32 – Negotiating Gender and Identity: Ethnographies on Education in South Asia
This panel draws on ethnographies of education in religious minority institutions to focus on the creation of gendered subjectivities. It includes diverse educational settings across South Asia – education of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh, Sikhs girls in Sikh religious minority schools in India and Muslim students in all-girls madrasas in India. While scholarship on gender and education has established the relevance of complex structures and ideologies that impact young women’s experiences in educational settings, we do not know enough of gender’s complex interaction with heterogeneities of class, religion, region, and location in educational spaces. The understanding of women as transmitters of religion and culture deeply impacts the experience of knowledge in educational institutions associated with religious minorities. Papers in this panel illustrate how gender intersects with different notions of community identity that shape religious educational institutions and inform the dynamics of interaction with the state in which they are embedded. It zooms into the educational experiences of girls and young women to expand the understanding of gendered agency. The papers go beyond the binaries of active resistance and passive conformity to highlight the subtle ways in which girls challenge the prescriptive processes of schools that seek to restrict them to community and/or state sanctioned gendered roles. The panel brings out the context-specific challenges, ambiguities, negotiations of being a girl student in religious minority institutions. It also reflects on the larger politics of belonging to religious minority communities across South Asia today. The interplay between religion, education and state politics, and lived experiences of girl students is the focus of this panel.
