Introduction
This article is an ethnography of interactions amongst elementary-school students and schools in Mayurbhanj District, Odisha, throughout 2008, the cusp of India's introduction of the 2009 Compulsory Education Act.Footnote 1 Children from Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste-dominated agricultural communities in rural Northern Odisha are historically marginalized in terms of access to formal schooling. Over the last decade, however, elementary schooling is becoming more widely available for them—even though school facilities and adequate teaching staff are still well below urban standards. In this transitional period, many children carry double work-loads: as participants in household agrico-forestry productivity and as full-time students. Yet most young people demonstrated remarkable commitment to schooling, and negotiated the conflicting demands of their labour-intense home lives and school studies. All this in the context of frequent absenteeism of their teachers, which often meant they arrived at school, only to study with peers in a teacher-less classroom on the one hand and some faced ambivalence from parents surrounding higher school studies on the other.
A teenaged matriculation student narrated that, when she graduated from year ten, her father forbade her from enrolling in matriculation college ten kilometres from their home. Without his permission, she used her savings and secretly enrolled herself, and independently applied for various government grants available to Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste girl students for a bicycle and other school amenities. Her father subsequently accepted her decision. The intense drive by students themselves was confirmed by some of the parents and teachers I spoke with. One school principal told me: ‘Here, our students are more diligent than the teachers in attending school.’
Rural schooling cannot be fully understood without considering the motivations, enactments, experiences, and perspectives of students. This in turn requires us to find a conceptual model that analyses children's school participation as more than just top-down structural influences shaping malleable child subjects. This article places children's motivations and narratives of their experiences at the centre of a conceptual analysis of rural elementary education in India in terms of concentric circles of educational desire/motivation of three stakeholder groups: rural school students, local rural school staff, and state education bureaucrats and planners.Footnote 2 The article thus foregrounds children's desires and views in an area where they are critical actors, and contextualizes their views in relation to the influences of local and wider structural constraints they encounter.
Though appreciating the critical significance of hierarchies of power and dominance within the education interactions amongst the stakeholder groups, employing ideas on circles of interaction drawn from ‘enactivism’Footnote 3 allows us to pay attention to effects of the interplay of social groups at various hierarchical levels, all variously influencing the changing ontology of the emergent common identity of the village school. Indeed, the notion of inter-nested levels, each mutually affecting the others, better describes the schooling interactions that this article explores.
After introducing the research setting, the article works its way inward from the outer two circles to the circle of students as a community of peers: from the experiences, activities, and educational desires of ‘the state’, to those of village-level school providers, and finally to those of students themselves. This final subsection section draws on texts and oral narratives of students themselves. Finally, the article briefly examines some aspects of students’ interactions with the other two stakeholders. The overall argument of this article is that Mayurbhanj schools cannot be fully understood without examining the interactions of the three sets of schooling stakeholders. And that students’ experiences, motivations, and evaluations need to be brought much more to the fore in light of (a) their highly active roles in Mayurbhanj village schools and (b) evidence suggesting that, through their experiential engagement with different categories of knowledge, students synthesize, process, and transform competing desires around education in unique ways, dynamically impacting the ontology of schools.
Setting and background
Our village is completely a hilly region. These hills are called Yogini Buru. Most of the villagers are Adivasi people. SC and general people are less in number. Most of the villagers are farmers. Government job-holders are very less in number. Most of the villagers are economically poor. The reason for which I like my village is—my village remains cooler even in the scorching heat during summer as it's a hilly region. I like to stay in my village during our long summer vacation. I like the heart touching festivals celebrated by the Adivasis throughout the year. I like the greenness of my village. There is plenty of cultivable land. The green colour decorates my village and its surroundings during the peak days of rice cultivation. Our village is calm and peaceful compared to other populated area. Our village is free from pollution which is a common thing in big cities. So I like my village very much.Footnote 4
Mayurbhanj in North Odisha is a semi-forested rural district sharing state borders with West Bengal and Jharkhand. Most villagers in Jamda Block (the site of this study) practise subsistence rice cultivation and the collection of non-timber forest products (fuel-wood, medicinal, and edible plants and fruits), with occasional remittances from family members who migrate for employment, often in mines, kilns, factories, domestic work, or technical occupations.
Despite rapid advancements over the last two decades, and modernization in the district headquarters and other district towns, many Mayurbhanj villages still lack electricity, adequate clean water, primary health services, access to communications infrastructures and technologies, or well-functioning schools, all of which reinforces isolation and poverty. Odisha is one of India's poorest states, with poverty concentrated in the interior districts, such as Mayurbhanj, amongst communities classified as ‘ST’. Fifty-eight per cent of the district population is administratively categorized as ST. Mayurbhanj ranks amongst the lowest in Odisha's district-level HDI and has the lowest annual household income of any district in the state (87 per cent of households earning under Rs 12,000 per annum)Footnote 5 and poor levels of health, with a high incidence of malaria and infection.
In Jamda Block, Santal, and Ho peoples, both ‘Munda’ communities, comprise over 75 per cent of the block level—and, in some villages, close to 100 per cent of the population. Many of Jamda's present-day villages were founded by Ho or Santal headmen and practise contemporary Santal village governance systems (panchayat raj), which rest on collective social relationships with village land and forest under the seniority of a village head. The Jaher (sacred grove) and the Akara (the village dance-ground) are focal points of the village.
Over generations, various occupational caste families were incorporated into AdivasiFootnote 6 Jamda villages, initially invited by Santal or Ho village headmen to provide goods and services (weaver, potter, blacksmith, animal husbandry, midwifery, and carpentry occupational castes) to rice-cultivating Ho and Santal households in jajhmani exchanges for rice.Footnote 7 The Scheduled Caste families did not incorporate into Santal or Ho modes of shared-ownership village land. As market products increasingly disrupt local demand for their traditional services, weavers, potters, blacksmiths, and others are gradually abandoning their ancestral occupations in favour of either rice cultivation and forest collection alongside their Munda neighbours, or occupying new occupational niches in local trade/private business, labour, or local government services. Pfeffer proposed the term ‘Deshia’, inhabitants of the land, to refer to the socially interconnected and interdependent communities who inhabit remote hilly areas such as Mayurbhanj.
Historicizing Santal and Ho contemporary identification as ‘Scheduled Tribals’, BaylyFootnote 8 reminds us that colonizers introduced the term ‘tribal’ and other notions of racial difference quite instrumentally to distinguish between subjects in a comparative taxonomy, ranking all humankind, which under-scored difference and entrenched their own relationships of power.Footnote 9 For ‘tribals’, paternalistic protection and harsh correction went hand in hand.Footnote 10
Although self-identification as ‘tribal’ arose in response to indirect pressuresFootnote 11 and direct imposition,Footnote 12 and Santal identity was shaped by colonial frames and continues to reinvent its cultural forms in response to contemporary politics, there is a pre-colonial continuity that contradicts any idea of this as entirely a colonial invention.Footnote 13
Mayurbhanj Santals assert their distinctive social identity in fundamental ways. They are prominent in district and national Santali language-recognition movementsFootnote 14; they observe Sarna Dharma, a social-sacred performanceFootnote 15; they practise contemporary forms of tribal governance at the village and block levelsFootnote 16; Santal ‘identity’ informs active participation in district elections and in wider pan-Indian Santal political movementsFootnote 17; and, pertinent to this article, they are active in ‘modernizing’ projects that encourage formal education, while insisting that schools need to better reflect and explore their linguistic and cultural distinctiveness, rather than marginalize Santal and Ho children by leaving their social and cultural norms and paradigms invisible or distorted by stereotypes within the curriculum texts students study.Footnote 18
The princely state of Mayurbhanj earlier spanned parts of today's Singhbhum district of Jharkhand, parts of West Bengal's Midnapore district, and Odisha's Keonjhar district, and extended east to the Bay of Bengal. Active social and cultural networks across this wider geographical area underlay the impassioned Mayurbhanj Santal/Ho rebellion of 1949 against integration of the autonomous state of Mayurbhanj into the newly formed Odisha state. The rebellion was extinguished through violent massacres of Santals in several places in western Mayurbhanj.Footnote 19 The new Mayurbhanj district administrators then sought to rapidly re-establish relationships with the Santal/Ho communities.
From the 1970s, many Western Mayurbhanj Santals and Ho actively sought political integration into Jharkhand state. As the home of Pandit Raghunath Murmu, Rairangpur Subdivision (in north-western Mayurbhanj) was an important centre promoting education/schools aligned with Santal and Ho languages and cultural values. This became a vital aspect of both the Jharkhand sovereignty movement and broader Santal modernization movements. Young Santal activist elites travelled from village to village promoting education in Ol Chiki (the Santal script) and the representation of Santal history through dramatic performances and literature.
Santal families in more remote Mayurbhanj villages, however, had poor access to schooling in any form, and incorporated their children into the local subsistence economy. The rulers of the autonomous princely state did not leave a legacy of widespread access to primary schools, although, as in other princely states, Mayurbhanj rule was an important supporter of higher education. With this history, attitudes towards school within Mayurbhanj ST-dominated villages range across the spectrum from optimism and ambition (for both individual economic futures and for collective progress of community) to circumspection or disappointment and pragmatic adoption of alternatives. A large percentage of Jamda adults, especially women, are illiterate, having had no schooling themselves. Consequently, many of the students who participated in this study were first-generation students. They participate at the interface between state-generated aspirations, Santal modernization aspirations, and familial and individual socio-economic aspirations.
Concentric circles of educational desire: state, village school, and student
The state and educational desire
Radical shifts in state commitment to the delivery of schooling in remote rural areas such as Mayurbhanj in recent decades introduce what can only be described as a paradigm shift in the implementation of universal education in India. Today, rural block development programmes emphatically focus on improving hitherto neglected rural schools. In Jamda, in 2008, most village schools were construction sites, with newly emerging concrete school buildings or classroom extensions jostling for space in small walled-in school compounds.
In addition to large-scale school-building construction, the state implements the national curriculum and provides incentives to children from marginalized communities to go to school, rapidly increasing the rates of literacy and schooling of children from socio-economically marginalized communities. The changes began with the 1980s Education For All programme and led up to the historic 2009 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Elementary Education Act (2009), which holds the state constitutionally liable to compulsorily provide universal access to elementary schools.
Contemporary state desire for universal education receives impetus from globalized rationales as well as the traditional nationalist imperatives. As Jeffery observed, the political-economy terrain of India's education includes the involvement of international partner-agencies explicitly articulating educational priorities and implementation methodologies.Footnote 20 Commitment to formal education falls within India's participatory principles of global citizenship and transformative action in the context of international human rights frameworksFootnote 21 and neoliberal economic-development ideologies.
Signboards outside many village-school compounds in Mayurbhanj District display how much money one or another government or state–private or state–international non-governmental organization (NGO) partnership had allocated for the expansion and construction of that school and hostel. State budgets also allocate significant funds for incentives to poor families to enrol their children through midday meals programmes for poor-area schools, free girls’ school uniforms, free hostel accommodation for children from poor rural families, free text books, free bicycles for rural female matriculation students, and so on.
There are at least two implications of this shift: first, many of the students of this study were first-generation students, who still bore significant agricultural household responsibilities (double work burdens) during a transition away from the era in which farming households relied on young people's full-time participation in productivityFootnote 22; and, second, amidst these impressive quantifiable transformations in manifestations of state educational desire, the particular concern in this article with student narratives and experiences probes the quality of rural schooling and the nature of negotiations and motivations of rural schools for young people. For, in the macro developmental focus on schooling, it is young people who balance diverse social and economic expectations upon them and enact roles of studentship within a changing landscape. Students have become significant targets for educational development agendas and must find ways to interpret powerful development discourses directed at them. Moreover, along with optimistic expectations of a democratizing universal schooling, Bourdieu reminds us of the structural potential of schools to reinforce inequities.Footnote 23 In the next subsection, we will examine how schools fare in this regard and local responses to state projects.
Mayurbhanj village schools and educational desire
Pink concrete school buildings with sky-blue iron gatesFootnote 24 stand out from the local mud-brick houses. Set at the village crossroads, they represent a metaphorical link to elsewhere. In the village where I spent most time, a hand-painted mural on the school's front wall depicted a child in school uniform riding on a giant rocket-shaped pencil flying up, up, and away. It conveyed an optimistic message that, through school, children will fly into the space age, into ‘modernity’. The boundary walls enclose the school and yet, like the gaps in the walls, local schools are shut off neither from the landscape of the village nor, as Benei reminds us, from other political-pedagogical projects. With each school, a unique interface: autonomous, different, endowed with state legitimacy and authority, yet inhabited by the teachers, students, and other local actors, who re-appropriate and shape it.Footnote 25 This village school is surrounded by the paddy fields, where students’ family members work, and the forested hills, imbued with the local values of the Santali, Ho, and minority ‘Scheduled Caste’ and OBC (‘Other Backward Class’) communities who live there.
Through the school gates, an open quadrangle of bare earth is surrounded by buildings. On the left is an old building where hostel students reside and where the cook prepares the midday meal of local rice in a small fire-blackened chimneyless kitchen. Straight ahead is a long building with a number of primary-school classrooms and an administrative office. On the right hand side are several high-school classrooms, some still under construction. On the fourth side, just inside the school's front walls, are old upper-primary classrooms and the grade 1 and 2 classrooms and a small school store room that doubles as the primary-school principal's office. Most of the buildings have concrete verandas where students gather during breaks and eat their midday meal. The school has no electricity and daylight enters classrooms through grilled windows. Most classrooms have wooden bench desks with attached bench seats. Elsewhere, students sit directly on the concrete floor. Beyond the quadrangle and buildings is an open field where the students play sport. Beyond the field are bushes and trees visited for urination. A tube-well hand-pump, outside the school gate, is the only water source for the entire school, where students drink and rinse their hands and plates before and after the midday meal. The hand-pump is shared with local villagers.
The rudimentary facilities of both the school and local area make it hard to retain qualified teachers, most of whom want to stay in towns or cities, to send their own children to better-resourced schools and to avail of conveniences such as running water, electricity, and ‘pukka’ housing. Appointed government teachers simply do not turn up or visit the school intermittently, as the following anecdote narrated by a village-school principal illustrates:
To teach 120 students the government has engaged three paid teaching staff including me. I'm employed as both the headmaster and a teacher. However the other two paid teachers have never arrived to actually do their work. I have been here for 8 years. There are four local NGO unqualified volunteers who each help me out from time to time as assistant teachers (all Ho and Santali volunteers). They are all from this very village. A local women's Self Help Group comes in to cook and serve the daily midday meal. The hostel cook serves a midday meal and a night meal to the hostel students.
I have been posted at this school for 8 years and I live in the school compound. We all face many problems here, especially because of our acute staff shortage and because some government appointed staff have never showed up to do their duties. As this is a malaria area no one wants to come here. Malaria and typhoid are rife here and all my students and I suffer from malaria all year round. We have no electricity. Our drinking water has to be carried by the students from one kilometre away. Everyone (myself included) has to bathe in the nearby village pond, which involves health risks and students go to the field for latrine (School headmaster interview, Mayurbhanj, 2008).
Similar stories, of the challenges faced by their staff and students were narrated to me by other headmasters.Footnote 26 Those headmasters and teachers who interact with students at the chalk face were overwhelmingly sympathetic and concerned with students’ daily commitments. Several village headmasters emphasized that, in recent years, most of their time was so consumed with serving as school-building construction contractors that in fact they are unable to manage everyday pedagogical supervision of their schools and, with absent teachers, students often sit in the classrooms without any teachers present. A teacher in my adopted extended family manages as a sole teacher in a school of 200 students. The headmaster whose family I reside with tells me most of his days are busy purchasing building materials and supervising construction. Thus, children in rural scheduled tribe and caste areas are admitted into a distinctive and, in various key respects, impoverished version of formal schooling, in the absences of teachers.
It is beyond the scope of this article to analyse the complex factors determining India's teacher absenteeism in rural and marginalized schools—a topic explored in some depth in the literature,Footnote 27 as my primary focus is on students’ motivations to attend school despite teacher absenteeism and the conflicting demands on the rural student. When assigned teachers are absent, it provokes unique experiences in students—which we will explore in the next section. It also provokes responses from local-level NGO groups who run private schools and recruit local volunteers to act as unpaid assistants or para-teachers in government village schools, often inspired by the ideological project of their NGO.
In Jamda block (2008), two main social groups respond to the teacher-absenteeism gap: (i) the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS), with its aims to instil specifically Hindu cultural values and political identifications through its pedagogical programmeFootnote 28; and (ii) tribal/Santal NGOs such as the Kolhan NGO, which aim to incorporate Santal and Ho cultural and linguistic values into school curricula. Both run private schools in Jamda Block.Footnote 29 Furthermore, both these distinct groups send volunteer para-teachers to government schools in response to teacher absenteeism.
For instance, in a remote Jamda village, local residents complained that the full-time salaried government teacher only visits their school one or two days a month. However, an unpaid young local man from a Kolhan NGO climbs the mountain almost daily to teach the students there, motivated by the idea that the children, who are from his tribal community, must not miss out on their schooling.
Such educational-volunteering spirit was not unusual amongst Santal and Ho communities in Mayurbhanj. As noted above, a desire to improve formal schooling opportunities for Santal children has long been a part of modernist Mayurbhanj Santal and Ho social and political movements. In this context, Santal and Ho volunteers, often poorly educated/unqualified themselves, give of their time to the local village schools to facilitate the functioning of the school, and to ensure that Santal and Ho languages and cultural references are normative within the classrooms. Young people, such as the youthful volunteers I met, have been at the fore of education movements to promote Santali history and language for decades.
Thus, diverse, sometimes competing, local educational desires, modes of curriculum implementation, and visions for the future entwine with wider political-economy priorities. In brief, two distinctive forces bring different qualities to village schools in Mayurbhanj: state educational planners have dramatically improved the roll-out of access to schools in hitherto marginalized tribal areas, providing new material and pedagogical inputs. In the gaps, such as teacher absences, the local teachers who are present, para-teachers, and organizations (such as Kolan and the RSS) reshape village schools and respond to these gaps to ensure schools may function. They imbue the school curriculum and school routines with their own ideological perspectives. Students negotiate the inputs and vicissitudes of state and local school providers and bring their own sense making, educational desires and values, and enactments to this mix. As a community of peers, they too shape the ontology of schools and develop their own meanings around it.
Mayurbhanj students and educational desire
On a warm winter's day in February 2008, a group of elementary-school students sat on the grass outside their village school in Mayurbhanj, Northern Odisha, waiting for a festival procession to commence. I joined the group and we began to talk about our everyday routines. Twelve-year-old JharnaFootnote 30 said:
My mother is a widow who makes money by cutting and selling fuel-wood from the forest. She goes with a group of other people from our village who trek in a large group to the forested hills, leaving at about 3.00am. I usually get up when she does and study for a while. Then I sweep our hut and yard, then sit outside and wash the pots and plates from the night dinner and then go to the tube-well and hand-pump our kitchen and drinking water. I come home and light the fire and put the rice on to cook. Around dawn I go to the village pond and wash clothes and take my bath. I come home and eat rice for breakfast and leave rice for my mother to eat when she returns from the jungle. After a while I get myself ready to go to school and then leave home to walk to school.Footnote 31
While Jharna was matter-of-fact about her multi-tasked morning routines, some of her friends stressed that her workload was particularly heavy. Nevertheless, it reflected a pattern common among many students in rural North Odisha, as the following student diary excerpt illustrates:
At 3.00 am I got up and washed my face and prayed for five minutes. At 3.15 I read geography and then history. I stopped studying at about 5.00 am and folded my bedding and mosquito net and went to the river holding a small towel. When I returned from the river my father said, ‘Today we have to plough our fields’. So instead of going to school I went to the field at 7.00 am and began ploughing. At about 9.30 am or so, I returned home and then went to the river to bathe. I returned home at around 11.30 am and at 12.00 I started reading my text books.Footnote 32
Many school-going children,Footnote 33 like Jharna and Vijay, interweave various types of work and embodied learning along with full-time study. Understanding their involvement in schooling is incomplete without understanding the ongoing struggles that shape the terrain on which schooling operates at the pragmatic level for students. Their narratives and others that follow indicate that students are prepared to work extraordinarily hard to be students. The two main methodologies employed to learn about young people's motivations, experiences, and enactments were informal conversations with students and text-elicitation.
The text-elicitation methodology was conducted in the state school of the village where I resided, asking voluntary participating students to write (a) brief essays (less than a page) on specific topics and (b) a seven-day journal of their daily activities. This drew on Morrow'sFootnote 34 observations on the analytical potential of eliciting literary texts from school students in research among young people, and that eliciting written work in the classroom setting does not detract too far from students’ normative routines.Footnote 35
In the collection of students’ seven-day journals and essays, and in conversations with students within and outside of school, the following themes arose about students’ engagement with schooling: managing their time to perform a variety of roles; negotiating, as a peer group, the conceptual significance of what they learn at school with what they learn outside of it; intrinsic desire to learn/increase knowledge; fulfilment of future aspirations; and the importance of school to peer identity as members of an age-mate ‘community of belonging’.
Their writing and oral narratives also emphasized common factors that temper their engagement with school, including: walking long distances in the heat of the day to and from school; teacher absenteeism; being first-generation scholars; and fitting in unstructured, unsupervised play time with their peers.
Managing time to perform diverse roles
Being a student involves daily negotiations and choices undertaken autonomously and through familial obligations, as illustrated in an essay excerpt on work and play, written by 12-year-old Pradiip: ‘My mother works very hard. I don't go to school every day because my mother is old. I help her in work. We both work together.’Footnote 36 Pradip simultaneously reveals how he is compelled by circumstances beyond his control and how he determines his own priorities. It is a given for many students that, where the need arises, they will absent themselves from school to carry out domestic, agricultural, or other tasks. Eight-year-old Manoj was playing just outside a school one day and I asked him why he was not inside. He said he had taken the day off because his family was pressing oil that day and needed his help. Many of the young people whom I worked among in 2008 made decisions each day regarding the flexible management of their in-school and out-of-school roles and responsibilities. Such decisions were often intimately connected with their roles in familial productive units, as the following essay illustrates:
I particularly concentrate on my study. Apart from my study, I usually do many types of works in my holidays. I use to go to the nearby forest on my holidays. I collect firewood, leaves and travel 8–10 kilometres to sell those. I spend the money I get in my study. Like buying books and note books etc. Sometimes I help my father in his day to day work. My father is a green grocer. He vendors potato, onion, garlic, chilli and vegetables. I sell these stuffs if my father is away from home. Sometimes I go to plough our fields with my father. Actually I help my father in his work whenever I am free.
I go to the jungle to bring firewood and timber wood with my friends and sell them.
Sometimes I go to the jungle with the elders to hunt in the night. I do these works in my holidays and free time from school.
Negotiating different categories of knowledge: in-school and out-of-school learning
When students were asked to write on the topic, ‘Myself, My Family and My Village’, a 14-year-old girl wrote the following essay:
We have different jatis of people living in our village. Many people are facing many troubles in this village. Mostly we face troubles in the rainy season. Mostly all of the people walk on me. The farmers go to their fields and school-boys and girls go to their schools by bicycle or walking. The milk-boys go to graze their cattle. Some passers-by (travellers) and businessmen go to the market on me. The trucks full of goods come to the market on me. Hot road, how many things I have seen. I witness the proud laugh of the rich, the pitiful cries of the depressed, foreigners returning.
I am well known to everyone. Where is the question of dust blowing? And the days passed away. Again, black chips were brought in trucks, not in the bullock cart. Pitch drums were brought to the site. Workmen melted pitch and mixed chips along with the black chips and all were poured on me. As soon as they poured, my colour became black, so deep black. It is true. But trucks and carts and cycles are driving beautifully now. Now on both of my sides, trees have been planted. They will be the rest-shade after they have grown to their full extent.Footnote 37
Reading the Odiya-to-English translation, I said to the translator: ‘I don't understand what the author is saying.’ The translator responded: ‘she is writing as if she is the village road.’ Rereading it, I was profoundly moved by its poetry. The student took a playful and innovative approach to the topic, ‘My Village’. She was the road that runs through her village, and conveys travellers to distant lands and back again. As well as describing her village from a unique perspective, the author expresses implicit appreciation of ubiquitous rural road-construction projects—bituminizing unsealed village tracks. This contrasts with some of the ambivalences expressed to me by some of the elders in Jamda, whose desire for the convenience of sealed roads is constrained by suspicion that well-built roads may bring economic developments that, they expressed, may impinge on the current comparative autonomy of their tribal villages.
Schooling presents young people with differing discourses around everyday dilemmas in a rural block and advances positions that sometimes differ from and critique those of their elders. The student is offering her current perspective on rural road development and trying to make sense of debates—that she would be aware of—the pay-offs of convenience and connectivity against current local autonomy based on preserving distance from state effect.
The author also blurred boundaries between the powerful economic-development symbol of ‘roads construction’ with the equally powerful local symbolism that landscapes are animate. In a world where rocks, ditches, paths, rivers, and hills are inhabited by spirits,Footnote 38 her animate, watching, and feeling road remarried local cosmologies with ‘development’ cosmologies.
The effort to make sense of and evaluate cross-cultural categoriesFootnote 39 was a recurrent theme in the collected essays and the essay collection reflected the full spectrum of young people's approaches to implicit themes of development associated with formal education vis-à-vis their knowledge categories in their home lives in rural villages. The following excerpts are from two adjoining essays written by a 12-year-old girl: one on ‘Work’ and the other on ‘My Village’:
My village . . . is at the foot of the hill. Therefore we collect fruit, roots, wood, leaves and twigs from the jungle. We also collect medicinal herbs. We get a lot of benefit from the jungle. We go to the jungle when we are not at school and on holidays. We eat various fruits in the jungle. We get kendu, chahar to eat in summer. In the month of July we get blackberries and kusum. We also collect mushrooms. Thus we spend our holidays and free time from school in the jungle. We rear goats and cows to increase our income. On Saturdays and Sundays we go for cow-herding or bring leaves to feed our goats. Our parents go on other days. A river flows through our village, which comes out from the jungle. We dig wells on the river sand and when it fills up with water we jump into that and bathe.
There is beautiful scenery around our village. Many streams come down from the mountain and meet at one place . . .. There are many ‘Ho’ films which have the scenery of our mountain and the spring . . .. There are many green trees on both sides of this spring. There are many small caves on the foot of the mountain. Tigers, deer, elephants, bears and other wild animals drink water there. We never go in front of them. We watch them hiding ourselves. They are very dangerous. They are not tamed. Nobody goes near them.
There is another famous and beautiful mountain called Yogini Buru . . . . People say an old woman was weaving a mat on the top of the mountain. The rain of fire fell down from the sky while she was still weaving. She turned into stone due to the fire. Now also the stone looks like a woman weaving a mat.
People climb to the top of the mountain to visit her on Rakhi Purnima. People make offerings there, males and females go up there. The Deheri (village priest) brings sacred water in a pot from a nearby mountain called Huludi Buru and pours it on Yogini Buru . . .. If this is not done, farmers believe that there would not be enough rain that year. There could be a drought in the village. Therefore it is necessary to offer water to Yoginii Buri on Rakhi Purnima. There is a big tree of champa (frangipani) flowers on that mountain-top. The mountain seems to be very old. I think military forces were fighting here in olden days. That's why there are signs of bullets in the mountain. Girls offer garlands made of the champa (frangipani) flowers which they pluck from the champa tree on the top of the mountain. Many people come to see this puja.
This student offers a rich, ethnographic description of the significance of her local environment to her and her local community, and evokes embodied knowledge of the tastes, smells, sights, sounds, and activities she engages with. She also shares local stories of place, which expresses pride in her community heritage. By contrast, the following essay, written by another student on the ‘My Village’ topic, reflects that the author has internalized development discourses:
My village is situated in the district of Mayurbhanj. It is a very backward village of Orissa. Most of the people here are farmers or labourers. They are extremely poor and live from hand to mouth, so the condition of my village is very bad. Now I would like to improve the condition of my village. I shall first of all work for the farmers. They are illiterate and ignorant. They do not follow the scientific method of cultivation. They get very little profit from their lands. Their children therefore get little food and clothes and go without education. They themselves also live miserable lives. I shall at first teach them how to grow more crops. I shall tell them to use machines and fertilizer in their field. If I improve the condition of the farmers of my village then the condition of the whole village will change in no time.
(Jamda Student Essay Collection, 2008)
CarrinFootnote 40 described how the Santal students she interviewed referred to the knowledge they acquire outside of school in their villages as ‘bidya’ and the knowledge they learn at school as ‘sarkari bidya’ or ‘government knowledge’. Similarly, Mayurbhanj students were developing generational perspectives based on shared negotiations of multiple categories of knowledge prevalent at the time, and developing peer critique of both forms in a partial symbolic autonomy that both replicates and exceeds adult forms of knowledge. This student's perspective on the circumstances of his village and local cultivation methods critically contrasts with views expressed by some of the adult farmers of the village I resided in, who told me they consciously avoid chemical fertilizers and pesticides after finding that it is expensive and eventually depletes the soil, and are proud of their traditional, chemical-free farming methods. Students’ negotiations demonstrate how cultural knowledge is not only transferred from one generation to another, but also developed among child peers who participate in generating the criteria that validate changing knowledge paradigms.
Intrinsic desire to learn
Some students emphasized that their desire for school stems from an intrinsic interest in learning specific subjects. Much of this learning relied on the study of textbooks set as part of the national curriculum, usually printed in the state language (Odiya). Textbook studies extended beyond the classroom right into the circadian rhythms of their sleep, as many students wake up in the middle of the night to study history, geography, languages, maths, or science textbooks by kerosene lantern while the rest of the family sleeps. The following is an excerpt from a seven-day student diary written by Alok Murmu:
I was asleep and then got up at 2.30 in the morning and washed my face and read history books at 2.40 and then I read my geography book. I stopped studying at 5am. I went to the river at 5am.
(Student Seven-Day Diary Collection, Jamda, 2008)
Most of the Odiya rural students who narrated their routines to me, or described them in their seven-day diaries, spoke of waking in the small hours of the night to study, perhaps because they believe this is an ideal, quiet time to study or because early-morning agricultural and domestic chores leave little time before school in the morning to complete their homework. A student narrates in his diary:
Day 1: Thursday 10.7.08
12–5am: I had my dinner at 12 and went to bed alone. I dreamed different types of dreams. I got up at 3am and washed my face and prayed. Then I started studying and at 5am I left my bed.
5am–7am: I left my bed at 5am and I went to the river close to our village. I ran on the river sand for 10 minutes and did exercises and brushed my teeth with neem twig. Then I took bath in the river then I returned home. I put coconut oil on my body at home. Sometimes I make tea myself or sometimes I go to the village shop and spend R3 to buy Parle G Biscuits and eat it.
Another student wrote:
Day 7: Wednesday 16.7.08
12.00–5.00am
In night I studied many books, science, history, geography and Hindi until 1 am. Then I slept and got up at 3am to practice the writing test. 5am I practice the mathematics.
5.00–7.00am
From 5am to 7am, we 3 brothers and sisters worked in the garden. We gave water and clear out the weed grass. There are many kinds of vegetables available there.
I noted that many young people elected to sacrifice their sleep time rather than carry out homework study tasks straight after school from 4.00 p.m. to 6.00 p.m., when many students hang out and play games and sports with their peers in and around the village—a priority for many students in Mayurbhanj.
Fulfilment of future aspirations
Some students wrote about their future-oriented hopes—that schooling would enhance their adult career prospects. One student wrote:
The distance of my high school from my village is eight kilometers. I am studying to fulfill my ambition in life that is, if I pass matriculation, then I can join ITI. (Industrial Training Institute). I don't know what will happen. I will try my best. I will pray to God also. Many of the students from my locality are studying there. They like me and I also like them.
(From the Student Essay Collection, Jamda, 2008)
This student, like many others, was motivated to travel a long distance on foot or by bicycle over unsealed roads each day with the aim of passing the examinations, along a trajectory towards future employment. Another wrote:
I am Sri S. Tudu, I have a family. There are my mother, father, 3 brothers, 3 sisters, grandy and grandma in my family. My parents are illiterate. We depend on cultivation. My and my parents dream is I would do a service. How many days they could support our study by working? My mother and father are 45 and 57 years old. . .. My mother gets weak so my sisters do every work of house like cooking, fetching water etc. I feel lucky to get these sisters. I love everyone.
Familial aspiration for a government service position through education was regarded as a route out of labour-intensive subsistence livelihood.
School and peer identity as members of an age-mate ‘community of belonging’
Another recurring theme was enjoyment of being part of a peer community with fellow students. Performing the daily rituals of schooling (early-morning preparations for school, walking or cycling to and from school with friends, and making sense of the demands of school life) all enacts a ‘community of belonging’ for many young people and is another pivotal reason they attended school even when teachers are absent: ‘I had my bath with my friends. After, had rice, I went to school with my friends. We cleaned our school. We prayed and sat in our classes. We gave presence in school and read math, MIL and science and sang the song.’
I asked the headmaster whose family I resided with what his students do when they come to school to find their teacher absent. He replied that students generally stay at the school, sit together in the classroom, and study their textbooks in the company of each other. They also joke and chat with their friends. If they become too boisterous, any teacher or volunteer present on the premises may enter the classroom and intervene to silence them, otherwise they are largely left to their own devices. I visited a number of teacher-less classrooms where students were sitting in groups, either studying and working their way through textbooks or joking and chatting together, apparently not achieving much in the way of textbook studies, but enjoying exchanges with peers. Identification with each other in the place of school provides experiences of fulfilment in the ‘here and now’ of their lives as young people as much as any future career aspirations. Interacting with each other, they develop shared social cognition about their generational predicaments. Affective bonds, friendships, hanging out together, and sharing similar duties and responsibilities facilitated their shared processes of sense making about the dilemmas and demands of their various tasks. The physical site of the school building provided a geographical location for their own imagined community—a place somewhat excluded from the sociality of the village, in which they tried out new norms.
Friendship was very important to students, fluid as it could sometimes be, and school was a place where young people mixed and interacted, irrespective of considerations that they may reside in segregated areas along the lines of jati, within their village. One diary extract illustrated the comradery of hostel students:
On Wed my friends and I slept at 9pm. I went to urinal at 12.30 am on Thursday and with me there were two pupils. After that we felt ok. At 4am I felt very weak. I again went to sleep at 5am. I feel very weak at that time. We are all sleeping. After that I get ok. First then I wake up two students, my friends. Then we clean up our bed and go to brush our teeth with daton stick. We go to river to finish our morning work then we return to hostel room. Then I asked the teacher to go to Jamda [five kilometres from the school]. My friends and I got ready to go to Jamda at 7 o'clock am. I borrowed a bicycle from my uncle and returned to the hostel. When we reached the medical centre the peon was sweeping. It was 8.30 am then the doctor came to the medical centre and I go there and discuss about my fever and he wrote me a prescription.
At 9am we come from medical centre and see that the school students are going to school with their books. We reached the bus stand (in Jamda) and were supposed to buy a pillow for our teacher but the shopkeeper says that the pillow is not available and we return to school with disappointment.
At 12 noon we reach, then we eat rice. After eating I take the medicine and then fall asleep and my friend went to class. Then at the time of tiffin I went to bathroom. At that time I had severe fever and then I again slept in the room. At P.E.T. sir asked me what happened and I told him that I am suffering in fever.
At 3pm I woke up and moved here and there, then I feel well. At 4pm after school is over I go to the field to walk here and there. At 4.30 pm I and another pupil go to Tendra rice mill and from there we bring rice from our teacher's house. After that food is prepared and we are doing gossip outside.
I go to sleep from 6pm in the evening inside the room and at 9pm we eat and then prepare our bed for sleeping. I slept after taking medicine. Then I suddenly wake up and temperature is very high. Then the pupil with me brings water and I wash.
We were sitting on the veranda at 9pm, then after a while we went to sleep.Footnote 41
I sat with an eight-year-old boy who was a non-school-going cow-herder and asked him what he liked to do most of all. He replied: ‘Going to school.’ I said: ‘But you don't go to school, so how do you know that it is what you like best?’ He responded: ‘But I've seen the school and all the kids going there and that's what I like best.’ It was a present-tense longing for inclusion with age-mate peers in the location of the school-ground that seemed to motivate him. As this article explores, against the odds of other pressures, students themselves drove much of the desire to keep village schools alive and filled with their active presence. In the absence of teachers, they could have become vacant dwellings. Most significantly, amongst age-mate peers, students formulate their own generational responses to the dilemmas and circumstances of the particular context that they share.
Conclusion: significances of how students interact with the other two circles of education desire
Many of the students I spoke with anticipate that their futures will remain connected with their rural village, and they will in due course inherit agricultural land or marry into neighbouring agricultural villages. They expressed profound feeling for their social, cultural, and environmental surroundings and awareness that there are paradigms of understanding and categories of knowledge outside of school that are essential to their social, cultural, and economic lives that have little to do with school knowledge. They also know that their rural spatial context is changing. Their own involvement in school, many as first-generation scholars, is a significant part of that transformation. This is a process of simultaneously being acted upon by structuring forces that regulate the internalization of disciplining modes and discourses and young people themselves playing enactive roles, attending school even when teachers are absent, studying even though they have to negotiate other agricultural and domestic work, which is also important to them. They negotiate a political history of embracing formal education as part of a Santal and Ho modernizing political movement, yet one that critiques education curricula that misrepresent them.
As discussed, different circles of educational desire interact with each other. The state funds local schools and controls pedagogy via its national curricula, its incentives, and its arbitrary oversight of teachers. Local school providers re-appropriate schools run on the ground. They organize day-to-day routines and exert disciplinary techniques within the schoolyard. Students are profoundly affected by these diverse inputs. As the diaries illustrate, they wake up when the rest of the family sleeps and study national-curriculum textbooks and manage their daily, weekly, and annual time according to routines instituted by the school.
However, the combination of enactments, motivations, experiences, and evaluations of students is a potent yet often overlooked force in shaping school. Without understanding what students negotiate to attend school and the way they make sense and compartmentalize different paradigms of understanding, we will not fully understand a school.
As they study in the rapidly changing rural context, and flexibly manage their time to perform a variety of roles, students are dynamic evaluaters of the varying inputs they confront. They assess competing discourses and formulate new responses that exceed adults’ initial inputs—which themselves come from diverse viewpoints. The student essay that playfully synthesized appreciation of roads as a symbol of rural development with roads, as animate entities, enacted a new meaning, poetic and effective in its symbolism, that accommodated and superseded two different ways of viewing the world. Through their interactions with schooling, students do voice development agendas. Yet this is modified by the fact that they simultaneously voice narratives that reflect their active engagement in extended kin communities. More importantly, amongst their peers, students develop new generational paradigms of local understanding that have their own ontologies. Each school is emergent through the interactions of multiple stakeholders. Students’ motivations, experiences, and enactments as a community of peers are pivotal in these interactions, shaping the effects of schooling as well as being shaped by it.
