them. However, I was bluntly shooed away. Later on, when I reached the main road to go elsewhere, I saw the children of these women running up to me to ask me where I was going. I asked them how they had found me and to answer that they guided me to Lachhi and Aasaa. It was at this time that they shared that they were “beggars”, who had been begging in the market area and at a major traffc signal, for the past several months. They appeared to be sorry and shared the reasons for concealing this. As I continued to meet them over a month, they shared about their circumstances. Lachhi (28) got married when she was 13. Her husband grew up being what she called a “charasi” (drug addict). As her husband’s addiction grew, he started “stealing things from here and there” in order to buy drugs. She said, “He got engaged in all sorts of wrongs and was arrested by the police several times; even now he is in jail”. In these circumstances, Lachhi had to manage the family alone. Finding a job was not at all an option in her case. Her history, lack of belonging to any community, destitute poverty, gender, lack of a permanent residence – all excluded her from the institution of work. In her opinion, begging was the only “dignifed” option open to her. It was better than stealing and prostitution, and also made her life fexible to be able to take care of her children. Her children could also assist her in this and all of them could earn enough to have a day’s meal. Three among her children were girls. She was not against sending her children to school, but did not see any meaning in it. She had not met her husband during the past several months and did not really refer to him in our many discussions unless I specifcally asked. She said, “His being here or not doesn’t make a difference; rather, I feel troubled when he is here”. Aasaa’s case was more complex. For her, begging was a makeshift source of income. She begs while she shifts between the small jobs she took up now and then. She had recently found an employer for one of her sons. She said, My husband is useless [bed-ridden] now . . . his addiction ruined us. I was earlier working as a junk collector [rag-picker] but then 61

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I had TB and bore this child who had TB. My eldest son was born different . . . now that my second son will work with the butcher, I will stop begging and fnd some small job. She felt that the butcher was kind as he had accepted her son for the job at the request of a neighbour, without asking for any security. Aasaa knew that she would become increasingly less capable of earning. She therefore wished that her second son acquired the skills of work as soon as possible. On the question of schooling her four children, there was a strange complication involved. The eldest son was born different, and her second son got a job with great diffcult and therefore was the only hope. Her third child is a girl who is underage for school, and as per Asaas’s belief her daughter may not be “safe” at school. The youngest child has chronic TB. Whom among them should she send to school was her question. How Lachhi and Aasaa explained their feeling of being trapped made the question of the “agency” of parents and “willingness” to educate the children not only problematic but also seemingly irrational. What emerged more prominently was the structure and conception of a family that did not match that of the middle classes and even of the relatively better-off families in the feld. The roles men, women, and children play in a family were defned by the conditions of life (undercut by a complex gender, caste, and poverty relationship) – and the decision regarding schooling was constituted by this context. In these experiences, I could also note diversity in how children were located in the design of relationships.

Between “us” and “them”: Concluding discussions The outsiders’ construction of “the slum dwellers” and the perspective of the insiders alluded to the larger political ethos of the urban spaces while bringing forth the political role of the State in defning the core and periphery. Such character of cities is also noted in a wider literature. Duneier (2000) who studied the black male vendors on the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village, also fnds how an “us” and “they” politics of the urban space intricately involves the contestations between the blacks and whites and the poor and rich. He highlights how the experiences of increasingly being rendered weak and vulnerable in the guise of cleanliness and safety discourses, the black vendors are politically made vulnerable. However, the economic and social functions that they serve are what make them indispensable for the city. But this experience increasingly generated a psychological “confict” among the vendors. Such generation of conficts appeared to undercut the interaction between the meaning that others attribute to the everyday life of those living in the slum and the meaning that it holds for this community. A child is situated amidst such structures of relationships and experiences the world in this context. While going to school generates one kind 62

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of  experience, being at home or being at work constitutes a different set of conditions. The activities and lives of the children were deemed meaningless by the others in society, which came across through abuses, taunts, expressions, and phrases, used for particularly the male adolescents and children – like “badmash”, “bhikhari”, “gunda”, “awara”, and “chor”. This undermining of identities shaped the children’s self-concept as individuals and as members of a community. What Bourdieu (1974) theorised about school is illustrated in how the two mothers (Lachhi and Asaa) described the possibilities of their children at school even without having experienced schooling. Hazari poignantly makes a case, Even if they are taken to school they will run away in two days . . . they know that as grown-ups they have to do only the same work that the family is doing . . . I also went for two-three months but then I understood . . . it is not for us. Here, a desire to progress encounters a communication from the society of it being impossible. These conficts further take an intricate form when the nature of marginalisation compounds. For example, in the case of female children in the slum, the complexity of conficts takes another level when the issues of social–physical safety and gender roles intervene with their economic and social independence. These lives amidst conficts develop their own realities, truths, standards, and processes that operate in the backdrop of the negotiations with the world. These realities are in a way the structures on which the knowledge of the community scaffolds. As I pursued the study, I also experienced a sense of shift in the paradigm with which I understood the city and slums. Although I was prepared to understand social relationships, how they unfolded before me was not something that I had expected. While a researcher would ideally maintain objectivity and a focus, the meaning of objectivity in social research came across to me as being subjectively or politically constituted. As I entered the feld, the scope of what I was doing expanded and I was unable to delineate my work in the manner in which an objective researcher would. How the categories of “us” and “they” govern the social world and the lives, became a prominent concern for my work and for me as a person. Works like that of Said (1978), Das and Poole (2004), Das (1989), Mills (1959), Gandhi (1909), and Ambedkar (2002) helped me to reconcile with the experiences that I was having in the feld, in a system of ideas and thoughts that explain the relationships between society, institutions, oppression, and individuals – though may be not in an educational context. I studied the meaning of schooling for the community and the experiences of children in the school in this context. The following section of the book is a presentation of this work and the understandings so drawn. Although it would have been ideal to present a picture of the school context in this chapter, it appeared to ft much more meaningfully in the next chapter. 63

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Notes 1 According to Tejinder Khanna Committee report (GOI, 2006), Delhi has in all 362 villages, of which 135 are currently classifed as urban villages and 227 as rural villages. In 1908, when the revenue settlement was done for the frst and only time, the abaadi (settlement and population) of these villages were included within a well-defned “Lal Dora area”, outside which the agricultural produce was assessed for purposes of land revenue. Thereafter, the exercise of consolidation of land holdings in Delhi villages began in the year 1952 and is still continuing. Since the village abaadi had undergone natural expansion between the settlement of 1908 and the commencement of consolidation operations, the extended village abaadi was enclosed within the new peripheral boundary known as “phirni”, the area between the original Lal Dora and the post consolidation phirni being treated as “extended Lal Dora” (p. 52). 2 The rent is decided on the basis of negotiations between the tenant and the dealer. The major factor in this is the reliability of the tenant. I observed that there was a willingness to compromise a higher rent to get a reliable tenant. As Teekam said, “if the owner is dealing directly, he checks if I am a family man, and usually rents out the jhuggi when he sees that a man has daughters . . . a family with older [teenage] sons face more problems . . . having networks in the neighbourhood is also considered . . . but hard bargaining is involved”.

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5 THE IDEA OF SARKARI SCHOOL Negotiations and aspirations

The closing section of the previous chapter has presented some narratives that provided a glimpse of the manner in which some informants contested the idea of schooling. These expressions may seem to indicate a “lack of willingness” or rather apathy towards school education. I was introduced to this perception about the community in several ways from the various actors. The same informants looked at the achievements of the government initiatives or incentives for education as absolute, and which in their view would increasingly solve the problem irrespective of the community’s non-willingness. While the initial interactions with the community also in a way supported the view that the State personnel and the NGO staff held, gradually as my interactions deepened a more complex picture emerged. This generated a question about how the community visualised schooling and the aspirations/expectations from it. Stated differently, it led to probing the “worth” of schooling from the standpoint of the community and the functions that people experienced the school performing in their lives. Located in this context, this chapter presents a picture of how everyday educational discourse – among the schoolteachers, other educational functionaries and community – was constituted in interaction with each other and in relation to the State policy. It focusses particularly on how the vocabulary and concept of “schemes” were very central in the (re)structuring or shaping the discourse on rights and in a way the aspirations as well. For this purpose, it is organised in two broad sections. The frst section seeks to explore the narrative of the apathy of the community towards school education. It begins by introducing the manner in which I was introduced to this narrative while working with the NGOs in the feld followed by the State functionaries’ perspective. The second section locates the school in the community and presents some ways in which the people negotiated with the various institutional demands. It traces how the State schemes, the varied expectations of the school, and the experiences with the system infuence the people’s idea of school and school education.

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Ineducability: Educational functionaries’ view As described in Chapter 1, PROBE (1999) had highlighted the aspiration of the marginalised to send their children to school as against the “general” perception or the “myth” in offcial circles of their being apathetic towards schooling. The report calls it “convenient rationalisation of low levels of schooling” (PROBE, 1999, p. 14). Brinkmann (2020), Dalal (2015), Ramachandran and Naorem (2013), Subrahmanian (2005), and Velaskar (2003), and many others have also problematised this myth and the other forms it takes such as the discourse around “ineducability” of certain social groups. This study led to a similar fnding. However, building on the literature an attempt was made to make sense of how such perceptions and willingness are situated in everyday practise and how they may be constituted. In this context, the feldwork involved engaging with the educational functionaries (in the governmental and non-governmental institutions) who directly intervened in the school and/or in the neighbourhood on a routine basis. These included the schoolteachers, the sub-district level and national SSA personnel, and the NLF’s (NGO) staff. The NGO’s account My introduction to the varied and often conficting perceptions about schooling began with the process of engagement with the Prakriti’s incharge and feldworkers. These interactions with Ms. Kavita (the NGO’s in-charge), Jagwati, and Neetu (feldworkers), introduced me to a “belief” that they held – the belief that there was a general apathy in how community thought about the need for schooling their children. This apathy, Ms. Kavita stated, was “the main reason why our work is not going well”. She meant that NGO’s work or performance did not seem as good as that of similar organisations as the community they were working with was disinterested in schooling. Jagwati complained, “We fnd it very diffcult to convince the parents”. Neetu added, “even if you succeed in doing so, there is no guarantee that they [children] would come”. In such interactions, it appeared necessary to understand what the NGO staff thought “convinced” parents and what in their view constituted the apathy or “disinterest”. As I observed them convincing parents, there was an uncanny similarity in the arguments. It appeared that their descriptions were pre-decided and almost rehearsed. Its highlights were expressed clearly by Jagwati: Our school takes no fee. With us [hamare yahan] you get food also. We give dress, books, and bag. You do not have to give us anything; not even the janampatri. It is so close to this place; the child can come on his [or her] own. It starts at one in the afternoon so the child can do the work in the morning and come. Afterwards we get 66

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the child enrolled in the big school as well, so you are saved from the trouble. You will not get these benefts anywhere. This description – that Jagwati, Neetu, and others like them were trained in – was constituted by a view in which cost of schooling, children’s economic engagement, bureaucratic procedures, and the physical distance between home and school, were seen as the constraints that kept children from disadvantaged families at M Block out of school. At the same time, tangibles like food and uniform were understood as the incentives that would draw greater enrolment in their centre which they referred to as school. The feldworkers had internalised this vision sketched by the NGO leadership. What made this internalisation peculiar is that the feldworkers themselves had life experiences similar to that of the community in question. Jagwati and Neetu were born and brought up in the slum cluster (in only a slightly better off habitation). Both were frst-generation school goers in their respective families. However, while they described the “slum community” or M Block in narratives like the ones presented above, they engaged in an act of distancing themselves from this origin. They pitted their families’ different attitude towards education against the mind-set of the community. While critiquing the community for being apathetic towards education, they described their parents as “exceptions”, more “aware”, and intrinsically willing to send them to school. Neetu said, “When someone doesn’t want to educate their child, at the most we can talk to the person. If this does not work, we cannot do anything. Minds do not change. My parents lived here but were so different from these people”. This became more prominent when the NGO workers described the school as “Hamara School”. The expression indicated an “us” and “they” vision in which in apparent ways the community workers were “trained” at or experiencing at the NGO. Instead of utilising the familiarity of the feldworkers with the feld for a critical engagement with the community, the NGO assumed a role that proliferated the distance between the workers and the community by enclosing the defnition of the community within the rubrics of “welfare recipients” who are not willing unless they are offered incentives. When a parent refused to send the child to school the community workers would invariably say, He will study with children of the neighbourhood. Brother – sister can also study together. As it is when he doesn’t study what does he do? He wanders around. When he’ll come there [to the centre] he’ll learn something at least. And if he studies then in future it will be of help to you. . . . Parents negative soch pehle se hi rakhte hain. They feel what will happen by going to school. They have not studied ever so they do not know how necessary the school is. Life ban jati hai. They send the child in the beginning, then minds change. If they do not 67

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send the child due to work it is still understandable, but when the child does not turn up just like that, then we feel angry. . . . [H]e [the child] will keep on wandering here and there uselessly, but how many schemes you may give he would not come to school. . . . [T]here are so many good schemes. This interaction brings out two crucial things. One, that there was a perception (or understanding) that for the community a child’s safety was a concern, and that the family would feel confdent if the child is accompanied by some other children from the same community or home. Second, this narrative was based on a given understanding that the children did not really “learn” anything in their daily lives out of school. Thus, the community life, in general, was seen as deprived not only in terms of poverty of income but also in terms of learning; which itself was one major constituent of “the impoverished” life. In doing so, learning was also tacitly defned. The NGO “school” offered only “some learning” over “nothing”. Similarly, a parent’s refusal to send their children to the school was situated in the discourse of the “culture of poverty” (as described in the previous chapter). For me, this was an initial introduction to how the concept of “worth” was played out in the everyday contexts. The category of the NGO school was used to defne learning by pitting it against what was referred to as “wandering here and there aimlessly”. Education was presented as an instrument that will enhance earning capacity of the child, and when it was made available for “free” it should be availed. The narrative was limited within this imagination, at all the organisational levels. When the NGO workers were able to “convince” families and bring children to their centre, the children appeared happy and expressed their excitement to go to the NGO School. However, in most cases, their reactions changed on reaching the centre. Many of them started crying as soon as the centre’s gate was closed after they had entered. Some ran towards the door and banged it; others stood still in a corner. Some cried when they were taken to the porch where the “classes” were held, and many others did so on meeting Ms. Kavita. While a few adjusted to this in some days, most dropped out soon. They did not return until the community workers went to their homes. Many of those who continued became somewhat docile, looked tired, and fell asleep in the classes. Ashu (a 10-year-old out-of-school male child from the slum) had joined the centre happily and continued for 3 weeks or so. However, he suddenly stopped attending the centre. In an interaction, he confrmed that he doesn’t feel like going to and feels unwell in the centre. Jagwati tried to negotiate with Ashu’s mother and argued, You have already given time, why don’t you continue? . . . We gave you so many things – bag, notebook, uniform, shoes, and now you 68

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say that you won’t send the child. You shouldn’t have taken all that if you had to do this. . . . If everyone in the locality does this then how will things work? Our school will shut down. This argument was reiterated with several parents on similar occasions. It appeared that in the perception of the feldworkers, the primary agenda of the organisation was to sustain itself – that is in their understanding enrolling children in the NFE centre was an end in itself. The NGO also found it diffcult to counter some parents’ resistance to send older girl children to their centre regularly. They did not intervene much in this matter. Even when three girls dropped out, the matter was not pursued. Ms. Kavita said, For girls it is a different kind of diffculty altogether; if something happens we will be blamed. Those enrolled in the centre will also withdraw. What can we do? They [parents] will have to think themselves. . . . We also do not want to take this responsibility. The NGO staff did not engage with the community at a level where the discourse around education could be deepened. They did not attempt to understand the parents’ views about the centre despite several experiences that made it pertinent to do so. They expected the children to attend the centre regularly, specifcally because of the presumption that the work they did is for the people’s betterment and that their work and presence should be perceived in the same sense. The NGO functionaries felt that when education is made available for “free”, the parents from the slum should see it as an “opportunity”. However, the organisation did not engage in a dialogue with the community on why this was an opportunity and how it was constituted. The organisation was aiming to achieve its targets within such perceptual framework. The pressure of targets surpassed the concerns of the community. More than the children’s education, the concern was focussed on drawing numbers to the centre so that their work could be sustained. In this process, the centre was often introduced to the parents as a “Sarkari sanstha” [a government organisation]. This was because NGO was receiving its funding partly from governmental sources. Its centre was also temporarily located inside the premises of a government school. By presenting their organisation in this fashion, the community workers could assure parents from the community about the “genuineness” of the work that they did. Some kind of involvement of government was one of the prominent reasons due to which it could draw 25 children to its centre as soon as it began its work. While this involvement of government was a qualifer of a sense of security for the parents, it was not suffcient to retain the children. In this context, more than anything, the parents’ experience with the NGO further implicated their conception of the State and Sarkari schools. 69

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State functionaries’ belief How the State functionaries perceived the slum community came across in interactions with the E-5 primary schoolteachers and the people working in the SSA sub-district-level structures. In some ways, the message on the school’s entry gate itself communicated the vision of the school functionaries regarding what would make parents from the community enrol their children there. The school gate had a message written in boldface letters with black paint (in Hindi), which said: Let’s go to school • • • • • •

Computer education, free education Monetary incentive for children from minority Monetary incentive for scheduled caste, tribe children, insurance scheme for children Incentives for girl students, Laadli Yojana [cash deposit scheme for girl child] Free meal, uniform, bag, books Scholarship, English education

If one looks at this message on the gate, it emerges that its contents do not indicate what kind of learning environment or curricular experiences are provided by or what constitutes the “academics” at the school. Computer education (for which there was no provision) and English education do selectively mention academic activities of the school. However, even these two inhere a particular assumption about community’s aspirations – that it is only the instrumental aspects of education that interest the parents. A general examination of the contents of the list will indicate that the items lack even a logical sequencing. All the stated incentives funded by the central and state-sponsored schemes were distributed through the school. A good part of the schoolteachers’ work time went in administering these. These were popularly referred to as “schemes” and sometimes as “policy” by the people in the school and the slum. In an interview, Mrs. Alpana (a schoolteacher who was in-charge of the school as there was an unflled vacancy of the head of the school) told me that these contents were decided by the SSA personnel as SSA funded the whitewashing of the school premises. Regarding the meaning of the contents, Mrs. Alpana felt that they were fne and well framed. She elaborated, You know these people from the slum only want these schemes . . . just a fst-full of children are sent to government schools for learning something. In sometime those few also realise that they cannot study in this environment with the other children. So very soon they shift to private schools which are better in all . . . . [W]e all [teachers] and our qualifcations are wasted here with these people. 70

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This belief was strongly held by all the teachers in the E-5 primary school – which had recently been “upgraded” to Pratibha Vidyalaya. The views of the SSA personnel (at both the state and the national levels), with whom I interacted, were also not much different. However, these perceptions were dependent upon schoolteachers’ accounts. This was because these personnel rarely interacted directly with the community. Mr. Mehta, Delhi SSA consultant, sounded helpless when he said in an interview, What should we do? We have taken all steps to ensure that children come to school .  .  . our data says that there are very less out-ofschool-children . . . but I know the real situation . . . how do we ensure attendance? Schemes only make parents enrol. . . . Teachers tell us and we also know [that] nobody wants to send their child to a government school except for the schemes. Teachers themselves are unwilling. How do we mend all this? Mr. Mehta’s concerns expressed the disequilibrium that he experienced when he observed how the various schemes distributed through the schools in a way amplifed and more clearly brought out what was being called the apathy of the community. This disequilibrium appeared to have emerged from the gap between the mandates, which are conceived in a “solving-theproblem” or project mode, and the complexity of the “ground reality”. Irrespective of the dilemmas, he said, “I have to do my duty; so I stop using my mind after a point”. The national component of the SSA continued to train him and the other personnel to meet the goals of quality education without taking cognisance of these disequilibrium(s). Now that the targets of the numbers were nearly met on paper, the work revolves around the linguistic frameworks of outcomes and performance. However, Mr Mehta thought that most of these “reforms” were only like airbrushing the reality. As I interacted with some personnel working in SSA at the national level (Technical Support Group), it came across that they feel that if the state teams and schoolteachers implement things properly the targets of quality would not be diffcult to achieve – and things would change only when this happens. Mr. Walia (a consultant in the Technical Support Group) shared in an interview, “How would things change? The SSA teams are indifferent and are hardly concerned about quality; they just do their jobs. . . . Schoolteachers are very much the same. Unless this cadre is willing to change, nothing will change .  .  . how will community change?” In both Mr. Walia’s and Mr. Mehta’s view, the overall system of the middle-level delivery mechanism was failing or lagging. They both counted themselves as exceptions to the “norm” in the middle-level systems of delivery. Their views almost completely converged with that of Banerjee (2011), who examines the case of primary education in Bihar. She argues that the educational demand from the community is high or is there, and so is the apportionment of resources 71

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from the top – but the non-effcient performance of the middle functionaries creates a paradox of poor quality at school level. The SSA personnel in principle avoided “blaming” the community accessing government schools. However, as I met them over a period of time, the contradictions in their views surfaced. As we went deeper in making sense of the situation, they could only explain things by pointing out parents’ apathy towards education. Mr. Walia stated, Had I been at the place of these people [states’ SSA teams and teachers], I would have thought the same . . . when one would encounter the reality at government schools entire theory goes down the drain .  .  . when you see nothing changes despite all kinds of incentives then what would you do? I understand the compulsions of life and everything, but a lot depends on parents’ internal will. There are so many schemes to support them; but they do not make use of these. Thus, while the initial interactions appeared to be a part of a larger cycle of blame that was constituted by an explanation of “lapse” on the part of the middle-level delivery systems, all arguments converged at the end – by tracing the source problem in the non-responsiveness of the parents or the community. These interactions also gave a glimpse of these functionaries’ feeling of entrapment in the philosophy and vocabulary of “schemes”. The schemes that were designed with an objective of enhancing enrolment and retention seem to be working towards this objective. But they do not seem to help in changing anything beyond the (temporary) enrolment – the social reality does not seem to be “responding” any further – as Mr. Mehta said, “zameeni vastavikta to wahi hai” [the ground reality is as it is/unchanged]. However, this vision of “policy” making and/or implementation – in which distribution of tangibles in the form of schemes is imagined not as a route to achieve policy goals, but as an end – seemed to constitute or reinforce an image of the community as one that looks up to the State schools for feeting instrumental purposes only. Regarding how the various schemes worked at the school, it can be said that there were several signifcant contradictions in the numbers and records relating to or those that were used in planning these schemes. This generated a space where several arbitrary practices prevailed in the administration of these incentives. A micro-level example of this could be the signifcant contradiction in the school records and realities in the context of counting of the schoolchildren for the varied scholarship schemes. This in one instance related to the mismatch between the number of children availing the scholarship schemes provided by the State for SC/ST children and the actual number of SC children at the school. The school records showed that there were only 52 children availing the scheme. Whereas, as per the schoolteachers account, around 80 per cent 72

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of the children attending the school were from the scheduled castes and tribes. However, their parents either did not have the documentary evidences or the certifcates against which the schemes could be claimed or their castes were not “notifed” in Delhi, which complicated the process of obtaining the certifcate. In fact, Vaghari caste, one of the most prominent caste groups in the area, did not fgure in the list of SC/ST notifed by the government of Delhi. For the people who have not been residents of Delhi before 1951, getting caste certifcates is more cumbersome. Those who have migrated to Delhi after 1951 (who are considered to be migrants) would essentially require a caste certifcate of their father to apply for a certifcate for themselves and a variety of other documents. A separate caste certifcate is needed for every member of the family. Das’s (2004) presentation of the signature of the State appeared meaningful in understanding the purposes that the offcial documents as technologies of the State serve, and in seeing school as a “checkpoint” for defning the nature of a person’s citizenship and identity (Poole, 2004). Some parents were struggling to secure these to avail various schemes for their wards and families, some were unaware, and some did not want to put much effort. This contradiction becomes important not only because several children from the marginalised caste groups were being excluded from their entitlements but also because the provision of education in itself was “adjusted” in this light. How provisions may be structured and still may be propagated as “good provisioning” comes to the fore in this situation. Although I did not engage in an in-depth analysis of the numbers and the meanings that they communicate, such glimpses of the scenario enabled in visualising how the quality of schooling diverges in practice from the standards set by the policies and how it may construct the idea of a State institution in the community. This is particularly so in a situation where these incentives are offered “in return” for community’s “investment” in schooling. The questions that emerged at this juncture were: What does the State communicates through these schemes? How well does the delivery of these schemes represent educational achievement or improvement in quality? Why is there a mismatch between the data gathered by various agencies, the reality, and the offcial accounts in these contexts? How (if at all) do these schemes also become a way of shaping the meaning of quality of schooling? How are the meanings of policy, reform, quality, and public schools, altered in these processes? These questions became more pertinent when the narratives of the parents from the slum community were taken into account. In the course of interactions with parents from the community on RtE, I found that the parents not only were unaware of the right but also made sense of it as another package of “Sarkari schemes”. It appeared as though the meaning of State school and the idea of functions that it is meant to serve were being (re-)shaped or transiting in these processes. 73

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Slum dwellers and aspirations Construction of apathy As said in the previous chapter, educational discourse varied in the different settlements in the feld site depending on the varied socio-economic and socio-cultural demography of people inhabiting them. In the feldwork in the settlements like Tanki-waali-jhuggi, which had the highest number of out-of-school-children, questions on the purpose of schools constantly came up. For instance, Kanti, a single father, discussed with me the enrolment of his three male children in the E-5 school. He was a single father whose wife had left the family about a year back. He had sold cigarettes [bidi] on a pavement in a local market from which he earned around Rupees 200 on a good day. Given the life circumstances and future possibilities of his children, he didn’t see much merit in sending them to school beyond primary classes. Instead, he wanted his children to set-up their own “dhanda” – a small entrepreneurial initiative. However, this was his opinion. In practice, he said, he was open to enrol his children in the school. Two of his children were around 7–8 years old, but had not started going to school. As we talked, Kanti asked, . . . Would my children get a meal there as well? I have heard that Sarkar gives food but only to some children I: Sarkari schools serve midday meals and it is meant for all children unless they do not want to have it Kanti: I can also feed my children . . . but they are all growing-up, and feel hungry all the time and eat anything that they get . . . what is served in the school? I: Different meals on different days like choley-chawal on Monday, aloo-poori on Tuesday, halwa . . . Kanti: That’s good . . . if sarkar itself does this much. What else does it offer? Something after the school is over? Otherwise how will one wait for so long [over the school years], wapasi kuch to milna chahiye [one should get at least something in return] I: I did not understand . . . Kanti: Like some other scheme. I have heard that some parents also avail paise wali scheme [monetary scheme]. I: Would you not ask about padhai [studies]? Kanti: [Skips answering the question] Would I need to take some documents? Kanti:

In the interaction nothing was discussed or asked by Kanti about teaching– learning in the school. When I asked him if he would want to visit the school to understand how teaching–learning happens there, he said, “What will I 74

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see there? Sarkari schools are all same – wahan kab padhai hoti hai! [When has teaching-learning happened there!]”. Two other informants from the community who were standing nearby also nodded agreeing to most of what he said. In similar interactions with parents, it appeared that the grammar of schemes was almost knitted in their concept of Sarkari school. The rationale of schooling was based on a kind of “negotiation” – “what does the government offer in return” is a question that was weighed against the decision relating to attending a government school. There were some other instances in this particular jhuggi cluster where the parents explored the possibility of enrolling their younger toddlers in the school instead of their older ones. In an instance, a mother (who had tied her 2-year-old child with a loosened rope to a tap in her house as she completed daily chores) enquired, “Kya school mein isko baitha loge?” [Would you take him in the school?]. Some mothers were also worried about the bad company their children got into and thus thought of school as a safe space or a surveillance mechanism for their children. It appeared as though there was a lack of intrinsic worth that the parents from the Tanki-waali-jhuggi saw in State schools. This was particularly because, in their conception, the school did not offer education at all. The government campaigns and the NGO workers also did not promise quality education but certain other benefts. Thus, in a way, what was called as “apathy” was contextualised in the poor quality of academic and pedagogic environments of the government schools accessible to the most marginalised income groups and communities (Ramachandran, 2018). In the absence of the quality education, the meaning of Sarkari school and in turn “free education” has come to be defned in terms of these schemes. It came across in a more explicit fashion during a situation where Hazari narrated his story of dropping out of the schools he attended as a child. He shares, For some days we used to stay here and for some days in Punjab. When we came back madam used to scold me . . . this and that . . . I do not know why she kept shouting and what we used to do at the school. Padhai to samajh aati nahi thi [I could not understand padhai]. I never did anything there, except for listening to scolding and getting beatings. I couldn’t have been sitting like that all the time; I had to start working as well. Then I decided that I will do work only, when I have to do this then what sense does it make to go to the school? I left two schools in the same fashion. The idea that nothing worthwhile happened at the school was central in most of Hazari’s arguments about or his recollections of the experiences he had there. He sounded agitated on the question of schooling and thought that his experience universally explained the plight of the children in his slum. Hazari was not angry while he said this, but resolved and frm. He 75

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was much gentler on discussions pertaining to the other concerns and very enthusiastic about the small business that he had been planning with the women of the community. Narratives that were contradictory to that of Hazari emerged in interactions with the relatively younger children (6–10 years old) from the same jhuggi settlement. These children (Heena, Sunny, and Ashu) saw school not as an institution that promised a joyful learning experience, but as one instrument that can help in becoming “bada aadmi” (big man/person). Initially it looked as if the bada aadmi that the children were idealising, was similar to that explicated in Sarangapani’s (1997, p. 76) thesis. However, the category appeared more complex when I inquired into how the children related it to school going. While going to school was seen by the young children (of ages where schooling begins) as one of the routes to become bada aadmi, it was not the essential or the only route to become one. I will explore this in Chapter 7 in some detail. However, here it is relevant to state that in many ways, the term “bada aadmi” was used to refer to an “ameer aadmi” (rich man/ person). To explain its meaning, the children verbally sketched an image of a man who drove a car, was aggressive, and knew how to use others as a means. This ameer aadmi was visualised as someone who had ownership of assets or wealth. The children expressed their desire to become bade aadmi instead of becoming a public offcial or a famous professional or anything else. Having been to school was one (not essential though) trait of a bada admi. That is, the children believed that most bade aadmi had been to school. However, they could also identify those who became so, irrespective of whether or not they went to school (neighbourhood vendors and kabaadis). I will describe this in Chapter 7 in a greater detail. However, their mothers disagreed. They thought that the children would never become bade aadmi by going to school; and that it was their fate to do menial jobs like their fathers and/or become “awara”, “badmash,” and addicts. The narratives of the older children (12–15 years old) came closer and almost matched with that of mothers (like in the case of Hazari). Through the experience of the social world, it seemed that these older children had come to decipher their social possibilities or the range of their capabilities. The school experience, in Hazari’s case at least, brought him to believe/assess that education or what was on offer at the school was not meant for him; and by assessing his probabilities through schooling, he seemed to engage in what may be called sociological imagination that was shaped by his past, his present, his observation, and experiences (vicarious and direct both) (Mills, 1959). How schooling performs a conservative function and engages in cultural “reproduction” became more nuanced in how Hazari saw his possibilities at school and his corresponding disposition towards the school education (Bourdieu, 1974). Bourdieu argues that students internalise “the odds of success within their social group and, acting within such a habitus, are bound collectively to reproduce them given the 76

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continued existence of the operative structures of the feld” (Nash, 2001, p.  58). Willis (1977) makes a similar argument while he answers the question why working-class children get working-class jobs. While these works could help in understanding what was happening in the situation, Gandhi’s (1909, 1937) idea about work, education, and the problem of synonymising knowledge with “knowledge of letters” situated in an educational perspective what the people had experienced through education. In the case of children like Hazari, even the “schemes” did not work as incentives and the “unwillingness” to come to school persisted. In such persistence, the experience of mismatch between the lives that the people lived and the nature of education available were highlighted. Here, the unwillingness also looked like resistance towards investing time in an institution which does not seem to lead anywhere. Negotiating school While this was the case with the most marginalised within the margins, there were other kinds of orientations/dispositions towards schooling and school education in other somewhat economically better settlements. In these settlements, the worth of schooling was not questioned. However, there were other reasons for which those who did not question schooling could not enrol their children in a school; two of these are described subsequently. The cost of schooling As per the RtE Act 2009, the elementary schooling is supposed to be free. However, an idea of cost of schooling operated in various ways in the community. Even the children thought that there was a cost of schooling. In the interactions with the parents in the sawa-barah-gaj in M Block, the cost of schooling was cited as a major cause of worry for parents. While the parents could afford most of the material requirements, the standards of “hygiene” expected at the school had its own cost that was based on altogether different socio-economic standard of life. The school not only expected that the child be neat and clean, it demanded that the uniforms, books, bags, and other belongings be well maintained. Despite all attempts, the standards that the school set were not achievable. The pre-school training and preparation were another expectation that comprised the cost related to schooling that the better-off parents also found diffcult to meet. The parents told that the teachers who enrolled the children at the school “tested” them for their ability to hold a pencil, write alphabets and numbers, and to be able to read them out. This also matched my observations at the school. Among the cases which I had observed, there wasn’t any child (from among those who came for admission) who did not already know the initial Hindi alphabets and counting till ten, before 77

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admission to the school. The parents and teachers confrmed that the child had learnt the skill from the older siblings, neighbourhood children or elders at home, or at the pre-school/crèche (private). These skills were assumed as a prerequisite for the school and when parents came to inquire about a child’s admission, they were told about this expectation. Mrs. Nilesh, E-5 schoolteacher, used to say, “I will frst make the child read and write and only then admit”, to which parents never objected. Many asked what she would ask the child to write. These skills and abilities were used as the base in the class I. Mrs. Alpana told me that until 2 years back the situation was better and most of the children had the skill of holding a pencil and scribbling with it. However, now she said there were several who were unable to do so. She blamed it on the RtE and the NGOs that bring children directly to school at “whatever” age. Although she told that the teachers do not refuse the children who do not have such abilities, but tell the parents to put “special efforts”. This meant that either the older siblings teach the child or that the parents arrange for a tuition. While no child was rejected for not having the ability to read or write, almost invariably all children who came for an admission to the school could scribble something with a pencil. In these ways, it seemed as though a of school and pre-schooling was being established and/or reinforced. Some of the parents sent their children to a pre-school and were bearing a cost as high as Rs. 700 per month. The expectation of the child taking tuition continued in the later stages as well. One parent unpacked this cost when he said, “Whatever they [schoolteachers] say, sending the child to school is costly . . . they would call me to school, I will have to pick-up and bring them [children] back, bring things, and then what about the tuitions?” While the frst two relate to the cost of time and space of schooling that led to an opportunity cost, the tuitions are a different category of expenses or investments. One schoolchild’s mother also affrmed: It costs so much. . . . I have to do everything in a hurry and change my work timings as per the school. . . . I lost one job [ek kothi ka kaam nikal gaya] because of the change in the school timing. Then the school meetings, picking-up and dropping during winters and rains . . . then there will be Rs. 100 every month on tuitions [for one subject] . . . and then they go to school, see the other children’s things and demand . . . The tuitions costs varied from Rs. 100 to Rs. 400 per month per child depending on the number of the subjects a child studied. The discussions with the informants indicated that these costs were understood as the “implied” costs of schooling. These were so intricately subsumed under school education that they could not have been separated from it. The question of “How free is free primary education in India” needs to be situated in 78

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a larger framework that Tilak’s (1996) and Sadgopal’s (2008) works explicate in context of the RtE. At the same time, such larger critiques also need to be situated in the nuanced ways in which the cost of schooling shapes public perceptions about and participation in the State-sponsored education in particular, and in the processes of a democratic State in general. On the one hand, the cost may be understood in monetary terms, on the other, there are psychological/emotional aspects of it that have deeper implications on the concept of the State and citizen relationship. Proving birth One of the most unexpected observations related to cases where a desire to schooling was not converted to going to school and not because of some family constraints but because of a peculiar bureaucratic hurdle. The hurdle was related to non-possession of what was known (or described) as janampatri. The term janampatri started appearing over and over again in the discussions with parents in several situations, and much more frequently in interactions with families located in the illegal squatters and the footpath dwellers (though it came across in a “procedural” fashion in the other “legal” settings as well). It persisted in most of the general interactions throughout the study both outside and inside the school. It was understood and used by everybody in the locality, in the NGO and the school (however, it was not understood by the two people working in the national SSA component). The NGO workers and the schoolteachers explained janampatri as the people’s “naive” formulation of the “birth certifcate” – one of the certifcates that is essential to avail other certifcates from the State that proves or legitimises a person’s citizenship and grants access to various kinds of State provisions. There were instances in which parents stated not having the janampatri as the main hurdle in enrolling their children in school. These families were more “attractive” for the NGOs (NLF and Prakriti), as in these cases “convincing” or following up was not required. In such cases, the NGOs’ efforts were more focussed on informing the parents that they would get the janampatri made and enrol the child in the government school after the child registered in their centre. Sometimes the parents joined their hands or expressed through some other gesture how obliged they were. Initially it appeared that the parents were unaware that no documentary proofs are needed to enrol a child at the State schools after the implementation of the RtE. From the RtE Act 2009, it was clear that no documentary proof is needed to enrol a child at school after April 2010 (since the Act was implemented) and the SSA personnel confrmed that the rules on this have been sent to all schools in Delhi. However, when I observed the practice at the school where janampatri was invariably asked for and parents’ narratives in this regard, it appeared 79

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necessary to explore the issue and re-visit the RtE Act 2009. In the context of this mismatch, a re-reading of the RtE Act 2009 led to a different interpretation. The excerpt from Section 14 of the Act concerning this provision is as follows: Proof of age for admission 14. (1) For the purpose of admission to elementary education, the age of a child shall be determined on the basis of the birth certifcate issues in accordance with the provisions of the Births, Deaths, and Marriages Registration Act, 1886 or on the basis of such other document, as may be prescribed. (2) No child shall be denied admission in a school for lack of age proof. While the Act explicitly states that the age of a child may be determined on the basis of a proof of age, it also states that no child shall be denied admission to the school for a not being able to produce an age proof. The information that I gathered from the teachers and Mr. Mehta did not match. While Mr. Mehta said that even a written note from the offce of the local Member of Legislative Assembly or Village Panchayat would be accepted as a documentary proof, the teachers insisted that they have been instructed to ask for an affdavit. Whatever the case may be, accessing the Parshad’s offce, Village Panchayat, or procuring an affdavit involved a degree of familiarity/preparedness, submission to and investment in the bureaucratic systems of the State. However, here what is worth noting is that the Act only ensures that a child is “not denied” an admission in case the parents are unable to produce proof of her date of birth. It does not specify whether or not such proof will be required in due course or not or whether the child can be admitted without the proof or not. It rather makes it mandatory to ensure that the correct age of a child is established through a documentary proof. This is particularly because it is only through the “legitimate proof” that the “appropriate authority” would be able to ensure an age appropriate enrolment for every child. Initially, the term janampatri sounded confusing to me as a researcher particularly because of its traditional connotations and a brahminical association. How “janam praman patra”, a certifcation by a modern State, was translated into something that had a traditional character, in itself looked important. More signifcant was the worth that this instrument tacitly ascribed to the institution called school, particularly when seen in the light of the everyday practice at the school. The “monitoring” of birth and access to school through these documents appeared to defne not only the category of the “citizen” but that of the State as well along with the character of the relation between the two (Das, 2004). 80

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Schooling as a norm In discussions with parents in the sawa-barah-gaj, while the cost of schooling and the problems of acquiring janampatri did emerge, but they were able to navigate their ways past these hurdles. In the interactions with parents who had recently shifted there from relatively lower income settlements, the shift was the most signifcant factor encouraging the family to send the child to school. A change in the social circumstances made the families see schooling differently in terms of its “worth”. Why the families deemed it important was not purely an individual household’s choice. A shift to a relatively better-off residential settlement made it a social compulsion for the family to register the child at a school. Similarly, sending a child to tuition went along with this as “everybody” in the neighbourhood did so as a naturalised practise. To certain extent in these situations, along with being seen as a necessary institution for children, association with school was a status symbol that indicated a family’s affliation to a “better” social stratum. However, this cultural affliation was not easy to procure. It costed not only money but systematic attempts and an overall “preparedness” as well. In some way, it could be seen as an investment. How a family earning around Rs. 3000 per month apportioned Rs. 400 to Rs. 500 per month for tuitions could be understood in the framework of such investment to maintain and enhance the social status that has proximity to the middle classes and a particular kind of social life. However, such participation is not just a matter of willingness or non-willingness. It has its own constitution, whereby (as said earlier) it entails acquisition of an ability to participate in and make way through certain bureaucratic arrangements, which are regulated by the State and are more accessible to (or meant for) particular social groups more than others. Morey’s (2001) autobiography brings out the complexity involved in such participation in the case of similar class–caste context, where caste works in the undercurrent of a particular kind of a socio-economic condition that constitutes the framework of the experience of school.

Conclusion Several recent researches have continued to fnd that there is a general perception among the educational functionaries that the poor are apathetic towards education and are thus uneducable (Brinkmann, 2020; Ramachandran, 2018; Kumar, 2020). However, this study fnds that there were no universal or unidimensional responses to the idea of school education that could be mapped in the feld across the settlements. The perspectives about the relevance and need for schooling varied with a change in the socio-economic conditions of the settings. The views included looking up to school for some specifc schemes and functions, questioning schooling, aspiring to be in the system but being limited by the bureaucratic procedures, 81

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and seeing schooling as a norm. These responses in a way indicated the varied degrees of preparedness to beneft from the institution of education (whereas the school lacked the preparedness to support any of these perspectives and aspirations). On the one hand, these ideas were shaped by the nature of lived reality vis-à-vis the nature and structure of school education. On the other hand, the “quality” of the State schools accessible in the setting was also pertinent in these formulations. That is to say that experience of and the common knowledge about the government primary schools were involved in the meanings that the people attributed to education. Although the practise at the school is a subject matter that would unfold in the next chapter, it is relevant to state here that this commonsense knowledge matched my observations at the school. “No teaching happens at school” was an everyday understanding in the community – and this was one reason for the success and demand for tuitions and private schooling in the neighbourhood. However, this reality was not factored in State programmes and incentives. Such an ethos not only was shaping the meaning of the public institutions in the people’s perception but also appeared to be contributing towards the construction of a particular image of the poor citizens in the slums in general. Along with this, it also shaped the self-perception of the people in the slum. In conversations with the informants, it emerged that they had increasingly come to see themselves as “seekers of tangible incentives” from the State. Therefore, in the negotiations with the State institutions, they did not view themselves as asserting or claiming their “rights” but as thinking in terms of the everyday pragmatics or negotiations. In this process, the idea of right to education in itself looked distorted or was reduced (at least apparently) to the matters of demanding more provisions or seeking short-lived solutions. It also interfered with the everyday perception or the meaning of the responsibilities of the State towards the people – thereby shaping the nature of the relationship between the State and its margins. The power of the State to distort the conception of entitlements becomes visible in these spaces (Sadgopal, 2006). This is because this process was not limited to the schools in the feld, but could be seen in the case of the other public institutions as well. Drawing from Das (2004) it can be inferred that this was the fashion in which the State operated in the margins. The incentives that were planned to ensure that the people access the system appeared to restructure the meaning of the system itself. It was in this context that the school worked as a mechanism for negotiating the “minimums” between the State and the people in the margins – where the psychology or the vocabulary of increments got played out. For example, it created a general ethos of complacency based on the idea that “at least” there was a school, at least it provided for a meal, at least the child got a uniform, at least there were regular teachers, at least it worked as some kind of a daycare, and so on. Although for the people in the slum, this incremental 82

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progress was a “strategy” of negotiating their citizenship claims not only in the schools but also in general as well (Das, 2010), for the State it created a space where it became possible to only “maintain” the given provisioning. In several ways, it appeared that in such ethos, the benefciary–benefactor negotiation was structured within a discourse on tangible schemes, and the school assumed the role of one mechanism that constructed such ethos. In this regard, it is relevant to refer to Apple (2009a, p. 9), who says that one of the most important political agendas of the neo-liberal times is to change the common sense or to alter the meanings of the basic categories that we employ to understand the social and educational world and thereby altering who we think we are and how our major institutions are to respond to this changed identity.

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6 THE TEACHERS AND THE SCHOOL CULTURE

This chapter revolves around the schoolteachers and the school culture that they engender. The chapter draws from the relational dynamics between the teachers and the other actors in the school context. The aim is to describe the relational ethos or culture of the school, in framing which the teachers played a central role. In this context, it examines the role that the teachers assumed vis-à-vis the community. It develops a picture of the work ethos of the school while delving into how the teachers visualised themselves and their social role and position. In this process, it attempts to make sense of the nature of the agency that a teacher attributes to herself, how her predicaments are constituted and experienced, and how this dynamics impinges upon the children’s experience of education and their aspirations. The contemporary discourse on teachers, especially in the public system, is comprised of debates on teacher performativity and accountability, and autonomy and agency (Sarangapani, Mukhopadhyay, Parul, & Jain, 2018; Verger, Novelli, & Altinyelken, 2018; Verger & Parcerisa, 2017). On the one hand, in these discourses, the direct impact of teachers’ performance on the student learning outcomes is the matter of contention. On the other hand, concerns are raised on the nature and extent of a teacher’s autonomy and agency to work within the given systemic constraints and global policy pressures. In the Indian context, the historical tracing of the teacher’s positioning as a meek dictator (Kumar, 1991) in the system (developed under the colonial regime) is useful in making sense of the contemporary issue of lack of agency of teachers. As Kumar (1991, p. 74) presents it, On top of these routine responsibilities, a teacher could be assigned other kinds of duties. . . . These varied tasks that a teacher could be asked to perform tightened his relationship with the State. In this relationship, he acted as a meek subordinate of administrative offcers. In many ways, the school experiences reaffrmed these images and connections with the traditional colonial character of the school system. The initial fear among the teachers that I would “investigate” and complain to the 84

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authority, yet their having enough power themselves to regulate my access to the school, particularly helped understand the unique position of the teachers. As the interactions with the teachers, the children, and the community intensifed, these images became fner. The nature of the feld observations also brought forth a confusion about the aptness of teacher as meek dictator. That is, while the disenfranchisement of the teacher cadre has been a prominent frame for explaining the school practice (Kumar, 1991; Goodman, 1988), in the feld it appeared as though the professional practice was largely shaped by the teachers’ social location and personal or familial aspirations. To demonstrate this, in part the chapter describes how teachers perceived themselves. While writing this chapter, I was constantly faced by a dilemma or fear of becoming polemical in my presentation of the teacher. This was particularly because a critical examination of the teacher’s position could be used to make a case against the teacher cadre in the public system and further disenfranchise teachers, as much as it could be for highlighting a need to engage with the idea of teacher empowerment. The former among these not being the purpose, I draw from the perspectives of Batra (2009), Subrahmanian (2005), Menon (1999), Ramachandran (2005), and Ramachandran, Bhattacharjea, and Sheshagiri (2008). Delpit’s (2006) work (in a different perspective) also enables an understanding of the cultural complexities of interactions between the teachers and the students in urban classrooms. This frame facilitates understanding the assumptions of urban educators, who mostly represent the “mainstream”, about the educability and integrity of the children in the margins. The chapter is organised in two broad sections. The frst section explores how the everyday work and routine at the school were constituted. The second section provides a glimpse of the personal and professional politics of the teachers.

The work routine As I began the feldwork in the school, and initiated visits to the boys shift of the school as well, Mr. Azimuddin (the Principal of the boys shift) told me, “Whatever you want to study is okay; I have been interacting with researchers for several years . . . their topics may be whatever, that’s none of our business but they disturb the school routine. . . . [T]here are chances that they complain about the school . . . and the teachers cannot carry on the work as usual”. Similar concerns on how I must mind my own business and not disturb the routine of the school were also indirectly expressed by the teachers in the girls shift. What was the “usual” and routine for teachers was a particular question that this experience generated. The initial idea was to observe classroom processes and curricular transaction to understand marginality and aspirations in an urban school context. This idea underwent a change as I became more familiar with the school routine or work as usual. 85

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Initially, as I started visiting the school, I was expected to work as a proxy teacher – where a teacher who was planning to soon go on long leave asked me to “manage” her class in her absence. (In the government primary schools in Delhi, the same teacher teaches all subjects and also stays with the cohort through the 5 years.) I repeatedly asked her about the course content she wanted me to transact. There was either no response to this question or a general statement that I could check the textbook. The task clearly stated for me was that I should manage the class. In general, I thought that loss of teaching days would be a critical concern in the school, but it did not appear to be the case. A normal day at the school was 6 hours long and began with a morning assembly – which was hardly a 10-minute affair. The students then strolled into the classes. Sometimes the teachers pushed them in with a scolding. The girls who were assigned the “gate-keeping” duty, as there was no guard appointed, went to report to the teachers. Those assigned “broom duty”, as there were no permanent sanitation staff employed, continued to sweep the class while assembly went on. Others who were on duty to maintain chalk, blackboards, and registers also carried on with their respective assignments. The teachers entered the classrooms after the cleaning was completed, and shortly one could hear attendance being taken in the classes. For roughly around 1 hour the teachers remained in their classes. After that, some came to the in-charge’s room (that also served as a staffroom), some moved out of their respective classes to sit and talk, while others continued with record or register work inside the classrooms. After the frst hour, the class monitors “managed” the classes. In the beginning, it appeared that this was a temporary phase. A forthcoming annual function was to be held at the school, and this “casual” scenario seemed to be due to that. However, this continued for long. There were no classes held in the month of September as I was told that most of the term’s work had been covered. In October, there were too many holidays. November was the same. Then the school attendance became too scanty as the students with their families started leaving for their villages for the winter vacations. As the time passed, I began approaching the teachers to observe their classes for the frst hour in which it appeared that they were teaching and landed up “managing” the class I sought to observe for the whole day. Instead of my seeking permission to observe their classes, the teachers requested me to do so – by which they meant that they would leave after handing over the charge to me. I continued to wait for things to become as one expects them to be at a school. This expectation was especially as the teachers had expressed their grudge about their inability to devote time to teaching due to the non-academic workload. In due course of time, it became clear that this was the usual. In this scenario Shivali, the class-teacher of IV B, came across as an exception. Rather, she was acclaimed to be an exception by the school in-charge and Mr. Mehta, the SSA personnel. She was the only one in the school who 86

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did not move out of her class without a reason. She resisted and was visibly irritated when asked to leave the classroom even when the in-charge called her. She taught for the frst 1 hour in the class, whereby she usually began by listing sentences in English on the board and asked the students to make a note of them. The sentences were not pre-planned. They also did not seem to relate to the syllabus or textbook contents, or the classroom discussions of the previous day. The sentences made on one of the days were as follows: “The cow is a holy animal”, “The girl went to the market”, “We should help others”, and “We should not tell lie”. The students were asked to explain or translate each of the sentences. After the children noted the sentences, Shivali repeated the same process with sentences in Hindi. She did not translate the English sentences but wrote fresh sentences in Hindi – “Rose is a fower”, “Clouds bring rain”, “We went for an outing yesterday”. She at times glanced through classwork notebooks, when the students voluntarily came to her to show their work. Having done this for the frst 1 hour, she asked the children to open their textbooks and silently read a particular chapter on their own. Post lunch break, she taught Mathematics by asking the children to solve questions from a guidebook that she carried. One child was asked to jot down the solved problems from the book on the board, while the others had to copy them. This Mathematics guidebook had its own life history. It was handed down to Shivali by Mrs. Alpana, who herself borrowed it from another teacher. It had been in circulation in the school from several years – nobody could specify from when – and the other teachers also borrowed it from Shivali. It had all the topics of the primary-level Mathematics; it would have had more than that, had it not been sliced/torn after the page number 221. The remaining section of the book was nowhere to be seen – just like its cover pages and list of contents. Shivali had no clue about these missing parts, and Mrs. Alpana was unsure. The children were familiar with the book. As soon as Shivali asked her class to open their Mathematics notebooks, the class monitor, Rima, in an automated fashion came forward and stood by her side waiting for the book to be taken out. Rima really liked the book as it had “solutions and not just questions and answers”. Shivali also gave classwork to the children to keep them engaged through the day. This included tasks like – “Write ten sentences on things you like”, “List your daily routine from morning to evening”, or “Write ten sentences on your teacher”. Having given these tasks to the students to work on, Shivali continued to do other work. She would either work on her MA assignments (as she was pursuing MA Education in distance mode), read a guidebook for the University Grants Commission’s National Eligibility Test, complete the pending administrative records, or cover her registers with new covers. The students in Shivali’s class were habitual to her way of teaching–learning. They had been with her from Class II onwards. There was an implicit understanding between her and the children, so much so that after the frst hour 87

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in the class their task was only to sit quiet and appear to be engaged. Rima told me, “after studying we all have to sit quietly and do our work; we can do anything – Ma’am ji does not say anything, but if we make noise we will obviously get scolded”. At times, when Shivali forgot to tell the girls what to do after the frst hour, Rima and the others themselves asked, “Ma’am ji, which book do we have to open today?” Having opened the books and sharpened their pencils, they sat for a while staring at the pages and gradually (almost naturally) began talking to each other, but in whispers. Whenever their voices rose above a certain level, Shivali reminded the children to do their work by scolding them. In an almost “conditioned” manner, after around every 15 minutes she warned, “What is happening .  .  . do your work . . . tum sab naalaayak bachche ho [you all kids are good for nothing]”. The students, all girls as it was a girls-only school, in Shivali’s class were appreciated for being much more “disciplined” (as compared to the others in the school) in terms of how they greeted the teachers and how they managed themselves through the day. They were much more regular as well (around a third of them having more than 75 per cent attendance). Their notebooks, books, stationery boxes, and bags were better maintained than those of the others in the school. As compared to those in the other sections, the girls were able to read and write relatively fuently. Three of them had also been participating in the zonal competitions. The school attributed all this to Shivali’s hard work. For all these outcomes, she was the frst one to have been given an opportunity to move her class to the new building with a pucca roof constructed recently in the school. What made her exceptional among the rest of the teachers was that she was invited as a resource person for the in-service training of teachers. In Shivali’s classes, I could never observe how she transacted or introduced a concept. For example, while listing sentences she asked the students to underline all the pronouns; but she did not explain what a pronoun is, as if the students were already familiar with the concept. Similarly, without teaching fractions, she asked the students to solve the problems from the guidebook by themselves, as if they already knew halves and quarters. Despite this, several students in the class were well versed with these concepts. As described in the previous chapters, this was an outcome of the tuitions, which at least two-thirds of the children had right from Class I onwards. Shivali actively encouraged the students of her class to take tuitions for “extra help”.

Personal and professional politics The authority and the centrality of the teachers in the schools had come across in explicit ways as I attempted to fnd my feet there as a researcher. The other ways in which the teachers assumed a similar role became visible in the process through which children were admitted to the school. The RtE Act, 2009 mandates that no child shall be denied admissions to the school, 88

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irrespective of the parents’ ability to produce the relevant documents. Although the teachers did not “deny” admission to any child, the procedure of enrolling children at the school was tweaked in a certain arbitrary fashion. It is here particularly that the centrality of a teacher, her authority, and the social functions that she performs became visible in a broader context. Some of the frst observations pertaining to this would enable in making sense of the situation. It was around 11 am on a working day when a man came to the school asking for the teacher who is in-charge of admissions. The children, who were standing since morning at the school entry on the gate duty, guided him to the in-charge’s offce. The man, Prakash, had come for the admission of his child and this was his fourth visit. He appeared to be in his mid-30s, was dressed in a shirt and pant which had faded marks of colours – in all likelihood from the Holi festival which had been celebrated months ago. Mrs. Nilesh (a teacher) was sitting outside the offce and I was assisting her in some record-keeping work on her request. She was the admissions in-charge for the academic year. When Prakash came, Mrs. Nilesh was engrossed in explaining the poor state of the school attendance to me. She was trying to convince me about the explicit disinterest of the parents to send their children to school to study. She said, All these parents do not have any interest in educating their children. . . . [T]hey come to school only for the schemes . . . tell a single child that something is being distributed in the school, within ten minutes those children would also come who would have never been seen before in the school. Having waited for 2 minutes, Prakash intervened: Prakash: Mrs. Nilesh: Prakash: Mrs. Nilesh: Prakash: Mrs. Nilesh: Prakash: Mrs. Nilesh:

Namaste madam ji You have again turned up at this time? You were told that whatever work has to be done would be done before 11 am. Madam, I have left work to come here, I cannot come early . . . this is the fourth visit; madam register the name today What do you think; we are all sitting idle here? Madam, I am not saying this . . . it is just a matter of a few minutes for you . . . [No response] Madam, I am the only earning member in the house. Every day if I come here for the registration then it will become extremely diffcult for me Do you know I come to the school at seven in the morning? I work for a full 6 hours, shout in class, fll registers, manage admissions, and you all keep coming whenever you want 89

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Prakash: Mrs. Nilesh: Prakash: Mrs. Nilesh: Prakash: Mrs. Nilesh: Prakash: Mrs. Nilesh: Prakash: Mrs. Nilesh:

Whenever you would come, you expect me to leave all the work and start doing your work Tell me madam, when should I come? I will do as you say Show the papers Madam, we were told that the janampatri is not needed but you asked so I brought it Why haven’t you brought the child? Madam you said frst get the papers made, and bring the child after that But it wasn’t said that only bring papers . . . bring the child along tomorrow; then we will write the name Madam please write the name today; I will positively bring her tomorrow Look, I won’t admit the child without seeing her, right? Bring her along tomorrow, and dress her in good clean clothes, and feed her a meal, and bring a pencil. . . . I will make her write frst Will it get done tomorrow? How can I tell whether or not it will be done, but come on time; I will see what I can do.

On another occasion, a mother who had visited the school for the second time was sent back to come another day as Mrs. Nilesh was late. The mother complained of having taken a leave from her job of a newly appointed MCD safai karamchari [sanitation staff]: Mother: Mrs. Jain: Mother: Mrs. Jain: Mother: Mrs. Jain: Mother: Mrs. Jain: Mother: Mrs. Jain:

What all papers do I have to bring so that I don’t have to take many leaves Tomorrow you come with the child [Mrs. Jain did not even notice the child standing near the door] I have brought the child today as well Okay, but what will she do today? Bring her tomorrow But at least tell the papers to be brought so that I save a round Janampatri and two photographs, and your jaati pramana patra also for the scheme for [SC] category We don’t have janampatri, but we will get the photographs Bas to fr aise nahi hoga [It won’t happen like this] Madam please tell properly. I have to leave work and come Your work won’t get done in one visit . . . you will have to run around . . . you will have to make an affdavit

In these instances, the teachers did not deny the access as located within their offcial duty, but by asking for the documentary proofs to admit the child they made their institutional authority evident to the parents. The teachers were discharging a gate-keeping function and exercising their power 90

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to regulate (if not deny) access to the institution. They were also asserting their authority by determining the “norms” of the organisation – like that of cleanliness, health, and investment – which would in turn consolidate the power to regulate that they would continue to maintain even after granting access. This authority is institutional to some extent, but is also derived from their position in the social hierarchy. Interestingly, in the second instance, Mrs. Jain made an “automatic” connection between the mother’s occupation and the caste. Such inference was not new and was encountered on several occasions. While caste was not explicitly made a part of the discourse, it was an inseparable element of the construction of the “slum dwellers” in the school’s neighbourhood. In both instances, the teachers started explaining how ill-mannered the people in the neighbourhood were and how much they disrespected the teachers. On the basis of her experience, Mrs. Nilesh was particularly clear on the unwarranted arrogance of the safai karamcharis of MCD who she thought were challenging to deal with. She was of the view that they should be “shown their correct place” right at the time of enrolment to avoid issues later. She said that the parents from the vicinity though that “we are always sitting idle . . . how much labour we do, how would they know . . . the one who bears it only knows it”. Mrs. Nilesh was the teacher of Class I and had been teaching for the past 12 years. Her husband worked as an engineer and both her children were pursuing undergraduate studies at a State university. Mrs. Nilesh usually reached the school an hour later than the actual reporting time. She usually came to the school in-charge’s room having marked the attendance in her class and having assigned griha-karya [homework] for completion in the class. Her class was either unmanaged or managed by some “senior” students (Class  5). Otherwise, any other teacher walking by the class slapped, scolded, and warned the children to be inside their room. However, Mrs. Nilesh ensured that she leaves her bag in her classroom and a register on her desk. She said, “You never know who comes at what time . . . at least they will see my bag and understand that the class is not unattended”. She went back to the class at 12 pm when the parents started coming to pick up their wards. About her class she said, “These children trouble so much . . . keeping registers is much better than tolerating them . . . as it is, what can we teach in the frst class . . . even they don’t come to study . . . nor do their parents send them to school to study”. In discussions with the teachers of the school regarding the RtE obligation to register a child even without any formal certifcate, it was clear that the teachers were aware of the mandate. Mrs. Nilesh acknowledged it too, but made a case for it being meaningful to still ask for documented evidences. She said, If at the time of entry itself parents get a janampatri or affdavit made, it would be good for the child in the long-run . . . issues that 91

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come-up later will be taken care of . . . even if the child drops out and when we don’t give her the certifcate. . . . If we continue to take admissions without certifcates the school will turn into a birth registry centre . . . what will the other departments do if these jobs are also carried out by schools? Later on they [the government] will also ask us to do caste registry. In a group discussion with six teachers of the school, the teachers agreed that the parents’ running around for the documentary evidences of birth and caste was surely not a waste of time and had some larger utility or purpose. Mrs. Jain said, “When the child is born these people take it too casually . . . don’t even make the effort to register the birth . . . if we compromise on such things no one will go in for the registration”. She added, “It’s easy to say but we should not admit anybody without proof . . . anything can happen these days . . . the police too asks us not to employ even servants without registering their proper identity with certifed proofs”. Another teacher added, “They know very well how to get the certifcates. Many get fake certifcates of caste made”. Therefore, logically it was for the general “social good” and “safety” that the documentation was being asked for, even when it was not needed. By getting the paper-work done, the teachers saw themselves performing their social duties, irrespective of the institutional role by which they were bound. It was here that the State school’s function as a “checkpoint with gatekeepers” became more lucid (Das, 2004). The perception of the teachers about the community also came across through these instances. The idea of an uncivilised, morally misplaced, and anti-social Other, guided these perceptions. In the act of regulating the access to school, the teachers engaged in the act of defning the Other and legitimising their own perceptions. Also, by regulating access and performing the gate-keeping function, the teachers framed their authority over entry to the public system of education – despite the RtE apparently taking away (though in ambiguous ways) this power to regulate. On a different occasion, while refusing to accept the duty orders that required the teachers to go to the houses in the neighbourhood to enrol people on the electoral roll, Mrs. Alpana made a strong case for the diffculty that “women teachers” face in doing the work. When the offcer, who brought the orders, left she explained more “openly” to me: Now that the two offcials have gone, I can tell you what I was saying . . . all these children stay in one-room homes. And before [the appropriate] age they get to know a lot many things. They know everything .  .  . what would they do? .  .  . [T]hey will talk among themselves about it. This argument did not appear to be related to the duty or the refusal to take the orders, and it was diffcult to make sense of the case that the teachers 92

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were making. The narrative continued as Shivali also joined and shared her view: Mrs. Alpana:

Shivali:

Addiction is a huge problem in this area . . . going to their homes is futile. Some fathers are even unable to stand straight and talk; they stink when they talk. It’s not the children’s fault but what can we do? Nobody here is interested in studies, sometimes children come to school on an empty stomach and complain of stomach ache . . . there is no concept of cleanliness .  .  . everything around stinks .  .  . how would anybody work here? . . . . you know Alpana madam hinted about this to Mr. Sahdev because otherwise the BLO [Booth Level Offcer] says that we are sitting at the school and thinking such things; but the truth is that every teacher knows every child in her class and the family culture they come from . . . when we refuse duty the offcers blame only the teachers, but never the parents.

The poignant case the teachers made about the pathos of the location and the “uncivilised” ways of the people were directed at proving that there was no question of their going for any sort of work in the community. The ideas of “public” institutions, the civil functionaries, State, and the citizen were also implicit in these interactions. Given that this experience was spatially and structurally located in a State school, the meaning of public education is also shaped in this process. Such narratives highlight the need to further examine the questions power and their refraction through narrative of modernity, inclusion, and equality in the urban educational contexts. The social hierarchies underlying this negotiation of power between the educated and modern urban middle class, and the people in the margins also become problematic in these narratives. In this context, it becomes relevant to broaden the frame of analysis of school practice and to locate the teacher and the community, in an intersectional matrix of institutional as well as social authority or power as constituted by class, caste, and gender. Understanding the teacher only as a peripheral civil servant in this sense appeared to be insufficient here. The confict in the two cultural contexts was deep seated in the teachers’ everyday knowledge or common sense about the space where they were working, and was conveyed in various forms (Delpit, 2006). These narratives also uncannily match the fndings of Dalal (2015), Majumdar (2004), PROBE (1999, 2011), and Subrahmanian (2005). On the one hand, the narratives highlight how ideas about heredity-based uneducability of the people in the socio-economic margins are constituted. On the other hand, these also 93

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bring out an experience of lack of meaningfulness of their own work among the teachers. A close reading of the narratives would indicate that the teachers in some way felt guilty about not discharging their functions and being on the sly – but they rationalised this by making a case for the uneducability of the children. The complexity of the case was situated in how a group of teachers feels trapped in a set of circumstances which they could have avoided, given their class position. Gender in family and conjugal spaces is one of the missing links in this context (Chakravarty, 2011, 2012). The informal teacher talk in the girls shift of the school primarily revolved around the conjugal spaces to an extent that the school looked like an extension of home space for the teachers. The case of male teachers also did not seem to be much different in the second/boys shift of the same school. Five of the male teachers in the second shift had their own real estate businesses aside of their jobs as teachers. One teacher, Baldev, ran a coaching centre from his home where Mathematics and Accountancy were taught at the senior secondary level. He said, My income is too meagre to support my family, so I have to earn from other sources as well. Our family has been into real estate for some time and now we have a bigger offce in Rohini; so the offce at my home was vacant – I thought what better than using it for a noble purpose; my brother helps in it. The principal also confrmed, “For males, making good money is necessary; while you do other things you can also teach here. It’s only a matter of fve hours”. Albisetti’s (1993) work explains how gender plays a role in the teaching profession. It explains the mass exodus of males from the teaching profession in the nineteenth century in America, and of the increasing feminisation of the teaching profession. It examines the stricter norms for recruitment and retention that worked against “those who saw teaching as a transient profession, coupled with high paying industrial jobs – which in turn made the opportunity cost for choosing teaching very high” (as cited in Johnson, 2008, p.  4). This also explains the context of male teachers here for whom this opportunity cost that made them disinterested or less invested in education. This was compounded by the low status of the profession. The situation in the case of women teachers is somewhat different. In the Indian context, while over the years, there has been an increase in the participation of women in education and work, their choices have remained constrained and gendered (Gautam, 2015). While teaching is a preferred profession for women for it is seen as a feminine or “soft” job (Chanana, 2007), it may not refect the choice of women. These factors

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shape the aspirations and motivations of teachers and the circumstances that they fnd themselves in. Teaching in itself did not appear to inspire most of those who were working as teachers (Ramachandran et al., 2005). The motivation came from the convenience that the job provided to a particular social group – “safe for women”, “soft”, “regularity of income”, “permanence”, and the like. While teaching was not a profession of choice for the teachers with whom I engaged during the course of this study, it was inaccessible to another set of people. Jagwati, Neetu, Surveen, and Zahid (community workers of the NGOs) all aspired to become regular teachers. While teaching was not a frst choice for them, after having worked with the families and children from the slums they aspired to become teachers. All of them had studied in MCD schools and graduated from the Sarvodaya Vidyalayas in Delhi. This was in sharp contrast with the teachers who were teaching at the school. It was not that they were much critically aware in terms of understanding teaching– learning or challenges of the community – their ideas about uneducability were also drawn from the everyday discourse on the slum dwellers. However, they had experienced working in a community context, were closer to the families, and were motivated to teach in government schools. They wanted to undergo formal teacher training after the experience of working with the children from the slums. Zahid and Jagwati were known for being hardworking and sincere, so much so that their employers considered them as assets. Both of them were convinced that the community they work for would gain from formal education like them. Jagwati had learnt from her observations in her vicinity that educated people (particularly women) were able to lead more dignifed lives. She constantly compared how she was living a better life than others around her. She said, My mother and father do not know how to read . . . nor did they teach my elder sister for long. . . . I am the second child in my family who has completed schooling . . . and we both know that we are in a better position than our parents. Had I not been educated I would not have got a job, I would not have known so many things that I know now . . . therefore for all women it is necessary to complete schooling and then take-up independent work. However, Jagwati and Zahid faced several challenges in joining a teacher education programme. They had over a period found that neither did they have the eligibility (in terms of qualifying marks) nor the privilege to invest time in a full-time teacher education programme. While Zahid realised this soon and dropped the idea, he felt that he can do the same work even outside the school in different ways. Jagwati wanted to work as a teacher in a government school – not because she preferred the public system, but

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because the private schools were not an option for her. She knew that she wouldn’t get a job at a private school given that she was herself educated in Hindi medium. Despite attempts her economic background did not allow her to leave the job and pursue a full-time programme, but she hoped to overcome this hurdle in future.

Making sense Ramachandran (2016) argues that the debate on public schoolteachers is highly polarised. On one hand, there is a large constituency (comprising administrators, researchers, and writers) “who have taken to regular ‘teacherbashing’” (p. 1). On the other hand, an equally vocal community of scholars and practitioners take a diametrically opposite viewpoint. The purpose of this chapter is to be on neither of these poles. Rather, it has looked at the social distance between the teacher and the margins in attempting to make sense of how the processes of marginality are refracted through the social structures of class and to some extent how caste and gender are implicit in these processes. Delpit’s (2006) contextualisation of how the difference in the teachers’ and students’ “cultures” shapes “the silenced dialogue” in the schools where cultural gaps between the two constitute the ethos relevant here. She says, “The upper and middle classes send their children to school with all the accoutrements of the culture of power; children from other kinds of families operate within perfectly wonderful and viable cultures but not cultures that carry the codes or rules of power” (p. 25). In the situation that I observed it came across that the teachers did not see their work as important. Yet, being in a public position not only provided the teachers a sense of security and generated a feeling of being in control and thus being in a position to “govern” the others and the self. As Batra (2009) puts it: School teaching in India has declined to the status of a least favoured profession over the last three decades. It has largely become a last resort of educated unemployed youth, part-time business people and young women seeking to fnd a part-time socially acceptable profession. Yet, the massive demand for teachers in both government and private schools almost guarantees a job to most participants of the better teacher education programmes. Government and nongovernment organisation-led educational school reforms have paid little attention to this reality and continue their focus on improving access to schooling and building a more convivial teaching-learning environment. In this context, it would be necessary to develop an informed understanding of who comes to be a school teacher. (p. 12) 96

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While working with the teachers at the school, I found myself confused about how the adjective of meekness explained their position. As and when I looked from within the purview of the system of schooling and the hierarchies therein, it appeared to offer a way of understanding the situation. However, in a broader social context, the teachers had a position of power vis-à-vis the marginal social group that attended the school. Thus, the paradox of meek dictator made sense. Yet, while the teachers were in subordinate positions and experienced powerlessness in the system, they also critiqued it continuously, twisted its rules and mandates and generated states of exception (Das & Poole, 2004), negotiated with it, and maintained it for their convenience. Ramachandran et al. (2008, p. 12) state: We are confronted with this reality: regardless of the ‘system’ there are always teachers and head teachers who are able to elicit parental and community support to improve the overall learning environment in the school. Equally, notwithstanding the best programmes and high budget allocations, a group of indifferent administrators, head teachers and teachers becomes a stumbling block in improving the learning environment. The softness of the profession in many ways served the interests of a classed and gendered cadre – and this appeared as one manifest form of disenfranchisement of the teachers. This safeguarding of class interests appeared all the more political when it was explicitly based on depriving the other classes from what was of interest to them – or what now constitutes a fundamental right. While within the system the teachers were positioned as meek dictators, from an outsider’s perspective they appeared to construct and preserve “the business as usual” and in turn weaken their own capacity to act upon their and others’ social circumstances. Further in this case, in almost complete absence of the traditional role that a teacher performed (i.e. transaction of the offcial curriculum) how the teachers’ “power” is constituted was a question that pointed to the need to reimagine politics of school knowledge or how hidden curriculum works in school contexts.

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7 EXPERIENCING CHILDHOOD IN THE MARGINS Meanings and aspirations

This chapter describes how the children, in school and at work, experienced the relations around them, and made sense of their experiences and aspirations in relation to the social axes of caste and class as situated in the context developed in the preceding chapters. The chapter has been organised in four parts. The frst concerns the school’s pedagogic environment and the children’s engagement with it. It presents the social distances at the school, which were described to some extent in the previous chapter. However, here the focus is on the children’s experiences. The second part relates to how the schoolchildren engaged in making sense of their experiences and of the categories of the adult world which shape these experiences. It comprises a selection of engagements on two stories or narratives from which the children’s ideas and experiences of caste, class, and educational aspirations come to the fore. The descriptions in the third part take the reader out of the school, as it presents selected accounts of a group of children working as rag-pickers. It develops a picture of the social world that emerges from this experience. This is followed by the fourth part that makes sense of the descriptions. The work presented in this chapter spanned over the entire period of the study, and thus the descriptions oscillate in time.

Part I

Social distances and punishment

The previous chapter outlined the strong perception among the teachers of uneducability of the children from the slum. This belief operated in the backdrop in which the schoolchildren made sense of their social world, the self, and the Other. This knowledge construction was further strengthened by the norms of the school. These norms were established through the practices in which the “body” assumed a central role. Two kinds of interactions between the teachers and the children that constituted this process are presented here. Disciplining and punishing Several researches have examined punishment and discipline as being central to the concept of the modern school, particularly based on Foucault’s 98

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(1977) idea of disciplining. While in the academic discourse there has been a focus on understanding how corporal punishment has been replaced by more organised (or legitimate) forms of discipline, in the modern institutional spaces – including schools and families (Deacon, 2006) – reports and studies continue to highlight the persistence of corporal punishment (Kacker, Varadan, & Kumar, 2007; UNICEF, 2017). Punishment also comes to be examined from the standpoint of freedom and the innate virtue of the child or the discourses around the concept of the pre-social child (Rousseau, 1762). “Politics of childhood”, as it comes across through the works of Aries (1962) and Holt (1975) – where childhood is seen as a social construction of modern adult institutions and their practices – also provides a frame to analyse punishment. These lenses helped in understanding the discourse around punishing children in the school. On separate occasions, mothers of some of the schoolgirls argued in favour of corporal punishment for the child. In the perception of these adults, punishment was one of the very effective ways of “teaching” the child at school. The mothers’ perspective on beating the child could be understood as being constituted by their image of a “traditional” school. They understood punishment as a part of the functions that they expected the school to perform – of “training” the child in what they thought was worthwhile. Shabnam’s and Aarti’s mothers, while debating on the matter of the schoolteachers’ attitude, distinguished between two kinds of punishments. One kind was in which the punishment is for the “beneft” of the child. It included punishment on matters like absenting from the school without reason, for not doing homework, for not paying attention in the classroom, and for getting poor marks. The second kind included situations when a child was beaten for “other reasons” or excessively. That is, when a teacher’s anger had nothing to do with teaching or was unjustifed. Aarti’s mother said, “Sometimes they [the teachers] just beat our children because they are in a bad mood; or because they feel these children are useless”. The mothers therefore distinguished between the use of punishment as a strategy for educating and “beating for personal reasons”. In a discussion on the prohibition on corporal punishment imposed by the RtE Act, 2009, the teachers strongly disagreed with the mandate. One teacher felt that punishment was an instrument for taming the social group that they worked with to prevent them from becoming “criminals” and deviants. The notions of heredity-based educability (Kumar, 2020), as discussed in the previous chapter, with deep-seated social hierarchies based on class and caste were implicit in this belief. Although the teachers perceived their work within the rubric of control, surveillance, and institutional authority (Foucault, 1977), the rubric itself was defned by a perceived sense of social distance between the self and the Other. In a way, the control extended beyond the institutional authority and position. Situated in this context, the aim that the teachers attributed to their work was not of “delivering” or “transacting” the school curriculum. It was seen in the purview of a larger 99

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social function of moralising a particular social group, which could potentially become (or was) a “nuisance maker”. This discourse was omnipresent in the relations and environment at the school. The social distance thus constructed, worked as the backdrop against which the child made meaning about the social world and her location in it. As I talked to the schoolgirls about their experiences of corporal punishment, they felt that the teachers were “very good” and did not punish them too often. Since this was contrary to what I had observed, I inquired further to understand how they perceived punishment. From the discussions it emerged that the girls qualifed only “isolation” as a severe punishment. That is, they only considered being asked to get out of the class, to stand-up with hands raised, to sit in the corner alone, or ordering others not to talk to a particular child, as excessive punishments. Regarding the teachers slapping them, pulling their ears, and holding their hands frmly, the girls said that these were “normal” and should not be counted as severe punishments. The teachers’ scolding did not qualify as punishment at all. Aarti explained, “Scolding can’t be a punishment. Ma’am ji speaks like this . . . It’s their way; they are like that . . . how could it be punishing?” Hema, (monitor of Class V B) on my frst visit to the class when her cohort was making noise, playing, shouting, and running around, said to me, “all of them have a habit of being dealt with sternly [sakhti ki aadat hai]; unless you beat one or two they will not listen to you”. Hema had been given a long stainless steel ruler by the class teacher to “discipline” her peers. However, Hema said that she had never used it for beating any of her peers as she felt it would cause pain. However, the girls could not articulate the absence of this feeling in how the teachers related to them. For “mistakes” of varied kinds (like roaming around, shouting outside or inside the classroom, being in another class, spoiling their clothes, spilling the midday meal, toileting accidents, and fghting with each other) the children got a beating from the teachers. Two teachers, Santosh and Alpana, were considered as the ones who had “heavy hands” and most children of the school were scared of them. They all ran to their respective classrooms as soon as any of the two teachers were seen approaching. Rinku used to enact this whole episode to make her peers laugh. She was popular for this act. At times she would twist one of her wrists in a peculiar way (to mock a “heavy-hand”) as a cue to remind the peers of the episode – this was enough to make the girls laugh. Punishment appeared to be so overarching in the life world of the children that they seemed to have accepted it as a given or as predestined – so much so that violation of respect and body was completely internalised. The children were “habituated” of being beaten to an extent that they could not analyse the situation. When asked questions that demanded engaging with their experience, they shied away or changed the topic. However, in the instances of punishment in the stories that I narrated (as described in Part II of this chapter), they examined the experience of punishment in general. 100

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While punishment was a signifcant experience and a routine, it was not the most effcient way of “managing” the children. Punishing the children brought teachers in trouble if the parents complained about it. (I did not observe such instances though.) Even the teachers felt that ideally they would not want to beat the children now because corporal punishment, increasingly, has become diffcult to justify. To contextualise this it is relevant to draw from Foucault (1977). While exploring modern institutional punishment, Foucault explains how the pain of the body no longer is the constitutive element of the penalty. The body now serves as an intermediary or instrument which is caught up in a system of constraints and privations. Yet, the body continues to assume a peculiar place in the act of disciplining and punishing. Building his thesis titled “the body of the condemned” he says, “Punishment like forced labour or imprisonment . . . has never functioned without a certain additional element that concerns the body itself . . . which is enveloped, increasingly, by non-corporal nature of the penal system” (p. 16). Foucault examines justifcation for punishment as a strategy intended to “obtain a cure”. In the school, the teachers’ justifcation was enveloped by a particular idea of the Other as the nuisance maker and the self as the victim or as morally upright. As described earlier, punishments of isolation had a deeper impact on the schoolgirls. They felt much more humiliated by such punishments. Komal had said, “bacche hain to maar to padegi hi na [we are children so we will get beaten] . . . but when madam asks me to stand outside the class, I feel very bad”. Social isolation was an experience limited only to the school and the humiliation in front of the peers was the main source of feeling bad. It was such ways of “punishing” or “communicating” that appeared to be much more powerful than corporal punishment. This falls in line with Foucault’s (1977) statement: “The expiation that once rained down upon the body must be replaced by a punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will and the inclinations or the ‘soul’” (p. 16). The observations at the school continued to lead me to view how the body got involved in inciting such penalty on the “soul”. While the implications in certain kinds of punishments did not appear to be corporal, they were directed through it in an intricate and complex manner. There was a particular way in which the children’s bodies were made conspicuous. The teachers shouted at the children for reasons that could not be related directly to the “fault” in question. For example, when a child was constantly talking to a peer despite general reminders from Shivali, she said loudly enough for everybody to hear, “Kanu! Just look at yourself, especially your legs; how dark they are looking . . . at least use soap when you bathe. When did you last bathe?” When the other children started laughing, Shivali asked, “Why are you all laughing? Should I show you all a mirror?” In another instance, when a child was found sitting in her older sister’s class rather than her own, Ms. Alpana says, “You are the worst girl of the school. In how many days do you take a bath? Both the sisters do not bathe”. In such instances, these comments 101

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looked arbitrary. It was this arbitrariness that framed the nature and extent of a teacher’s control over the children in the institutional setting. The children were constantly regulated by remarks about their body and appearance. This worked as an effcient strategy (for inciting a silence) considering that this was a girls’ school. Such comments made the girls feel awkward and shy. Their body language and expressions changed too. When I tried talking to some of them about this, they only smiled and changed the topic. Only one of the girls, Aarti, who was scolded by a teacher in a similar fashion on the same day, said, “It makes me feel awkward; I feel embarrassed”. The physical presence of the child brought her into the purview of serving some functions in the school. Cleaning (sweeping the classroom and cleaning the table and chairs in the in-charge’s room) was one such function. The girls also ran several petty errands for the teachers. One of the most common and accepted one was where the girls were sent out of the school to the neighbourhood shops to buy stationery and photocopy papers. At times, when the teachers decided to celebrate some occasion in the school, the children were sent out to bring food items for the teachers’ get-together from a nearby shop. On the last working day of every month, which is a half day at the schools, this was a routine. The children were not chosen arbitrarily for this task. Only the “good girls” did the task, and became subjects of envy for the other girls. Some themselves went to ask the teachers if they wanted them to bring something, whereas some felt disturbed as their classroom engagements were disturbed, but could not refuse the teachers’ order. On one occasion, after school hours, Shivali was seated on a bench and two girls of the class were oiling her hair. As I happened to be passing by, Shivali stopped me and praised the students, “These two girls do a very good head massage”. She had made them stay back to oil, massage, and comb her hair. She had brought oil and a comb from home for this purpose. When I talked to her about this and how this may impact the students, she was visibly upset and said, “My headache is a result of shouting at them [the students]; they can at least do that much for their teacher”. Shivali shared that on every last working day of the month, she brought oil from home, and the two students themselves came to her to ask if she wanted them to oil her hair. Therefore, in her understanding the girls did it “willingly”. In Shivali’s opinion, the other students felt envious of the two “preferred” children. On a different occasion, a child of Class I met a toileting accident and defecated in her uniform. The teacher called another girl from Class IV, who was the child’s relative, to clean the child. The older child dutifully did the job, reported to the teacher, and asked for soap to wash her hands. The teacher asked her to throw away the soap after washing her hands. Another girl of Class IV helped the younger child change her uniform. These episodes were fairly routinised at the school. How not only the “good girls” but also all the children internalised this role vis-à-vis teachers, explicated in a broader sense how the children learnt about the social 102

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relations. The construction of the feeling of “envy” disengaged the girls from problematising their experience. The teachers also established a code of conduct that the children were supposed to follow. This included some behavioural rules which among others included to not touch the teacher and to maintain a physical distance from the teacher. These rules worked only for the students; teachers could arbitrarily follow or break them. These could be seen being broken particularly during the acts of punishment and in those like the ones described in the preceding section. The observation that children freely touched me and my belongings, explored the books that I carried to the class, and that we shared water from each other’s water bottles if there was a need (especially given that the school did not have a regular water supply), did not sit well with the teachers. Some also expressed their discomfort with my visiting the neighbourhood in which the children resided. One of the girls of Class V B was once leaning against me while putting on her shoes. When Mrs. Joshi (a nursery class teacher) saw this, she said to the child, “You are not supposed to touch teachers; learn to behave yourself . . . don’t you see the wall; you should take its support and wear your shoe”. The children had internalised the rule and never touched a teacher or her belongings unless a teacher herself expressed the need to do so (like carrying the teacher’s bag from one room to the other). On occasions when children did so accidently, they were reminded of their mistake immediately or they themselves realised their mistake and apologised to the teacher. The teachers transacted a set of social norms in the school and socialised the children in these. Concepts like that of hidden curriculum, while applicable to the context, did not seem to entirely explain the observations. This was particularly because these norms were not “hidden” in curricular relations. These instead became the rationale for not transacting the curriculum. Bourdieu’s (1974) concepts of cultural reproduction and habitus were helpful in situating the children’s responses and reactions in a perspective. However, these did not completely capture how the children “felt” or experienced the negotiation of power at the school. Despite the fact that the girls at the school expressed deep respect for the teacher and a common-sense belief that most things are for their good, there were zones where they were silent and could not explain the teacher’s behaviour. They were also unable to express or make sense of their own feelings and experience. Among one of the ways to understand this was talking to the children upfront. However, this would have required making the discussion “explicit”, which in turn involved three issues: (1) the nature of silences that the children maintained on such matters, and their shying away or changing topics, made it clear that they were not comfortable “talking” about these; (2) “interacting” (through interviews or FGDs) on abstract ideas did not appear to be a 103

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reasonable  approach to carry out focussed work with primary schoolchildren; and (3) it appeared diffcult to talk about a subject that was in general never talked about. It would have involved interacting with the children on implicit concepts of caste, class, and gender and their understanding of these. How my own identity would have intervened in the process was also not easy to pre-empt. More than anything, I did not want to impose my views on the children, which could have happened in general interactions. It was during these instances that I thought about stories as a medium of engaging with the children.

Part II

Stories as a medium of relating

Observations and conversations like those described in Part I of the chapter furthered me to think about ways in which I could interact with the children in a more focussed manner on their experiences and the underlying notions of caste and class. Although the idea was to discuss and understand how children articulate these categories, being blunt and interacting in a direct/confrontational fashion was something from which I wanted to refrain. This was primarily to ensure that these discussions were subtle and nuanced like they were in their daily lives, and that the children were not made vulnerable. It was while pondering on these lines, that I explored storytelling as a way of engaging on the categories. I engaged with the children by telling and listening to a variety of stories from the very beginning of the feldwork at school. From these experiences, it emerged that the children had a more than ordinary interest in narrating and listening to stories of varied kinds. They also actively assumed a mode of asking questions and discussing as I narrated stories. In some sense, these stories also provided us a context for meaningmaking. Some characters from the stories and some situations became a point of reference for us and frequently emerged in related and unrelated contexts, which helped in understanding how children thought about a situation. Reading of the works like those of Bruner (1991), Caruthers (2006), Kumar (1996), Roney (1989), and Matthews (1984) helped in furthering this understanding and in developing a way of working and corroborating the observations. I also recited the autobiographical narratives of Dalit authors – who presented their silences when they described the exclusion or marginalisation they experienced during their childhood. I collected certain classic and contemporary narratives or cases that could facilitate discussions on the experience of poverty and the concept of the State, which in turn could enable a refection on the nature of economic development and conficts therein. Some newspaper reports of cases where caste and class were the centrepiece of a situation and could support a discussion on “exclusion” were also included. However, “childhood” was another aspect that 104

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naturally emerged in these engagements. In many ways the stories were much more useful in understanding children's meaning-making than they were in making sense of how the adult world is experienced by children. These were not the only themes that were discussed in these sessions but here given the focus of the work only a selection is presented. In the following section, I present the work on two of these stories or autobiographical accounts (Morey, 2001; Valmiki, 2007), where I was able to engage with children more intensively. A brief overview of the broad features of the narrated excerpts is given in the following: i

In these narrative excerpts, family, community, and schools assume the central place in the authors’ experience of social exclusion during the formative years of life. The authors explicate the politics of school and community life by highlighting the organisation of social relations (with peers, teachers, and the staff) that worked to maintain the status quo. ii The excerpts raise critical questions on the common-sense belief and offcial narrative that the “modern” institutions of the State are democratic and provide social mobility (Beth, 2007), and that migrating to a city enables shedding the cultural baggage of caste and/or other forms of discrimination. The excerpts highlight the complex ways in which power (with respect to caste and class) is centred, legitimised, and distributed through schools. iii Each author takes a different approach to this presentation. For example, while Valmiki (2007) presents how his schoolteacher resorted to punishing, beating, abusing, and silencing him, Morey (2001) found teachers who were “patronising” with their “appreciation” and “generosity” towards him. While Valmiki’s narration clearly makes caste discrimination problematic, Morey draws a complex account of how the economic conditions, dispositions, and possibilities are sociohistorically and culturally determined. iv While the social class of the authors could be potentially deciphered in the excerpted narratives, references to caste were implicit particularly in their experiences in urban institutional contexts. The authors highlighted how the nature of caste confict differed in urban settings, where discrimination/untouchability rarely took manifest forms. It comes across that the migration to a bigger centre rendered explicit discrimination weaker. However, marginalisation took subtle forms. The narrations (in Hindi) were followed by focus groups and other extended activities, such as thinking about alternate possibilities in the narratives and open-ended writing. While I narrated other stories as well where caste was not the centrepiece, those narratives are not drawn-upon here. Some of these themes were also a part of the school curriculum. 105

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Children’s conception of caste and class In early discussions with the girls, it was evident that the terms such as Dalit, jaati [caste], achhoot [untouchable], gareebi [poverty], and varg bhed [class] were accessible to them. However, their meanings were more implicitly understood and not clearly articulated by them. Generally, these meanings appeared to be thought of as taboo that should not be explicitly articulated or discussed. For example, in discussions on a newspaper report, Anshu referred to an instance from her village where a family was asked to pay a fne for drinking water from the “thakurs’” tap. Rinku went on to say that a particular caste group was cut-off [hukkapaani band] from the village because of some reason. Hema described how a “poor” person was asked to pay fne because he had used water from “somebody’s” well that polluted the water. These descriptions were constructed without using the terminologies associated with caste discrimination. During interactions, the term that got articulated was bhedbhaav (discrimination). Although the children were not able to explain the term, they furnished examples to demonstrate its application. Shabnam presented an example and explained, “When you give somebody less than the others for some wrong reason”. In this instance, it appeared that while the conceptual category of caste was familiar to the students, it was not deployed by them in the form of a concept frequently or without a sense of discomfort (and probably fear as well). This seems to be at variance with the fndings of some of the studies in rural contexts that explored Dalit children’s experiences (such as Nambissan, 2009; Subrahmanian, 2005; Ramachandran and Naorem, 2013) by talking to children about the discriminations they were facing at the school due to their caste identity. In this urban school context, caste was not talked about openly. Caste and humiliation at school: The story of Om Prakash and his village school I referred to Om Prakash Valmiki’s Joothan (Valmiki’s, 1997, 2007) and compiled the author’s narratives about his childhood, family and socioeconomic situations, experiences of school, relationship with teachers and peers, and about his life as an author and activist. I ensured that I do not use the concepts of class and caste at any point in addition to how these are presented in the autobiography. Experiencing humiliation What caught the children’s interest the most in this story was the behaviour of the “others” towards Om Prakash. They constantly empathised with the author and consistently referred to how they would have felt placed in Om 106

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Prakash’s shoes. This was the frst story where children applied the concept of jaati or caste to explain the experiences of Om Prakash: Shabnam: This story makes me sad . . . Rinku: . . . but I liked the end when Om Prakash becomes a writer and writes his own story I: What upset you? Shabnam: Everybody behaved very badly with Om Prakash; master ji made him clean the whole school and still didn’t let him sit in the class with the others Rinku: He had to sit near the door where he couldn’t even listen or see Other children also agreed that this was the worst part of the story. What mattered to the children the most was the experience of humiliation that Om Prakash went through as a child in the school. Though his experiences outside the school were similar, they were not referred to. The battering by the teacher, the amount of work that Om Prakash was subjected to at school, and the humiliation this would have caused left a signifcant impression on the children and became a reference point for rest of the discussions. All the children were talking about this incident as if they could vicariously experience it. Rinku says, “This should not be done to any child”. Exclusion from the classroom process and the gross discrimination with Om Prakash were the primary reasons that made the group conclude that the master ji’s behaviour was discriminating. Shabnam applied the concept of discrimination as she felt that the beating and punishments could not be justifed on any ground. Regarding why they thought master ji behaved that way, even if unjustifed, the children started speaking simultaneously: “He was dirty . . . he was dark . . . he wore torn clothes . . . he was poor and stayed at a dirty place . . . he was in mud from head to toe”. Additions to this list of reasons stopped when Anshu said, “because he was a neechi jaati [lower caste]; the bade aadmi [big men/people] hated him”. There was a pause, after which some expressed agreement while others remained silent. I asked: I: Anshu: Shabnam:

What is neechi jaati? I can’t explain; it is something It is a poor jaati

Having heard this, most in the group agreed with Shabnam’s explanation. However, no one could explain the meaning of jaati. Rinku intervened and brought the discussion back on track: Rinku: I:

He should have left the school . . . in his place I would have run away from the school Maybe he could have joined another school 107

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Anshu: I: Shabnam: I: Aarti: I: Anshu:

But even in a new school people would have done the same; everybody in the village was like that Probably, the teacher and children would be different When the village is the same then how will people change? What if some relative of Om Prakash was a teacher and he went to that school? All Om Prakash’s relatives were very poor; they were not educated, they can’t be teachers Maybe the children at a new school would be better? The children learn from adults; they will do as the adults do

The argument that the nature of discrimination was all pervasive, and that the situation would not change on changing the school, indicated that the children were able to make a connection between the social context and school environment – and infer that the schools in a similar social context would be the same. Interestingly, the group expressed two ideas that a poor family (in which Om Prakash was a frst-generation learner) could not have had a member who was a teacher, and that children of the village would learn from the adults and therefore be the same. Here they were making connections between the social location and probabilities for Om Prakash and his family. They were also locating children in a broader social matrix – as a social group which had less voice and control over their situation and learning. Further, the idea of how exclusion happens – what kind of experience would lead a child to dropout, withdraw, abscond, and feel psychologically troubled – was articulated by the children. In this practice of exclusion, the attitude of the teacher towards the child was central. In this discussion, it emerged that the children could apply the concept of jaati and were aware of it. Punishing the teacher The discussion continued: I: Then what should be done? Shabnam: The frst thing is to call the police and punish the master ji; if he gets caught people will feel scared and not behave like him Regarding whether or not any one had seen or heard of a similar experience of a child in any school or their school, Aarti explained: Aarti: I: Aarti:

Our school is very good; all teachers are very good; they never scold us or beat us But don’t teachers scold children? No, it’s not like that. . . . That’s their [the teachers’] style of talking to us 108

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Aarti’s usage of the term “style” made the others in the group laugh. The same narrative as I had described in the section on punishment in this chapter, resurfaced almost undisturbed. The idea that master ji should be punished was agreeable to all. It was expressed that the story would have been much better if the teacher was punished in the end. The teacher was clearly the “villain” in the story – punishing him by handing him over to the police was an ideal solution to begin with. Despite being in a situation to decipher that what had happened to Om Prakash was categorically wrong – that what his teacher did was discriminating and thus needed to be punished for it – the girls were unable to compare and refect on their own experiences. The intention is not to say that what happened at the school could simply have been understood as discrimination against Dalit children. Instead, the intent is to make visible how the children refrained from even thinking about their own experience of punishment at the school despite having critiqued Om Prakash’s teacher. The interactions continued: I: Rinku: Shabnam: I: Shabnam: Hema:

But the teachers speak to each other softly, why do they speak to children in a different style? That’s because they are all teachers; we are all children; they can speak in any fashion to us I feel bad when scolded in front of others but when it is for our good, I do not feel bad Didn’t Om Prakash’s master ji also do so for his good? No, he was very bad .  .  . he wanted to keep him away from studies . . . he did not let him sit in the class after he cleaned the school . . . he used to beat such a little child But our teachers do not keep us out of the class

Although the detached context of the story enabled them to identify poverty and caste as the reasons for the “bad behaviour” with Om Prakash, and that these were the main causes of his exclusion, the children could easily distance their experience at school from that of Om Prakash’s. The notion that this was a “story” also intervened in this meaning-making by the children. When the children and I discussed their feedback on the narrative, Rinku said that she had heard a real story for the frst time. She explained, “stories are not real . . . but because you told us that it is written by Om Prakash himself and is about his real-life, it is a real story”. Shabnam interjected and said, “Stories are stories; they can’t be true or false!”. The hero and the victim The girls liked the part of the story the most in which Om Prakash’s father argues with the teacher. They said that it was Om Prakash’s father who was the most “heroic” or the best character of the story. They explained, “His 109

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father was so brave; despite being afraid he fought with the master ji when he saw him doing wrong with Om Prakash”. Interestingly, some of the children did not agree to the proposition of Om Prakash being the “hero” in the narrative. He was considered a good character. It appeared that the presentation of the protagonist as a victim did not ft into the children’s schema of a “hero”. The courage and ability to assert and fght against “wrong”, in their imagination, were the traits of a hero for them. Aarti said, “He was very weak; what could he have done? He didn’t even have the courage to tell his father until his father himself saw it”. Meaning of “weak” or “marginalised” therefore essentially involved an inability to challenge and resist, or lack of a “voice”. This was manifested in Om Prakash’s not complaining to his father and suffering in silence. Thus, strength to “resist” and “act” not only for oneself but also for others were essential traits of a hero; whether or not these attempts were successful did not appear to be very consequential. The children appeared excited when Om Prakash’s father intervened to counter the teacher. Regarding Om Prakash’s life as an adult, the children felt that he was now happy as he had become a known writer. Shabnam says, “I really liked that Om Prakash became a writer”. However, in their descriptions, no one in the group stated that Om Prakash had become a bada aadmi, despite the fact that they had used the concept in discussions to refer to “the others” who misbehaved with Om Prakash. It was also used for other characters in other stories. It appeared that the sense of deprivation that children attributed to Om Prakash did not allow them to relate the concept of bada aadmi with his life as an adult. When I specifcally asked them if they thought Om Prakash had become a bada aadmi, Aarti said, “You yourself said that he is old now, so why are you asking this?” Bada aadmi in this case was related only to age. Intersection of class and caste: The story of Dadasaheb Morey I narrated the story of the childhood experiences of Dadasaheb Morey (2001, pp. 16–21, 54–56, 102) keeping in mind the lines on which I had narrated Valmiki’s story. While Valmiki’s autobiography is well-known among educationists, Morey’s work is less frequently referred to. The difference between the two stories was that in Valmiki’s narration, the explicit violence of caste is presented; whereas, Morey sketches a picture where caste is in the backdrop of everyday experiences and constitutes the class position of the protagonist. He has described his experiences of education comprehensively. He belonged to a community that lived a nomadic life and made living by begging. I described to the children Morey’s life conditions and everyday events of his life, his oscillation between being in school and out-of-school, his teachers’ behaviour (which was not tyrannical as in the case of Valmiki), and how the other children made fun and did not befriend him. As I engaged with the children on this narrative, they understood this context much easily. 110

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A dear character The children found the life story of Morey much more engaging than any other that I narrated. Referred to as Dadasaheb, Morey became a dear character for the children. They wanted to know more about his life and referred to him when other stories were being narrated. At times their questions were so specifc that I wondered if they thought that I had personally known Dadasaheb. Some questions that the children asked were: “To which school did he go – is it nearby somewhere?” “How far was his grandfather’s home from his home?” “How was his grandfather – did he beat him?” “How many marks did he get in Class fve?” They continued to ask me to re-narrate it, and at times I overheard them discussing Dadasaheb in their groups. One day when I went to Shabnam’s house, she shouted out loudly to her cousin sister in order to introduce me, “she is the one who narrated Dadasaheb’s story”. It was the imagery of Morey’s social context, his familial ethos, his socio-politico position in the family, the behaviour of the others, and his appearance, which captured the interest. Morey’s life world, particularly his location in the matrix of social relationships as a child, was similar to that of the girls. This was something that they could assess. Shabnam said, “Dadasaheb’s story is like my story”. Despite being a male character, Morey’s childhood account resonated with the lives of the girls. Dadasaheb and Om Prakash in the words of the children In a discussion, the girls compared the two protagonists in the narrative accounts. They identifed elements of similarities and distinctions. i

The descriptors . . . both were small children, both were poor, both were good, both had parents, both lived in huts, both were in the village, both moved to the city, both grew older, Dadasaheb became a bada aadmi and Om Prakash became a lekhak [writer]

ii

Teacher’s expectation

Rinku: Shabnam: Aarti:

Dadasaheb wouldn’t have run away from the school because the teacher was good and he wanted him to study and become bada aadmi It was only the children who used to tease him, and some elders . . . but all elders were not bad He was very intelligent and master ji was very happy with him . . . his school was good 111

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iii Poverty; not caste Anshu: His dera shifted from one place to another and the school was at one place. . . . His father had very little money so he could not bear the expense of studies I: But still he could have gone to a school; couldn’t he? Anshu: No, even if he would have enrolled in some school then again when his dera would have moved he would have to leave it. His father was poor, so he could not stay at one place Aarti: The main reason was gareebi [poverty] I: What about Om Prakash? Aarti: His teacher did not want him to come to school, because he was a neechi jaati, but Dadasaheb was poor; not a neechi jaati iv

Caste: Maybe, maybe not

I: Aarti: Rinku: Shabnam: Hema: Rinku: Anshu:

How do you know he wasn’t from neechi jaati? I don’t know It can be; but don’t know Dadasaheb was poor; that was why children behaved badly with him [B]ecause he wore torn clothes and was dirty and hungry; so the good children of the school hated him; but master ji loved him But it can be also; one can’t say He was very small and was extremely poor therefore children used to trouble him . . . the rest of them were rich, they were older and healthier.

In the story only Dadasaheb’s peers “explicitly” misbehaved with and discriminated against him. The adults, specifcally the teachers, although strict and patronising, were not presented as tyrannical unlike in Om Prakash’s case. Therefore, unlike Valmiki’s case, in children’s understanding jaati did not explain the situation. As they said, children learn from adults, so could not have discriminated on the basis of caste without other adults in the story doing so. Why Morey’s peers behaved badly with him was explained by his physical appearance and economic condition. This distancing also resembled their real-life experience in the peer circle at times, where there were some differences in the ways of different groups’ uniforms, quality of their belongings, appearance, their lunches, and the teachers’ liking for them. Further, the difference in the nature of expression that Valmiki has used in his text brings out his experience of caste exclusion directly. Such a style clearly articulates the feelings of pain, humiliation, sense of deprivation,

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injustice, and resistance – so much so that a reader does not have to struggle to draw inferences. Whereas, the style of narration that Morey follows in most part is a recollection of his experiences with a sub-text situated in the conjugality of caste and class – and therefore most meanings have to be inferred. This lends a quality of “anonymity” and provides a cushion to the meanings in the text and the identity of the characters. In various ways, the children underlined that the main challenge in Dadasaheb’s education was the confict between the cultural–occupational reality of his family – they were sure that a life that demanded shifting from one place to another, and the structure of schooling that was not mobile, were the core challenges. However, they could not connect cultural–location with the concept of caste. The urban context in which the children are located did not provide them adequate equipment to formulate such a link. As we continued to discuss these life stories, several of the questions about the authors’ adult lives were addressed in due course—here I have only presented the discussions that enabled in making sense of the children’s meaning-making about certain social categories. Defning bada aadmi: Aspiration and education Despite the fact that both the authors engaged in writing and in articulating their life experiences, the children understood one as a bada aadmi and the other as a popular writer. The sense of deprivation, which was associated with Om Prakash’s life as a child and as an adult, did not allow him to be recognised as a bada aadmi. The idea that Morey’s teacher wanted to “include” him in the institution of school and saw some merit in his abilities, was an indicator of his access to the conditions of becoming a bada aadmi (which was contrary to the case of Valmiki). These conditions taken together gave the girls the space for imagining an upward mobility in his case. The close relation that children could see between Morey and their own lives would have enabled them to project their own aspirations to become bada aadmi. When I asked the children why they thought that Morey became a bada aadmi, Rinku explained, “[H]e went to school”, “his master ji helped him”, “he was very sharp; his master ji had said”, “he must be rich by now”. She contradicted my proposal that Morey may not have been rich by saying, “No, he is rich now and nobody teases him, now he can do whatever he wants to”. I had described the concept of the bada aadmi to some extent in Chapter 5. It was intriguing to see how the children used it in various situations. The concept emerged here in relation to some particular idea of success. Despite the fact that these details were not mentioned in the narration, the children were able to develop these meanings. The idea that Morey had become “rich” was constructed by Rinku on her own. This construction was

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based on two details about success – his being able to study and becoming upwardly mobile. However, as the discussion proceeded, it appeared that schooling was vaguely placed in the idea of bada aadmi. That is, schooling was not central to the process of becoming a “big man”. Komal: Rinku [to Komal]: Aarti:

Without padhai [studying] he would not have become a ‘big man’ It is not like that. Sanju [Rinku’s cousin brother] is not very educated, but he is now becoming a bada aadmi – everybody listens to him – even the neighbours And my father’s friend is illiterate but has a very big shop and an Ecco [a car]

After this, the children began sharing real-life cases where someone they had known had become a big man without having been to school. All the descriptions were about males. As I probed further, the following narratives emerged: Anshu: I: Anshu: Rinku: I: Shabnam:

Many such people stay in my neighbourhood. . . . Kuki’s father had never been to school but he is a bada aadmi I don’t know him; who is he? He is a big junk-dealer and owns a big house; he has just bought it – on instalments He did not become rich just like that, he established his own business Can one become a bada aadmi only by going to school? Ban bhi sakta hai, nahi bhi [may or may not]

Schooling was not seen as an essential condition for becoming a big man or a successful person. It was not unimportant, but its placement was vague. Although there is a traditional image of schooling that builds on the rhetoric of bada aadmi, this rhetoric didn’t match the reality that the children observed. The people around them seemed to have “gained” more from work than from school education. However, this work was of a special kind, as it involved ownership and investment of entrepreneurial resources. However, in the girls’ conception, schooling and work were not mutually exclusive. In their view, they both should or could go together. All the children confrmed that they had known people who had become bade aadmi while working along with studying. However, studying was only of secondary importance, while own business was essential. Bada aadmi was much more a class-related concept. What the children were referring to as a bada aadmi could well be understood as ameer [rich] aadmi. In fact, the children appeared to be using these terms interchangeably. However, the notion was neither very clear nor too nebulous – it appeared 114

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to be “fuid”; it took different forms and changed meaning depending on the context in which it was being used (another form in which it was used will be seen in Part III of the chapter). While being rich was the main constituent in the concept, there were several other indicators that could be present or absent (like education, a high post, a respectable status, or a job). It would be better described as a notion than as a concept. This differed from Sarangpani’s (1997) explanation of the same category in a rural context. This could be because of the rural–urban difference between the two studies. A different conception of bada aadmi emerged, when I engaged with the children who worked along with studying. These children’s worldview was based on their experiences with the social others, and was expressed in the vocabulary of “us” and “they”. Their experiences of work and struggle they undertook enabled the children to express resistance and talk on a variety of matters on which the schoolchildren appeared confused or silent. Their critique of the bade aadmi, the police, and the MCD, along with the narration of the everyday challenges of their work, emerged prominently in these interactions. In the following section, I present these accounts.

Part III

Rag-picking: Children at work

The feldwork of this part of the chapter was located in Sitapuri, which is known for being a prominent site for unregulated waste collection and sorting “business”. As per a survey done by the NGO, NLF, through which I entered the feld, around 90 per cent of the families residing there (spread in around 2000 households) were fully or partially dependent on waste collection or rag-picking and sorting. These were primarily Muslim (particularly migrants from Bangladesh) and Dalit families. While the parents did the sorting, the children (of the ages 4–16 years) were sent for collecting junk, particularly because the work did not require much training and was easily accessible to begin with – given their age and lack of perceived ability to do other economic work. In this way, the children supplemented the family income. NLF functionaries and local police personnel were of the view that the waste collection was a part of a larger trade that operates almost like a syndicate in Delhi. Several informants said that the work was growing and expanding day by day and bringing additional households in its purview. However, the State’s “vigilance” on the work was also increasing with frequent raids carried out by the MCD, in a bid to regulate the illegal business and replace it with State and corporate controlled formalised mechanisms. In 2001, waste picking was included in purview of the hazardous occupations in the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986 (Government of India, 1986). Nevertheless, a considerable number of children, mostly those living on the streets and in the slums of Delhi, are engaged in this work, and the studies indicate that this number is rising. It is estimated that in Delhi at least 30 per cent of the waste-pickers are children (from around a total 115

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of 1 lakh in 2009 (Chintan, 2009, p. 7) to more than 3 lakhs in 2015). A substantial proportion of the children are from the oppressed castes (Save the Children and Institute for Human Development, 2011). What I present here are the accounts of a group of 40 children living in this slum and engaged in rag-picking. The group included girls and boys between the ages of 7 and 15 years, some of whom were Dalits and some were labelled as “Bangladeshi Muslims”. All the children had been at the NLF’s centres for around 6 months and were beginning to attend government schools. NLF facilitated the feldwork especially FGDs with children. Along with discussions, the FGD also involved making notes, and writing narratives and short incidents. I present certain selected descriptions from these discussions under certain broad categories: (1) related to the children’s experiences of work and (2) that of interactions with “others”. (3) Their narrations about self are intertwined with these. Nature of the work Children’s work and routines The “rag-picking” work that the children do is often equated with that of garbage collection. However, the children identifed their work as that of “selecting junk” and distinguished it from that of garbage collection. They called themselves as junk dealers or kabaadi. One child said, “We pick kabaad; those who collect garbage are different – they only help their parents but we work . . . still people think that we are the same”. The work was a part of the everyday life in the slum, and came “naturally” to the children. A child usually began by accompanying friends to work or bringing things home while roaming around. Zahid (principal informant, NLF community worker) who was working with the community says, Each family has several children – even 10 in several cases. Almost 95% of the children here work as rag-pickers. From a very early age, about 6–7 years, they are introduced to the work – they assist parents at home in sorting the garbage. Actually, they grow up amidst the heaps of waste. They play with the waste as they do not have anything to play with . . . it’s their toy. Zahid said that the work becomes rigorous as the children transit into adolescence. The boys, particularly, start looking up to it as a source of upward mobility and try to pave their way to other allied areas. Some adolescents who had been engaged in this work since childhood, had “progressed” to being recognised as kabaadi – who deal directly or come to work closely with the bigger dealers. The children’s daily work involves getting up at 4 am in the morning and approaching the vicinities (by 5.30 am) pre-decided by 116

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the parents. Suraj (10 years old) said, “Delineating the territory is the toughest work among all. . . . We have to travel, argue with children already working there; we also don’t know the place well, and where we would fnd what”. The children usually begin with the garbage dumps around the residential clusters, and then move to the markets. The earlier the sack is flled, the earlier a child returns home and goes to another site, or goes to school. Each child in the group knew what he/she had to select and discard. They also assessed the condition of the items before selection or rejection. Employing their imagination to the waste was an important part of the everyday work, and it brought a good deal at times. From this experience, the children had come to recognise a variety of items, particularly metals and their forms and uses. Although the work comes across as an easily accessible economic opportunity, it involves varied kinds of threats to the health, life, and psychological well-being of the children. For example, the work usually took 6–8 hours. Mostly the children did not get food for all this while. Sabir (9 years old) said, “At times we faint or feel dizzy, especially in summers; we sweat so much that we are all wet . . . once we were checked by a doctor at NLF school and he told us that all of us suffer from khoon ki kami [anemia]”. They had to rely on the thrown food or request for it from “kind looking” people mostly “didi’s”. The nature of the work led to varied kinds of pains (particularly in the spine). This was amplifed by the amount of travel the work involved. Keeping their bags aside was to be strictly avoided as it could mean losing the collection and getting a beating at home. Along with several explicit physical struggles, there were other kinds of challenges and fears. Experiences of the body The children also recognised the dangers involved in their work. Their experience tells them that food items are among the most hazardous things that they come across and that they can potentially cause death. A narrative of death of two children in the neighbourhood due to food poisoning re-surfaced in discussions with the children over and over again – which explained that it was an active fear for them. Lalit (9) said, I throw chocolates as soon as I see them, and also tell others to do so. But there are some children who eat it even when mummy tells us not to. Like Savita; she had one in the morning just today . . ., she will die someday. The anecdote of death was passed on by the adults, including parents and NGO workers, to the children. It was a powerful strategy to dissuade children not only from eating thrown food but also to regulate their actions in many similar matters – like not going away from the routine sites with strangers. Apart from food poisoning, the children identifed several dangers 117

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and problems that they face in everyday work routines. They described how their work demanded them to “dirty” themselves. Suraj says, “We become dirty very soon . . . hands, feet and body become dirty and black; not for one day but forever”. Jameel adds, “We have to put our hands in drainages for things and sometimes have to get down shallow drains to pick-up some item. . . . [W]e all look dirty”. They felt that the children of bade aadmi made fun of them and adults hated them as they looked dirty. They also knew that staying “dirty” made them more vulnerable to diseases and falling ill frequently. Stomach and skin infections were listed in the most common irritants. The children explained how they are much more likely to become “addicts”. Lalit described, “When some children feel hungry and thirsty they drink leftovers from alcohol bottles; those who work with older children also start taking drugs with them . . . many older ones make cigarettes of these and smoke”. He shared with me that older children tell the younger ones that pain goes away when they smoke and drink. While such older children helped in some ways, they created more trouble for the younger ones. Deepali (10) narrated, “They do not collect waste on their own; they wait for evenings when the younger children are returning home and snatch their bags”. The younger ones, when more in number, stood for each other, and offered a good fght. While the older children were one set of troublemakers, many “others” made life diffcult. They also described their vulnerability to accidents. Sonu (7) said, “Because we have to cross the roads and be on the road the whole day, there is a danger of accidents”. The most well-known incident among the children was about a boy who was hit by a bullet motorcycle and suffered a head injury. Lalit said, “His brain was affected due to this” and that he succumbed to the injury and died. He further emphasised, “Rupees 1 lakh were given from the government’s side, but what will that do”. Experiences with others: Contested terrains The children and the animals Insects and reptiles were another source of danger that the children identifed. Wasps, bees, ants, lizards, and scorpions bit children every now and then. Savita described how a “poisonous lizard’s” bite led to a swollen ear for days and then hospitalisation. Dogs and bulls were two other “enemies”. Almost all in the group had suffered dog bites, and many were hurt by bulls. Sonu articulated this experience by saying, “All dogs bark only at us, as soon as they see us coming for work they get together and start barking till we move into the market area”. Suraj said, “They think we will take away their food”. The children too were at war against the stray dogs and played a variety of pranks on them, whenever they “substantially outnumbered” the dogs. However, at their homes and in their neighbourhood the same children had pet or friendly dogs. Lalit goes on to describe, “We only fght with them at work and they don’t harm us 118

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otherwise when we are without bags”. However, the pet dogs of the big people and were petrifying for the children. The case of the bulls was different. The children said that the bulls were not afraid of them. Lalit says, “They are arrogant and want to control the waste”. He explained that anyone who is hit by a bull cannot get back to work before 2 weeks. Sabir said, There is a way of approaching the waste if you see a bull around. Stick around for a while and see how they are reacting, and only then act. It is more dangerous when cows are also there. Sometimes they don’t do anything . . . actually all these dogs and bulls trouble the younger children much more than us. The children felt that they were in a “strife for the waste”. Jameel described, “We win over the dogs usually, and the bulls win over us and the dogs”. What was special here was that the children used “they people” to refer to these animals. It appeared as if the line between the animal and human world became blurred in these narratives. How the boundaries between the children and the stray animals overlapped in the city waste – and the geospatial position that a city ascribes to both the groups – is an aspect that I as a researcher living in the city was introduced to through this narrative. How bade aadmi treated the children Deepali wrote, The ones who do rag-picking have to bear a lot of problems. Bade aadmi scold us, shoo us away, make fun and hate us because we are dirty, we wear dirty clothes and don’t go to school . . . but now I go to school, bathe and wear my uniform, but then also they do the same. The big people shouted at them if the children or their bags touched them, or if the children wandered around the big people’s houses. To explain, Jameel articulated, “Ameer log dadagiri karte hain” [Rich people bully us]. Safa (9) described how once she was picking up a fallen guava from a tree outside a big house when a woman started shouting at her and the woman’s son chased Safa away to a distance. She started running, and fell with the bag, and hurt herself. What the children argued against the most was the “bad way” in which bade aadmi talked to them, and how they changed when they wanted to get some work done. Sonu, said, “I was doing my work, when a woman shouted from her balcony ‘Girl, will you clean our toilet? We’ll give twenty rupees”. Lalit said, An aunty shouts at me every day if I go near her shop, but when she has to dispose large wastes, she calls me with affection and 119

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addresses me as ‘son’. When I refuse to take the waste, she promises tea and biscuits. The bade aadmi often stole or snatched (or coerced the children to give) some item from the waste collected that would be of use to them. Most of the children had on some occasion or the other got a beating from the men and women whom they encountered in their daily work. The group narrated incidents in which servants or children of “the rich” let loose their pet dogs on them. The discussions, particularly with the adolescent girls brought forth how they were harassed and molested by men (including those from their own community) while they worked and how this became the primary reason for leaving the work that they were doing as children. This was another category of men whom the children called “gande aadmi” (bad men). Most diffcult of all: The police and the MCD The police and the MCD were beyond comprehension of the children. The children did not understand why these two agencies were against their livelihood. They felt as if they were there to trouble them. All of them listed the police high in their list of the challenges they negotiated in their everyday work. Most of the children wrote or narrated stories where the police was involved in troubling them. Ashish said, Sometimes we don’t know that a heap of waste is private waste. When a child starts searching it, people think that he is a thief. Then they call the police . . . younger children are spared with one or two slaps, but the older ones are taken to the station. How much ever you plead, they won’t listen. . . . they want us to plead. Sonu narrated, Once my older brother went for the work . . . the police picked him up thinking that he is a Bangladeshi. They asked us to show our ration card or janampatri which we didn’t have. They were asking for big money; we didn’t have it. They freed my brother after a day. The children opined that the police “conspired against” the poor people who do the work of junk collection. Zahid, the NGO worker, confrmed that the police and the MCD could more legitimately do so with the people living in the particular slum, as many Bangladeshis stayed there. Lalit argued, “They call me Bangladeshi musalman but I am a Hindu; my village is in Uttar Pradesh. My colour makes them think I am a Bengali”. The “legitimate” refugees – were much better placed than the others as they had some documentary proofs. The 120

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life of those who couldn’t produce proofs were affected primarily by the arbitrary interference of the state functionaries and agencies. The children did not very articulately register such contradictions, but they experienced a disequilibrium. They constantly experienced or observed the struggle in accessing regular schools and other State agencies, specifcally in the absence of citizenship documents. Sonu said, “My fake janampatri was made with great diffculty .  .  . without it the teacher was not enrolling me in school . . .” The children experience these processes and construct the meaning of what the State deems “legitimate”. As per a survey conducted by Chintan (2009, p. 7) the rag-pickers save almost 14 per cent of the municipal budget annually, in Delhi. The survey reports that if the work stops, the weakness of the formal waste management system would be highlighted. Despite the work being hazardous for children and illegal, it continues in the city. At feld site, the MCD seized the waste every now and then but was not intervening to “reform” the situation. In this scenario, the people (including children) encountered or rather lived with a constant threat to their ways of livelihood, posed by the MCD. Deepali elucidated, “When the MCD van comes, everyone starts feeling scared. Everybody starts struggling to save their carts”. Sabir asked, “Why are they after us? We aren’t stealing anything; we are only selling waste. Cleaning the city. The ones who steal, they let them go after taking bribe from them”. Interestingly, the children used “we” instead of “I” all through their narratives. For example, saying, “we have to get down into the drain at times”, instead of saying “I have to get down into the drain at times”. Where they narrated incidents that were distinct, “I” was used. Not just the narrations, but the dynamics within the group, the body language, and the degree of comfort the children shared with each other, all indicated that they were seeing and articulating themselves as a group or a collective. They also knew each other well as they lived, worked, and studied together – and therefore could clearly note the commonality in their experiences. However, what is central to this articulation of “we” is that it captures a strong sense of assertion and explaining to an “outsider” the challenges of “their” work and life. While referring to themselves as “we”, the children were also engaging in an act of resistance against something that they were unable to articulate, yet communicated it in different forms through their narrations. This could be understood as a resistance against the perception that the “outside world” created about “them”. This was also an act of ensuring that their voices got noted by me.

Part IV

Making sense

Governance, biopolitics, and childhood It appeared that a particular kind of power relation, which was explicit yet diffused, and visible yet incoherent, was implicit in the experiences of the children. While one could ft it in the concept of cultural reproduction, the meanings 121

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appeared to go beyond this frame. This was particularly keeping in view the centrality that “body” appeared to be holding in the context. Foucault’s (1977) analysis of political economy of body is meaningful here. He says, the body is also directly involved in a political feld; power relations have immediate hold upon it; they invest it . . . train it; force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound in accordance with complex reciprocal relations with its economic use . . .; the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. (pp. 25–26) He argues that knowledge of the body is not constituted simply by the science of its functioning but by the “political technology of body”. This technology may not be systematic, but diffused and random. He says, This power is exercised than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege’ . . . of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions – an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated . . . this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who ‘do not have it’; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them. (p. 27) Foucault’s idea of biopolitics or biopower seems appropriate to describe this phenomenon – especially in the governmentality context. Through the development discourse around children (that includes the policies and programmes for alleviating child labour, mainstreaming, education, and welfare and rights of children), childhood in the margins is actively brought under the purview of governance and governmentality discourses (Holzscheiter, Josefsson, & Sandin, 2019; Nadesan, 2010). These discourses are shaped by the state on the one hand. On the other hand, an increasing action by non-state actors (such as NGOs) is seen in these processes (Holzscheiter et al., 2019). Both these actors frame the norm of appropriate childhood in the urban margins and in that process also construct the deviant child. While the children do not articulate this politics, their experiences enable them to engage critically with these conficts and tensions every day – whether it is through the medium of stories or through other means. The social pathos and “us” and “them” The kind of picture of the social world that is created from the standpoint of the children in school and at work appears to be different from how it is 122

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represented in schools, textbooks, and institutions of education.These children visualise the axes of inequalities and the distinction between their world and that of the “elite”. They face and articulate (explicitly or by projecting onto stories) the confict between the way they are treated by “the mainstream” and the moral pathos of the bade aadmi. They constantly encounter facts that go against the concepts of justice, equality, and democracy, particularly in the messages that reach them from the institutions of the State – and through the way the State institutions discriminate between them and the “big people”. How the children articulated the collective experience of class and caste, how they understood their social position and roles came across in such discussions. The children from this slum community experience this exclusionary politics at an implicit level, yet the tension it creates is seen in visible forms of aggression, addiction, depression, resistance, or a struggle to change the situation by coordinating with the standards of the authority (for instance, aspiring to become bade aadmi). The children share experiences of the everyday events in the geo-cultural space in which they are situated. In general, apart from the struggle they undergo for the necessities of life, their daily lives are constituted by socio-psychological conficts involving issues relating to morals, values, freedom, dignity, and self-worth. These conficts become even more intense when the psychosocial infuences of their caste, religion, and gender are taken into account. In the everyday negotiations that the children make with the others/outsiders, their deprived status confers the guarantee of a loss, which not only generates conficts and frustration but also has a bearing on how they visualise themselves and their realities, and that of the Other. School and aspirations The discussions in the chapter have highlighted that the school in the margins serves the role of an institution where two different kinds of experiences and social agenda interact. On the one hand, the community in the margins (as located within the framework of its experiences and worldview) has a particular kind of hope, aspiration, and demand from the school; on the other, the teachers and the functionaries of the State who belong to a particular social class/group have their own agenda. The children do not experience this “interaction” (between the two kinds of aspirational felds) only at the school. This interaction shapes their experiences outside the school as well in their everyday negotiations with the Others. However, the school comes to become a formal institutional space where conditions for such experiences are created. That is, it comes to be an agency that reinforces the agenda and conficts between the community, the State functionaries, and the State. It came across that the school and the idea of school do not generate an experience which can lead the children in the margins to formulate 123

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“hopes” and “aspirations” of their own. Although children placed value on school education, there were no role models who could affrm this valuing. At the same time, there were several people in their social context in whose life school education was only of secondary importance. However, this is not to say that the school was an unworthy enterprise for the children; but they valued it differently from how the adults did. It was in this institutional space that the children articulated their experiences of the social world. Despite the fact that the quality of formal education (at the NGOs and school) available to them did not facilitate a critical construction of the experiences of marginalisation or of life, the children used the conditions to make meaning by themselves. Stories and children Invariably, the children were able to gauge the spirit of the stories that were narrated. To study a story (or a text) they pursued questions like: How would a character be experiencing a particular phenomenon? How would she/he be feeling? In her/his place what would they have felt? That is, they followed the method of empathy, and of relating their own observations and experiences, to understand the situation that the narrative presented. At the same time, they continue to add meaning to it. The main purpose of these narratives was to explore how the children articulated certain categories and how they made sense of an experience by projecting it on a character. However, the stories, much more than other things, provided insight into the children’s thinking and imagination. The children invariably found ways to establish logic whenever there appeared to be logical gaps or omissions in the stories. They did not contest the logic of a story – they asked clarifying questions or discussed what happened and why it happened – without questioning the fow of the narratives. They constructed logical or imaginary bridges wherever the gaps existed. While on the one hand, they distinguished between “real” incidents and stories, on the other real and fctional were intertwined in a complex fashion in their conception of/engagement with the stories. Interestingly, the categories of “true” or “false” appeared to be inapplicable in the context of a story for them. This nature of narrative constructions has been explored by Bruner (1991). He says, Unlike the constructions generated by logical and scientifc procedures that can be weeded out by falsifcation, narrative constructions can only achieve “verisimilitude”. Narratives, then, are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and “narrative necessity” rather than by empirical verifcation and

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logical requiredness, although ironically we have no compunction about calling stories true or false. (pp. 4–5) Another critical “rule” about stories was that they could be narrated only by an elder person to a younger one, or by an adult to a child. Among themselves, children only narrated “incidents” that they had either heard or experienced, or a “story” told to them by adults. Therefore, the primary sources of stories were adults – and the “testimony” of an adult was of a greater value. Grandfathers/grandmothers narrations were much more powerful than that of a teacher or the parents, irrespective of the style of narration. The story in this sense seemed to serve the function of a repertoire of knowledge that was transferred from the older generation to the younger ones. Stories also, in this sense, appeared to be tools for socio-cultural reproduction and adult hegemony or interference, in the children’s lives and cognition. As Bruner (1991) says, We organize our experience and our memory of human happenings mainly in the form of narrative – stories, excuses, myths, reasons for doing and not doing, and so on. Narrative is a conventional form, transmitted culturally and constrained by each individual’s level of mastery and by his conglomerate of prosthetic devices, colleagues, and mentors. (p. 10) This engagement gave an insight into a particular method that the children applied to make sense of a situation or understand the experiences of others. They constantly used empathy as a way of relating to a character. Empathy appeared to be the method to reach a judgement about what would be right or wrong in a situation. These stories appeared to be more as cases that involved thinking about all sides and making a judgement, for which an agreeable system of value was needed. It appeared as if the children carved this value framework through the principle of understanding the point of view and the experience of the aggrieved and the victim. For the children, along with the method of empathy, experiences of the “body” were also critical in making sense of a situation. The children referred to punishment, humiliation, pain, hunger, poverty, and dignity based on how they are refracted through (or manifested in) bodily experiences. The pain of Valmiki, and the dirty clothes of Dadasaheb were among the prominent instances in the narratives that appeared to have been registered by the children and referred to again and again to explain their condition or case. The work around the stories, leads to an understanding of how children’s groups were constituted and how they engaged in collective meaningmaking. It also leads one to understand that though children’s experiences

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were shaped by the axes of the adult world, they maintained an independent cultural sphere as well. Hirschfeld (2002) says, “Children not only live in the cultural spheres of the adults with whom they share a life space .  .  . but they create and maintain cultural environments of their own” (p. 615). Similar observations about childhood become of interest in the domain of the anthropology of childhood, where there is a growing consensus that children through their experiences know something, or many things, that adults do not – particularly because the adult’s experiences are more compartmentalised while the children’s are not just hybrid but fuid (Stephens, 1995, p. 24). This fuidity becomes visible in how they explain the categories of the adult world. For instance, while the children were able to identify caste as being the core constituent of “experience” in the cases where there were overt indications, their meanings were more fexible or were “arrived at”. The nature of censorship on the category of caste in an urban context in itself shaped the ambivalence in meanings – where children thought that caste could be one constituent of the experience, but “agreed upon” what could be said for sure (poverty).

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8 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

In many ways, this inquiry evolved during the process of making sense of the feld. For me as a researcher, much more than the aspects related to a school context, it brought to the fore the complexity of marginalisation in a metropolitan space, where one fnds a confuence of a variety of identities and intersectionality(/ies) of caste, class, religion, region, gender, and disability. This inquiry focussed on understanding the everyday relation between a State school and the people living in a slum space in a metropolis. What goes on in the school and how school as a conceptual category is shaped in this process formed the centrepiece of the inquiry. Negotiation and framing of aspirations have come to be interpreted in this context. While the intersectionality of the varied social axes may seem to have appeared prominently only in glimpses, the character of the geo-spatial location in which the feldwork was set made the class–caste nexus critical in the inquiry. In this sense, this study explored how this ethos in the margins of a city refected in the system of education. In this chapter, I present the broad outlines of the understandings that I drew from the work.

The urban slum and anonymity The setting where I worked houses a population that has migrated from rural contexts in search of a better living. Despite being economically underprivileged, life in the city slums and resettlements offered some promise of betterment. This betterment in explicit ways was economic in nature, but in subtle and nuanced forms it was also social and cultural. For example, some of the informants felt that it offered “liberation” from the explicit discriminations based on (or rather references to) caste as experienced in the village contexts. A certain degree of anonymity that the space provided gave (or may be created an illusion of) a psychosocial “safety” by allowing one to either disguise or “hide” identity, or perceive it as immaterial. However, the life in the slum also formed new continuities with discriminatory politics of the urban while retaining some of those with the rural. Those who were transiting to the site saw people from the same villages (specifcally those from the same 127

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“community”) who had settled in the city slum/resettlement as models of better living or of cultural–economic progress and considered them as handholders. Through the accomplices already settled at the site, others could fnd their feet in the neighbourhood. In this act, these hand-holders gratifed the need to relate to one’s origin and created a mechanism to cushion isolation (and in turn vulnerability) that urban centres expose people to. In some ways, it appeared to be one of the strategies of negotiating citizenship claims (Das, 2010) in the urban centre by maintaining a social connectedness. This indicated a paradox where a desire to liberate coincided with a socio-political necessity to relate, and lent a peculiar character to the “community” identity. That is, this framed a situation in which anonymity and socio-culturalhistoric identity continuously interacted, and individual freedom and the community bond oscillated or were trapped between these. I say “trapped” because anonymity and identity were also intertwined in a complicated fashion. There were instances in which the community looked fragmented, and occasions where it appeared strong and assertive. For example, in the case of the second-hand cloth trade run by the Vaghri women, the community appeared to be the enabling structure on which a better livelihood unfolded. However, with the school and other institutions of the State, the parents from the same locality, caste, and region did not negotiate as a “community”. They discussed schooling and choice of school, but did not critically intervene to improve what was available or assert their claims as citizens. Although anonymity seemed to be valuable for the people living in the setting(s), from the outside it looked illusive. As discussed in Chapter 4, the geo-spatial setting, called the “urban slum”, in itself was patterned on class, caste, religion, and citizenship. This social streaming constituted the common knowledge about the slum dwellers among the “outsiders” – including the teachers and the other functionaries of the State. Therefore, the setting in itself described to the outsiders the identity of the people who inhabited it. With the urban slums appearing more homogenising, factors like income, locality, hygiene, and willingness to go to school, were employed by the outsiders to infer the insiders’ identities. At the school, these identifers worked as the foundations on which the relationship between the teachers and the children was framed and structured. The teachers’ discourse around the children and their education constantly refracted through strong notions of heredity-based educability (Kumar, 2020) to explain the pathos that public schooling involved and the worthlessness the teachers experienced in discharging the duty. However, this inference was not neatly structured to (consciously) discriminate against particular social groups. It was only one way of making sense of how one is positioned in relation to the other and of understanding one’s own power in the everyday negotiations (in both formal institutional and informal contexts) in subtle indistinct ways. These understandings match those that are drawn by the larger literature in the area as has been discussed in Chapter 2. 128

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Such character of the feld made it challenging to continue to inquire without thinking about how the city spaces are geo-politically structured in the margins and the centre, and the relation or negotiations between the peripheries and the core. This is not to say that there were no observable instances where the everyday politics of marginalisation got played out, but to indicate that such experiences constituted the banalities of life in the margins. One of the prominent observable forms where the issues of identity, anonymity, and marginalisation came to the fore was located in the institutional contexts – specifcally in the processes of claiming the various provisions and “schemes” of the State, where documentary proofs become the instruments of negotiation. Although these schemes in general may seem conceptually straightforward, becoming eligible to avail them not only involved dealing with the bureaucracy of the State but also made it necessary to navigate through a variety of cultural–hierarchical relationships. In these processes, as was seen in Chapters 4 and 5, these documents defned the eligibility conditions to seek a legitimate citizenship while working as technologies of citizenship (Das, 2004). Other kinds of institutions, including the school with which children directly engaged, were also situated in this context.

School as a checkpoint The social composition of the setting also refected in the school where I worked. That is, who accessed the E-5 school and who would successfully “pull through” it was not only unambiguous, but also known to the teachers and the parents. The quality of schooling available in the context and the experiences of the school, shaped educational exclusion and marginalisation. This reality functioned as a backdrop against which a child was socialised, where such meanings were not explicit but involved in how the child was positioned in the school culture. The parents who were able to afford private schooling, made a “choice” to withdraw their children from the State school. There were others (in the squatters) who did not send their children to any school. Both these decisions were taken in the light of what the State school or schooling offered. For the former, the idea of affnity to the middle classes and their culture was central in defning “better” quality education. For the latter, the school made no sense as it did not appear to ft in with their lived realities. Among those who sent their children to the State school, the fact that the institution did not discharge its academic functions was known almost in a naturalised fashion. That is, that the school did not serve an academic function was common knowledge. While one tends to think that in these circumstances the school only worked as a certifying agency, the observations from the feld indicate that this explains the situation in part only. The value of the public school, much more than anything else, was vested in its identity as an institution of the State. It was among one of those State institutions that was visibly there 129

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and more approachable when compared with the other institutions. Thus, by sending the child to the school the people made a connection with the State, or invested in a “formal” institution. Enrolling a child in school was an act of participating in a valid or a core system of the State, and also transiting to the legitimate, visible, and legal realm of citizenship from the illegitimate, semi-visible, and “abberated” margins. The state school served as a checkpoint for regulating entry in this legal terrain. In this sense, schooling was an increment from the margins towards the core – and was a way of navigating through several other increments (Das, 2010). The various schemes and incentives that the school offered were the manifest forms of this incremental politics. However, such incremental participation and politics were not as simple as they appeared. As a public institution the school disbursed entitlements, most of which were tangible or monetary in nature. However, in doing so a state of affairs was created where these schemes restructured the everyday conception of rights. That is to say, the distinction between schemes, incentives, or benefts, and political/civil rights became blurred. The complexity of or the pattern in this chaos emerges when one takes into account the fact that the school was not delivering the children’s right to education and continued to operate in a legitimate or normal fashion. Rather, it was upgraded to the Pratibha (excellence) status for “performing well”. Thus, the schemes of the State that were planned to ensure that the people access the system appeared to restructure the meaning of the system itself – where most of the stakeholders (the teachers, the parents and the SSA personnel) visualised the school as an agency for distributing the tangibles. It was in this context that the school worked as a mechanism of negotiating the minimums between the State and the people in the margins – where the psychology or the vocabulary of increments “at least” got played out. For example, it created a general ethos of complacency based on the idea that at least there was a school, at least it provided for a meal, at least the child got a uniform, at least there were regular teachers, at least it worked as a crèche, and so on. On the one hand, for the people in the margins this incremental progress was a strategy of negotiating their citizenship claims not only in the schools but in other spaces as well. On the other hand, for the State system it created a space where it became possible to hold back or only maintain the given provisioning in lieu of the right. In several ways, in such ethos the benefciary–benefactor negotiation was structured within a discourse on tangible schemes, and the school assumed the role of one of the mechanisms that constructed such ethos. Further, as one imagines a public system of schooling and the various stakeholders in it, the heterogeneity in the system comes across. The stakeholders vary from (a) the higher level State functionaries with an obligation to discharge a function, (b) an academia with its imaginations of what should be taught and how it should be taught, (c) a class of offcials who are to make the system work, (d) a classed and gendered teacher cadre that 130

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asserts an entitlement for employment in the public system, and (e) the marginalised who come to the school to negotiate with and participate in the system of the State. As a result, the school served as a space for negotiation between the State’s compulsion to draw larger numbers of children, the functionaries’ compulsion of discharging the mandates, and the parents’ compulsion and aspiration to send the child to the school. In interactions with the variety of the stakeholders, many a times one constituency blamed the other for the poor conditions. This generated an ecosystem where the status quo could be maintained. How such a system would interpret and deliver “quality education” with such distinctions in the agenda is a question that I grappled with. What is the purpose of public education and what would an ideal system of education comprise, were the questions that kept emerging in various forms.

Aspirations in the margins As I analysed the roles that the teachers assumed at the school and the manner in which they absolved themselves from their offcial role, what became a prominent question was – who becomes a teacher? While the feldwork reinforced the understanding about the state of teaching as a profession, it also brought into the picture the case of the people who could not become teachers. The aspirants who were working for the slum communities in which they themselves were born and brought up were committed to the idea of “uplifting” their community and were pursuing it too. Having a strong belief that their education made them upwardly mobile, they aspired to become teachers. Some were “teaching” in the local NGO centres. Yet, despite being suffciently educated they were “ineligible” to enrol in teacher education programmes and could not have in any way entered the State’s system of education as regular teachers. For them teaching was the most desirable and paradoxically a diffcult profession to access or aspire for. This situation presented a contrast when compared to the case of those for whom it was “convenient” to become teachers in the State school. This convenience was not only framed by the ease with which their socio-cultural capital made the profession open for them, but also by how the same capital gave them the power to shape their jobs (or the profession as a whole). In the frame of such a contrast, the conception of the teacher as a meek dictator did not completely explain the scenario. However, it made one think about how the meekness of the teacher was constituted and what role the teachers played in its maintenance. The aspirations of schoolchildren also resonated a similar ethos. Despite the reality that the school generally did not work as an academic entity, the children were there for several hours every day in which they experienced and made meaning about the institution. It appeared that the children’s location in a slum/resettlement context, accessing a State school, 131

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and experiencing a relationship with the State functionaries (including the teacher, the police, and the MCD employees) together sketched the outlines in which they made meaning about the self, the Other, and the status of their citizenship. Among many other things, the meanings that the children made from this experience refected in their aspirations from school education. The persistent silence among the schoolgirls on their educational and future aspirations, and the challenges that the children who worked as “ragpickers” faced in negotiating with the formal schooling, refected the role that the school education played or did not play in their lives. The conditions at the school, instead of facilitating a child to aspire or hope for the self and for the community, lead to a situation where education seemed to take the form of a “ritual” which did not have a meaning by itself. In the case of the schoolgirls, the experience at the school with the teachers alienated them from critically refecting on their own lived experiences and life worlds – or rather, silenced them. However, the children working as rag-pickers, while refecting on their experience of interaction with the bade aadmi and the State agencies, appeared to pathologise the social world around them. They were also more articulate in examining one’s possibilities and setting realistic goals for progress, in which education did not necessarily matter. Although it took time to understand the silences among the schoolchildren, from the work on the stories/narratives it prominently emerged that their assessment of the role of the schooling in success was nearly the same. The schoolchildren expressed how the life around them made them understand schooling only as a secondary, allied or an ambivalent route in the process of becoming a successful person. The phrase bada aadmi was used by the children in various situations and in relation to their aspirations. Each application of the term differed from the other. The phrase emerged in relation to ideas of success, accumulation of power by virtue of socioeconomic status, and respectable/famous men. The category of bada aadmi had overt bio-political connotations defned by age, gender, brute capacities, and socio-economic power, specifcally of adult males. Bada aadmi was clearly a class-related concept rather than one involving any discernible relation with education. While being powerful by virtue of being rich was a clear constituent, several other indicators could be present or absent (like education, a high post, a respectable status, or a job). However, the notion was neither very clear nor too nebulous – it appeared to be fuid (Stephens, 1995) and took different forms with changing meaning depending on the context. It was shaped by the experience of school and work that made them assess their possibilities and probabilities in which their geo-spatial (and thus socio-historic) identities played a pertinent role. In this context, the manner in which the children explained the relationship between education and social mobility was complex rather than a positive linear linkage. This understanding of school education as having an ambivalent location in the route to socio-economic success in the urban context differs from the 132

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fndings of the few qualitative studies done in rural or semi-urban settings that engage with this question (Nambissan, 2009; Sarangapani, 2003). This fnding underscores how aspirations in the margins of an urban context are shaped, negotiated, and adjusted politically and incrementally – thereby presenting aspiring as a political act. Some contemporary studies in urban education (Ganguly, 2018; Farooqi, 2017) point to the need of exploring this linkage between education, aspirations, and social mobility in the margins.

Children’s cultures and the school space The fndings also inform the existing methodological understanding of how children’s groups engage in collective critical inquiry into social structures that shape their everyday lives – a research approach that is not extensively explored in India. The discussions around life stories provided the possibility to engage with the children and understand their meaning-making around complex concepts that may be diffcult to explore using techniques such as observations, interviews, and abstract conversations. These engagements provided an insight into how they thought and made meaning about their experiences and social categories. The nature of logic they applied, the expressions they chose, the relations they established, and things that matter to them were also alluded to in this process. More specifcally, the interactions around the stories/narratives gave an insight into the children’s ideas of good and bad – how they deciphered and negotiated them – and thus the nature of ethics or the framework of values based on which they reached conclusions (where empathy and fraternity appeared to be a modality of relating). Although shaped by the categories of the adult world, the meanings that children made were not completely subsumed under these. On many occasions, the children’s ways of making sense of the world appeared more fuid, abstract, empathetic, and diverged from how adults make meaning (Stephens, 1995). In such engagement, the school as a space appeared to be playing a particular role in the children’s lives. The children were using the legitimate space and time that was available to them in the school to engage with those of similar ages and who shared meanings, norms, and ethics. Other than an institution that served as a checkpoint and certifed learning, the school was a space that was meant for children. It was physically safer, had basic infrastructural provisions, and ensured a meal and time to engage. Such spaces though available outside the school were neither as legitimate nor organised, and thus were vulnerable. In this sense, the school also appeared to be a setting where the children shaped their own cultural worlds. This made it pertinent to think about the form and nature of schooling available for children and how these spaces are constantly co-opted by the stakes or conficts of the adult world. In several ways, the experience with the children made it worthwhile to imagine schools as spaces for children, 133

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which would involve learning from the cultures of children and working with them. This understanding supports the argument for the potential role of critical pedagogy in the public schools in marginalised social contexts where the social distance between the teachers and students is a constant challenge. It suggests that with pedagogic reform, the public school classrooms in India have a potential to act institutional spaces for children to engage in critical social inquiry.  

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achhoot 106 alienation 20 Ambedkar, B. R. 7, 63 anonymity 113, 127–128 apathy 20, 59, 65–66, 74–77; ineducability 66–73; uneducability 93–95, 98 aspiration(s) 1, 4, 8, 10, 15, 17; community’s 70; and education 113–115; educational 5, 19, 66; framing 13, 21–22; marginality and 85; in the margins 131–133; school and 60, 123–124; see also bada aadmi bada aadmi 76, 110, 111, 113–120, 123, 132 Bangladeshi 29, 49, 116, 118–120; see also citizenship biopolitics 121–122; biopolitical 132; body 98, 100, 101, 102, 117–118 Bourdieu, P. 8, 15, 63, 76 caste 9, 10, 11, 13, 20, 21, 26, 27, 28, 34, 35, 47, 54, 55, 62, 73, 91, 92, 93, 96, 105–110, 126–128; jaati 90, 106, 107, 108, 119; see also intersectionality checkpoint 73, 92, 129–131, 133 childhood 104, 106, 110, 111, 116, 121–122; anthropology of 126; children’s culture 133–134; politics of 99 citizenship 2, 73, 79, 129, 130, 132; in the margins 4, 9–10, 26; see also citizenship claims

citizenship claims 59, 83, 128, 130; documentary evidence 73, 92; documentary proof 9, 58, 59, 90, 120, 129; janampatri 34, 59, 66, 79–80, 90–91, 121 class 1, 2, 5–7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 26, 27, 32, 53, 105, 122, 127–128, 132; interests 96; middle class 93; position 94; working class 77; see also intersectionality cost of schooling 77–79 Dalit 6, 106, 109, 115; autobiographies 4, 6–7, 26, 81, 104, 106, 110 Das, V. 4, 6, 9–10, 26, 80, 82, 92, 128, 129, 130; and Poole, D. 4, 60, 97 discipline 9, 19, 20, 98–100; see also punishment economically weaker section (EWS) 2, 3 ethics of research 36 ethnography: ethnographic 1, 2, 8, 10, 13, 15, 17; participant observation 36; qualitative inquiries 25 Foucault, M. 98, 99, 101, 122 fraternity 2, 7, 133 gender 1, 2, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 27, 34, 61, 62, 63, 93–94, 96, 97, 104, 123, 127, 130, 132; see also intersectionality humiliation 56, 101, 106–107, 112, 125

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punishment 20, 32, 98–104, 109, 125; see also discipline

illegibility 9, 47, 8 intersectionality 1, 5, 6, 14, 127; class and caste 4, 5, 6, 19, 81, 98, 99, 104, 106, 110–113, 123; see also caste; class; gender

rag-pickers 29, 35, 47, 98, 132; kabaadis 29, 76, 116; rag-picking 115–121 resettlement 32, 38, 39, 41, 128, 131; clusters 45; colonies 27, 30, 41, 42, 46; see also jhuggi; slum right to education 1–3, 58, 73, 78, 91, 92; RtE Act 77, 79, 80, 88, 99

jhuggi 57, 64; cluster 50, 75; dweller 10; jhompri 27, 41, 42, 46; see also resettlement; slum knowledge economy 1; knowledge worker 4; see also neoliberal marginalisation 2, 23, 63, 104, 105, 127; experiences of 6–7, 17, 56, 124; politics of 129; processes of 20; see also urban margins Morey, D. 6, 110–113 neoliberal 1, 18, 21, 22, 50, 83; restructuring 14, 17; see also knowledge economy; urbanism nuisance maker 53, 57, 56, 100, 101; nuisance discourse 19; nuisance law 59; uncivil 19–20; see also Other, the Other, the 16, 92, 98, 99, 101, 123, 132; describing 51–56; us and them 122; see also nuisance maker out-of-school-children (OOSC) 3, 33, 55, 60, 68, 74 power 36, 58, 59, 97, 105, 131; culture of 96; negotiation of 93, 103, 128; to regulate 85, 90–92; relation 121–122; and school knowledge 4, 7, 10, 13, 15, 19; socio-economic 132; of the State 9, 82 principal informant 33, 34, 116

Sarkar 57–60, 74 Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) 2, 32, 33, 70–72, 86, 66 school culture 8, 11, 15, 84, 129 school knowledge 4, 7–9, 19, 97 slum 3, 10, 40, 11, 39, 52, 54, 56, 60; cluster 1, 47, 57, 67; dweller 50, 62, 74, 91, 95; squatter 44, 46; urban 26, 39, 127, 128; see also jhuggi; resettlement social distance 5, 11, 20, 55, 96, 98, 99, 100, 134 social exclusion 4–6, 22, 26, 45, 105 social identity 10, 12, 19, 32 storytelling 36–37, 104–105 urban education 10, 13–18, 22, 26, 133 urbanism 17; see also neoliberal urban margins 4, 13–14, 19, 21, 26, 122; geographies of marginalisation 51; urban marginalisation 10, 15, 22; urban marginality 5, 6; see also marginalisation Valmiki, O. P. 6, 105–112, 125 Willis, P. 8, 15

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