Routledge Research on Gender in Asia Series, 7. London; New York: Routledge, 2014. xiv, 356 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$155.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-415-49300-0.
This book covers three different subjects: caste, gender, and education. As is evident from its title, it explores educational experiences and trajectories of women from Dalit communities, those who were once treated as untouchables in the Indian caste system and continue to experience exclusion and discrimination, albeit in changed form, even today. The focus on education helps the author raise many questions, ranging from the idea of Indian modernity, nationalism and social reforms to contemporary realities of intersecting social inequalities and discriminations.
Even though we have a fairly good volume of research on each of these subjects, and occasionally also on their intersections, the book shows that there still is much to be explored and understood. Another distinction of the book is its disciplinary openness. Even though a historian has written the book, it actively engages with sociological and political questions of the present day, and with scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds.
Renegotiation of gender relations and personal/public life during the colonial period through social reform movements has come to be widely accepted as one of the foundational moments in the history of Indian modernity. Drawn mostly from historical research on colonial Bengal, this common-sense understanding of the gender question concludes that male social reformers reinvented Indian identity through their interaction with colonial modernity. According to this “resolution” of the gender question, women were to be assigned the task of cultivating traditional Indian-ness at home while men modernized themselves in order to engage with the outside world of Western materiality. In the process, Indian women came to symbolize a new form of femininity and genteelness, invented by the reformers and the nationalists and cultivated through specific forms of education and training.
Paik questions such a thesis. While this could be true of the new middle-class Calcutta Brahmins, it was not the case for everyone or in every region of the subcontinent. However, this interpretation has tended to prevail. Even when a large volume of historical research has been produced on the subalterns in the colonial period, much of it has remained blind to the realities of caste and its regional diversities.
Paik’s own work focuses on the western region of India, urban Maharashtra, where she looks at the history of education of Dalit women. The category of Dalit is itself a modern construct. Even though it has come to be used across India for the ex-untouchable communities, its history is rather recent, embedded in the social movements in the western region that came up during the late colonial and post-independence period. It was here that, thanks to the efforts of some social reformers and with the opportunities opened up by the colonial policies, a new middle class began to emerge among the erstwhile untouchable groups. B.R. Ambedkar, who went on to become the first law minister of independent India, one of the most well-educated Indians during the later colonial period, has come to symbolize this new mobility among those located at the bottom of Hindu society. Not only did he become a symbol of “low-caste” mobility and political identity, he also emerged as the most vocal and radical critic of the caste system. He re-conceptualized caste and presented it in the language of power and discrimination.
Disagreeing fundamentally with Gandhi and other nationalists who invoked the idea of Indian tradition as a possible source of Indian nationalism, he, along with Jyotiba Phule, advocated the need for radical reform within Hindu society. Education, along with agitation and community mobilization, was a critical instrument of change for him. It was within this perspective that Dalit women began to be educated. Unlike the middle-class Bengali women, education of Dalit women was a clearly modernist political project that was directed against the idea of preserving “tradition.”
However, Paik recognizes that the identity of Dalit women was not weighed down only by their caste but also by their gender. Their experience of going to school was not very pleasant. They encountered strong prejudice and active discrimination, as did Dalit men. Their teachers and fellow students treated them differently, as untouchables, in the classroom as well as on the playground. The experience of education actively reinforced in them both the identities of gender as well as caste.
However, education was not simply a matter of formal learning. It brought them out of the village, to the urban slum, and occasionally to a middle-class locality. Even though Ambedkar had imagined and hoped that migration to the city and acquisition of modern education would liberate untouchables from their caste disability, it did not happen. But, it did change their identity and worldviews. They became political subjects. Their self-image was no longer that of untouchables, who willingly or unwillingly accepted their positions in the caste hierarchy. Even when modernity did not deliver what it promised, it transformed the Dalit women (and men) quite fundamentally.
It is this journey of gaining a new subjecthood that Paik explores in her book quite successfully. This story of education of Dalit women is fundamentally different from the popular historical narrative on the subject that draws almost entirely from the upper-caste Hindu experience. What seems to be almost missing in her book is a critical analysis of the new patriarchy within middle-class Dalit households in urban India.
Surinder S. Jodhka
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India
pp. 466-467