Our Creamy Layer : by Mihir Sarma (Business Standard))

Link : http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/mihir-s-sharma-our-creamy-layer/471249/
Mihir S Sharma: Our creamy layer Mihir S Sharma /  April 14, 2012, 0:18 IST     India is the most elitist, exclusive, unequal and stratified country in the world, and we don’t even know it. The Indian elite – which smugly calls itself the “middle class”, since it alone benchmarks itself globally – has constructed walls of privilege for itself that are all the more powerful for being invisible to many eyes. And if not invisible, then concealed behind other words — “culture” and “merit”, for example. Three pieces of recent news have helped make these mental and metaphorical walls a little more visible. The first was the Supreme Court’s upholding of the Right to Education (RTE) Act’s requirement that all private schools reserve free seats for students from the neighbourhood who can’t afford to pay tuition fees. Yes, this will raise costs and be difficult to implement. But it is an essential step towards breaking the first social wall elite Indians experience: the walls keeping other classes, castes and creeds out of their unimpeachably upper-crust schools. The “best” schools are also literally exclusive — and thence begins the life-long confusion of unearned advantage and “merit” that so defines our lumpenelite. The Court’s pronouncement follows a decade of effort. Many elite schools ignored outright an earlier judicial directive to admit poorer students free of charge — as they’d promised to when they were given land free or highly subsidised. That’s right, people: most of the schools you’re so proud of attending or sending your kids to are founded on a broken contract. Talk about a moral education, eh? When the RTE was passed, some of these very schools went to court to protect their walls. Last year, The Wall Street Journal interviewed parents and teachers at one of them, Shri Ram School in New Delhi. People spat fire at having to share space at parent-teacher meetings with people who they seemed more comfortable seeing clean their floors. They demanded the poorer students be “segregated”. Of course. After all, who in our obscenely comfortable elite thinks of servants as being anything like them? It is a feudal relationship, not a contractual one. As another recent piece of news brought home horrifyingly, we can leave for foreign vacations after locking up the little girl who cleans our floors. Of course, most of us don’t behave like that; but try suggesting to anyone that they pay their servants what they’re worth to you, rather than the most that they can demand, and the arguments you hear will reveal how important power and dominance is in the relationship. “They’ll get ideas,” I was told. I’ve seen foreigners or NRIs suggest it on email groups or at parties, only to be attacked by oddly holier-than-thou desis for introducing their destabilising foreign “ethics” into our nice, stable, comfortable society. The Indian elite confuses its tiny, mediocre, incestuous world of networks and inherited advantage with true merit, the merit that comes from striving upwards in the night when circumstances are unfavourable. India’s privileged children go to schools where their social assumptions are unchallenged, to colleges where their parents went before them and that most of the country can’t afford, and to jobs where the networks fostered in the exclusivity of those institutions support and nourish them. And they live in homes that they inherit; the third piece of relevant news was a Bloomberg study this week that showed that owning Mumbai real estate would take an average resident of the city 300 years. This was an outlier on the global charts; even in famously expensive Manhattan, it would take 50 years. Other countries, too, have these networks. But they have correctives. In egalitarian Europe, your child will study with your plumber’s child. In Brazil or in North America, your child will idolise pop-culture icons and follow movies and music that aren’t of, by and for the middle class. In post-liberalisation India, that isn’t true at all. Our elite dominates our cultural production, as well, helping it dehumanise everyone else. Yes, it will be tough for schools to adapt teaching to students with varied backgrounds. But that will force us to question the unstated elitist assumptions and knowledge that underlie what we mistake for learning and for merit. And young upper class Indians will be forced to deal, on nominally equal terms, with people they’d never otherwise acknowledge. When I moved from Bombay to Calcutta (as they then were) as a boy, I moved also from one of the most snobby schools in the country – it was in Fort, that’s all I’ll say – to one where children from one-room apartments mingled with those who were chauffeur-driven to school. There’s no question in my mind as to which was better for me. My friends in Calcutta included working-class Muslim boys, giving me a clearer idea, now, as to how resentments against the Indian state can be entirely justified. We learnt to appreciate the unmatched cool of even impoverished Anglo-Indians, allowing us to mentally disconnect money from social power. In all our discussions of quotas and reservations and affirmative action, we need to remember that they aren’t just for the disadvantaged. They’re for all of us. The American notion that diversity is itself an irreplaceable facet of the educational experience is something that we need to internalise here. It doesn’t matter if implementing it is unfair, or difficult. Our hideously smug, stratified society cannot be allowed to endure as it is. It is a blemish on the modern world. mihir.sharma@bsmail.in

Why discuss Aarakshan with an Immoral Upper Class ?

Link : http://www.firstpost.com/politics/why-discuss-aarakshan-with-an-immoral-upper-class-60016.html


Chandra Bhan Prasad

Is it worth discussing the issues raised by the film Aarakshan when the social class, which is opposed to the idea of reservation, is morally bankrupt?
To understand where I am coming from, let’s go to a report of the Indian Universities Commission of 1902.

“We were told that at Calcutta about 1,400 more candidates would have failed had the standards in English been 40 percent of the marks instead of 33 percent”, says the commission’s report.

The commission was analysing the matriculation examination results of 1901. It was worried about the low percentage of students who passed. According to the report, a total of 21,750 students from all over British India had appeared in the 1901 matriculation exams but only 7,953 managed to pass – a success ratio of just 36 percent.

The report also tells us how the pass percentage was brought down from 40 percent to 33 percent.

After Lord Macaulay’s British system of education came into being in 1854, British officials were faced with a unique problem: in order to keep the education system going, they had to constantly bring down the pass percentage. When the new education system first came into being, there were only two classes — First Class with 60 percent, and Second Class with 45 percent.

Something similar had happened in Madras presidency. Immediately after the new system came into being in 1854, the Madras Presidency College was established. A building was erected, and professors were imported from Britain. But, few students reached college level.

The Tamil Brahmins of that time prayed before the Governor General that a Third Class be introduced as their children were not able to cross the minimum pass percentage of 45 percent. Realising the enormity of the problem, a Third Class was introduced and the pass percentage was brought down from 45 percent to 33 percent.

It is also pertinent to point out that the student body comprised mainly of Dwijas – Brahmins and Kayasthas in particular.  In the indigenous system of education, the untouchables – then called the Depressed Classes – didn’t exist.

In the first quarter of the 19th Century, British officials undertook an extensive survey of the indigenous system of education to find out how many students there were from the Depressed Classes. This is what they found.

“Sir Thomas Munro, the then Governor of Madras, in his survey of 1822, stated that there was no student from the Depressed Classes,” says a report on the indigenous system of education. The report adds: “Mount Stuart Elphinstone, the then Governor of Bombay, had carried out a similar exercise in Bombay presidency in 1824. He too stated that there was no student belonging to the Depressed Classes in his presidency.”

The reason why the above instances are being cited is to showcase how the upper caste students performed, and what kind of demands their parents made before the British authorities. This document shows the examination results of Calcutta University for 20 years (1901-1920). The present author has similar documents for all the seven universities of that time. The documents show that the first and second generation Dwija students were an army of Third Classers.

It makes good sense to know that only 156 years ago, upper caste parents fought a brilliant battle and won Third Class for their brilliants kids. Only 92 years ago, upper caste students were an army of Third Classers.

Thankfully, Dalit parents never demanded a Fourth Class for their children, and they didn’t pray before upper caste administrators to bring down the minimum pass percentage to 16.8 percent.

They just asked for Aarakshan.

Ironically, while British officials encouraged Indians — mainly upper castes then — to join the new system of education, the brown men chased Dalits out of school. Consider a few examples:

A study on the “Progress of Education in India” between 1897-98 and 1901-02 by R Nathan (published by the superintendent of the Government  Printing Press, Calcutta, 1904) mentions upper caste attacks on Dalits trying to get a schooling. The study noted: “In former days, this difficulty was acutely felt, and, as the government insisted on the principle that its educational institutions were intended for all classes, schools were on some occasions closed, and disturbances were even excited, in consequence of the admission of low-caste boys into state schools.”-

“The opposition of the higher castes to the admission of Harijan (untouchable) boys to a public school was often so strong that, even with the best will in the world, the department (government) could do very little in the matter. Not infrequently, the caste Hindus opposed indirectly, and under social and economic threats, compelled the Harijan parents to withdraw their children from schools. In some cases, even the use of violence was reported,” note Sayed Nurullah and JP Naik’s book on Education in India.

Unable to tackle the situation — of Dalits being denied entry into schools — the British government finally took the view that it was not worth it. “We are fully alive to the fact that no principle, however sound, can be forced upon an unwilling society in defiance of their social and religious sentiments,” the Hunter Commission on Indian education noted in 1884.

What is the point of discussing Aarakshan with the upper class which has morally fallen and has no sense of shame or guilt?

Chandra Bhan Prasad is a Dalit intellectual and author. He describes himself as a self-taught anthropologist and social psychologist. For more on him, visit his website.