Shailaja Paik. Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India

The two books under review here herald a transformation of signal importance to South Asian historiography. The last decade has seen a marked rise in historical studies of caste domination, and specifically the history of those most subordinated by caste, known today as Dalits. But it is only now that Dalit women and men as gendered subjects have become the primary focus of historical monographs. This brings historical attention to how the regulation of women’s sexuality is essential to the reproduction of caste domination, an insight that has thus far remained primarily in anthropological and sociological studies of caste, and is relatively marginal even there. Shailaja Paik’s Dalit Women’s Education in Modern India: Double Discrimination is divided into two parts. The first addresses the glacial pace at which Dalit girls entered school starting in the late nineteenth century, tracing the halfhearted efforts made by the colonial state to expand education across social strata, and juxtaposing this to more concerted efforts, by the likes of Jyotiba (Jotirao) Phule and B. R. Ambedkar, to achieve compulsory education for both sexes (chap. 2). Paik’s account of the diverse ways that colonial-era caste and gender norms shaped the school lives of Dalit girls and women through public debates on education policy and the mobilization and school-building efforts of pioneers like Phule and Ambedkar lays the groundwork for the remarkable second half of the book. Based on extensive oral historical sources, which detail the experiences of Dalit women and girls through several generations of formal education, Part II offers a sobering analysis of the ambiguities of education and the limits on its emancipatory potential. For what Paik demonstrates is that each historical transformation that impacted Dalit women’s education in Maharashtra—the move from village to city, the experience of the first-generation learner, the precarious ascent to the middle class for a small minority of Dalits—brought novel and progressively less visible regimes of differentiation in tow. She thus moves beyond portmanteau concepts like “casteism” or “Brahminism” that simply name the problem rather than analyzing how modalities of domination shift in particular places and times.

Caste · Colonialism · Historiography · Political science · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science) · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies