The Politicized Indian Woman: India's Agendas on Women's Education

224 Pages·2016·1.75 MB·English

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Education Doctoral Dissertations in Leadership School of Education
8-2016
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Sabeena Mathayas
University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, [email protected]
Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.stthomas.edu/caps_ed_lead_docdiss
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Mathayas, Sabeena, "The Politicized Indian Woman: India’s Agendas on Women’s Education" (2016).
Education Doctoral Dissertations in Leadership. 81.
https://ir.stthomas.edu/caps_ed_lead_docdiss/81
This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the School of Education at UST Research Online. It
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The Politicized Indian Woman:
India’s Agendas on Women’s Education

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION, LEADERSHIP, AND COUNSELING OF THE UNIVERSITY
OF ST. THOMAS
by
Sabeena Mathayas

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF EDUCATION

Minneapolis, Minnesota
August 2016
UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS

The Politicized Indian Woman: India’s Agendas on Women’s Education
We certify that we have read this dissertation and approved it as adequate in scope and quality.
We have found that it is complete and satisfactory in all respects, and that any and all revisions
required by the final examining committee have been made.

Dissertation Committee

i
The word ‘invasion’ worries the nation. The 106-year-old freedom fighter Gopikrishna-babu
says, Eh, is the English coming to take India again by invading it, eh? – Now from the entire
country, Indian intellectuals not knowing a single Indian language meet in a closed seminar in
the capital city and make the following wise decision known. Cultural invasion is much more
dangerous than cultural revolution. So India is doing what India must do to hold it back.
- From Mahasweta Devi’s 1996 short story, Choli ke pichche (Behind the bodice)
ii
Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................... v
Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Context of the Problem ............................................................................................................... 3
Significance of the Problem ........................................................................................................ 8
Literature Review........................................................................................................................ 9
Structural Compendiums .............................................................................................................. 10
The Political Economy of Education ............................................................................................ 14
Critical Literacy and Citizenship .................................................................................................. 18
Gaps in the Literature.................................................................................................................... 21
Theoretical Approaches ................................................................................................................ 25
Structure of the Dissertation ..................................................................................................... 29
Chapter 1. Weaving Destinies....................................................................................................... 33
Women’s Education Pre-Independence .................................................................................... 34
Women’s Movements and Education ....................................................................................... 44
Gandhi on Education................................................................................................................. 51
Chapter 2. Trysts with Destiny: The Nehru Administration (1947 – 1964) ................................. 58
Maulana Abul Kalam Azad ...................................................................................................... 58
Ministers and Ministry – Education for…? .............................................................................. 76
The Five Year Plans on Education and Women under Nehru .................................................. 80
Chapter 3. Indira Gandhi and the Indian National Congress (1966 – 1984) ................................ 88
National Policy on Education 1968 and After .......................................................................... 93
Towards Equality: Committee on the Status of Women in India ............................................. 97
Rule by Decree ........................................................................................................................ 109
iii
Indira Gandhi and the Five Year Plans ................................................................................... 113
Chapter 4. The National Policy on Education: Approaching the Millennium (1984-2000) ....... 117
Ministerial Musical Chairs ...................................................................................................... 126
National Policy on Education 1986 and Plan of Action 1992 ................................................ 128
Five Year Plans from 1984-2000 ............................................................................................ 134
Chapter 5. Right to Education (2000-2010) ................................................................................ 139
Saffronisation of Textbooks .................................................................................................... 141
Dr. Manmohan Singh and UPA-I: A Congress Resurgence ................................................... 146
Gender in Curriculum ............................................................................................................. 153
Right to Education (2009) and the Five Year Plans ............................................................... 161
Chapter 5. Velleity and its Discontents....................................................................................... 167
Gender as Context ................................................................................................................... 169
Gender as Identity ................................................................................................................... 173
Gender as Agency ................................................................................................................... 179
Afterword .................................................................................................................................... 187
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 191
Appendix: Research Method...................................................................................................... 200
Research Paradigms ................................................................................................................ 200
Feminist Methods........................................................................................................................ 200
Public Policy ............................................................................................................................... 203
Research Design – Historical method and Document analysis .............................................. 206
Data Analysis – Rationale and Procedure ............................................................................... 210
Scope for Further Research ..................................................................................................... 215

iv
Acknowledgments
Omnia mutantus, nos et mutamur in illis. All things change, and we change with them.
The story of my education, or any enduring commitment to education, is of transformation.
However, in my moments of hubris, I believe that mine is closer to metamorphosis. I didn’t
merely transfer one form into another; nor leap from form to form. I experienced an insidious
relentless descaling, shedding skins and scabs to reveal a raw purposeful core. I am humbled and
privileged that this did not happen in isolation or alienation.
First, I would like to thank my advisor and committee chair Professor Kathleen M. Boyle
for her ruthless kindness as I struggled with my academic voice and identity. She continually
challenged my foundations while ensuring I retained my intellectual independence and curiosity;
bringing meaning and purpose to my paper shields and cardboard swords. This dissertation was
doomed a vast lost enterprise without her scholarship and friendship. I extend my endless
gratitude to my committee members. Professor Sarah J. Noonan; master scholar, and exemplar
professor, who saw my potential long before I did and encouraged my doctoral career; and
Professor Patricia A. Jensen for her astounding work in public policy, and unique interpersonal
style of leadership and pedagogy.
In addition, I would like to thank the vast network at the University of St. Thomas who
supported my work materially and personally: the members of the Doctorate in Leadership
Cohort 26, the Keffer library staff and resources, the Office of International Student Services,
Professors Tom Fish, Robert J. Brown, John D. Holst, and Stephen D. Brookfield, and most
importantly, Jackie Grossklaus, for being the advocate everyone deserves but few are fortunate
to have.
v
I would be remiss if I did not thank the graduate faculty at the Delhi University
Department of English, and the resources the Government of India and its Ministries compiled
and published through National Informatics Center in New Delhi, India. The Press Trust of India
and the Public Information Bureau also proved valuable in filling the vital gaps in the public
narrative.
And finally, I thank my family: Surender Mathayas, Tessy Mathayas, and Nitasha
Mathayas. Without their unwavering curiosity, faith, felicity, humor, and love, my education
would never even have begun. My mother and sister model for me the resilience, power, and
prowess of women determined to rise, and my father, our bedrock and strength. My roots and
wings, they inspire me every day to be, do, and see more.
vi
Introduction
I’m surrounded by Teachers. It is how they identify professionally, in any case. (In other
lives) Otherwise, they are my paternal grandmother, my mother, my paternal aunts, my maternal
aunts, my sister, and my sister-in-law; three generations of Teachers in one sentence, spanning
the 1930s to present day India. Their experiences alone could be an epic saga of one family’s
women learning and living through India’s education system since before it was even a nation. I
advance this lineage with two motives; the first being obvious: how it is the family, the deeply
personal, that lead me to my line of questioning. The second is how this rich legacy led to
valuations of my own Education, the implicit political covenants, and its perverse discontents.
By Indian standards, I received a middle class, cosmopolitan upbringing. My parents are
college educated, well-travelled, and well read. Through a series of employment and
immigration circumstances –which could be mistaken for serendipity or kismet – my parents
ended up in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia where my sister and I were raised. My mother taught
English at the Embassy of India School in Riyadh city (currently, First International Indian
School Riyadh) which catered specifically to the Indian expatriate or Non-Resident Indian (NRI)
community. Affiliation to the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) in India, meant we
studied an Indian curriculum and graduated after passing Indian standards for evaluation. It fell,
naturally, on my mother to take the lead on educating us and frankly, she shone at the charge.
Our nuclear expatriate family acculturated to Saudi Sharia law, wearing abaayas or
burkhas, and hijabs, mindful of the muttawas,1 all the while expanding through the school’s well
stocked library, news, magazines, art, and documentaries. To varying degrees, this was the

1 The official Islamic religious police or Mutaween in Saudi Arabia, who on behalf of the state are tasked with
enforcing Sharia as defined by the government.

1
balance of exposure in most expatriate homes. Avenues for social interaction were usually
among families and between homes; shopping malls were the closest approximation to a public
sphere that included women; the government banned clubs, bars, theater, musical performances,
and the sense of separation was overbearing.
Conversation is sacred and dialogue critical in our home, along with an extensive
personal collection of classics and contemporary literature. We discussed everything from the
inclusion of other nationalities in our school, to the strict segregation of the local and expat
communities, and even the First Gulf War and the fall of the USSR. Combined with a plethora of
extracurricular experiences in an ethnically diverse, but socioeconomically homogenous
community, a challenging yet sheltered, egalitarian pedagogy privileged my primary education.
Higher education in India was cognitively violent, ergo dissonant, from my early
experiences. India is not only ethnically diverse but wildly culturally heterogeneous, with
seemingly chronic socioeconomic inequalities, cradled in its tendency for hierarchy. Through the
course of my secondary schooling into my undergraduate degrees, I felt assaulted by the
hierarchical taxonomies of caste, color, region/geography, and primarily, gender. At first, I
thought there was more freedom; a democracy in all its dialectic dynamism. After all there were
no state-sanctioned moral police, or mandatory abaayas, no national religion or language, nor
any bans or limitations on the public sphere/square. Chaotic, devastating, and disarmingly
liberating in its gradual thralling of the senses. But later, in insidious incremental ways, I found
myself answering, or playing to roles, stereotypes, and archetypes of who I was supposed to be.
If I disregarded those meaning-sets, I would be policed. Not by official and policy institutions
alone, but by society and tradition at large. I was becoming intimately aware of the many labels
that came to define and disturb me.
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