Forging a Civil Society: Education and Sports As Strategies in This Chapter
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Forging a Civil Society: Education and Sports as Strategies In this chapter I explore how education and sports became strategies through which the social imaginary 'Marathas' organized capital- symbolic, cultural and social. This chapter is divided into six sections. Section one examines how civic organizations came to be organized during the early colonial period and how it came to be dominated by the Brahmin community. In section two 1 assess the discourses of the non- Brahmin movement regarding the Brahmin domination in the colonial fields and the strategies invoked by them. Section three and four are case studies of a 'Maratha' educational forum. Section five explores how sports becomes a strategy through which the 'martial' imaginary of the 'Marathas' is reinforced. Section six examines the role of 'talims' (gymnasiums) as a site for accumulation of specific forms of cultural capital. I begin with how education is an embodied form and an institutional form of cultural capital. Bourdieu (1985) examines how class reproduction takes place in modem societies generation after generation through the institution of education. He argues that the mode of acquiring what constitutes valued knowledge in schools matches the lifestyle and habitus of the dominant classes. The concept cultural capital was posited to challenge 'human capital,' a concept designed to think consciously or unconsciously, society in terms of a meritocratic system of autonomous individuals who vary in their economically marketable skills and dispositions. Cultural capital aims at making explicit the cultural processes of reproducing class privileges and exclusions in societies. Individualized exclusion is carried out almost universally in modem systems of formal education which grade, label, track and credential each of us with the force of a universally recognized authority whose publicly stated purpose is to recognize personally achieved knowledge and abilities and valued personal qualities such as "intelligence," "creativity," and "character." (Bourdieu, 1984, 1990, Waquant, 1998) 191 Cultural capital bares the socially masked and misrecognized phenomenon that these knowledges, abilities, tastes and dispositions are anchored in skills of the individual. The concept of cultural capital demonstrates that these differences are grounded in leisure and freedom from the pressures of necessity that the dominant classes possess and their symbolic power to define their cultural repertoires as universal or most legitimate. From this view, cultural capital is economic capital put to use by the dominant classes to distance themselves culturally from the dominated classes to maintain their exclusive access to the most valued and valuable resources, activities and institutions. Thus the educational system evaluates people as autonomous individuals, but for dominant class cultural knowledge, beliefs and dispositions that are transmitted, often unconsciously, within the home, the family, and exclusive social networks. (Bourdieu, 1990) The system of formal education thus works to sanctify the culture of the dominant classes and distribute credentials, universally recognized capital, on the basis of the possession of this culture. Fixed as this game is, it does allow for those who are less endowed some chance to move up and it does require that those in the dominant classes "apply" themselves to the game. From this brief summary of fonnal education as cultural capital, it should be clear that educational credentials are a central form of cultural capital- the universally recognized symbol/exchange value of one's cultural and moral excellence. Thus, acquired credentials have rightly become the primary measure of accumulated cultural capital. (Bourdieu, 1977, 1985, 1990) It is in this context of Bourdieu's (1990) understanding of cultural capital that I ask how the 'Marathas' organized formal education as a strategy to mobilize politically and to take advantage of the limited opportunities of mobility offered by the colonial state. To understand how the 'Marathas' organized this strategy we need to first ask what were the fields that the colonial state had inaugurated. What were the species of capital required to enter this field? How did the institutionalized form of cultural capital attained through education enable an individual to enter the colonial fields of public service? What were the colonial 192 policies that enabled/disabled entry into these fields? How did some members of the 'Maratha' social group envision and adapt to the colonial policies? But most importantly we need to ask how educational associations became a strategy to reinforce other strategies such as the notion of 'martial' and kinship ideology in order to translate as social capital. Before we examine how the 'Marathas' entered these fields, it is pertinent we discuss the colonial policies on education as these policies dictated and demarcated the boundaries and rules of the field of education. After military conquest over the Deccan in 1818, the colonial state machinery now maneuvered to consolidate its position through proliferation of its civil institutions amongst the indigenous actors. The administration had to be staffed by indigenous actors which was the primary motivating factor that informed the British educational policy. The bureaucracy required an operational class of clerks to help govern the Empire. The idea was to organize a civil society of the indigenous actors that could mediate between the colonial authorifies on the one hand and on the other hand with the masses. In pursuance of this policy, the colonial state structured an education system as a means of creating this class of citizens. Macaulay, then a member of the Governor-General's council, made this clear in the famous Minute he prepared for Bentinck in 1835, "...I feel with them (natives) that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population" (Edwardes, 1967; 45) This was also famously called as the downward filtration strategy by later nationalists. (Stokes, 1978) Keeping to this strategy, the colonial state inaugurated Maculay's Minute (1835) on education that favoured the limited government 193 resources to be devoted to teaching of classical and arts curriculum that stressed on western philosophy and literature- designed not to teach science or technology but to pass on English morals through the medium of English language alone. Another covert objective of the colonial authorities was to inaugurate only a few secondary level schools and colleges instead of a large number of elementary schools, thus neglecting mass education. These objectives were continued through the inauguration of the famous Woods despatch of 1854 (also deemed the Magna Carta of English education in India). With this in mind, the colonial state gradually began systematizing a hierarchy- from vernacular primary schools in villages to the Anglo-vernacular high schools affiliated to district level college and finally to the university at Presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras (Punjab university was set up in 1882 and Allahabad university in 1887). Thus by 1857 universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were inaugurated. By mid 1870s departments of education were also set up in all provinces to monitor this system. Two other important recommendations in the Woods despatch were - stress on women's vocational education and on teachers training, for which it suggested a grant in aid to encourage private enterprise by the indigenous actors. (Stokes, 1978, Kumar, 1968) Following the transfer of power to the Crown in 1858, the colonial policies vacillated between two contradictory poles - educating a small section of the indigenous actors thus ensuring a steady supply of workforce and in contrast, controlling the sites of higher education to check the mobilization and articulation of the nascent nationalist movement. In, 1882 a task force called the Hunter commission was constituted to elucidate the future educational policy of the colonial state. This commission recommended transfer of control of primary education to newly set up district and municipal boards and also suggested that the secondary (high school) education should have two divisions- Literary (leading up to university) and Vocational ( for commercial careers). In short this meant fewer openings for the indigenous actors to pursue university education. By 1904, with the heightening of the demand for unification of Bengal, Curzon the 194 then Governor General promulgated the Universities Act that justified greater control of the colonial state over universities as he deemed them to be sites of Nationalist activism. Keeping in mind its objective of nurturing a miniscule class, the colonial state marginalized primary education which was financed largely by the weak local authorities. As a result, the indigenious actors had little access to education (at the eve of independence in 1947, 88 per cent were illiterate). This was also a period when the Indian National Congress (INC) was inaugurated- in 1885. This was as per the designs of the colonial state- to set up a polidcal forum of the indigenous actors that would act as a 'safety valve' and facilitate British rule in India. The educational policies of the state ensured that only a miniscule urban based middle class constituted the INC. A class that was Indian in blood and colour and British in taste and Morals. This miniscule leadership was to represent the masses and in turn convey and convince the indigenous actors of the benign rule of the colonial state. Thus the colonial policy of limiting educational opportunities for the indigenous actors meant that the educational field was highly competitive.