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- Convenor:
-
Rashmi Kumari
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Brunswick G7
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 25 June, -, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will present case studies and personal experience narratives of boarding schools for Indigenous children in postcolonial nations like India and South Asia. Through this panel discussion we seek to explore and critique the continuous logic of colonization in postcolonial societies.
Long Abstract:
In 2020, several activists and anthropologists wrote an open letter (South Asia Journal 2020) and signed a petition denouncing the plans to hold the World Congress of Anthropology (2023) at the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences (KISS) or what is in academic and activists term referred as “factory school” (Survival International 2020). KISS is a privately run residential school for Indigenous children in Odisha, India. Boasting itself as the “biggest anthropological laboratory,” KISS has been criticized for its dehumanizing attitude toward children and for severing their ties with their language, culture, and family. Similarly, in a recent report, China is documented to have residential schools for Indigenous children of Tibetan and other ethnicities. In this panel, we analyze the logic of these boarding schools in postcolonial nations in South and East Asia. Indigenous education has its tragic roots in the colonial history of the world, which later resulted in boarding schools for Indigenous children in North America, Australia, and New Zealand. The colonial logic behind these schools was rooted in religious civilizational ideologies, which the Catholic and Protestant missionaries propagated toward Indigenous communities. However, in post-colonial sovereign states like India, which have established their formal education systems based on the British colonial legacy, there are public and private boarding schools for the Indigenous (Adivasi) population. Hence, it becomes important to look at the advent and continuation of such an education as a relationship between colonial religiosity and polity in the post-sovereign nation-state. We invite abstracts from researchers, early career academics, educators, and practitioners who are working on the issue of boarding schools for indigenous children.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 25 June, 2024, -Shankar Gugoloth (IIT Hyderabad)
Paper short abstract:
Through autoethnography, this paper discusses identity formation and aspirations among marginalized community students under the ‘Swaero’ Identity. The Telangana Social Welfare Residential Education Institution Society(TSWREIS) students and alumni identify themselves as the ‘swaeros.'.
Paper long abstract:
‘Swaero' has recently become an official English noun in the Oxford English-English-Telugu dictionary. It is defined as a fusion of SW (Social Welfare) and AERO (Sky is the limit), symbolizing the idea that students in social welfare schools have limitless potential. The term is used as an aspirational identity by students and alumni to combat the stigma tied to their traditional caste identities.
R.S. Praveen Kumar, who served as the Secretary of the Telangana Social Welfare Residential Education Institution Society from 2013 to 2021, coined 'Swaero.' The 'Swaero' movement represents a transformative pedagogy implemented in Telangana Residential schools. It has evolved into a powerful symbol for empowering Dalit and tribal students in Telangana Residential schools, aiming to break the stigma attached to their caste identities.
The author, a former student of these boarding schools (2005-2010), turned researcher (ethnographer) on the same schools after 13 years and Explores 'Swaero' through autoethnography. The first part looks into what 'Swaero' truly represents and whether government residential schools empower marginalized students or alienate them from their cultural roots and themselves. In the second part, the author delves into the aspirations and identities within tribal and Dalit social welfare schools, examining their dynamics influenced by neoliberalism. Drawing on lived experiences in the Telangana Tribal welfare school and being part of a tribal community in Telangana, the author provides insight into the changes within the school environment under the influence of neoliberalism.
Rajaraman Sundaresan Sharanya Nayak (Independent)
Paper short abstract:
KISS boarding school - a laboratory project, a 'performativity of power' and a continuation of the colonial-brahmical system on indigenous people whose lives are forcibly entrenched in the everydayness of resource extraction, land theft, social assimilation and cultural annihilation.
Paper long abstract:
The policy of assimilation, mainstreaming or de-tribalising indigenous communities by placing their children in residential schools has been increasingly disproved and abandoned, most publicly throughout North America, Australia and Canada since the 1980s. In India, this history and its dangers are little known, with relatively little awareness of how they are being replicated among many of India’s Adivasi communities. Extraction education has evolved more slowly in India, but has now reached a larger scale than in any other country, with many similar manifestations to the ‘stolen generations’ model that has created outrage elsewhere.
The KISS residential school in Odisha, India for Adivasi children, symbolises the gruesome colonial legacy and is an important marker of how Adivasi communities are being systematically consumed under the globalised project of ‘mainstreaming tribal children’. Post liberalisation, also the same time around which KISS school started, many extractive corporations began operating residential schools for Adivasi children as a part of their CSR policies. These companies have a strategic interest in the lands that Adivasi communities inhabit. Today, schools like KISS not only receive large amounts of funds from companies which wrest control over tribal lands, but have emerged as nodal agencies for extractive corporations to socially engineer and organise Adivasi identities to suite and justify India's fastest growing 'development story'. Residential schools for Adivasi children, more particularly in mineral rich regions, has almost become a rite of passage to becoming a part of extractive society, and not a means for achieving social justice.
Bodhi Ramteke
Paper short abstract:
Indigenous face loss of culture, language, and forced assimilation; Gond tribes in Gadchiroli, India combat this by establishing community-run schools preserving the Gondi language, and culture. Legal recognition is sought to challenge assimilative education frameworks.
Paper long abstract:
The global extinction of indigenous languages threatens cultural heritage. In India, despite 74 years of democracy, tribal communities struggle for education in their mother tongue, essential for preserving language, culture, and traditions. The Gond tribes in Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, initiated a groundbreaking effort - 'Paramparik Koya Dnyanbodh Sanskar Gotul,' the first Gondi language school. State-run schools force tribal students into Marathi medium, hindering cultural preservation. This community-run school, entirely managed by Gram Sabhas, addresses this gap. Pedagogy is rooted in traditional culture, teaching arithmetic and sciences in Gondi alongside English, with a practical approach covering community history, social reformers, farming techniques, traditional medicines, and more. The school, named 'Gotul,' symbolizes a blend of traditional and modern education. In tribal dialect 'Gotul' means an educational institution of tribal community in which youths are trained and imparted with the traditional knowledge.
This initiative challenges post-colonial education frameworks that historically assimilated tribals through Christian missionaries, Gandhian Ashram Schools, state-run schools, and Hindutva groups. Resembling the residential schools of Canada and the USA continued till the 20th century, these systems disrupted tribal ties with culture and language. The Gondi school, a resistance effort, faces bureaucratic complexities in obtaining recognition.
The emergence of this school signifies a powerful endeavor to establish an educational ethos for tribals. A legal petition seeks enforcement of constitutional rights, PESA Act (1996), and Forest Rights Act (2006) to protect their distinct identity and challenge assimilative education practices.
Sagar Kodi (Pondicherry University) Valerie Dkhar (Pondicherry University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper aims to study the Ashram Schools, in the displaced regions of Chenchus. It examines the curriculum of Schools. Highlights the perceptions and attitudes of Chenchus. Analyses if any, the assimilation of students, the problems they face and how these Schools impact their culture and society.
Paper long abstract:
In India, like other countries, tribes faced numerous problems over the years. The Indian government after Independence implemented various schemes to improve the lives of the tribal population in the country, one among them being access to education. As a result, the government established many Tribal Residential Schools, known as Ashram Schools, nationwide to educate the tribals. The Chenchu is a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTGs) in India, who live in the Nallamala Forest regions of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. They were once traditional hunter-gatherers, but were now displaced to the fringes of the forest and hence, have adopted new economic activities after their habitats were declared as Tiger Reserves in 1983. After their displacement, the Government and many NGOs tried to decrease their dependence on the forest and provided agricultural lands, and schemes, built houses, and gave formal education to their children. However, the literacy rate of them is still far behind at 32.28% when compared to the nation with 74.04%. To improve the literacy rate among the Chenchus, the government established and ran the Ashram Schools in the displaced regions of Chenchus. This paper aims to study the Ashram schools, their structure, functions, prevalence, and constraints. It examines the curriculum, and whether it accommodates and promotes their culture. It highlights the perceptions and attitudes of parents, students and teachers towards these schools, and critically analyses if any, the assimilation of students into conventional societies, the problems they face and how these Ashram Schools impact their culture and society.
Neeraj Naidu (University of Hyderabad)
Paper short abstract:
This paper underlines sudhaar (reform) as a structural problematic in residential schools for Adivasi/Indigenous children in central India. Exploring the discourse on sudhaar, I locate the underlying ideologies of hindutva that is operationalized through aesthetics of colonial forms of punishment.
Paper long abstract:
This paper underlines sudhaar (reform) as a structural problematic in schooling that functions on the foundations of “punishment-as-spectacle” (Foucault 1977). By analyzing the manifestation of Sudhaar in the form of violence and discipline, I look at how schooling forces children to navigate “everyday violence” (Das 2013). Drawing from decade-long experiences as a teacher in a boys’ Potacabin school, I deploy ethnography to analyze observations, experiences, and children’s narratives of violence.
The Potacabin Residential Schools emerged in 2009-10 to address the crisis of student dropout during the armed conflict in Bastar, Chhattisgarh. These schools “produced as safe spaces” to reconnect children to ‘mainstream’ education (Kumari 2021) present a paradox when juxtaposed with staggering accounts of violence on children. Schools offer a fertile ground for the reappearance of spectacular punishments where the dramatic execution of violence is embedded in the discourse of the creation of a reformed child. To understand violence in residential schools, it is crucial to observe asymmetrical interactions and power relations between non-Adivasi teachers and Adivasi children. On the one hand, these manifest as corporal and psychological punishments, and on the other hand, are children’s creative responses, resistance, and forced participation in the execution of violence.
While undertaking an exploration of discourse on Sudhaar, I argue that the methods appropriate the colonial aesthetics of punishment. The underlying ideology that operates through teachers in reformation acts is of hindutva that violently attempts to establish a hindu cultural hegemony on the bodies and consciousness of non-hindu Adivasi children in a further aim to establish a territorial supremacy over the indigenous space.
Kunchok Kyid
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyzes discourses of the two types of Tibetan boarding school education in China from literature both in Chinese and English with personal experience and observations.
Paper long abstract:
To cultivate ‘safe citizens’ of ethnic minorities, the Chinese government has been operating boarding schools for children in the land of ethnic minorities in China since the 1980s. In central Tibet, apart from having the residential schools located within its region, a dislocated secondary education titled The Interior Tibet Class (ITC), which selects top primary students to send to the heartland coastal cities in China to receive ‘quality’ education, has been introduced since 1985. Over the decades, being a pioneering educational policy in China, the latter received much scholarly attention, and many studies have documented the issues about the policy and practices. However, with the intensifying pace of China’s ‘civilizing project’ on the regions of ethnic minorities, the less-studied boarding schools on the Tibetan plateau also elicited various discussions inside and outside China. Claiming ITC as a ‘successful’ story, the government has double escalated its ambition of further upgrading the rest of the non-dislocated boarding schools in Tibet in a new direction. The paper analyzes discourses of the two types of Tibetan boarding school education in China from literature both in Chinese and English with personal experience and observations.