Abstract 2014 Anna-Lena Wolf

Anna-Lena Wolf, University Bern

Email: anna-lena.wolf@anthro.unibe.ch

The Claim to Equality and the Right to Development in India

The struggle for equality in post-colonial India has been framed in a language of non-discrimination or affirmative action mainly with regard to religion, race, caste or sex. These four categories are acknowledged in the Indian constitution (article 15) to ensure equality to Indian subjects. Moreover, recently persons with disabilities were additionally brought into focus (Kannabiran 2012). The present paper seeks to broaden the study of equality in India by focusing on the question, how different notions and claims to equality are negotiated regarding the right to development in India.

In 1986 the United Nations proclaimed the right to development, which is included in the so-called third-generation human rights or solidarity rights. The notion of development has played a crucial role in global politics ever since the era of colonialism. With regard to British rule in the Indian subcontinent the image of underdeveloped and primitive Indians helped to justify a „civilizing mission“ and to generate and maintain structures of dominance. Nowadays „development“ remains a core concept in international relations, although it has been highly criticized in post-development discourses. The historical and contemporary discourses on the concept of development evoke different meanings of equality such as equality before the law, distributive justice or equality of opportunity, for instance. The present paper aims to show how notions and claims to equality are currently negotiated in India regarding actors engaged in human rights and the right to development, including national and federal commissions (e.g. National Human Rights Commission in Delhi), law institutions (Supreme Court in Delhi and High Courts in federal capital cities), international and local NGOs (e.g. Human Rights Law Network in Delhi) as well as individuals (e.g. politicians, judges, activists, claimants, academics). Central questions are: What are the impacts of the global propagation of the right to development and the right to equality on local concepts and practices? How do implementations and consequently interpretations of the right to development and the idea of equality on a local level in turn transform meanings of universal human rights in global discourses?

Abstract 2014 Jana Tschurenev

Jana Tschurenev, Centre for Modern Indian Studies, Göttingen University

Email: jana.tschurenev@cemis.uni-goettingen.de

Mothers, Wives, Teachers: Agendas of Female Education in Colonial India

Sociological and historical studies which analyse the nexus between class stratification and education, such as Bourdieu’s concept of reproduction, or Willis’ exploration of “how working class kids get working class jobs”, often center on the question of how education systems tend to uphold the existing patterns of social inequality. The literature on female education, in contrast, tends to foreground questions of social change and individual empowerment. By contrasting different experiments in female education in nineteenth century India, this paper outlines some of the contradictory agendas and effects of female education within and on the colonial social order.

From the 1820s onwards, female education became a prominent site for debates about social reform. In Bengal and Bombay, British missionaries and the novel education societies (such as the Calcutta School Book Society or the Bombay Education Society) started to promote the education of girls and young women belonging to the urban underclass of European descent – which is the first case study this paper focuses on. Lessons in Christian morality and needle work were supposed to prepare them for their role as wives and mothers within “their respective social sphere.” Given the strong Christian agenda, and the promotion of the evangelical model of female domesticity, which was also part of the first efforts of British missionaries to “diffuse” new forms of education among Indian women, female education soon turned into a site of competing visions of social order and the formation of cultural identities. Women’s role as mothers of future generations became increasingly politicized in the course of the nineteenth century.

At the same time, female education became a crucial field for the development of women’s reform activism and women’s professional activities. From the 1820s onwards, British women used the engagement with the imperial “civilizing mission” as a way to enter the public sphere, to go abroad as teachers of female schools and act as missionaries among women. Towards the later nineteenth century, a strong link was formed between feminist activism and the promotion of female education in many countries. In this context, the second case study of this paper focuses on the educational activities of Pandita Ramabai (1858-1922), and the ways in which she linked the education of high caste Hindu widows to questions of the social emancipation of women. Her case is particularly interesting since it reveals the nationalist opposition towards the project of modern public female education, but also the limits of feminist emancipation within the caste frame. Applying an intersectionality perspective on inequality and empowerment, the paper points to the contradictory effects of (women’s engagement with) female education in colonial India.