Practice of Caste

in Higher Education
Amman Madan

or 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

Economic & Political Weekly

EPW

JANUARY 17, 2015

book reviews
Beyond Inclusion: The Practice of Equal Access
in Indian Higher Education edited by Satish
Deshpande and Usha Zacharias (New Delhi: Routledge),
2013; pp 356, Rs 415 (hardback).

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 judiciarys
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
peoples 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 states growing
vol l no 3

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
31

BOOK REVIEW

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. Devys 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
32

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 books 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.
Amman Madan (amman.madan@apu.edu.in)
teaches at the Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.

JANUARY 17, 2015

vol l no 3

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