NEGOTIATING TENSIONS OF DEVELOPMENT: A CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF EDUCATION AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY RURAL INDIA A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Karuna Morarji January 2014 © 2014 Karuna Morarji NEGOTIATING TENSIONS OF DEVELOPMENT: A CRITICAL ETHNOGRAPHY OF EDUCATION AND SOCIAL REPRODUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY RURAL INDIA Karuna Morarji, Ph.D. Cornell University 2014 This dissertation examines negotiations over development and social reproduction through the lens of education. Drawing on qualitative research conducted between 2006 and 2008 in the Aglar valley of Jaunpur, a rural mountain block in the Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand state, north India, I show how education serves as a pivotal practice and discourse through which modern development is constituted, reproduced and negotiated as an individual experience and social trajectory of improvement and change. Education is embedded in a long-standing modernist vision of being and becoming, but through the lens of critical ethnography, I examine how this vision takes on lived meanings in a particular context. In Jaunpur, school education is seen as key to mobility and improvement through employment and educated dispositions, and for futures without agrarian, manual labor. I use the term ‘education-as-development’ to capture how school education and development are interwoven as projects of postcolonial governance and as sites for the social construction of modernity. I thus locate education in the broader dynamics and cultural politics of development, showing how notions of inclusion and exclusion are structured by and reproduce middle class valorization and rural dispossession. I therefore argue that education as a process of uneven socialization into a dominant ‘development subjectivity’, as educators in both government and alternative schools, parents and community elders, and young women and men varyingly negotiate tensions of development as they manifest in and through school education. Such negotiations generate varied forms of educated subjectivity. As an analytic frame, tensions of development thus focuses on the dynamic, shifting relationships between liberal mandates of, and potentials for, socio-economic mobility and entitlement that development represents, and the reproduction of inequality, marginality and dispossession. These are tensions that resonate deeply in global histories of capitalist modernity and contemporary projects of neo-liberal development, yet also resonate with localized experiences, contestations and struggles over resources and values, over terms of change and social reproduction. By analyzing negotiations over education as a ‘contradictory resource’, this dissertation thus contributes to critical understandings of dynamics that shape cultural politics of development in contemporary India and beyond. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Karuna’s interest in contradictions of education arose from her own experiences of schooling. Her early years of school were mostly spent in a government school in Stockholm, Sweden. She later attended high school at Kodaikanal International School, an elite private boarding school in the hills of south India, established at the turn of the 20 th century to educate the children of foreign missionaries. When Karuna was at the school, it attracted a mix of ‘global nomads’: children of mixed heritage (like Karuna herself); wealthy urban Indians; Indians living abroad or recently returned to India; foreigners working for multinational corporations in India; elites from other South Asian countries, and a few children of foreign Christian ‘social workers’ (they are no longer allowed into India as ‘missionaries’). The school is located in a hill-station town that, in the name of ‘development’, underwent significant environmental destruction and social change during the time that Karuna was living there. Under the guidance of a couple of teachers, she and a few friends began to see connections between their schooling, which was grooming them to be a part of a global elite, and a lack of awareness about and engagement in local issues. This conception of relationships between education and visions of development continued to shape her academic pursuits. Karuna joined her mother and sisters in the US for college studies, and sought out alternative public institutions there. Thus, she completed her BA at the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies at Sonoma State University, and at the Evergreen State College. In the course of her studies at Evergreen, she conducted independent study in India, learning Hindi and exploring issues around development on the ground. As a part of this, Karuna came into contact with the Society for the Integrated Development of the Himalaya (SIDH), an NGO working for alternative education and development in a rural valley in the central Indian Himalaya. SIDH iii was another formative educational experience, and when Karuna eventually returned to academia to pursue an MS/PhD in the department of Development Sociology at Cornell, she based her research for both an MS thesis and this PhD dissertation on SIDH and the region in which they work. While this PhD marks the end of her direct involvement with academic pursuits, she continues to find meaning in exploring different means of learning and living. Currently, she shares these explorations with her husband and four-year old son in a village in Karnataka, south India. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful for funding received through a Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Abroad Research Award, granted to conduct the field research for this dissertation. The sustained support of Philip McMichael, Shelley Feldman and Ann Gold, my PhD committee at Cornell, made it possible for me to bring this project to fruition. Phil deserves special acknowledgement for being an ideal advisor: always reliable and responsive, and critical yet affirmative. I have found inspiration in Phil’s dedication to critical understanding of, and active engagement in, key issues of our times. I have also learnt much from Phil’s capacity and humility to rethinking and change perspectives, often in conversation with his graduate students like myself. Shelley and Ann I thank for being continued critical interlocutors of my ideas and writing, particularly as they resonate with their own studies and experiences of South Asian contexts. I am grateful for having a committee that continued to believe in the relevance of this project. I also want to thank my peers at Cornell who shared the joys and travails of graduate school, and served as friends, supporters and critical readers over the years: in particular, Nosheen Ali, Jason Cons, Alex Da Costa, Dia Da Costa and Farhana Ibrahim. The Polson Institute’s Social Movements Research Working Group was also a formative learning community; I thank all its members. Craig Jeffrey encouraged my research directly and indirectly; by commenting on early iterations, as well as through his own ethnographic writings on ‘post-educational landscapes’ in India. Completing the dissertation writing in my ‘office’, a rented room in a former rural health clinic in a village in South India where I now make my home, would not have been possible without the help of Cornell contacts: Phil McMichael’s speedy responses to all my emails; Jason Con’s often immediate assistance with my requests for references and resources, Tracy Aagaard’s and v Laurie Johnson’s help with administrative queries and matters. I am deeply indebted to many people at SIDH, but particularly to Pawan Gupta and Anuradha Joshi, who welcomed me into their ‘family’ at home and in the organization. Shobhan Singh Negi’s enthusiasm for my project, his insights, as well as invaluable research assistance, sustained my field work. SIDH staff in Kempty and in village schools, as well as friends and volunteers coming through SIDH, enriched my understandings of community immensely. Thanks to all those in Jaunpur who patiently made time for me, and thoughtfully answered my questions. Finally, I acknowledge the presence of my kinship families, old and new, who in varying ways contribute to my education and life. Above all, Vinish and Naman for their kind patience with mamma-poo going off to ‘the office’ so that she can ‘finish her writing work… vi TABLE OF CONTENTS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v INTRODUCTION Negotiating Tensions of Development: A Critical Ethnography of Education and Social Reproduction in Contemporary Rural India 1 CHAPTER ONE Not Bright Futures: Government School Teachers and the Production of Education as a ‘Contradictory Resource’ 45 CHAPTER TWO ‘Neither Here Nor There’: Elders and Youth Negotiating Education, Development and Rural Social Reproduction 86 CHAPTER THREE Fighting 'The Tide of Development': Contestation and Compromise in the Life of an Educational NGO 132 CONCLUSIONS AND CONTRIBUTIONS Education, Development and Modernity 245 APPENDIX A Notes on Field Research Strategies, Methods and Experiences 254 APPENDIX B Dabla-Matela Village Economic Survey: Estimated Changes from 1986 to 2006 270 REFERENCES 274 vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: View of Aglar Valley 8 Figure 2: Location of Uttarakhand 9 Figure 3: Location of Jaunpur 9 Figure 4: The Aglar River 12 Figure 5: Small villages and terraced field, Aglar valley 13 Figure 6: Text of Song Padhoge Likhoge 18 Figure 7: View from my room, Kempty 44 Figure 8: Government school teachers, Jaunpur