Rethinking education as a contradictory resource: Girls’ education in the Indian Himalayas

Abstract

Scholars are increasingly emphasizing the contradictory nature of schooling's social effects, often blending Sen's (2000) insights on education's empowering role with critical sociological work on schooling and inequality (e.g. Majumdar and Mooij, 2011; Morarji, 2014). This paper advances this literature through examining shifts in girls’ education in Bemni, Uttarakhand, India. The paper draws on two periods of ethnographic research – in 2003–2004 and between 2012 and 2017 – as a means of tracking long-term changes in the nature of the contradictions that young women experience. In the 1990s and early 2000s there was a marked increase in girls’ primary schooling in this village and Uttarakhand more broadly. But girls were largely excluded from secondary school, and patriarchal assumptions regarding women's work remained largely unchallenged. By 2012, however, young women were participating in secondary education, seeking paid employment, and felt empowered by their schooling. Nevertheless, key challenges remained. Educated women experienced underemployment, relegation into less favoured university courses, and difficulties navigating marriage markets. In making these points, the paper underlines the value of holding the theoretical ideas of Sen (2000) alongside critical approaches to education, but it goes beyond existing work on the contradictions of education in two key ways. First, it highlights the experiences and voices of young women in the rural Global South, about whom there is currently a dearth of substantive material. I show that the contradictions associated with education among young women are sometimes different to those experienced by men in similar settings (e.g. Jeffrey et al., 2008; Mains, 2012). Second, I argue that the contradictions associated with education can change over time within a single location – an observation that emerges from longitudinal ethnographic research of the type showcased here.