Revitalizing Education for the Women’s Movement:
A brief note
 
 Jasodhara Bagchi
‘Fili, Sapientia thesaurus est et cor tuum archa’
(Child, knowledge is a treasure and your heart is its strongbox.)
Hildegaard of Binjen. 12th Century

I.    Education per se has not been central to women’s movement as we understand it today. Rather, we tend to say Education for Women’s Equality (NPE 1986/92) or Education for Women’s Empowerment (Mahila Samakhya). Why does it need these special accreditations in order to be acceptable to women’s movement? The answer is that Education obviously contains within it, the potential for inequality and disempowerment that needs to be addressed specially. An uneasy relation, therefore, exists between the question of gender inequality and the mainstream education.
As I had argued elsewhere, that the process of what Simone de Beauvoir called ‘becoming woman’ is inexorably, a political one, embedded as it is, in the power imbalance within social organizations that witness the process of social reproduction. Along with inherited belief systems and media practices, educational processes are largely responsible for shaping our personalities and socializing us into members of particular class, caste, ethnicity and religious community to which we belong. Since patriarchy is ubiquitous and cuts across all forms of domination, education, left to itself, could act as the most prominent reinforcing agent to lead women into a position of subjection.
What has been called in liberal parlance, the ‘subjection of women’, is, therefore, not just a social pathology that can be extracted like a rotten tooth. Subtle processes of hegemonic consensus-building has been put in place by what Althusser called the ideological state apparatus. If we recall Althusser’s moment of intervention in history, education was detected as one of the most significant of such apparatuses.
In a book entitled Pliable Pupils and Sufficient Self-Directors. Narratives of Female Education by Five British Women Writers 1778-1814 just published, Barnita Bagchi has convincingly argued, there is a strong ambiguity built into the concept of education, particularly in the context of female education, which is of prime significance for the question of ‘gender.’ ‘-Choosing the case of middle class British women of the eighteenth century, Barnita diagnoses, education as a ‘site of irreducible tension-- tension between a view of education as, on the one hand, a form of social control, a way of guiding and indoctrinating the pupil into gendered social norms and acceptable model of education, with the stress on opening up opportunities and freedom, impelling the pupil towards a more open ended model of development. (p.6)
As Barnita neatly summarizes the ambivalence,
The tension in the notion of education that I have been describing are found in the very etymology of the word education—the emphasis on ‘ducere’ or leading on the one hand, and on ‘ex’, or the movement towards freedom on the other. This is the dialectic between control and freedom. (p.7.)

This basic ambivalence makes Education a particularly efficacious instrument to wield in the women’s movement which articulates itself with the help of constraints of gender construction Juxtaposing education and women’s movement will bring out the dynamics within both. What I propose to do is to unpack some of these and to see in what ways revitalizing education might up help us to locate the patriarchical foci within the ambience of society.

II.    Education, as it has operated in a stratified society like ours, has, we have got to remember, been a re-enforcing agent of privilege, per se, this would mean that not only gender, it has been one of the parameters of class and caste privileges. In a state like West Bengal, moreover, where the Partition saw the exodus of the Muslim middle classes, by and large, the spread of mainstream education has also entrenched the divide between the dominant and the minority religious communities. The vulgarity of the educational aspirations of the native people during the colonial period was epitomized by the Bengali couplet which roughly translated itself as follows:
The one who learns
To read and write
Will ride in horses
Coaches bright.

Seen by the male elite of the early colonial times as the gateway to jobs and opportunities opened up by the colonial masters, women, shudras and other marginal groups were carefully excluded from the process. The emerging Bhadramahila or the women members of the middle classes have been characterized by the noted historian from Bangladesh Ghulam Murshid as The Reluctant Debutante. The reluctance among the debutantes, that is to say, the women who were expected to come out through the process of so called ‘modernisation,’ of which education was a central kingpin, is by no means something we can assume. But as we hear, not only from male reformers like Iswarchandra Vidyasagar or Jyotiba Phule but from Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein or Jyotirmoyee Devi how the resentment against this exclusion got built up. Here is Jyotirmoyee:
Men get frightened when they hear of women’s education—in case the oppressed understand the nature of their oppression and rebel against it. So, it is said through different ploys that western education is corrupting the blessed ideals of sacred India. Fortunately women have not been corrupted by this education, so the skeleton of the Hindu order (skeleton indeed!) till remains. So, please do not introduce indiscipline in the purity of the inner quarters. (The irony is not to be missed!)

I had occasion to examine the early phases of women’s writings when in 1863 the Journal Bamabodhini Patrika began to publish ‘women’s compositions’ (bama rachana), women’s education was found to be as the most palpable of instruments, not of women’s equality, but of a civilized society, that can stand up to the missionaries who had used education as the main plank of their critique. In other words, there is always a possibility of a re-inscription of the patriarchal structure around the family, community and kinship within this recasting of women through new education.
It is, however, possible to simplify and thereby essentialize the patriarchal takeover of the new education. In his Catechism on the theme of widow immolation Raja Rammohan Roy had asked the universalist question as to how the society could presume to vouch for women’s deficiency in understanding, when no one had bothered to test it. Less than two decades ago the English woman Mary Wolstonecraft had taken on the male guru of the French Revolution, Jean Jacques Rousseau with regard to his formulation of the education for the democratic era. Rousseau had only addressed the question of education of the male in Emile and had blithely relegated the girl Sophie to a blissful world of ignorance so that she can please Emile the better. How is one to judge the potential of Sophie if she were kept out of the purview of education forever? What will be wrong, as I had indicated at the beginning, is to ignore the emancipatory signal of the demand for women’s education in the social Reform period that were taken up by the women writers of the slightly later period with great sense of commitment. As Tanika Sarkar’s superb edition of the first women’s autobiography in Bengal, Amar Jiban by Rashasundari Devi brings out, learning to read and write was like winning a battle: she became not just sakshara but jitakshara. Hence this unique text was renamed by Tanika as Words to Win.
 

III.    In an oft-quoted article Partha Chatterjee claimed that the Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question signified that much of the liberating agenda for women of the Social Reform period had got subsumed under the Resolution that had re-invented the purity of the inner sphere, whose greater spirituality kept the women as the gateway to the social order. Given the ambiguity we have noted above, the claim is difficult to sustain except in the form of a pure revivalist ideology. For one thing that women had made strong inroads into the public sphere through the channel of education. Kadambini Ganguly was the first woman medical practitioner to qualify in the British Empire. As editors of a long-standing and highly reputed periodical Bharati, Rabindranath Tagore’s elder sister Swarna Kumari Devi and her two distinguished daughters Hironmoyee Devi and Sarala Devi Choudhurani certainly made palpable efforts to make this periodical into a platform for educating public opinion. If creative writing by women could be misconstrued as belonging to the private sphere, discursive uniting and organizing could hardly be considered as excluded from the public sphere.
The Hindu exclusivity that marked the Cultural Nationalism was also something that found no place in women’s own advocacy of education. The brightest example is that of Rokeya Sakhawat Hosein who had written in English Sultanas Dream a female utopia She had not only founded the women’s organization called Anjuman e-khawalin but she did not rest contented till she had founded a girls’ school in memory of her late husband. When the first All India Women’s organization was founded in 1927 the All India Women’s Conference used education for women as one of their major political platforms.
How did education lose this political edge in the years of turmoil just before and after the Independence? This was partly due to the fact that, in blindly focusing on unequal access to education, not enough attention was paid to organization and content of education. While individual scholars of sensitivity used their specialized knowledge of education to critique the content and even the mode of delivery, women's movement had not been sufficiently alerted to the complicity of the entire educational process with the class-caste-ethnicity and religious communitarianism that constantly thwarts the democratic texture of our society. As the Indian women's movement has noted, though not adequately, gender-marginalization has nestled in the bosom of the larger inequities that threatens the entire educational process
That education had become a major grid in perpetuating gender gap in society had remained largely invisible. Not only was the man-woman gap wider as we went up the scale in prestigious slots in Higher Education, such as Science and Technology the ever widening gap even as we moved from Primary to Secondary level was seen as a source of a major worry.
Gendered understanding of education, however, cannot stop merely with enumerating the gap in enrolment between boys and girls and the inability of girl children to be retained in school. What came under direct scrutiny of feminist scholars was the ways in which not just the external modalities of the administering of education but the subtle perpetuation of gender bias and other inequalities within the mainstream education itself.
To unravel the exact nature of the process of perpetuation requires time space and expertise that is not available to me. It has to take into account, among other things, all the innovative work done by committed NGOs and government officials, along with the policy measures adopted at different levels of the state machinery. While the policies have addressed the number game of literacy, retention and drop-outs, the interventionist groups have addressed the serious lapses in making educational opportunities not only accessible, but acceptable and palatable for girls belonging to the deprived sections of our society.
Apart from larger movements like the Adult Education movement in the sixties and seventies and the total literacy campaigns of the eighties, Mahila Samakhya programme that started at the end of the eighties certainly brought the empowerment of the toiling women from the grassroots centrestage. Inspired by the Women’s Development Programme in Rajasthan Mahila Samakhya had initiated the educational perspective not as a one shot venture but as a process in which women learn to collectives (Sanghas) to articulate their demands and priorities in terms of their lived reality, to get rid of the sectoral divides in order to converge the different priority areas, such as health, access to credit and legal rights and so on. The official Mahila Samakhya states, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka have made progress by leaps and bound. But, what is to be noted is the energy that has been inducted in the Hindi heartlands of U.P. and Bihar are to be ascribed to the efforts of Mahila Samakhya combined with dynamic educational input like the DPEP that used as inputs innovative thinking about addressing women’s self-awareness in dealing with their own everyday-everynight world. The way of ‘knowing’ is also effectively interrogated by this innovative process of making education a programme of contributing effectively towards making women critically aware of their surroundings. This is the kind of education that is likely to bring gender closer to addressing the social gaps produced by caste class and ethnicity. Targeting human capability this innovative critical input should be allowed to galvanize the elementary education, the right to which is made into a fundamental right after the 84th Amendment.
A major opportunity opened up in Higher Education in the emergence of Women’s Studies that permitted questioning the basic assumptions of knowing. This has not only been facilitated by the questioning of disciplinary boundaries but it has actively contributed to the inter-disciplinarily of knowledge. At the same time, women’s marginalisation and women's active agency have both energized analyses made under the Women’s Studies/ Gender Studies. This rare combination of criticality of analytical tools and commitment of activism have had rich and extensive fall-outs. For instance, this demand for unpacking not just the gender bias in the content of education, but the recovering of ways in which the contents have been complicit with majoritarian Brahmanical patriarchy, has been one of the rich outcomes of Women's Studies.
I would like end on the cautionary note that is part o my unmistakable bond with the scholar-activist whom we are honouring.  Capitalism under globalization has nakedly shed its earlier façade of universalism. In India as in the rest of the world, majoritarian fundamentalism has found a soul mate in market fundamentalism and the two together are threatening education from both inside and outside. With the global pressure on the state to withdraw from looking after the basic needs of a democratising society such as elementary education, health etc poor people's lives are being thrown open to the unbridled profiteering of the market. At the same time, by elaborately revising syllabi it is trying to replace history with myth and the representation of women that goes with it. The recent move to rename the U.G.C. centres of Women's Studies as Women and Family Studies is meant to put criticality to sleep.
These simultaneous threats to education and to women’s movement finally should alert us to the need to keep up the need for revitalizing education on our own terms. Writing in honour of Gabrielle Dietrich is a commitment to social justice and a pledge to make true democracy prevail. This brief note is an inadequate ex-pression of the commitment