'Neither suited for the home nor for the fields': Inclusion, formal schooling and the adivasi child

Abstract

The effort in this article is to engage discourses of social inclusion and exclusion through experiences from the field that push the present understanding of these concepts out of a convenient dichotomised categorisation, into a complex, more subtle reading of the experiences of marginalised children in school. While the first section of the article highlights the ways in which these adivasi children are discriminated against by particular actors in school, the second section theorises this discrimination within the practices that frame the modern state's desire to create rational citizen-subjects out of its diverse populations through formal schooling. The argument in this article is that the social inclusion paradigm being fundamentally premised, as it is on state and civil society mechanisms, will have to factor in the irony that this dependence on formal schooling underscores.