Tribal education as a tool of domination and alienation

RUBY HEMBROM

THE Constituent Assembly Debates1 lay threadbare the Adibasi2 or ‘tribal question’ on the threshold of India’s Independence. Use of the term ‘Adivasi’, with its implication of indigeneity, emerged
more as political self-reference than as an anthropological definition, out of a common experience of subjugation by the state faced by tribal groups since colonial times. The term signifies our demand for recognition of our identity and rights over ancestral lands, forests, and customary practices of self-governance amidst the exploitative relationships imposed by dominant elements in society.

The general opinion became a view of Adivasis’ ‘backwardness’, that their general level had to be raised, becoming the mission for a new level of hegemony over Adivasis in newly independent India.3 While often exercising caution and sensitivity on the state and fate of Adivasis, many of the comments and observations recorded during the Constituent Assembly Debates (which took place during 1946-49) were paternalistic, patronizing, racialised and offensive. The underlying conclusion was that tribal people were ‘still in such a sub-human state of existence is something, for which we should be ashamed’; ‘the existence of the Scheduled Tribes and the Scheduled Areas are a stigma on our nation’; they needed to ‘come up to the level of the rest of the population’ and be ‘developed so quickly that they may become indistinguishable from the rest of the Indian population’.4

Thus began the project of taming, refining and civilizing, on the presumed basis that ‘…the Adibasis are so backward that the period of ten years prescribed here may be safely extended to twenty years’.5

This agenda of ‘upgrading’ India’s ST population still continues today, and formal education was seen and has become the main vehicle for this. Mainstream formal education as a development tool to assimilate or civilize India’s 104 million indigenous peoples (Adivasis or tribals) has become a tool of domination and suppression. An out of context, un-Adivasi, and alien education estranges Adivasis from self, land and roots. Instead of the hoped-for far reaching positive outcomes, due to half-measures in implementation and repeated ignoring of vital policy recommendations, it has even failed to cover the entire Adivasi population in terms of access.

The 2011 Census and Ministry of Tribal Affairs record India’s literacy rate at 73% and tribal literacy at 59%. This speaks for itself in terms of gaps in infrastructural preparedness, capability, standards or even willingness to ensure that the basic tenets of public formal education coverage is met. Access, literacy rates and enrolment are taken as measures of being cultured or integrated into mainstream India. Another aspect begs the questions: Why do Adivasi lifeways need salvaging or civilizing. How can an imposed and alien system of education be a remedy to cure us of our backwardness?

Though India’s tribal peoples constitute 8.6% of India’s 1.4 billion population (according to 2011 Census), their linguistic and cultural diversity have not been considered in the legal, political and policy structures that cater to the country’s overall education policy. Colonial prejudice against Adivasis – even as a foundation of nation building – is clear from the British to the Hindu dominant castes and classes.6

Already under British rule, schooling was used as a tool to control and ‘pacify’ tribal peoples.7 After Independence in 1947, mainstream education has served as an apparatus to further alienate Adivasis and make them redundant in modern society and their own. The quality of schooling delivered in tribal communities is often second-rate, leaving children with low levels of literacy and few skills to enable them to get the ‘mainstream’ jobs that schooling was set up to do.

Adivasi children often get lost among inaccessible, unfamiliar and poorly taught materials, leading to high dropout rates and growing up with no connection to the skills their parents lived by. This is an intellectual alienation that comes from the inherent design of the curriculum and the notions of superiority among those who implement it, who see their own knowledge systems as superior to our ‘primitive, unscientific’ ways – a learning system in which we are continually being measured against a set of doctrines requiring submission to a foreign, alien, colonial agenda that aims to rewire, re-programme and create urban, employment-oriented aspirations for the entire tribal population. This separation from one’s roots is complete when it is served in a language that is not one’s own, leading to many indigenous languages being lost and dominant languages and vocabulary taking over – an indoctrination into new thought patterns.

This attempt at mainstream assimilation also involves processes of an influx of outsiders, along with dispossession and displacement from one’s land for the ‘greater good of the country’. It leaves Adivasis more perplexed than ever, exposed to further exploitation and isolated. What succour can such education give to people dislodged from their homelands, cordoned off from forests that they lived in and from, struggling to eke out a living in hazardous jobs, as their lands become stone quarries or mines, making them economic refugees,8 often in regions that are socially, linguistically, and culturally different?

In addition to government schools, the main models of tribal residential schools seem founded on racist assumptions of the superiority of the dominant culture and a need to make tribal and indigenous people fit the ‘mainstream’. Some children do flourish and achieve mainstream success, but often at grave costs to their culture and identity. India’s Tribal Affairs department is listed as running 7,147 residential schools in 2014, with about a million tribal students in these confined learning spaces across the country. Yet news from these schools is rarely of academic accomplishments but the ‘death of nearly fifteen hundred students of state-run and aided tribal residential schools – in Maharashtra, including seven hundred girls… in the past 15 years… and sexual abuse was suspected to be a reason behind a majority of these deaths.’9

In other words, this system of education for Adivasis is one that sexually assaults, rapes and kills. Why would an Adivasi sign up for this, when, in the garb of providing ‘urban and employment-oriented aspirations’, these schools endanger children’s physical and mental health? A UNICEF study of two states in India reported squalid conditions ‘shockingly below the minimum standard of human dignity for any child’.10 Adivasis are repeatedly accused of being against education, anti-development, and being lazy, stupid and uneducable. Ashram and other residential schools radically missionize11 and de-politicize Adivasi children, undermining their communities’ movements of resistance to displacement by invasive industries and dams that are devastating the natural environment.12

Decolonizing education for Adivasis has to begin with decolonizing the schooling system and other formal mainstream educational systems. Can our knowledge systems thrive and be transmitted in establishments that are built, owned and run by non-indigenous peoples and mindsets? Even if we have our own curriculum, how can experiences and learning environments be recreated? Learning for Adivasis happens mostly on the land – on fields we plough and harvest, in fishing and hunting, and in forests
where roots, tubers, mushrooms are picked and firewood is collected, and in grazing cattle. This is lived wisdom.13

Worldwide, tribal communities have been reclaiming control of the formal education of their children with their most urgent demands being say over the curriculum, mother-tongue intervention, at least in primary levels of education, and therefore the need for native teachers. Some Non Governmental Organizations have tried to incorporate these needs and ethos into educational mediations through setting up learning centres with alternative pedagogical content,14 with government systems rarely paying attention, despite our Constitution having provisions for doing so, and the inclusion of two tribal languages, Santali and Bodo, in the 8th Schedule of the Constitution in 2003, taking the total of ‘scheduled languages’ to 22. Yet these interventions of a home-grown Adivasi pedagogy have only minimal effects overall, since we work within systems that are skewed in favour of the colonial and mainstream legacy. Also, much of the Adivasi content in education is either general knowledge input or material written by non-Adivasis that perpetuates bias and prejudice.

Even when programmes include Adivasi materials, the curriculum is usually limited to textbooks, within the confines of a classroom which involves knowledge that is decontextualized, and therefore far from being decolonized; and mostly taught by non-Adivasis folk who merely reproduce the content. Few Adivasis have the educational qualifications and degrees to obtain teaching positions. So for Adivasis to formally enter academic and learning spaces as teachers they have to be re-colonized. How much can Adivasis decolonize themselves in a prejudiced system?

The formal education systems have effectively ‘de-indigenized’ Adivasis – taken away everything that makes them what they are. Adivasi children are given an education that often places them in the very companies and organizations that have displaced many of their people – business conglomerates that their ancestors protested against, and were often jailed or murdered for resisting.

The medium of education itself is a tool of dominion and suppression. Being educated in Hindi or any of the regional dominant languages and not standard English has left us ill-equipped for ‘mainstream’ jobs. This sub-standard education dished out to us is a ploy to keep us dependant and colonized. If we are educated, where will domestic help and low wage workers in hazardous jobs come from? How will a continuous supply of working class cheap labour be maintained? 

Settler colonialism means subjection to mainstream, dominant cultures for Adivasis in Independent India. ‘Democracy’ facilities a ruling class from privileged backgrounds in seats of power in the government and private corporations that replicate the models of colonization, keeping Adivasis and other marginalized people in a state of servitude and exploitation.

Being an Adivasi in mainstream academia, either as first or second-generation student or faculty, is a constant tug or war with oneself and one’s own knowledge systems, having to uphold,
use and transmit the mainstream educational structures we’re in. Colonial writers, anthropologists, sociologists
and historians like Verrier Elwin, Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, J.H. Hutton, G.S. Ghurye, André Béteille and M.N. Srinivas, and contemporary non-indigenous academicians, continue to produce material discourses on tribes; and we, entering these spaces, are supposed to immerse ourselves in a learning process about ourselves from them and their writings. Questioning these texts that dominate us is not welcomed openly, as it means questioning the status quo, and established standards and methods of education.

Decolonizing of education for Adivasis is not about producing and reproducing our knowledge in tangible formats, for access in the public domain, but challenging this dominion of text, and liberating the images, impressions and repute of our ancestors and ourselves, by re-humanizing ourselves. This is a pushback, of Adivasis exerting agency, proclaiming that they will not allow the texts of the past, that preach primitivism, to continue to oppress, subjugate and inform their present.

Decolonization of education is not a takeover – why would one want to control a system that works against us? Either we dismantle and eliminate it or transform it into something useful and valuable for ourselves. New texts need to ascend from the tribes – narratives of our endurance through millennia, drawing on and from our shared memory for this collective resurgence against the inherited and internal colonialism of the present. Decolonization of education is a call from within, to renew and strengthen our relationship with our lifeways and all that sustains our being Adivasi.

Footnotes:

1. CADIndia Project, 2016. Constituent Assembly Debates, Read Search and Explore India’s Constitutional Origins, Centre for Law & Policy Research, Bangalore.

2. The Constituent Assembly Debates record Jaipal Singh Munda’s usage of the term Adibasi, spelled with ‘b’ not ‘v’ as it has come to be used now. He represented the tribals in the Constituent Assembly that drafted the Constitution, to which he was elected from Bihar in 1946. He was one of the few independent candidates to the Constituent Assembly. For the term ‘Adivasi’ see Virginius Xaxa, ‘Tribes as Indigenous People of India’, Economic and Political Weekly 34(51), December 1999, pp. 3589-3595. The Indian government decided on ‘Scheduled Tribe’ as the key administrative term from a perception that emphasized their lack of literacy, economic backwardness, weak political participation and inability to deal with external pressures.

3. Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant, Constituent Assembly Of India Debates (Proceedings) –Volume II, 24 January 1947, Document no. 15, paragraph no.177, and Lakshminarayan Sahu, Constituent Assembly Of India Debates (Proceedings) – Volume IX, 5th September 1949, Document no. 132, paragraph no. 171, at https://www.constitutionofindia.net/

4. Shibban Lal Saxena, Constituent Assembly Of India Debates (Proceedings) – Volume IX, 5 September 1949, Document no. 132, paragraph no. 131.

5. Sahu 1949, ibid.

6. The British Empire’s conquest and colonization of India lasted from 1612 to 1947, after which the colonial policy towards Adivasis was continued by the Hindu privileged classes. As a Supreme Court judgemment acknowledged (5 January 2011), from a Bench comprising Justices Markandey Katju and Gyan Sudha Misra, in Criminal Appeal No. 11 of 2011, arising out of Special Leave Petition No. 10367 of 2010 in Kailas & Others versus State of Maharashtra TR. Taluka P.S., ‘India is largely a country of old immigrants and that pre-Dravidian aborigines, ancestors of the present Adivasis, rather than Dravidians, were the original inhabitants of India.’ The Hindu immigrants were and are colonizers of these lands and their original inhabitants. ‘The injustice done to the tribal people of India is a shameful chapter in our country’s history. The tribals were called “rakshas” (demons), “asuras”, and what not. They were slaughtered in large numbers, and the survivors and their descendants were degraded, humiliated, and all kinds of atrocities inflicted on them for centuries. They were deprived of their lands, and pushed into forests and hills where they eke out a miserable existence of poverty, illiteracy, disease, etc. And now efforts are being made by some people to deprive them even of their forest and hill land where they are living, and the forest produce on which they survive.’

7. Jo Woodman, Factory Schools: Erasing Indigenous Identity. Survival International, London, 2019.

8.  Samarendra Das and Felix Padel, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminium Cartel. Orient BlackSwan, Delhi, 2010/2020.

9. ‘NHRC Seeks Explanation From Maharashtra Over Deaths of 500 Tribal Schoolgirls’, The Wire, 26 January 2017.

10. P. Veerbhadranaika et al., The Education Question: From the Perspective of Adivasis: Conditions, Policies and Structures. National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore, 2012.

11. Sohini Chattopadhyay, Inside a Hindutva Hostel: How RSS is Rewiring the Tribal Mind. South Asia Citizens Web, USA, 2015 (republished 2016).

12. Parul Abrol, ‘Educating Adivasi: The Side Effects Of School For India’s Indigenous’, The Wire, 23 January 2019; Malvika Gupta and Felix Padel, ‘The Travesties of India’s Tribal Boarding Schools’, Sapiens, USA, 16 November 2020.

13. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, ‘Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3(3), 2014, pp. 1-25.

14. Vidyodaya Nursery and Primary School – A Model School, Viswa Bharathi Vidyodaya Trust, Gujarat, http://www.vidyodaya.org/vbvt/school/model-school/; and Ghosaldanga Bishnubati Adibasi Trust, http://www.martin-kaempchen.de/?page_id=246