Our member, Dr. Divya Kannan (Shiv Nadar University, India), talks about her new book, Contested Childhoods: Caste and Education in Colonial Kerala (Cambridge University Press 2024).
The present-day ubiquity and legacy of Protestant-mission schools in the south Indian state of Kerala is no historical accident. Established in the 1800s by British and German-speaking missionary societies, these schools were a fascinating microcosm of larger social and cultural politics, especially regarding the education of poor, lower-caste children. The interactions of these institutions with the state on one hand (British Malabar and the princely states of Travancore and Cochin) and existing caste and religious communities on the other, have both formed and been informed by normative ideas and contestations of what it means to be a school-going child in colonial Kerala. Located in the political context of empire and religion in South Asia, Contested Childhoods goes beyond a descriptive history of education to provide a conceptual history of childhood itself.
Taking a cue from the rich scholarship on the history of education in the British Empire, and the growing field of histories of childhood in South Asia, this book draws upon the archives of Protestant missionary men and women of the London Missionary Society (LMS), the Church Missionary Society (CMS), and the Basel German Evangelical Missionary Society (BM), all of whom served in multiple capacities as preachers, educators, writers, and reformers in colonial Kerala, and played a crucial role in the articulation of schooling as integral to identity building. Their establishment of printing presses, usage of standardized fonts and print language, writing of school textbooks, and the interventions in local practices of worship, work, and parenting significantly influenced the constructions of colonial childhoods within the milieu of ‘missionary modernity’, partially distinguished from ‘colonial modernity’ owing to the main religious impulses that underpinned it. This study adopts a broader conception of ‘schooling’, as one that encompasses processes of socialization, political struggles over the right to a school education, and meanings associated with literacy, and considers schools as larger sites of ideological contestation.
In colonial Kerala, how and why were poor children educated, and how did schooling become integral to childhood formation? These overarching questions frame the narratives detailed in this book. Although mentioning ‘Kerala’ and ‘education’ in the same breath may seem trite for some, an exploration teasing out the historical configurations of schooling is pertinent to understand the shifting cultural and political values associated with the Malayali child. Today, with the steady removal of children from agricultural and industrial labour, a declining fertility rate, smaller family units, increasing global migration, and commercial values accrued by families from an accumulation of certified educational skills, the Malayali child has become almost ‘emotionally priceless’, to use sociologist Viviana Zelizer’s incisive term.
With this context in mind, I wanted to move away from the scholarly attention overwhelmingly paid to dominant social groups to reveal the parallel dynamics which shaped the construction of ‘poor childhoods’ in Kerala during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, ‘poor’ refers to the conditions of poverty and deprivation suffered by children belonging to oppressed castes and religious communities, including Christian converts, and the ways in which the circular logic of poverty shaped the schooling landscapes into which they were brought. Notwithstanding the contradictions between the emergent universalist conceptions of childhood by virtue of children’s numerical age and biological development and the extraction of various groups of marginalized children’s labour in regimes of exploitative capitalist production, various colonial and Indian adults in the nineteenth century largely agreed that elementary schooling offered an important though partial solution to the problems of the ‘poor child’.
I wanted to examine the complicated encounters between adults and poor children during the past two centuries and their culmination in the deep entwinement between constructions of schooling and childhood that gave rise to the uneven spatio-temporal conditions that characterize the ‘subaltern student’ in Kerala. I move away from what Hayden Bellenoit calls ‘a semantic focus on institutions and policy’ to focus on ‘pedagogy on the spot’ as an endeavour to assess the educational experiences in classrooms and playgrounds. I contend that an analysis of the asymmetries of colonial education, its epistemic modes of operation and pedagogies of aspiration without a closer look at the ‘emotional frontiers’ traversed by young historical actors can only provide us a partial picture.
In the story of British colonialism in India, we often overlook the role of other European actors, especially those who lived in close contact with the local populace. The predominantly German-speaking, Switzerland-based Basel Evangelical German Missionary Society (BM) was one such group that lived and functioned under the aegis of British rule in India from 1834 onwards. On the Malabar coast, in the southwestern part of the subcontinent, they saw themselves as members of a broader religious community than those confined within specific territorially defined boundaries and forged a cordial relationship with several administrators. The BM was also a beneficiary of the European foreign evangelical movement during the early nineteenth century and postured itself like its contemporaries as a mission to save ‘heathen souls’ in faraway lands, especially children…The Basel missionaries established the first residential institutions for poor and needy children in the predominantly Malayalam- speaking region, where they sought to establish ‘model’ Christian communities. In their attempt to erase caste-inscribed markers, the Basel missionaries negotiated with different adults and children to run these establishments. In fact, ‘orphans’ were not always without parents, and the BM employed coercive measures to admit pupils by arguing against the ‘barbarity’ of Indian parenting and childhood norms. They were not always successful as children influenced decision-making processes and resisted strategies of emotional disciplining and modes of labour regulation imposed on them. Exploring these dynamic encounters of local populations with non-Britons in determining educational agendas helps us understand transregional histories predicated on ideas of ‘whiteness’.
Pietist missionaries placed an emphasis on the communal upbringing of village children and wholesome disciplinary and moral training, resulting in a spiritual rebirth, indicated in the term erziehung, whose essence cannot be fully translated into English. In Malabar, they adapted these ideas into their differentiated school curriculum, which devoted time to literary study and vocational work, especially in colonial boarding schools. Aware of the economic insecurity of their congregants, the BM decided to provide work and religious instruction to adults and children simultaneously, a decision that would distinguish their presence from their British evangelical counterparts in the colonies. Even so, this propagation of a Protestant work ethic was not disconnected from dominant nineteenth-century racial stereotypes of the ‘lazy, unproductive, and cunning native in heathen lands’, which prefigured the emergence of local Christian communities. Paradoxically, as poor converts involved in various forms of menial labour and small-scale agriculture accepted membership into the BM’s churches, missionary workers often informed supporters back home that the former had fled or did not wish to work hard, perhaps to be read as an indication of the ongoing tensions in churches borne out of a strict and harsh regime sought to be implemented by the BM. In the language of mission philanthropy, guided by evangelical self-interest, the ‘native’ had to be ‘educated’ into the ‘correct’ attitudes of labouring and living, and when failing to do so, appropriate punishment was to be meted out…
These included enforcing school uniforms, monitoring mixed-gender interactions, and restricting contact with relatives, underpinned by attempts to inculcate a religiously driven sense of shame and guilt associated with acts labelled as sexual misconduct. Physical punishment was a crucial disciplinary mechanism used against school children, particularly embedded within notions of a quasi-parental love that accorded missionaries the authority to ‘correct’ wayward behaviours. Missionary Wilhelm Hasenwandel, the supervisor at the Thalassery Girls’ Boarding School in the 1870s, reported on punishments imposed on such ‘errant’ pupils and justified them as necessary for their improvement. This reference to the so-called acceptance of punishment by the girls themselves pointed to highly coercive circumstances in which obedience and deference were extracted from several pupils. ‘The cane has been less used this year than formerly, and in the cases in which I was forced to use it, the girls punished acknowledged the necessity,’ wrote Hasenwandel in 1875.