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Paper short abstract

This paper considers a new concept, “dhadpad” – emerging from marginalised girls’ encounters with education, to respond to this panel’s questions of disrupting linear and teleological temporalities of development and offering a decolonial revisioning of progress.

Paper long abstract

This paper, drawn from my doctoral thesis, responds to the panel's questions of disrupting linear and teleological temporalities of development and offering new vocabularies to reimagine progress.

Challenging a popular idiom from India, “Mulgi shikali, pragati zali” (Educate a girl and progress follows) which is echoed in global pronouncements of girls’ education as a “magic bullet” towards social and economic progress, my thesis undertakes a participatory journey to rethink both “education” and “progress” by centring the voices and experiences of marginalised girls who are often silenced within development and education policy.

Using the stories, questions, and insights from a collaborative fieldwork with rural and Adivasi girls in India, this paper critically reflects on the ways in which mainstream pushes for education weaponise girls’ bodies and minds to further a particular teleology of progress linked to historical as well as ongoing forms of colonisation. However, in rereading girls’ struggles to access, participate in, and make sense of their education, this paper proposes the concept of “dhadpad” – from a Marathi term denoting struggle – as a lens to disavow the agent/victim binary and make visible the ongoing negotiations, covert resistances, and collective forms of struggle within oppressive contexts.

Situating this “dhadpad” in education offers an expansive reading of education as a double-edged weapon that is both destructive as well as “de-constructive”, potentially enabling critical and creative deconstruction. In doing so, this paper offers “dhadpad” as a decolonial alternative to “progress” and a necessary interruption to the teleological visions of development.