Mediated Empowerments: an Ethnography of Four, All-Girls’ “Public Schools” in North India
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Mediated Empowerments: An Ethnography of Four, All-Girls’ “Public Schools” in North India Meghan M. Chidsey Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2017 © 2016 Meghan M. Chidsey All rights reserved ABSTRACT Mediated Empowerments: An Ethnography of Four, All-Girls’ “Public Schools” in North India Meghan M. Chidsey This ethnography takes place at four of northern India’s most renowned, all-girls’ private boarding schools, established in reference to the British Public Schooling model mainly during the tail ends of colonialism by Indian queens and British memsahibs on the sub-continent. It is a story told from the points of view of founders, administrators, and teachers, but primarily from that of students, based on fieldwork conducted from July 2013 through June 2014. Schools heralded as historic venues of purported upper-caste girls’ emancipation, this study interrogates the legacies of this colonial-nationalist moment by examining how these institutions and their female students engage in newer processes and discourses of class formation and gendered empowerment through schooling. For one, it considers the dichotomous (re)constructions of gendered and classed personhoods enacted through exclusionary modernities, particularly in terms of who gains access to these schools, both physically and through symbolic forms of belonging. It then examines the reclamation of these constructs within (inter)national development discourses of girls’ empowerment and the role of neoliberal privatization in reconstituting elite schooling experiences with gender as its globalizing force. Here, seemingly paradoxical relationships between such concepts as discipline and freedom, duties and rights, collective responsibility and individual competition are explored, arguing that the pressures of academic success, tensions over the future, and role of high stakes examinations and privatized tutoring are contributing to student experiences of performative or fatiguing kinds of empowerment. Through such frames, extreme binary constructions of empowerment are complicated, demonstrating how female Public School students exist more within middling spaces of “betweenness,” of practiced mediation . Empowerment in this sense is not an achievable status, nor unidirectional process, but a set of learned tools or skills deployed in recurring moments of contradiction or in difficult deliberations, whereby students variously buy in, (re)create, opt-out of, or reject proposed models of “successful” or “legitimate,” female personhood. Overall, this ethnography problematizes assumed relationships between empowerment and privilege, questions the alignments between school and the (upper-)middle class home, and suggests that as the reproductive capabilities of elite schooling are challenged in the face of newer venues of capital, these all-girls’ Public Schools and their students are finding unique ways to remain or become the elite of consideration. Table of Contents List of Charts, Graphs, Illustrations………………………………………………………………iv Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….vi Dedication……………………………………………………………………………………….viii Introduction. Empowered Mediations/Mediated Empowerments...…………..……………...1 A “Peculiar Colonial Sociology” and the “Politics of Modernity”: Imperial Binaries and Woman-as-Metaphor...………………………………………………………………..9 Development Discourses: Women’s Empowerment and Education…………………….19 Empowerment in Competitive Times: The (Re)Production of Successful Selves………28 Plan of the Dissertation…………………………………………………………………..31 Ethnographic Methods of Inquiry. “Elite” Networks & Subjectivities: Being Everyone’s Some/No One……………………………………...…………………………...35 Chapter 1. First Comes Emancipation: The History & Founding of India’s All-Girls’ Public Schools.………………………………………………………………………………49 A Story of Founders: Two Queens and a British Memsahib …………………………….54 Visions of Female “Re-Awakening” ...………………………………………………….69 The Opening of Schools, their Aims, & Leading Women…………………………...69 Formative Narratives of Differential Modernities…………………………………...83 Early Curricula: The Cultivation & Projection of a “Modern” Indian Womanhood…….88 Concluding Thoughts: Change as Progress, Loss, Balance, Stasis……………………..103 Chapter 2. Accepting an “Elite” Class of Girls: A Discussion of Status, Values, and “Folding-in”………………………………………………………………...……….……..106 Regional Diversity: The “All-India” Character of a North Indian Majority…………...115 North India Character and Small-Town Rising: “Problems” and “Mentalities”…...116 Local Duty and (Inter)National Prestige: The Day Scholar-Boarder Debate in Admissions………………………………………………………………………….124 Class Diversity: The Upper-class, Middle-class, and Notorious “Business Class”…….129 Contemporary Narratives & Figures of Class………………………………………133 Class Acceptance and Admissions………………………………………………….143 Caste Matters: The “Merits” of the Right to Education Act and its 25% Quota…….....152 i A Brief History of Reservations in India…………………………………………...155 Public School Protests: Merit and “Mixing Up”……………………………………159 Quota Implementation at MGD…………………………………………………….166 Concluding Thoughts…………………………………………………………………...169 Chapter 3. Disciplined Empowerment: Individuated Female Leaders and Controlled Collectives………………………………………………...………………………………..170 Spatial Discipline……………………………………………………………………….174 Campus Spaces: the Spatial Diffusion of Discipline, Ownership, and Power……..177 The Semi-Public Disciplined Center: Primary and Secondary Spaces…………177 The House System: The Primacy of the Middle………………………………..186 Toward the Periphery: Belonging, Policing, and Indiscipline………………….191 Boundary Walls and Gates: Symbolic Enclosures or Exposure………………..193 Temporal Discipline…………………………………………………………………….197 Time-Pressure & Time-Waste……………………………………………………...199 Time-Pass…………………………………………………………………………...203 Bodily Discipline……………………………………………………………………….207 Within the Collective: Power and Belonging………………………………………213 Wearing it With “Class”……………………………………………………………221 Concluding Thoughts…………………………………………………………………...230 Chapter 4. “Why our Education System is Killing Us”: Public School Curricula, Examinations, “Mugging Up,” & Private Tuitions………..……………...…..………...231 Boards of Education: Local, National, and Global Markers of (Mis)Alignment………238 Boards, Schools, Streams, Subjects, Tuitions: The Paths & Pressures of Exam Prep….243 Private Tuitions: The Troubles with Separate & Supplementary………………………249 “Whole-Person” Education: Marks Driven & Crunched for Time……………………..257 The Utility of Learning with(out) Understanding: Copying, Mugging Up, and Raṭification …………………………………………………………………….………..267 The Tuition Compulsion: The Loss and Expansion of Social Networks……………….281 Concluding Thoughts: The Faustian Bargain…………………………………………..287 Chapter 5. The Language Medium “Divide”: English-Hindi Ideologies and Styles of Status………………………………...…………………………………………………..…293 ii Languages of Power: The Indian Public School Medium……………………………...296 Student Ideologies of Language Empowerment: Opportunity, Achievement, and Morality…………………………………………………………………………………303 Student Ideologies of Difference & Belonging: Reputation, Criticism, and Context….311 Gender and Status: “Proving it” through Language……………………………………323 Concluding Thoughts: Mediated Multilingualism……………………………………...328 Chapter 6. Theaters of Empowerment: The Performativity of “Empowerment Fatigue,” Service, and Choice……………………..…………………………..………….330 Performative Empowerment……………………………………………………………335 Empowerment Fatigue……………………………………………………………...336 The Prestige and Making of a Performance………………………………………...340 Service: Moral Citizenship and the “Costs” of Empowering Others…………………...343 Service as a Public School Requirement…………………………………………...344 The Costs and Social Capital of Service……………………………………………348 Deliberations of Purpose: the “Me” and the “We”…………………………………353 Representations of Future Choice and Empowered Decisions…………………………360 Practicing Choice…………………………………………………………………...366 Sacrifice and “Owing it”……………………………………………………………375 Concluding Thoughts…………………………………………………………………...379 Conclusion. Reflections, Contributions, and Personal Mediations………..….……………381 Legacies of Colonialism: Dichotomies with Meaning………………………………….383 Empowerments: Gender, Education, and Development………………………………..387 Comparative Cases; Future Mediations………………………………………………...393 References………………………………………………………………….….………………..395 Appendix A: Towards a Modern Hindoostan : Schooling a Classed, Gendered, and Educated “Indian” Identity……………………………………………………………………………406 Appendix B: Student Demographics…………………………………………………………...417 Appendix C: North India’s Gender-Based Statistics…………………………………………...427 Appendix D: “Secular” Spaces: the Religious, the Scientific, and the Natural…………….......429 iii List of Charts, Graphs, Illustrations Figure 1 Bharat Mata represented by The Ahmedabad New textile Mills, 14 Figure 2 Husain, Center panel of 50 Years of Emerging India: A Triptych, 14 Figure 3 Advertisement for BJP's PM Party Candidate, Narendra Modi, 23 Figure 4 Maharani Gayatri Devi in her office, 59 Figure 5 Maharani Gayatri Devi on horseback on the Jaipur Polo Grounds, 59 Figure 6 Vijaya Raje Scindia in her home in Sagar, 64 Figure 7 Rajmata Vijaya Raje Scindia of Scindia, 64 Figure 8 Miss Oliphant of Welham Girls’, 65 Figure 9 Miss Linnell in her office at Welham Girls’, 65 Figure 10 First MGD students at Madhovilas, 72 Figure 11 MGD Prospectus, 86 Figure 12