This book addresses the familiar issue of unequal access to education in a new perspective. In this regard, whether one looks at gender or caste or ‘tribes’ or class differences, the gap between the privileged and the disprivileged is a matter of everyday experience. In what manner and form are these asymmetries reflected in the domain of education is the question at the core of this collection of essays. How did the traditional social privileges control access to educational opportunities? How did educational institutions and practices in turn shape privileges and inequalities? Is education itself an instrument for the construction of hegemonies? In India’s pre-independence past is there evidence that the traditional, socially ordained privileges of the male or of the upper castes were reinforced by the new educational initiatives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? How does one situate the system of social privileges within the overarching European cultural hegemony and cognitive authority? Was the nationalist contestation of ‘colonial education’ free of ambivalences in respect of broadening access to education for the backward castes and women and the poor? To what extent has corrective action since independence bridged the gap between the dalits at one end of the caste axis and the castes at the other end? Distinguished specialists in the areas of sociology, history, economics, anthropology and educational studies were invited to examine some of these questions in the light of their empirical research. The introductory essay by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya of Jawaharlal Nehru University, puts together the major findings of these analyses and allied published research in a theoretical framework. This volume is likely to be useful to those interested in understanding the interface between education and society in India as well as in other developing countries.
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