History at the Madrasas

Madrasas: In the archival records of the British colonial state, as well as in the private records of members of the Indian intelligentsia, the indigenous school of North India is referred to by the generic term \u27madrasa\u27. There is no exclusive implication of this institution as Islamic. This is close to the literal meaning of \u27madrasa\u27 which is \u27the place of dars\u27: dars being teaching, instruction, a lesson, or lecture

Mothers and Non-mothers: Gendering the Discourse of Education in South Asia

This essay brings together and complicates three stories within South Asian education history by gendering them. Thus modern education was actively pursued by mothers for their sons; indigenous education should be understood as continuing at home; and women were crucial actors in men\u27s reform and nationalism efforts through both collaboration and resistance. Gendered history should go beyond the separate story of girls and women, or the understanding of women as mothers and mothers as the nation, to see these three processes as gendered. The essay argues for the coming together of historical and anthropological arguments and for using literature imaginatively

The Scholar and Her Servants: Further Thoughts on Postcolonialism and Education

The hypothesis of the paper is twofold. By juxtaposing the two subject-positions of mistress and servant, moving between one and the other to highlight how each is largely constructed by the interaction, we illuminate the questions of margin and centre, silence and voice, and can ponder on how to do anthropology better. But secondly, to the work of several scholars who propose various approaches to these questions, I add the particular insight offered by the perspective of education. Because one of the subject-positions is that of ‘the scholar’, someone professionally engaged in knowledge production, the new question I want to consider is regarding the formation of this authoritative knowledge, its seemingly autonomous history, and the existing and potential intersections of that history with the history of the ‘non-scholar’. If I study India the question is how the history of India impinges on the history of the subjects involved in the study. The solution proposed is a radical one. Might one consider that the fancily educated, laboriously trained western or modern indigenous scholar who is in the field to do her research for degree or publication may contribute something to the necessary education of her less-than-perfectly educated informants? If this sounds illegitimate or unfeasible, I suggest that it is so because of certain problems in our understanding of ‘colonialism’ and ‘culture’, and that these could be resolved particularly by reflecting further on several histories. My suggestion then is to work to create what I call a postcolonial context, defined by the attempt to minimize the dichotomy between the scholar as subject and her non-scholarly, indeed, unschooled, subjects of study

The (No) Work and (No) Leisure World of Women in Assi, Banaras

In the riverside neighborhood (mohalla) of Assi, in the south of Banaras, families of the following professions are to be found: the preparation and retail of foods such as: milk, sweets, tea, paan, peanuts and snacks; clerical work in offices or shops; private professional work, such as priesthood, teaching, boating, cleaning toilets; and crafts, such as masonry, weaving, making and maintaining jacquard machines, carpentry, and goldsmithy. All this work is done by men in the public sphere. In Banaras, the observable and articulated sphere of activity called work (kam) largely exists for men only. Men are the workers in that they are supposedly the breadwinners. The terms for the traders and shopkeepers, artisans, and craftsmen, laborers, priests, and other professionals, are all names for men. Women are not reported to be workers. Communities of artisans, particularly, state outright, Our women do not work

Widows, Education and Social Change in Twentieth Century Banaras

In the first half of this century, some one dozen women in Banaras played key rotes in channelling the educational movement into new directions, expanding its agenda to include girls, especially poor girls. These women stand out as pioneering in that they founded schools, dynamic in the way they administered and expanded them, and radical in the vision they had for their students. What makes the case of these women particularly interesting is that they were mostly widows. They rejected the familiar stereotypes for widows through their activism, but in subtle ways that retained for them the respect of society Through the manipulation of symbols, they attained the position of \u27devis\u27. Other women of the time, from before then, and right up to the present, who are active in education—and indeed in other areas of public life—have similarly found that functioning within certain norms that define \u27purity\u27, \u27virtue\u27, and \u27austerity\u27 enable them to go further in their professional work. Is this merely an instrumental technique of the most obvious kind, or do these highly motivated, enterprising women not share the same cultural fund of values as their society, and often deliberately choose to exploit the flexibility and contextuatity inherent in a cultural tradition