Thank you sir for this insightful review the book has not delth with the issue of disability in detail however, this compilation could be critically criticised for ignoring vexing challenges traversed by persons with disabilities in higher educational institutions in the country. such sheer obliviousness of mainstream academicians towards students with disabilities should provoke researchers in the disability sector to produce in defth studies documenting unending struggle of disabled students for searching their rightful due and voice in the university culture.
edited by Satish Deshpande and Usha Zacharias (New Delhi: Routledge), 2013; pp 356, Rs 415 (hardback). Amman Madan (amman.ma...@apu.edu.in) teaches at the Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. http://www.epw.in/book-reviews/practice-caste-higher-education.html For many centuries in China, India, as well as in the West, it was an accepted idea that only a few should get a higher education. Louis Dumont reminds us that a world view of hierarchy has been far more widespread and deeply entrenched than those who believe in equality usually imagine. Most people today live in states which formally accept a principle of universal equality. As Satish Deshpande says in his introductory essay to the volume under review, this is a paradoxical situation of a legal guarantee of equality in societies which are actually structured so as to maintain and reproduce inequality. The resolution of this profound contradiction between our beliefs and our personal and institutional practices may be a long-drawn struggle. It was only as late as the middle of the 20th century that ideas like those of socialism, social democracy and equality of all within the nation state came together in western Europe to create an explosion of new universities and enrolments. An alliance of powerful trade unions with industry created political coalitions that led this change, which asked that the majority should benefit from higher education, rather than stay with a situation where the majority was left out. India today wrestles with similar challenges of expansion, though with a mixture of ideas like those of competing with the knowledge workers of China and the nebulous hope of social justice through reservations. Meanwhile the social forces which may press for greater access to higher education are gaining strength and if we are optimistic we may expect great changes in the decades to come. The book edited by Satish Deshpande and Usha Zacharias is an example of that gathering momentum, where the Ford Foundation allies itself with a variety of Indian scholars, activists and institution builders to scrutinise the situation in India. Titled Beyond Inclusion, what makes the book special and different from most of the recent writings on higher education, reservations and social inequality is that it consciously distances itself from enrolment statistics and instead focuses on the actual experience and practice of institutions. It argues that admissions into educational institutions are only the first step towards a more just society, the next big challenge being that of how to thrive within those institutions. This is a welcome emphasis and it is research like this which will actually help institutions and individuals transform themselves into becoming more open. Caste in Education The first section of the book is about policy matters, which inevitably centres on the Indian obsession with reservations. Satish Deshpande argues, following Marc Galanter, that the state and judiciary's approach to reservations has only been a vague seeking-the-welfare-of-all approach, rather than an approach to correct historical wrongs or the assertion of people's right to higher education. Filtering through the upper-caste control of existing state bodies, this has translated into little more than an ambiguous and weak commitment towards ensuring that students from unprivileged backgrounds get the support they need to do well after admissions have been obtained. That lack of commitment is also seen in the Indian state's growing embrace of privatisation, which further accelerates marginalisation by driving up the costs of higher education. Deshpande drives home the point that if we are serious about equality of access then we cannot be blind to what happens after the initial admission occurs. That second stage requires even more attention and intervention than the first. The narrowness of the public debate on reservations obscures many other fundamental questions too, some of which Mrinalini Sebastian draws our attention to. She first examines the historical documents of British India to point out that the preference for educating a few rather than the many is an old one, coming from precolonial times and fitting well into the objectives of the colonial rulers. She then argues that seeing reservations as only a means of professional education diminishes the broader goals of a higher education. The cultivation of citizenship and enlightenment as the goals of education gets short shrift. It is thus important to inquire into the kind and degree of success which institutions have had in their attempts to increase access. The second section of the book examines some examples of this. Vandana Dandekar provides a remarkably detailed quantitative study of a government medical college in Maharashtra, examining who gets into the MBBS course, their experience in college and what they do afterwards. Such studies are quite rare, which is paradoxical given the smoke and fury that reservations otherwise seem to generate. The nuanced and measured descriptions are capped by the interesting observation that the majority of the doctors who moved into the private sector are from the open seats, while it is the majority of the reserved seat students who are staying on to work for the poor in government hospitals. That even a conventional state university can take up praiseworthy experiments is demonstrated by Punjabi University. Ranjit Singh Ghuman and Davinder Kumar Madaan describe the experience of its engineering college which admits only rural students and takes them in directly at the 11th grade itself. Eventually roughly half of the students who join do get a B Tech degree from an independent examining body. A more rigorous analysis of this endeavour would have been interesting, telling us, for instance, how this university came to start such a college. Successes and Failures G M Devy vaults the book to a higher level, arguing that a mere increase in numbers of inclusion is not enough, educational institutions must be part of a deeper rebuilding of our society. He takes up the case of three institutions, Gujarat Vidyapith which was founded by Gandhi to promote an alternative model of development, Rayat Shikshan Sanstha which was set up by Bhaurao Patil to provide education to peasants, and the Adivasi Academy, which he himself was part of. Devy's thought-provoking account reminds us that the struggle for greater justice must ask difficult questions about the very nature of valid knowledge that is taught in higher education. The path of reconstruction may meander into intellectual sloth of protected enclaves (Gujarat Vidyapith) or be taken up by new dominant castes as their own preserve (Rayat Shikshan Sanstha) or live a precariously fragile existence dependent on the vagaries of funding agencies (Adivasi Academy). The journey clearly will not be an easy one. Living It Through The lived experience of the students who must struggle through institutions staffed by dominant cultures is brought out in the third section. The emergence of both feminist and dalit voices in academia shows the importance of organisational mobilisation and politics in getting issues to be recognised and studied by academic social science. In the absence of attention by rigorous social scientists, it is the activist here who represents the experience of the marginalised. Anoop Kumar Singh brings together interviews of 11 dalit and adivasi students to present their lived experience of being a reserved-quota student in conventional and sometimes elite institutions. They talk about the motivation they got from their families and the extraordinary grit they needed to struggle through a neverending flow of humiliation and discrimination. Several interviewees highlight the importance of consciously organising to protect their interests. The upper castes were already networked and dominant in their institutions. It was the dalits and adivasis who had to form organisations to stand up against the daily needling and harassment. It is a moving tale of those who battled against the odds and still won. And at the end are three chilling case studies of those who died fighting. N Sukumar looks back at his alma mater, the Hyderabad Central University (HCU) to recall how difficult it was to be a dalit or adivasi student there. Many experiences are recounted, from taunts in the hostel to the embarrassment of an invitation to a party or share a cup of tea, because of the inability to buy one in return. A continuous refrain is the reluctance of the majority of university authorities to recognise discrimination. The emergence of the Ambedkar Students' Association (ASA) was an important step towards standing up against bullying by upper-caste students and also getting the administration to respond. Many of the activists of the ASA had initially been closely associated with left organisations at HCU. Sukumar does not tell us about this connection, but it would have been interesting to understand the reasons for the distance which emerged between the two. Since mainstream academic institutions are still either reluctant to support their marginalised students or feel lost in figuring out what to do, some of the more energetic initiatives are being developed outside them. The final section of the book describes three efforts of trying to support dis-privileged students outside of regular academic institutions. Sony Pellissery, Vivek Mansukhani and Neera Handa talk about what the Ford Foundation does in a programme that supports people who wish to learn abroad so as to act to further social justice when they return. One element of their approach is to ensure that selections are done through a deprivation index using not just caste but several other factors, as well, like religion, gender, disability, type of school/college attended, first generation literate, parental occupation. Going beyond merely affirmative action in selection, they have also built support systems of preparing fellows for the study they are going to move into, helping in admissions, supporting them academically while helping them fit in on their return. D D Nampoothiri discusses the Kerala context and how the Centre for Research and Education for Social Transformation helps students in developing cultural and personality traits that help them to find their way. Usha Zacharias describes the Pathways programme to teach English and "soft skills" to help students find service sector and business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs in corporations. An Indispensable Guide Those struggling to improve justice and equality within higher education institutions have hardly anything available to turn to for constructive examples and insights. They will find this book an indispensable guide. There is actually nothing comparable to it as a text which presents illustrations of strategies by universities or individuals to try and create a more inclusive experience. It draws many valuable lessons that deserve to be learnt. It also raises some important questions that still search for answers, including that of the realpolitik of social change through educational institutions, and how that must negotiate the political economy of our terrain. A weakness of the book's essays is that for the most part they are innocent of the extant literature on the theme, be it the work which has taken place on the construction of selfhood in educational institutions or on the politics of organisational processes. While this makes the book easier for a novice to read, it does not help us much in advancing our understanding of the basic processes at work. But maybe it will succeed in inspiring more people to pay attention to the cultural and institutional dynamics of social inequality in higher education -- Avinash Shahi Doctoral student at Centre for Law and Governance JNU Celebrating Louis Braille birthday Jan4th Register at the dedicated AccessIndia list for discussing accessibility of mobile phones / Tabs on: http://mail.accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/mobile.accessindia_accessindia.org.in Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.com/accessindia@accessindia.org.in/ To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. AI cannot be held liable for any commission/omission based on the mails sent through this mailing list..
