Papers
-
The Scholar and her Servants: Thoughts on Postcolonialism and Education
Abstract:
I propose here that ethnography would be enriched by more deliberate interaction with our informants as "ourselves", that is, by presenting (and first understanding) ourselves as more than trained scholars, to people who are more than just our informants. I suggest that doing so leads to much richer discoveries of the informants' "culture" than through our refusal to be anything but neutral. I am specially interested in the possibilities of education, specifically, in how interaction with poor and illiterate informants (to use shorthand terms) could result in some improvement of their condition in life. I see this as a difficult task for ethnographers, however, and discuss the justified fears of contamination, domination, politics, and poverty. I use the case of the master-servant relationship as I experienced it in the field over twenty years to illuminate some of these concerns.. [key words: ethnography, subject-position, education, servant, South Asia]
-
A Postcolonial School in a Modern World
Abstract: This paper is about a school, taken not only as an educational project but as an active historical intervention. Discussion of the school can elsewhere help in understanding how to do schooling better, but here we discuss how it helps us (i) to interpret the history of education better, and perhaps all history, (2) to understand modernity and its problems in a provincial city, and (3) to fashion an approach to both theory and practice that could be called postcolonial.
- Mothers and Non-mothers: Gendering the Discourse of Education in India
- Provincialism in Modern India: the Multiple Narratives of Education and their Pain
- History at the Madrasas
- The Space of the Child: the Nation, the Neighbourhood, and the Home
- The Gender of Madrasa Teaching
- Languages, families and the plural learning of the nineteenth-century intelligentsia
- The Ramilila Project: Indian identities in and age of globalisation
- Learning Modernity? The Technology of Education in India
- Leadership in a Flat World: the Past, Present and Future of India