Education Meets Gender
Tracing the Beginning of Learning Gender, the Search for Identity and Representation in Indian Textbooks.
Manushi Desai
Supervisor's name: Edyta Just, Gender Studies, LiU Master’s Programme
Gender Studies – Intersectionality and Change Master’s thesis 15 ECTS credits
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Abstract
Gender equality is something that most countries around the globe are trying to
achieve. Education is one of the major factors that can bring about significant change as it can shape young minds to nurture a more equal future. This thesis aims to look at a very specific but important part of the education system: textbooks, by investigating them through the lens of intersectionality and gender roles. The purpose is to identify what the status of Indian textbooks is in terms of gender and intersectional awareness and identify gaps if there are any so that necessary interventions could be designed. The intersections that I will be specifically looking at are gender, religion, caste, disability, and age. I will also be investigating whether these textbooks represent gendered and intersectional identities and if so, in what capacity.
Keywords: gender, intersectionality, marginalised, representation, education, Indian textbooks, Indian feminism.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would first like to thank my thesis advisor Prof. Edyta Just of the TEMA Genus at Linkoping University. I am grateful for the consistent guidance and appreciate the freedom given to me to shape my thesis in my own way and at my pace. An extended regard for my faculty from St. Xavier’s College – Sarvar ma’am, Susan ma’am, and Cathy ma’am. Thank you, all of you, for pushing me to think and question more. I would also like to thank my classmates, especially those from Tutor Group 4 ‘Angry Snowflakes’ - the regular support and checking in was valuable to me. I would also thank my colleagues for checking in and working around my schedules whenever I needed. Additionally, my students for being a constant inspiration for me to work harder and try and do my little effort to better the education system.
Finally, I must express my very profound gratitude to my family, my friends, and to my partner, for giving me harsh pep talks whenever needed and unfailing support,
throughout my years of study and through the process of researching and writing this thesis. This would not have been possible without them. Thank you.
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Contents
Abstract 2
Acknowledgements 3
Introduction 4
Aim and Research Questions 5
Thesis Outline 7
Context 8
- Gender and Education 8
The Importance of Representation 9
- The Indian Context 10
Previous Research 12
Theoretical Framework 13
Materials and Methodology 21
Observations from the Study and their Analysis 25
Common Analysis 35
Sites for Possible Interventions 38
Conclusion 39
List of References 40
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Introduction
A quick Google search that I did to try and start off this introduction in a clichéd, creative way was to look for a quote on education. As my research combines gender, society, and education, I thought it would be appropriate for me to find one by a woman, or a non-male identity. I opened a web page titled “45 Powerful Quotes About Education and Learning” and while these quotes all spoke of education beyond schooling, what intrigued me was that only 5 out of these 45 quotes were said by women. (Mission, 2017)
I started wondering if there were no female pioneers in education or at least none who sounded powerful enough to be in this list. As a cis-woman myself, I looked back at my school education, most of my teachers were female, yet I felt less represented. Why did my history textbooks not talk about any female warriors? Why did I learn about no female scientists except Marie Curie? For years, my naïve-self believed that maybe there were no women accomplishing great enough tasks. As I grew older and studied gender, read more things like Virginia Woolf, and her ‘A Room of One’s Own’ essay, I understood the world and my textbooks (or rather what they lacked) a lot more.
Education - some consider it the greatest power we can give to new generations - while some consider it the death of learning. Either way, the significance that education, more specifically, formal education holds over today’s world cannot be ignored. Most people across the world are striving to put their children through the best schools and colleges that they can afford. Countries are striving to pull up their literacy rate and all for what? While the whole world toils and sweats to get our young generations the best education possible, who pauses and takes a look at what we are really teaching them? How do we
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ensure that they not only become talented individuals and gain skills but also learn how to respect themselves, and therefore, each other? How do we make sure our younger generations are brought up to be socially aware people who will not discriminate and create and uphold systems which are inherently unequal? The answer to these
questions is too complicated. It is definitely not a single word.
India being such a diverse and complicated country, these questions will have even more complicated multifold answers. The Indian education system has long been criticised for its shortcomings - as someone who is a part of it, I can vouch for the shortcomings - but I also see where the problems come from and why people in power refuse to deal with it. It is, after all, a way to make people learn, what you want them to learn.
Children are impressionable beings, they learn from us, they learn from their surroundings and then they learn from very minute things which we as adults, conveniently overlook. Most children spend a lot of their time at home or school - so these become the primary influencing environments. The resources the school uses then, like textbooks, become quite important to look at. Parents also rely on these textbooks to teach their children a particular subject.
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Aim and Research Questions:
My research aim is to explore the status of current Indian primary school texts in terms of intersectional and gender awareness and where and how interventions for the same could intervene. Therefore, identifying the key points where the interventions are necessary will be some part of the research. I will also be specifically looking at the kind of representation given to intersectional identities in terms of content and illustrations. The additional research question that emerges is whether there are existing practices in place for bringing about gender and intersectional (religion, caste, age, and disability) awareness interventions in primary education and, to what degree do they work for the specific Indian context. My research questions are:
1. What is the status of current Indian primary textbooks in terms of intersectional and gender awareness?
2. Do these textbooks represent gendered intersectional identities, especially marginalised ones? If so, how?
3. Possible sites for intervention.
4. Are there existing practices in place for bringing about gender and intersectional awareness interventions?
I have decided to look at only a few specific intersections - caste, age, disability, and religion - because I wanted to limit my scope and these ones in particular were chosen to specifically look at unique intersections that become quite significant in the Indian context. However, a larger part of my analysis and framework will still be devoted to gender.
The reason for doing such a thesis is simply going to the formative years when children are developing a sense of society and culture and making sure that the resources they,
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and the adults around them access to contribute to their learning, do not contribute to a bias that might have started forming in their mind at such a young age. I feel that interventions of intersectional awareness from such a young age would be the most helpful in the all-round sensitivity of these children, especially when they grow up to be adults. In order to apply those interventions, first it’s important to find whether they are needed, where they are needed and that is what this thesis aims to do.
A larger purpose is to also make a small contribution to the ongoing improvement efforts of the Indian education system.
Thesis Outline:
My thesis follows a pretty straightforward path. I start by situating the thesis in a specific context - that of gender, intersectionality, education, and India. From there I move to previous research to explore what has already been done in the field and what my thesis will be doing differently. Next, I define my theoretical framework which is the lens through which my analysis of the observations I make in the textbooks takes place. Within this, I also look at Indian feminism where I set the base for
intersectionality and place it in the Indian context. After this, I note down observation parameters and then the observations that I have made in the textbooks along with a short analysis at the bottom as that is the purpose of this thesis. I also add a common analysis of the textbooks as I felt the need to tie them to each other and connect it to my theoretical framework. Then I mention the possible interventions. Lastly, there is the conclusion where I tie up all the loose ends and identify spaces for possible
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Context:
Gender and Education
In order to connect the theoretical framework of this thesis to the material I am investigating, it is important to understand the impact society has on young children and while that may be huge, how much do textbooks really impact children? Why do the illustrations in these textbooks and the words used become so important?
In his research essay, ‘The invisible obstacle to educational equality: gender bias in textbooks,’ Rae Blumberg, points out how important textbooks are as students end up spending most of their study time engaging with the textbook and how the teachers also base a lot of their instructions, discussions, and exercises based on these textbooks. This is especially true of the Indian textbooks as chapters are read out within the class, all our exams are based on the textbooks and the homework is from that too - there is hardly any learning that happens outside the textbook. In fact, these textbooks that I am about to investigate have a page for teacher instructions and what the teacher should focus on and what kind of exercises they could do, after almost every chapter. Clearly, the textbooks then sort of become like the religious texts of the school. (Blumberg, 2008) When I started with preliminary brainstorming, I wondered at what age do children really start becoming aware of social identity markers, understanding gender, caste, identifying them, and then expressing it.
Most of the research suggests that even before they turn 5 years old, children do have an awareness of gender binaries and are able to identify them, but they see it as a temporary state - something that can go from one to another from time to time. Gender as an identity starts developing around after this time when they start thinking of
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gender as a stable trait. This is the point where “they become motivated to relate to other members of their group and seek out gender-related information, often becoming very strict about adhering to gender stereotypes.” (LoBue, 2018)
In India, first grade is when children are about 5-6 six-year olds, coinciding with the above estimate. This is one of the reasons why I chose to look at 1st grade English textbooks as it is clearly a crucial age and the material that them and their parents depend on should be looked at. As for other interactions, my theoretical framework aims to keep it simple by simply looking at representation, especially in the 1st grade textbook since the text component there is quite less.
The Importance of Representation:
As a teenage girl, reading novels and watching TV shows originating from the West had an unusual but not uncommon effect on me. I started writing short stories in about 8th grade - the ones I wrote before that and after in my creative writing classes
consistently had white characters. I remember also often wanting to write from the male perspective. At that point, I never questioned it, nor did my teachers, my family, or my friends. As I grew up, that started changing bit by bit. I started having one or two Indian characters, I was more comfortable with writing from a female perspective because I understood that better now - however, the setting and other characters were still largely American, and white. This was around the same time that I started reading books about women, sometimes even women of colour.
Soon after, my writing bloomed into a kind of woman-ness and Indian-ness that I myself was not aware of. I remember surprising myself with finally writing about
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characters that were like me, that I was not alien to, characters that weren’t borrowed caricatures of a world far away. It wasn’t just about reading literature written by Indian authors with Indian characters - the kind of language choices Chinua Achebe makes in his 3-part series, starting with ‘Things Fall Apart’ inspired me to embrace my own culture while writing in what is technically a foreign language, even though the Nigerian people he talks about have little in common with me. Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘Purdah’ and Ismat Chugtai’s works like ‘The Quilt,’ gave a voice to my intrinsically Indian female experiences. This one was even more complicated, as I related a lot to Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘Purdah’ even though being an urban Hindu woman, I will never experience or understand the experience of Muslim women practicing the purdah. However, the experience she wrote about was not just of Muslim-ness, it had layers of which some might be relatable to many Indian women. Similarly, watching modern Indian web series, and films made by young actors that were relatable, also gave me representation. (Dharker, 1989)
This kind of an approach may sound absurd but is real for so many young adults across the world. I came across this article on Stanford Daily written by a woman of colour about similar experiences with her writing. (Natachi Onwuamaegbu, 2018) While this is writing, it speaks of more than that - it speaks of the kind of mindset we develop as young children who are only reading or watching certain kind of stories about certain kind of characters. Among other reasons, this is why I believe representation in the books we access, in the stories we read, and the films we watch is significant.
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The Indian Context:
My thesis will be looking at Indian primary education textbooks and hence, it is
important that I give some background of the country and its education system. I have already mentioned the complicated nature of India as a country. This complicated nature is brought about by a lot of factors - some of which are relevant to this thesis and I will mention here.
India is the second most populous country in the world - this poses as one of the major challenges for any kind of development or change - social or economic. Additionally, according to the Reserve Bank of India’s calculations in 2012, 22% of the Indian population is below its poverty line. (Archive.org, 2013) Even the difference between the rich and poor in India, is enormous. Add to this, discriminations of religion, caste, gender, and intersections of all of these. India is home to a lot of world religions and countless cultures. As an Indian living in the western urban part, I would have very little in common, culturally, to a person living in the eastern part of India. Even
linguistically, India has no official language and as a country, our people speak in more than 500 dialects. The government follows Hindi as its official language, while English is largely spoken as a business and academic language. Most schools in India will not only be affiliated to an education board but also a medium as each state within the country has its own 1 or more language. However, the more popular nowadays and widely sought after are English medium schools where the medium of teaching and writing is English.
Caste - ancient India’s age old social stratification system is still prevalent in many parts of India. Although India has made discrimination on basis of caste illegal, socially, it is
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still a marker that gets used against people belonging to the so-called “lower” caste. In education and the job sector, the “lower” and “backward” social classes hold
reservation seats so that their education is not limited. However, whether they find the right resources and access is definitely debatable. Caste, as a social system, started off as categorisation of people into the type of work that they do. According to many
historians and critics, pre-Vedic texts do not mention any caste-based discrimination or “purity-impurity” standards, rather caste-based discrimination was institutionalized and became systemic under colonial Britain’s rule. (Princeton University Press, 2019) This wouldn’t be the first or the last thing that decades of colonial rule affected India by. Much like India itself, the Indian education system tends to be complex too. We have a lot of diversity in terms of public schooling and private schooling, boards of education, etc. Our primary schooling is divided into two sections - lower primary, which is from Grade 1 to 4 and upper primary which from grade 4 to 8. Schools are generally affiliated to a particular education board - which could be a state or national level education board. We have about six-seven education boards in the country - these education boards set the curriculum and conduct 10th and 12th grade level certificate
examinations. (indiaeducation.net, 2010)
Previous Research:
All the research that I did related to an analysis of textbooks in India, seemed to yield results related specifically to the gender bias that is prevalent in these textbooks. All of these studies investigated primary school textbooks. These studies investigated primary school textbooks for gender biases and portrayals of gender stereotypes in visual
content, textual content, and some of them even in the language part of it. (Ncert.nic.in, 2014)
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It should be noted that on the NCERT official website, the institution commits to
making gender “an important organizing principle of the national and state curriculum frameworks and their transaction”. In fact, there has already been research carried out by NCERT itself, identifying places in their textbooks where there is a clear gender bias. Something I came across on the same website was the organisation renaming its
Department of Women’s Studies to Gender Studies in light of India’s Supreme Court declaring transgender as the third gender and committing to contribute for a gender-inclusive society. (Ncert.nic.in, 2014)
The research that I read, carried out by NCERT itself, was quite statistically detailed, however it did not investigate keeping intersectionality in mind; intersections with gender like - religion, caste, disability, and age. It also only looked at the man-woman gender binary. In light of that, my thesis also focuses on gender but it is intrinsically tied up with intersections like religion, caste, disability, and age. This difference becomes significant as it treats the previous research done on similar grounds as a departure to a more inclusive approach. Also, my theoretical framework redefines intersectionality as it is defined in Western feminism for the Indian context rooting its base in its history and colonial struggles. My research is also taking into account the kind of language (mostly pronouns) being used for various characters.
Theoretical Framework:
Imagine a Malayali Christian girl from Kerala reading the 1st grade English textbook, and then a Bohri Muslim boy from Gujarat, and a Dalit Hindu girl from Bengal reading the same textbook - will they all find their English textbook reflecting their reality, their identities? This is what my thesis intends to find out. I started off with looking at these
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textbooks from the lens of gender and then I started thinking about all of these different kinds of students learning from these textbooks. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that it was impossible to keep intersectionality out of this theoretical
framework.
Intersectionality began as a black feminist theory to investigate the oppression faced by certain people based on their layered identities. Kimberley Crenshaw being the one who coined this term in her critical essays, came up with this analytical framework that can be applied to many cultures and situations. “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take
intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated.” (Crenshaw 1989, p. 140)
In the same way, the intersectional experience of being a post-colonial Indian person- may that be from any religion, caste, age, or class is greater than the sum of multiple layers of identity we might try to investigate. In order to apply a western feminist theory of intersectionality to Indian textbooks felt a bit disconnected to me in terms of its cultural roots which is why a quick glance through what Indian feminism looked like in its three phases will root intersectionality in the Indian context too. Along with that, it also provides a much-needed understanding of how Indian feminism has looked through the decades and then seeing whether that is reflected in the textbooks as well. Since we are looking at Indian textbooks, I find it important to place intersectionality in the context of Indian feminism so as to build a theoretical lens that is well informed of Indian feminist history.
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A Glance through Indian Feminism
As I pointed out in the context of this research, the Indian identity is extremely diverse and multifold. Much like most feminist movements across the world, the Indian
feminist movement also started out as being monolithic in its nature. The beginning of the first phase of Indian feminism was pre-Independence, in the 1850s, the same decade in which India was passed on from the British East India Company to a rule under the British Crown, declaring Queen Victoria as the ‘Empress of India’. (Bbc.co.uk, 2011) At that point, British India was much bigger than present-day India that we see right now. British India was present-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and at some points for
shorter periods Sri Lanka, Burma, Bhutan, and Nepal.
The first wave feminist movement was not a revolutionary female struggle led by women as a resistance. In fact, “the social reform movement did not radically challenge the existing patriarchal structure of society or question gender relation. They picked up for reform only those issues which the Britishers were pointing out as evidence of degeneration in the Indian society.” (Pande, 2018, p. 26)
The movement, then, seemed more like a cultural defence that Indian men were trying to build against the British. In a cultural power struggle between who is better than whom, Indian men decided what was holding them back were their uneducated women. It was not a movement started by women, for women, or to uplift women - quite to the contrary, it was a movement started by Indian men, for Indian men, to prove their cultural and moral superiority over the British - education of women, giving them a token of power in how they dress, where they go, how they talk was an
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“Women were seen as passive recipients of a more humanitarian treatment to be given by western educated elite [Indian] males. There was thus an attempt to reform the women rather than reform the social conditions which opposed them. There were no attempts to alter the power structure and the man-woman relation in society. This was but natural since the change in the status of woman was being sought only within questioning patriarchy itself. The attempt was to create a new Indian woman, truly Indian and yet sufficiently educated and tutored in the 19th century values to suit the new emerging society. Thus education for girls was not meant to equip them to be self-sufficient, independent and emancipated and train them to follow some profession but to be good housewives, the mistress of the home and the hearth.” (Pande, 2018, p. 26) To draw inferences from this above passage, we can also safely assume that these women that were being educated, uplifted were upper caste and upper-class women - wives, sisters, daughters of men who held some power in British India. The men who wanted the women standing beside them at parties and brunches with British officers to be able to make conversation in English, to be able to form allegiances. But what about the women who weren’t privileged to be born into these families who held power or had access to western education? What about the “untouchables”? When it comes to talking about gender in India is that it is intersectional with class as well as caste. This crossroad of privilege gives rise to a lot of questions - were the women of India
progressing, in a true sense, at all?
This is not to say that there were no women carrying any kind of power or that no social reforms were happening. Age old traditions like Sati, child marriage were being
changed by people like Raja Ram Mohan Roy. Women like Savitribai Phule and Kamini Roy who fought for girl’s education at different times were also making great efforts.
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However, it was limited to little pockets across a very large geographical region - and aimed at very select sections of society. For example, the abolishment of Sati was
concentrated in the Bengal region and the movement for widow remarriages was aimed at upper class and upper caste women as the middle/lower class and the lower castes were already allowing their widows to remarry, mostly for financial or reproductive gain. (Ashoka University, 2016)
The second wave of Indian feminism started around World War I and lasted up to the Indian independence. This also meant that this period saw many women participants in the ongoing independence struggle - not in pockets but finally, in an organised way across classes.
“Nehru refers to this in his discovery of India: most of us men folk were in prison and then a remarkable thing happened. Our women came to the front and took charge of the struggle. Women had always been there of course, but now there was an upsurge of them, which took not only the British government but their own men folk by surprise. Here were these women, of the upper or middle classes, leading sheltered lives in their homes, peasant women, working women pouring out in tens and thousands in defiance of government order and police lathi. It was not only their display of courage and daring but what was even more surprising was the organizational power they showed. This was also the first time in Indian history when a large mass of women was
mobilized for political purposes in a mass organization. Many of the women felt that their struggle was two pronged. They were fighting not only the British overlords, but they had to fight against patriarchy in their homes too.” (Pande, 2018, p. 26)
As he points out, women were fighting against multiple oppressors - colonisers, Indian men, society and traditional expectations, both individual as well as the ones they were
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conditioned into. Just like there were multiple oppressors, there were multiple
oppressions that these women faced - often traversing through the oppression of class, caste, marital status, poverty, etc. These women who were active participants were not frontliners, leaders, they came from a sense of community and functioned in a public revolution against the British from their personal sphere of domestic strengths. I have personally heard stories of my late grandmother and her sisters using rotis, flat Indian breads, to carry chits of important messages from one house to another. It is no
coincidence that almost all houses have such stories of grandmothers who were a part of the freedom struggle.
The third wave of Indian feminism, was, I believe, where academic and critical thought truly got behind the movements. The third wave came around post-Independence. However, it is important to note that India’s independence came with a violent and bloodied event, the Partition of India and Pakistan. “With no accurate accounts of how many died or lost their homes, estimates suggest that perhaps up to 20 million people were affected by the Partition and somewhere between 200,000 – 1 million lost their lives.” (The Partition Museum, 2018)
Partition affects international relations between India and Pakistan till today. Moreover, it also affects the communal harmony within India - tensions between Muslims and Hindus still run high. In order to understand Third-Wave Feminism in India, it is critical to understand what partition of India did to the women of India. Third wave feminism, in light of these major events, could hardly divorce itself from the post-colonial religious context; there by adding other inseparable intersections to the
movement. What many critical feminist authors have written about women’s suffering during the partition is how the women’s bodies became a site for violence - Muslim women raped by Hindu or Sikh men to prove their power over Muslim men and
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versa. Urvashi Butalia writes a whole chapter on this in her book, ‘The Other Side of Silence’. Third-wave feminists, of which Butalia is a pioneer, then, wrote from quite an intersectional point of view combining nationality, class, religion, and caste, with gender. Women who belonged to the upper class and caste have stories of surviving partition which are completely different from the stories of women who were not in a position to survive partition without a great personal loss. However, the bottom line remains the same - gender, during Partition, was intersectional and amidst all this, the third wave of feminism developed in India.
This way, partition turned women’s bodies into a site of violence, to establish power and dominance over the opposite site, by owning their women. Women’s bodies being sites of violence was not limited to idea of men behaving that way because they believe they own women - in many eastern cultures, women are seen as carrying the culture within themselves. Women are seen as an embodiment of certain values, virtues and are often seen as representatives of everything that the culture wants to be seen as. Many eastern cultures, especially that of ancient India, do not have a monolithic deity and we have many Goddesses in Hinduism - even though the creator, preserver, and destroyer are male forms. However, out of these three, our preserver and destroyer have female forms who they have switched over to in many texts and legends. Some of them show the male and female form living inside the same form. Due to so much representation of women in religion and culture, the binary of nature and culture does not seem to work quite the same way as it does in the West - women are seen as the upholders of tradition and culture, what it ironically ends up doing is putting even more pressure on women and making them the oppressors of their own self. This happens when women are constantly told to embody the values of the goddess and are placed in a self-contrast when they do or want something that does not align with what is required of them as upholders of tradition and culture.
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“The culture question is posed in the Third World or, more broadly, non-Western societies as part of a colonial contestation; in India, for example, the term sanskriti, which translates as ‘culture’, is emblematic of a system of representation that calls ‘Indian culture’ into being. Here, the culture question is an intimate part of the
formation of a national(ist) modernity, but culture in modernity tends to be represented as something that remains outside of modernity. This curious relationship between culture and modernity in the colonial context may give us some indication as to why women occupy the place they do in discussions about culture, while in the West, as Mary John (1998) has pointed out, the opposition is indeed between women and culture, with women being consigned to nature.” (Niranjana 2007, p. 211)
These are the few limited theoretical viewpoints that build upon the complicated nature of Indian feminism and show us how inseparable it is from many other intersections it is entangled with. Through these phases, I wish to point out the contrived nature of being an Indian woman. Being an Indian woman is not just limited to a merging of a nationality and gender - it is much more than that - it carries the baggage of culture, colonialism, and national identity.
How then could I keep intersectionality out of this theoretical framework? It would be absurd to even try. This is the reason why I decided to use intersectionality as my main theoretical frame to look at these textbooks through. As Mary John explains
intersectionality in this video (Ashoka University, 2016) intersectionality is not an addition of different identity markers on one another and hence a sum of all those additions or discrimination multiplied in that sense - it is a difference in qualitative that intersectionality looks at. It is not about summing up; it is about using a different lens. In the Indian context, this rings even more true. As she elaborates, the caste equations
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are much too complex for a simple summation to solve, what it needs is an
intersectional lens as the number of castes and the levels they all function at and more importantly the inequalities they all practice on each other, not just in one singular direction - requires an intersectional approach.
While I do that, my theoretical framework is also indirectly rooted in what I have been reading throughout the last five years of my life - foundational western feminist
thoughts like drawing inferences from Nina Lykke’s ‘Feminist Studies,’ Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and how she looks at women’s writing and writing about women. These theories have developed my feminist lens over the years -
something I look at everything through. For example, Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ specifically, reminded me to look at who the authors of the stories of these textbooks are. From Nina Lyyke’s writing, I learnt the importance to situate myself and my thesis, which is where my emphasis for the Indian context and Indian feminism comes from.
Material and Methodology:
Material:
For this thesis, I have selected English textbooks of 1st grade and 8th grade. I picked my focus to be primary school as children start developing opinions and biases at a very young age. So, it is important to see what they are consuming from as young as
possible. I have selected the lowest grade from the lower primary and highest one from the upper primary, 1st and 8th, respectively, since they are the first and last grade - when
they enter primary school and before the children move to secondary school. Ideally, I would have liked to pick more grades, however, time is a major constraint here and so I have limited my scope to two.
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I have selected English textbooks because from 1st to 5th grade, students only study languages and Math so in order to do a comparison, I would have to pick a subject which was taught in both. Additionally, English textbooks are generally full of short stories and poetry and stories, about people’s lives. This is also the reason why English textbooks are where children connect with characters the most and hence look for representation in the sense of “someone like me” or “someone who I can be”. I will be looking at how these textbooks cover different identities and how well it represents all kinds of identities - in terms of graphics, who the chapter is about, who is getting the most representation and whether the stories and characters shown challenge
stereotypical representations of those identities. Observing these things will be a way to identify where these textbooks stand in their gender and intersectional awareness. These textbooks are from NCERT (National Council of Education, Research and Training) which are then used by CBSE (Central Board of Secondary Education), a national board that schools across the country are affiliated with. According to their website, CBSE “as on 17-07-2018 has [affiliations with] 20,299 schools in India” (Cbse.nic.in, 2018). This wide range gives me a view of textbooks used by young children nationwide.
In the first-grade textbook, accessed from the NCERT website, ‘Marigold,’ a quick glance showed me that there were more images and exercises than texts to read - which makes it slightly more difficult as it limits the range of the subject it is trying to cover. In the eighth grade textbooks, ‘Honeydew’ there seem to be abridged versions short
stories and poems by known authors - there is much more text here which will give me some more room to investigate it.
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Methodology:
My methodology to conduct the study of this thesis is close reading and a visual and textual analysis of the two textbooks. To make sure I had a few guidelines to go by while close reading the textbooks, I decided to do a quick reading through the textbook to see what kind of content there was and then made a list of pointers, or in some cases questions to ask the textbooks.
1. Authors.
2. Main characters and supporting characters - their apparent background, pronouns being used, etc.
3. The number of male vs female characters and the role they are playing?
4. Illustrations: What kind of people are being shown - what are they wearing and doing what exactly?
This is the kind of basic list of questions that I started to look at both textbooks from. However, I did not limit myself to look at these alone. I kept an eye out for any other details I might come across and marked them out too. Since I am looking at English textbooks, I will be also be investigating the background of the authors, the characters, and how they are talked about.
While going through the textbooks, I did not engage with each exercise or class
questions given after each chapter in their singular detail, as they were simply carrying forward the language of the text. However, I did look at them overall as a chunk and asked only one question to them:
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1. Are the class questions or exercises pushing the students to question or think about the caste, religion, age, disability, and gender biased gaps which might be present in the chapters?
This helped me look at the nature of it, overall rather than picking each question apart which was turning out to be time consuming for this time period.
For the sake of visual identification, I have to rely on explicit visual or textual markers of religion, caste, gender, etc. These visual and textual markers include names, clothes, any religious symbol they might be wearing, etc. Names tend to give away religious identity, what part of the nation they are from and often times people’s caste too. For example, a name like Mohini, one of the characters of the chapters in the Grade I textbook is an intrinsically Hindu female name, so much that it appears in Hindu mythological stories. Caste can also be identified, generally from people’s last names - as originally, people’s last names were given according to their social caste.
Once I was done marking everything in the textbooks, I compiled all the observations and divided them into sections based on the questions I made above. I plan to present these observations divided into these sections itself for easier understanding. I will also be adding my analysis after each observation and then do an overall comparison
between the two textbooks so that we can trace the intersectional and gender gap in the two. However, before I start with the sectionalised detailed observations, I would like to present my broad observations too - things that do not fit into any of the questions I asked but I noticed anyway.
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Observations from the Study and their Analysis:
As per Indian law and the NCERT website from where the textbooks have been accessed, it is allowed to reuse images from the textbook as long as the watermark remains.
The detailed observations will be divided into separate sections for the two textbooks. First, I will discuss the observations made in the Class I English ‘Marigold’ Textbook and in the same section give my analysis which is done through my theoretical
framework. This textbook has a total of 10 units and each unit has two chapters.
1. Authors - what is their background? Female v/s male v/s other gender authors?
In the grade 1 textbooks, the authors seem to be coming from diverse backgrounds. Out of the 20 authors, around 5 were unknown, 9 were women and the other 6 were men, some Indian and some British or American. Out of these 9 women, 5 of them were Indian female authors.
Analysis: This textbook, in terms of who was writing the stories, leans towards female
authors and in that also, female Indian authors - in fact there are more female authors than male and 1 more Indian author which is significant for relatability for the student, especially at such a young age. The authors vary in age and belong to diverse
backgrounds, however most of them are middle aged. I could not determine their caste. None of them seem to have any apparent disability. It is important that authors come from different backgrounds because they determine what kind of characters and stories are written. There are no transgender authors either, limiting the scope as well.
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Most of the main characters of these chapters are young boys or girls, or animals. However, most of these animal characters are written like they are human; in that they are referred to from gendered pronouns, wear certain clothes and live like humans would.
The total characters across 20 chapters who are referred to with ‘he / him’ are 20 - this includes supporting characters who are mentioned in the narrative and animal
characters as well. In contrast, there are 7 characters who are assigned the ‘She / her’ pronoun. So the male : female ratio of this textbook comes to 20:7, respectively.
Analysis: Clearly, there are no third or transgender characters here. Most of these
characters have names that generally belong to the North and Western cultures of India - there seem to be no characters from the southern part of India, or the North-eastern. None of these characters are shown to have any religious identity in their clothing and their names seem to suggest a Hindu background. This means that most of these characters carry a hegemonic Indian identity - male and Hindu. Of course, these are extremely superficial markers - but even in those, there is no apparent diversity. Further inferences cannot be drawn as there is very limited text.
Having textbooks that have most characters carrying a hegemonic identity limits the students’ exposure to different, often marginal identities - hence limiting representation for students who belong to “different” identities themselves. Apart from that, the
students who might belong to a hegemonic identity, for example, a male Hindu able-bodied person would only keep reading these stories from a similar perspective not providing them a chance to understand and possibly empathise with different identities, lives, perspectives.
27 3. The number of male characters v/s female characters - the role they are playing.
The 7 female characters that are shown in the stories - most of them are young girls. The 2-3 adult female characters in the chapters are shown to have nurturing roles, in that they are mothers of grandmothers, trying to teach something to their kids or grandkids. The young girls shown engage in playing on merry-go-rounds, swings, drawing,
painting or learning how to from the nurturing adult females.
On the other hand, the 20 male characters shown in the stories - most of them are young boys. The few adult men that are shown are working men - tailors, “flying-man,” a caricature of a superhero, and one father who seems to be collecting fruits for his
children. The young boys shown engage in learning how to take a bath, two male chicks learning something from their mother hen, Mittu the male parrot driving away the scary male crow, kite-flying adventures, or male little pigs whose houses get struck down by a big adult male wolf or a little boy asking the “flying-man” if he can make him fly.
Analysis: All in all, yes the female and male characters do seem to be following typical
gender roles - where in, there are no girls going off on solo adventures or exploring new things, fighting with villains on their own and learning strategy and leadership. This is problematic as young girls need to see representation in terms of women doing all kinds of things. In society, women’s primary role is seen to be that of nurturers - in order to provide a diverse viewpoint of all things women can be, it is important for the young children reading these textbooks to see young girls going on adventures and wanting to be superheroes too - why would that only be reserved for young boys?
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Along similar lines, men’s primary role is never that of a nurturer and the textbook complies with that stereotype there by not giving any voice to the possibility of men knowing that it is okay to nurture or want to nurture.
4. Illustrations: characters and their apparent background, along with religious and cultural inclusion.
The total male characters seen in illustrations, including the characters of the stories, graphics alongside the class exercises are 52. In comparison, we see 34 females. To look at the kind of adult representation present in the textbook, I decided to also look at illustrations of adult and divided them according to traditional gender roles - nurturing v/s professionals. In all the illustrations combined, there were 12 male characters shown to workers or professionals, where as, 1 male character who was playing a nurturing role. In comparison, there were only 2 adult women shown as professionals and 5 in a nurturing role.
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A glaring example of lack of representation, I want to point out from this textbook is from this class exercise, “What shall I be when I grow up?” The image is taken from a PDF of the textbook, available on the NCERT website.
In this exercise, out of the 10 professionals shown, 7 of them are explicitly male and only 2 females. The astronaut could be either and so I left them out of the observation.
In terms of other intersections, simply from limited visual and textual analysis most characters are Hindu. There are two Sikh children shown in a graphic of a poem - however, they don’t have any names or a role in the poem. There is no apparent representation of Muslims, Christians, Parsis or any other religion.
Analysis:
All of these graphics show women wearing conventional Indian traditional clothing - salwaar kameez or sarees, outfits generally worn by Hindu women. All the women shown are also shown to be in nurturing roles. In the class exercise, out of 10, only 2 professionals are shown as women, a pretty low number. Even out of the 2 professional women shown, one of them is shown to be a teacher, a fairly “female profession” in the
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Indian context. Hence, the gendered representation is quite low. As for marginalised intersectional representation, there is hardly any.
Next, I will discuss the observations made in the Class 8 English ‘Honeydew’
Textbook. This textbook has a total of 10 units and each unit has one or two chapters, a
total of 17 chapters.
1. Authors - what is their background? Female v/s male v/s other gender authors?
In the grade 8 textbooks, the authors seem to be coming from not-so-diverse
backgrounds. Out of the 16 authors, around 3-4 are missing or part of a collection, Most of these chapters are abridged versions of short stories or poems written by Keats, Thomas Hardy, William Blake, Hawthorne, Ruskin Bond, Eliot, etc. - mostly white American or British male authors. The other authors are Indian male authors like Satyajit Ray, Rabindranath Tagore, etc coming from different class backgrounds and geographical regions of the country.
Out of the 16 authors, 12 of them are definitely male. There only seems to be one cis-female author. In terms of intersectionality, out of the 16 authors, 9 are definitely from the West out of which 8 are by male authors. The ones that belong to the Indian context (seemingly pretty diverse) are the rest 7 - out of which all are male. There are no
transgender authors.
Analysis: While going through this textbook, I recalled everything that Woolf said
about male authorship in ‘A Room of One’s Own’. The fact that most of the authors of the stories in this textbook are cis-male, and going one step further, mostly also Western cis-male rang too many bells for me. In the 8th grade, there is a definite scope to enrich a textbook with critical literacy, bring in complex diverse stories which exposes the
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students to different kinds of experiences and different kind of lives rather than the hegemonic ones. Lives which may be some students will relate to, where as, some will come across for the first time. However, the fact that all the authors are the typical classic male Western English literature cannon - was enough of a precursor of what was to follow. Even the few Indian male authors the textbook has are upper caste, upper class educated men.
2. Characters and their apparent background:
Most of the main characters of these chapters are adult men and women, and some children. The total characters across 17 chapters who are referred to with ‘he / him’ are 25 - this includes supporting characters who are mentioned in the narrative and animal characters as well. In contrast, there are 11 characters who are assigned the ‘She / her’ pronoun. So the male to female ratio of this textbook comes to 25:11, respectively. Clearly, there are no transgender characters here or disabled ones.
Analysis: None of these characters are shown to have any religious identity in their
clothing and their names seem to suggest a Hindu background. This means that most of these characters carry a hegemonic identity - male and Hindu. Of course, these are extremely superficial markers - but even in those, there is no apparent diversity. Further inferences cannot be drawn as there is very limited text. The stories of the male Western authors are filled with men, hardly any mention of women as if women don’t exist. Even if she does, she is just there, with no instrumental role in furthering the plot. An important things I would like to point out here is that out of the 11 female characters here - most of them are unnamed, while most of the 25 male characters are named and actively participate in the story, i.e. have dialogues or a role to play, however small. Not only this, a lot of the female characters are not just unnamed but they are referred to in terms of the men they are in relation with. For example, in Ruskin Bond’s story, the
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main character is a young boy named Bijju and all the rest of the characters in the story are known as “Bijju’s sister,” “Bijju’s mother,” “Bijju’s grandmother,” and well, “Bijju’s cows.”
3. The role of male characters v/s female characters? Are they stereotypical gender roles?
The 11 female characters that are shown in the stories - most of them are adult women and all of them seem to be playing a familial role in that they are shown to be wives, mothers, or daughters. One girl that stands out is in the Tsunami chapters, a young British girl Timmy Smith who, recalling her school teacher’s warnings, spots the tsunami right before it hits and saves many people from dying at a beach hotel in Thailand. All the other women seem to hardly have names, let alone a role in the whole story. On the other hand, the 25 male characters shown in the stories - most of them are adult men.
Analysis: While there are hardly any women in this textbook who are involved in the
story and have a name, the men that are shown are doing all kinds of activities:
climbing Mount Everest, one of them is Stephen Hawking, a few are just travelling, a lot of them are fictional and play characters of men of various professions like doctors, shopkeepers, poets, protectors, etc. The young boys shown engage in adventures of their own, one of them is shown going hunting with his father and once the father is injured, he goes alone to find a fawn in the forest that is apparently in need of
protection. All in all, yes the female and male characters do seem to be following typical gender roles - where in, there are no girls going off on solo adventures or exploring new things, fighting with villains on their own and learning strategy and leadership. I would
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like to recall a similar observation made in the Grade 1 textbook, clearly amplified in this one.
4. Illustrations: characters and their apparent background, along with religious and cultural inclusion.
There are hardly any illustrations in the Grade 8 textbook. However, in the above analysis, I have intentionally not counted the characters of the chapter ‘Glimpses of the Past’ - a comic book style chapter on Indian history under the rule of the British East India Company. Here are the pages from that chapter:
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The graphics show multiple people from diverse backgrounds and carrying
intersectional identities. The chapter is about the mutiny held against the British East India company, right before official British monarchical rule was set in India. The graphics show Hindus, Muslims, Hindu women, Hindu monarchs - everyone fighting together.
35 Analysis: This chapter seems to be the only one in the Grade 8 textbook that attempts at
an intersectional approach however, it borders on the line of tokenism. While there are these different identities shown, it is important to note that this is a very superficial representation that does avoid the potential blame of a bias but does solve the purpose of representing intersectional identities. Even in this case, there is no representation of transgender or disabled people. The men and women shown in the comics are mostly people belonging to a higher caste as they are shown to be Brahmins (the men shown in dhotis and bald except for a few strands of a hair - this is the most common
representation of Brahmins) and Kshatriyas (monarchs, or the ruling class of smaller kingdoms). Some of the images also show common people, mostly traders and small business owner. However, there is a deliberate absence of Shudras, the lowest caste in characters, as well as the illustration. It is important to remember that the Indian independence struggle was also marked by Gandhi fighting for the rights of
untouchables, in fact, the abolishment of untouchability, and having them join in on the freedoms struggle was one of Gandhi’s main agendas.
Common Analysis:
The nature of the Grade 1 textbook, that is less text and less complexity, does not allow for an intersectional approach that includes markers like caste. However, there is a clear lack of representation of people with disabilities and people from different religions, whichever gender they are. Transgender people, which the Constitution of India recognises as the third gender with the same equal rights, are also not represented in the textbook at all.
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When glancing through both textbooks, I remember noticing that the Grade 8 textbook had much more text and was at a level that could explore complexities of
intersectionality and gender in its texts, but when I went in detail and did a close reading, I realised that the Grade 8 English textbook had more of a gender and
intersectional bias in comparison to the Grade 1 English textbook - even while having the opportunity and space to do more.
Through the data that I collected from both textbooks and put forward in the previous section, it is apparent that the grade 8 textbooks hardly had any female authors. In fact the Grade 1 textbook had a majority of female authors, where as, the Grade 8 textbook had only 1. In terms of the characters and illustrations also, the Grade 1 textbook relatively, showed more gender inclusion, although problematic in most cases. Apart from representation, there is a lack of them existing as characters or authors as well. In terms of the research questions posed earlier, I believe the observations answer them quite conclusively: this Grade 1 English textbook does not have enough gender and intersectional awareness, while it does have a good number of female authors, the stories fail to work against gendered stereotyping and definitely do not show
intersectional awareness. The textbook also does not have enough representation for it. In fact, it reinforces the already existing stereotypes about gender and the continued absence or silence of marginalised intersectional identities as characters, authors, or simply illustrations even.
For my observations for both textbooks, I mainly used an intersectional lens. In a journal article in the Stanford Law Review, Crenshaw discusses representational intersectionality where in she discusses the implications of the use of stereotyped images representing a particular identity or culture. The fact that the only women
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represented in the illustrations or the stories seem to be Hindu women becomes a problem as there is a complete lack of intersectional identities like a Muslim woman, a Christian man, or even a Muslim Dalit woman. The Grade 8 textbook, especially, did have enough text and complexity to explore these kind of intersections. Instead, what we see are hollow caricatures of women who are only present to further the stories of men, and most of the times, not even that. The cultural constructions of these women’s identities in the textbooks are incomplete, further increasing the void Crenshaw talks about. (Jstor.org, 2019) As I discussed earlier in the section ‘Gender and education’ and the kind of effects textbooks have on children, it is quite clear what these textbooks representations or the lack thereof mean when children read them, often find no one relate to and develop those similar kind of stereotypical ideas of certain identities. The identities are never represented then become alien concepts to them as they have never across them in childhood.
As I mention in my theoretical framework earlier, and according to Tejaswini Niranjana, the idea of culture and woman are very closely integrated in India. As opposed to the West, where nature and woman are shown to be on the same side of the binary, in India, it doesn’t work in the same way. Women seem to embody culture, carry culture within them. Both of these textbooks reinforce the same idea by showing all things cultural being done by the female characters and them being represented also as carriers of Indian culture, most of the times, the hegemonic Hindu culture to be specific.
The difference between the textbooks in terms of the number of female authors, characters and different representations is quite apparent - the kind of effect it has on children is that as children grow older and more sure of their beliefs as they enter teenage years, they also develop set ideas. These set ideas seem to be getting more
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conservative towards hegemonic identities and less inclusive and diverse, therefore contributing, to whatever extent, to a hegemonic mindset.
Sites for Possible Interventions:
The thesis also identified the key points where gender and intersectional interventions could take place. These are: choice of authors should be varied including Dalit,
“backward castes’” authors, more female and transgender authors, graphics and illustrations can be more diverse, cover the vast expanse of various Indian and world identities. Another thing that would be useful is actually designing the exercises in a way that help students question the texts available.
Conclusion
This thesis has investigated both the textbooks, Grade 1 and 8, for gender and
intersectional awareness and representation, thoroughly. As it attempted to support the Indian education system, I believe the observations made give quite a fair and detailed insight into the status of Indian primary school textbooks regarding gender and
intersectional awareness.
The answers to my research questions were also quite clear: the status of current Indian primary textbooks in terms of intersectional and gender awareness is extremely
problematic and lacks gender and intersectional awareness and representation. These textbooks do not represent intersectional identities well and the gendered ones are also quite basic and hegemonic in nature. There are existing intentions that have been spelled out but clearly no work has been done in order to integrate them. In terms of
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intersectional awareness, there are no interventions or intentions to put them in place, that I have come across.
While there are certain small representations shown in pockets of these textbooks, overall, there is a huge lack of gendered and intersectional representation - especially that of caste and the third gender. Gendered representations are also extremely
stereotypical in nature. Transgender people are and have been a part of the hegemonic Hindu culture; hijras are present at most Hindu births and marriages - to bless the family, protect them from the evil eye while they say “nazar na lage” and collect their dues. Why fail to include such significant communities, hijras and transgenders, in school textbooks - when there are many stories and biographies out there, some even written by Indian transgender authors. There was also a clear lack of caste
representation and disability representation.
In conclusion, the Grade 1 and 8 textbooks of NCERT, do not have enough gender or intersectional awareness.
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