Caste, space, and schooling in nineteenth century South India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of varied schooling agendas for poor and oppressed caste children and adults in the princely state of Travancore in nineteenth-century colonial south India. Schools became socially contested and politically charged spaces in which various subaltern castes, particularly the Dalits and Nadars, articulated a new language of social and religious self-fashioning. British Protestant missionaries played a crucial role in provoking these imaginations and yet, the joint workings of caste and racial prejudices resulted in ambivalent cultural encounters in the educational landscape. Caste was central to these contestations and negotiations in making modern child subjectivities and tended to produce new forms of inequality and reproduce existing ones. I argue that schooling campaigns for the poor resulted in the perpetuation of hierarchised, caste-inflected norms of childhood and produced multiple marginal children in local society. This paper draws upon British Protestant missionary archives to highlight the unstable and violent geographies in which children of subaltern castes navigated the sphere of modern schooling in colonial Travancore and the constitutive function of schools in the making of marginal childhoods.