Why India Needs Scheduled Tribes to Educate Future Judges

https://thewire.in/rights/why-india-needs-scheduled-tribes-to-educate-future-judges

Boycott the Ministers and Officials Attacking Academic Freedom

As an India-based scholar, as someone who is not a member of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), which is primarily located in the US though it has 7000 members worldwide, and someone who had no plans of attending the AAS-in-Asia conference in Delhi (July 4-8, 2018), the boycott call against the AAS-in-Asia is not something that would ordinarily bother me.

The boycott call arose out of the Government of India’s refusal to allow Pakistani scholars to attend the AAS meeting; and the AAS’s failure to take a strong public stand against this and inform its members in a timely fashion so that they could make their own choices about whether to attend while Pakistani scholars were being denied. 649 scholars protested against what appeared to be the AAS’s and the local host, Ashoka University’s quiescence in an unacceptable restriction on academic freedom. I was one of them, even though my primary anger was with the Government of India, and not with the AAS. However, feeling that this was not enough, over 200 of the signatories have also decided to boycott the conference, arguing that the AAS should have had the courage to cancel the conference altogether rather than submit to the ban.

Education Insider - Interview on education

My views on education, interview by Dipin Damodharan at Education Insider

http://educationinsider.net/articles/top_story/263

Educating for Inequality

 

Educating for Inequality: The experiences of India’s ‘Indigenous’ Citizens. Asian Anthropology, Vol. 9, September 2010, pp. 117-142. 

This report deals with the contradictions and dilemmas concerning education faced by adivasis, the preferred local term for “indigenous people,” in central India. The full article is available at:  

http://www.scribd.com/full/46102521?access_key=key-12e1xsut7f0dtudx14ze

Teaching to hate: The RSS’s Pedagogical Program

“Teaching to hate: The RSS’s Pedagogical Program.” In Economic and Political Weekly 39 (16), 2004, 1605-1612 (Also in Tom Ewing ed. Revolution and Pedagogy, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005, 195-218).

 If schools are the one of the modes by which nations imagine and reproduce themselves, debates over schooling systems – availability, cost, curriculum, language, pedagogical techniques  - are, at heart, debates over the style and content of this imagining.  Increasingly in India, RSS notions of citizenship, nationhood and patriotism have come to be critical to this debate. This article is an attempt to explore some of the RSS/BJP’s educational interventions and their implications for the future production of ‘citizens’, first, at the national level through the textbook debate and then, through ethnographic fieldwork in RSS schools in Chhattisgarh. 

The full text of the article is available at: 

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46103038/Teaching-to-Hate

Indigenise, Nationalise and Spiritualise: An Agenda for Education?

“Indigenise, Nationalise and Spiritualise: An Agenda for Education?” In International Social Science Journal, 173, September 2002, 373-383.

This paper explores the relation between ‘indigenous knowledge’ and ‘formal education’ through the juxtaposition of two different but closely related examples from India  – the inclusion of astrology as 'indigenous knowledge' in the university curriculum, and schooling among 'indigenous peoples'. In both cases, the valorization of a certain body of knowledge as indigenous and its incorporation into a formal system (which then certifies it as legitimate ‘knowledge’) depends on the status and power of the social group claiming indigenous status, rather than the substantive content of the knowledge. Vedic astrology finds a place in the Indian university curriculum because the group backing it, the Hindu right, has been successful in claiming indigeneity, and they have the political power to transmute their beliefs into certified ‘knowledge’. On the other hand, indigenous peoples have not been able to assert themselves politically, and therefore their languages and systems of knowledge remain marginal. Ultimately then, ‘indigenous knowledge’ is a political and contextual category rather than one with substantive content. 

Full text available at:  

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46103000/Indigenise-Nationalise-Spiritualise