Degrees without Freedom: The Impact of Formal

                                Degrees without Freedom: The Impact of Formal

ABSTRACT
This article considers the capacity of formal education to undermine established processes of caste and class reproduction in an area of north India, with
particular reference to the views and strategies of educated Dalit young men.
It draws on quantitative and qualitative research conducted by the authors in
a village in Bijnor district, western Uttar Pradesh (UP). We discuss how
educated Dalit young men perceive education, how they seek to use educational credentials to obtain ‘respectable’ jobs, and how they react when this
strategy fails. Increased formal education has given Dalit young men a sense
of dignity and confidence at the village level. However, these men are increasingly unable to convert this ‘cultural capital’ into secure employment. This
has created a reproductive crisis which is manifest in an emerging culture of
masculine Dalit resentment. In response to this culture, Dalit parents are
beginning to withdraw from investing money in young mens’ higher secondary and tertiary-level education. Without a substantial redistribution in material assets within society, development initiatives focused on formal education
are likely to be only partially successful in raising the social standing and
economic position of subordinate groups.
INTRODUCTION
There is considerable disagreement concerning the capacity of formal education to empower previously excluded sections of society in India and other
areas of the global South. Some scholars claim that formal education
substantially improves the position of previously disadvantaged social
actors by increasing their skills base, knowledge, confidence and freedoms
This article is based on research focusing on household strategies, schooling regimes and social
exclusion. We are grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number
R000238495), Ford Foundation and Royal Geographical Society for funding aspects of this
research, and to the Institute of Economic Growth, New Delhi, for our attachment there in
2000–2002. We are also grateful to our research assistants, Swaleha Begum, Shaila Rais,
Chhaya Sharma and Manjula Sharma; and to the people of Nangal for their friendship,
hospitality and time. We would also like to thank Jane Dyson, Jens Lerche, Linda
McDowell, Jonathan Parry and two anonymous referees for comments on earlier drafts of
this paper. None bear any responsibility for the content of this article.
Development and Change 35(5): 963–986 (2004).#Institute of Social Studies 2004. Published
by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St.,
Malden, MA 02148, USA(Dre`ze and Sen, 1995; Sen, 2000). Others, however, argue that school
education acts as a ‘contradictory resource’, opening up certain opportunities but also drawing disadvantaged groups more tightly into systems of
social inequality (Levinson and Holland, 1996). We need to examine, then,
how far oppressed groups are able to use formal education to undermine
iniquitous processes of social reproduction.
Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from a village in Bijnor
district, western Uttar Pradesh (UP), this article considers how increased
formal education has affected educated young men belonging to the
Chamar caste of Dalits.1
We discuss how educated Chamar young men
perceive education, how they seek to utilize educational credentials to
obtain white-collar jobs, and how they react when they join the ranks of
the ‘educated unemployed’.2
The study shows that educational initiatives
are likely to be only partially successful in raising the social standing and
economic position of disadvantaged groups without a substantial redistribution in material assets or economic growth. In highly unequal societies
with scarce job opportunities, the schooling strategies of oppressed people
may not follow a simple upward trajectory towards growing participation in
formal education.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF UTTAR PRADESH
There continues to be a close relationship between caste and class in UP.
According to the 1931 Census of India, the last census for which caste figures
are available, upper castes (principally Brahmins and Thakurs) comprised 20
per cent of the population of the state. In most areas of UP, these castes
control access to lucrative business, professional and white-collar employment. They remain pre-eminent within government bureaucracies and usually
own relatively substantial amounts of agricultural land. Below the upper
castes in the ritual hierarchy is a thin stratum of ‘intermediate castes’, including, most notably, the Jats and increasingly the Yadavs. In 1931 the Jats
comprised just over 2 per cent of the total population of Uttar Pradesh, but
they dominate landownership, local economic opportunities and political
organizations in pockets of western UP. The backward castes comprise a
more heterogeneous range of jatis (caste groups), which are generally
accorded Shudra status within the varna hierarchy of caste, are often socially
and economically disadvantaged and are also known under the official legal
1. Dalit means ‘broken and oppressed’ in the Marathi language.
2. For a more explicit discussion of the political strategies of educated Chamar young men
and their links to low caste politics see Jeffrey et al. (forthcoming). The differences
between Chamar and Muslim strategies are explored in Jeffrey et al. (2004).
964 Craig Jeffrey et al.designation of ‘Other Backward Classes’ (OBCs). In spite of their relative
wealth, Jats obtained OBC status in 2000 in UP.
Dalits are located at the base of the Indian caste hierarchy, outside the
four-fold varna categorization, and were identified in the past with ‘polluting’ occupations, such as leatherwork and scavenging. Dalits comprised 21
per cent of UP’s population in 2001. Historically marginalized on the edge
of villages and denied access to formal education, these untouchable castes
had limited interactions with others. The 1950 Indian Constitution offered
the Dalits legal equality and reserved places in public-sector employment,
educational institutions and government representative bodies (Galanter,
1991). Nevertheless, in most areas of rural north India, Dalit households are
confined to manual wage labour and remain largely dependent on richer
higher castes for work (Mendelsohn and Vicziany, 1998). Dalits continue to
be subject to a range of deprivations stemming from their low ritual status,
economic impoverishment and social isolation.
The recent history of Uttar Pradesh has been characterized by the increasing participation of backward castes and Dalits in the political process. In
the mid-1960s the Indian government shifted the direction of development
planning away from Nehru’s model of industrial growth and administrative
reform towards a programme for improving agricultural production. This
policy shift contributed to the rise of a new rural e´lite: prosperous members
of the peasantry belonging to intermediate castes and upper sections of the
OBCs in UP. Within and later outside the Congress Party, the Jat politician
Charan Singh improved the position of the prosperous peasantry by raising
government support prices for key cash crops and extending subsidies on
fertilizer and irrigation (Byres, 1988). Until his death in 1987, Singh blocked
efforts to introduce a credible system of agricultural taxation or land reform
that would negatively affect the middle and rich peasantry. More recently,
backward castes have benefited from the decision of V. P. Singh (then Prime
Minister) in 1991 to extend the quota of jobs reserved for OBCs to 27 per
cent across India. In addition to being represented in formal politics, a new
rural e´lite has effectively colonized and co-opted local government bureaucracies in many parts of UP (Jeffrey and Lerche, 2000).
A second wave of democratization in UP politics has been associated with
the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) during the 1990s. Formally
committed to building a mass movement of UP’s ‘oppressed classes’, the
BSP has acted in practice to represent the interests of Dalits, especially the
Chamars, who are the most numerous Dalit caste in UP (Duncan, 1999).
The BSP held power at the state level four times between 1993 and 2003. It
has attempted to place Dalits in key positions within the UP bureaucracy,
channel development funds to villages containing high proportions of
ex-Untouchables and increase the speed and rigour with which crimes against
Dalits are investigated. It has also engaged in a symbolic programme
entailing the construction of statues, temples, parks, memorials, schools
The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men 965and libraries across UP dedicated to the memory of the Dalit hero,
Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar (Lerche, 1999).
The process of party political democratization in Uttar Pradesh has had
a substantial impact on the representation of lower castes within the bureaucracy and formal political bodies and has contributed to the rise of a small
‘middle class’ amongst Chamars (Jaffrelot, 2003). However, accumulating
evidence suggests that the BSP has not reversed established relationships of
dominance based on class and caste (Hasan, 1998; Jeffrey and Lerche,
2000). The BSP has made no substantial attempt to introduce land reform
or agricultural taxation. Widespread rent-seeking amongst rural e´lites
continues to threaten the well-being and security of the rural poor and
prevents the state from securing funds for its developmental and revenue
functions. UP continues to be characterized by high levels of poverty (Dube,
1998; Hasan, 1998) and wholly inadequate health and infrastructural
provision (Dre`ze and Gazdar, 1996; Jeffery and Jeffery, 1997).
State failure is particularly marked in the sphere of education. The
quantity and quality of state primary, secondary and higher education in
UP fails to meet the demand from parents (Dre`ze and Sen, 1995; The Probe
Team, 1999). Most state schools and colleges remain distant from pedagogic
advances and lack civic amenities, and teacher absenteeism and negligence
are endemic (Dre`ze and Gazdar, 1996; Jeffery et al., forthcoming; Singh,
1995). The political power of government teachers has prevented funds
being diverted from teachers’ salaries into improving teaching facilities
and systems for monitoring curriculum delivery (Kingdon and Muzammil,
2003). Since 1991 the fiscal crisis of the UP government has led to disinvestment in government schooling. Formal education is increasingly provided within an array of non-state schools and extra-school tutorials in UP.
At the same time, economic liberalization, a process that prefigured the
formal announcement of economic reforms in 1991, has resulted in a
collapse of productive employment opportunities in rural areas of UP
(Chandrasekhar and Ghosh, 2002: 146). Liberalization has reduced the
availability of rural credit and therefore possibilities for rural enterprise
development. Recent studies of 1993 and 1999–2000 National Sample
Survey (NSS) data show falling work participation rates in large parts of
the Indian countryside (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh, 2002).
This review of the relationship between the state and rural classes in UP
highlights the continuing nexus between state power and dominant sections of agrarian society. A new rural middle class has influenced the
character and direction of state policies in UP since the mid-1960s. Moreover, rural e´lites from intermediate castes and higher sections of the OBCs
have been fairly successful in cultivating social links within the local state.
This provides an important context for understanding the struggles
of poor Chamar households for educational credentials and salaried
employment.
966 Craig Jeffrey et al.DALITS AND EDUCATION IN UTTAR PRADESH
In spite of the hostile schooling and employment environment, a large number
of Chamar families in UP have recently embraced formal education as a means
of social mobility. Drawing on NSS data, Nambissan and Sedwal (2002) show
that, while Dalits continue to lag behind the general population, school
attendance amongst 5–14 year old children rose faster within Dalit communities than within the general population between 1987–88 and 1993–94 in UP.
Modest improvements in the economic position of many Dalit households in
north India, at least until the early 1990s (Sen, 1997), combined with positive
discrimination in government employment, appears to have encouraged
ex-Untouchable castes to increase their expenditure on schooling. A rise in
education amongst Dalits is also linked to the emergence of the BSP, which has
promoted a ‘petit-bourgeois’ vision of Dalit upward mobility through school
education and entry into service employment (Chandra, 2000; Lerche, 1999).
This message is linked to the ideas and image of Ambedkar, who extolled the
benefits of formal education (Gore, 1993).
Of three strands of scholarly literature regarding the impact of formal
education on rural Dalit households in UP, the first emphasizes the capacity
of school education to empower Dalit communities, particularly members
of the Chamar caste. Most notably, this work includes recent investigations
of Chamar political identities in four villages near Meerut, western UP (Pai,
2000, 2002). Pai (2000) argues that Chamar young men in peri-urban
Meerut district have used formal education to obtain service jobs outside
rural areas and thereby escape relationships of economic exploitation.
According to Pai, formal education created a new generation of confident
Chamar young men, who played an important role in communicating BSP
ideology to the wider Chamar community and in organizing fund-raising,
rallies and agitations (Pai, 2002). However, it is difficult to generalize from
Pai’s descriptions of social change (Jeffery et al., 2001). Pai’s research was
based in villages where dominant castes do not monopolize landownership,
and the villages are accessible to a major city in a relatively prosperous area.
A second strand of research focuses on educational institutions and is
more pessimistic about the capacity of school education to act as a mechanism of empowerment. These studies highlight how formal education may
further entrench social exclusion by exposing Dalits to discriminatory
attitudes or processes within the formal, informal or hidden curricula of
the school or college.3
This strand of research includes work documenting
caste discrimination in school textbooks (Kumar, 1989) and bullying and
exclusion by teachers or peers (Dre`ze and Gazdar, 1996). This strand also
examines higher rates of failure and drop-out amongst Dalit students
(Mendelsohn and Vicziany, 1998: 142–3), relegation of Dalits into less
3. For summaries of research in India as a whole see Nambissan (1996).
The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men 967prestigious schools and courses (Singh, 1995), and biases built into the
iconography of educational institutions (Jeffery et al., forthcoming).
A third view suggests that increased formal education may have had
an impact on the confidence of Dalit households without substantially
changing patterns of asset ownership orrelationships of dominance (Dube, 1998;
Lieten and Srivastava, 1999). In his account of social change in a village in
eastern UP, Dube (1998) showed that formal education had opened up
some opportunities to obtain secure government employment. However,
upper castes’ continued control over land and access to political contacts
outside the village had limited the positive affect of school education
amongst Dalits. In particular, he showed that educated Dalit young men
were increasingly being excluded from secure white-collar employment
because they lacked the bribes required to obtain these posts.
Taken together, these second and third strands suggest that formal education may act to improve the lives of Dalit men but that there are limits to
the capacity of education to free these men from caste and class oppression.
However, few studies based away from urban centres have sought to explore
how Dalits living in rural UP perceive the potential of formal education to
change their lives and the relationship between these perceptions and their
schooling strategies.
This study offers a new perspective on the contradictions associated with
formal education within one Dalit community in rural north India. Drawing
on field research amongst Chamars in a village in north India, we argue that
increased formal education has led to a degree of emancipation from caste
oppression. Education has given Chamar young men a sense of individual
dignity and confidence in the face of upper castes. However, the most recent
generation of Chamar young men have not been able to convert their
educated status into secure employment. The article describes a marked
disjuncture between the aspirations of Chamars and their disadvantaged
position within local class and caste hierarchies. Chamars continue to lack
access to agricultural land and social networking opportunities and most
households remain dependent on locally dominant Jats for paid employment. Moreover, Jats have effectively resisted the social threat posed by
Chamars through strategies aimed at dominating the fields of education and
employment. This disjuncture has created a crisis of unfulfilled ambitions.
Crucially, we show that in the face of increasing ‘educated-unemployment’,
Chamar parents are beginning to withdraw from investing money in young
men’s higher secondary- and tertiary-level education.
We must acknowledge several ‘silences’ in our account. First, this study
focuses on boys’ and young men’s schooling and employment in western
UP. This focus is partly pragmatic: we found it difficult to interview young
women except in the presence of their parents, when they were reluctant to
talk openly. The focus on young men also reflects the article’s concern with
tensions between societal expectations associated with formal education and
employment outcomes. The few Chamar young women educated beyond
968 Craig Jeffrey et al.junior high school (Eighth Class) are not expected to enter paid employment
or assume the role of main breadwinner. However, the schooling levels of
girls do affect the marriage market and therefore expectations of the education which young men should possess: it is therefore important to note that,
while school participation rates are lower for girls than boys, the number of
girls going to school or college is increasing at all levels. Second, we deal
primarily with young men’s views of formal education and experiences of
utilizing educational credentials in the search for employment rather than
their experiences of school itself or use of schooling credentials in marriage
markets. This again relates to the nature of our data: we found it difficult to
encourage discussions of young men’s experiences in school and within
marriage negotiations. Third, in the context of a rapid rise in formal
education amongst Chamars but comparatively little ethnographic research
on the ‘products’ of the education system, we have chosen to focus on
educated young men, defined as those with at least eight years of schooling.
The issue of how Chamars without experience of school perceived education
is dealt with mainly in relation to parental discourses.
The following section of the article provides a background to the area in
which we conducted research. We then describe Chamar schooling strategies, the social construction of education among educated Chamar young
men and how far these men have used their educational credentials to
obtain secure employment. In the penultimate section we consider young
men’s reactions to their ‘educated unemployment’. Finally, we reflect on the
implications of our material for an understanding of Dalit social mobility in
rural UP and discuss the broader implications of this study.
RESEARCH LOCATION AND METHODOLOGY
Bijnor is about 150 km north-east of New Delhi, on the east bank of the River
Ganges. According to the 1991 Census, about 42 per cent of the district’s
population is Muslim, 35 per cent caste Hindu, 21 per cent Dalit (about 16
per cent Chamar) and there are a few Christians and Sikhs. Bijnor district’s
economy is based on the intensive cultivation of sugar cane, wheat and rice.
Between 1960 and 1990, modest land reforms, improved agricultural technology and high government support prices offered for cash crops increased
agricultural profits. A locally dominant class of rich Jat farmers have used
their agricultural wealth to improve their political links and social standing
(Jeffrey, 2001). The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s also modestly
improved agricultural wage rates in Bijnor district (Jeffery and Jeffery, 1997).
Furthermore, the construction in 1984 of the Madhya Ganga barrage and
road across the Ganges opened up direct links between Bijnor and Delhi and
accelerated the growth of service-based industries in the district.
Nevertheless, Bijnor district — outside the growth corridor between New
Delhi and Dehra Dun — lacks a substantial industrial manufacturing base. In
The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men 969addition, the liberalization of the Indian economy may have reversed modest
improvements in rural livelihoods in the 1970s and 1980s (Sen, 1997). Opportunities for service employment continue to be concentrated in the public
sector in areas such as education, policing and agricultural development.
Moreover, the substantial growth in public-sector employment opportunities
in the decades following Indian independence began to slow from 1984 to 1985.
Our field research has been concentrated in two villages in Bijnor District:
Qaziwala and Nangal Jat, also called Nangal. This paper refers to Nangal, a
large village about 15 km south-east of Bijnor and connected by half-hourly
bus services. In 1990, Nangal’s population was 4,160, of which 45 per cent
were Dalits, 28 per cent Jats and 19 per cent other OBCs. In 2001 the total
population had risen to 5,300, of which the Dalit share was about 50 per
cent (Chamars being 48 per cent) and the proportion of Jats and other
OBCs had fallen slightly, to 26 per cent and 18 per cent, respectively.4
The
Jats dominate local landownership, owning 83 per cent of the agricultural
land in Nangal in 2001. Of the 216 Jat households, 88 per cent owned more
than 0.5 hectares and 59 per cent owned more than 1 hectare in 2001. Jats
have successfully reinvested agricultural surplus in small business ventures
such as wood yards, sugar-cane processing units, and shops and schools in
and around Nangal. Nevertheless, the rapid subdivision of agricultural land
has increased economic differentiation within the Jat caste.
The Chamars, traditionally leather-workers (Mandelbaum, 1970: 48), work
mainly as local manual wage labourers, though a very small number have
entered service occupations since 1960. In 2001, the Chamars owned only 8 per
cent of the agricultural land in Nangal. Of the 457 Chamar households in the
village, 77 per cent were landless, 18 per cent owned less than 0.5 hectares of
land and only 5 per cent owned more than 0.5 hectares. Social inequalities in
landownership were reflected in the broader asset profiles of Chamars and
Jats. According to our 2001 census survey, 56 per cent of Chamars lived in
pukka (brick built) houses compared to 89 per cent of Jats. Only 19 per cent of
Chamar households had televisions compared to 70 per cent of the Jat households. There is a close but not perfect fit between caste and class in Nangal.
The failure of the state to provide adequate schooling facilities has led to
the increasing privatization of educational facilities in Nangal and rural
Bijnor district. Nangal contains two government primary schools, three
private primary schools and two private secondary schools. Brahmins run
the private primary schools. Jats dominate the management committee of
the larger of the village’s two secondary schools: the Nangal Jat Junior High
School. In 1978 an educated Chamar from Nangal established the
Ambedkar Junior High School (catering mainly for Dalits, but also for Muslims
and some OBCs, up to Eighth Class). All the schools in Nangal are poorly
maintained and equipped in comparison to privately-run English-medium
4. We have continued to list Jats separately from the OBCs for reasons of clarity.
970 Craig Jeffrey et al.schools, and to most Hindi-medium schools in Bijnor. The Nangal schools
have inadequate amenities, with children sitting on the ground in the open
air during lessons, and there are very few teaching materials. Similarly, the
government degree college in Bijnor is poorly provisioned relative to private
institutions in larger cities within western UP. The college lacks basic
teaching materials, civic amenities and adequate assessment procedures. It
is widely said to be easy to pass college examinations by hiring private
tutors and cramming from ‘cheat books’ available in local markets.
Our research in Nangal in 2000–02 involved conducting a village survey
as an up-date to an identical census carried out in 1990. We then interviewed
Jat and Chamar parents and their children in households with young men or
women aged between 15 and 34. Our discussions were semi-structured
covering, amongst other things: perceptions of school education; schooling,
employment and marriage strategies; child rearing; and political affiliations
and activity. The interviews were written up in Roman Hindi by one of our
research assistants within twenty-four hours of the conversation and we
then translated these accounts into English. Our interviews with parents and
young people were supplemented by interviews with school and madrasah
(Islamic school) teachers and managers, politicians and state officials.
SCHOOLING AND CULTURAL CAPITAL
Most Chamar parents and young men in Nangal perceived schooling, and
the qualifications, skills and credentials that it provides, as central to efforts
at improving a household’s economic position and generating ‘cultural
capital’: the possessions, manners and attributes that tend to be valued
in social settings (Bourdieu, 1984). The philosophy of the Dalit hero,
Dr Ambedkar, had promoted awareness among the Chamars of the
potential for school education to transform social and political structures
and create individual confidence and prosperity.
Table 1 shows a sharp increase between 1990 and 2001 in the number of
Chamar boys of upper primary and secondary school age in formal school
education in Nangal. Nevertheless, Jats retained their advantage over
Chamars in the educational sphere.5
For example, in 2001, 94 per cent of
Jat 13–17 year old boys were in formal education compared to 55 per cent of
the Chamar boys in this cohort. As a result of the relative wealth of their
families, Jat boys were much more likely to be enrolled in private primary
schools, moved into secondary school earlier than Chamar boys and
remained in formal education for longer. Many Jat parents were able to
pay for private tutors and, partly as a consequence, their children were less
likely to drop out of school. Jat parents were also generally more educated
5. See Jeffery et al. (2001) for more detailed information on Jat levels of education.
The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men 971than Chamar parents and therefore better able to supervise their children’s
schooling. In addition, the richest Jat families had increasingly enrolled
their children in secondary schools outside the village, such as Englishmedium schools in nearby cities. In these cases, Jat children were often placed
with urban relatives who assumed responsibility for the children’s schooling.
Jats’ capacity to invest in education is linked to their smaller family sizes
(see Jeffery and Jeffery, 1997). Jats began to use modern forms of contraception much earlier than other caste groups in the area. Jat reproductive
strategies increasingly focus on investing greater resources in a smaller
number of children (Jeffery and Jeffery, 1997). By contrast, Chamars (like
most groups in rural UP) have been slower to reduce their fertility. The
increase in the numbers of Chamar boys aged 8–12 and 13–17 between 1990
and 2001 also reflects the effects of mortality decline since the 1960s, leading
to population growth in the 1980s and early 1990s. With larger numbers of
living children, it is harder for Chamar households than for Jat households
to invest in their sons’ schooling.
Chamar parents cited poverty as the single most important reason for
withdrawing boys from school. The Chamars lacked the requisite money
and social connections to send their children to private schools outside
Nangal, and many said that they could not afford to keep their sons in
the village secondary schools. The costs of schooling rise markedly after
Eighth Class due to higher fees, the need to pay for transport to schools
outside the village, and greater pressure to arrange expensive private tuition.
As a result of corruption amongst teachers and bureaucrats, Chamar parents rarely received the full amount of government scholarships to which
they were entitled. Aside from the costs of schooling, Chamars cited family
crises and boys’ lack of interest in school as the most common reasons for
removing boys from formal education.
Table 1. Schooling Status of Chamar Boys and Young Men in Different Age
Cohorts, Nangal, 1990 and 2001
1990 2001
8–12 13–17 18–22 8–12 13–17 18–22
Government primary schools
41%
2%
0
42% 4% 0
Non-state primary schools 36% 5% 0
Government secondary schools
14%
36%
16% 00 0
Non-state secondary schools 8% 47% 10%
Higher education 0 0 6% 0 0 1%
Not in school 45% 62% 77% 14% 45% 89%
N 139 95 135 193 155 146
Notes: Totals do not all add up to 100% because of rounding. The number of 8–12 year old
Chamar boys in 1990 does not equal the number of 18–22 year old Chamar young men in 2001
due to the 11-year (not 10-year) gap between the two censuses, migration and deaths.
Source: Village censuses conducted by authors, Sept–Oct 1990 and February 2001.
972 Craig Jeffrey et al.Most Chamar young men believed that local schooling regimes are capable
of providing the confidence and cultural capital associated with ‘education’ in
its ideal form. Chamar criticisms of schools and colleges focused on an
insufficient quantity of teaching rather than the quality of the formal, informal
and hidden curriculum. Parents and young men more often complained about
teachers’ poor attendance records and lack of commitment to instructing
pupils rather than biases built into the schooling or college system that
systematically excluded lower castes.6
Chamars who spoke of caste discrimination complained that teachers occasionally singled out Chamars for punishment or made remarks about the caste background of pupils. There was near
universal agreement that acts of exclusion based on notions of ‘untouchability’
had disappeared within schools and colleges in the 1960s or 1970s. This decline
in caste discrimination is likely to relate to the increasing separation of lower
castes and higher castes into different schooling streams.
Many Chamar parents and young men argued that the principal benefit of
education (parha ı) was that it provides opportunities to obtain service employment (naukr ı). In this sense, schooling was central to the ambitions of Chamar
young men and their parents. Chamars maintained a three-fold distinction
between the scarce, lucrative, secure and comfortable nature of government
employment, insecure and poorly paid private service, and demeaning and
irregular manual labour. Chamars regarded a government job, even a lowranking post, as offering the chance of a regular salary, a large ‘over-income’
(from illegal rents), financial security (job security and a pension), prestige
and enhanced social networking opportunities. Jat parents made similar
distinctions between different forms of work and also highlighted the value
of education in providing access to salaried employment.
Chamars believed that school education enhances the employment
prospects of young men by conferring formal qualifications. A high school pass
is a minimum qualification for many types of low-ranking government
employment, and many Chamars believed that further qualifications
would increase opportunities to obtain secure white-collar jobs. In addition,
parents maintained that schooling provides skills (reading, writing and
arithmetic) that are important in establishing useful social contacts, competing for government employment, building confidence and defining ‘civilized’
adulthood. Parents contrasted the educated with illiterates (anparh log),
who were depicted as savages (baarb aar ) or animals. Jat parents also maintained
that education provides key skills, useful knowledge and ‘humanity’. But
many Jats parents believed that only schools outside the village could
deliver ‘civilization’.
6. We cannot read too much into this virtual silence on questions of caste discrimination. We
have not done research inside local schools to assess processes of social exclusion within
these institutions. It is also possible, though unlikely given discussions about caste in other
spheres, that Chamar informants were unwilling to discuss caste discrimination in school.
The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men 973Among educated Chamar young men, there was an emphasis on schooling as a source of individual dignity and masculine prowess. These young
men described how the educated Chamar man is bold, knowledgeable and
independent in his interactions in modern urban spaces, while the illiterates
are typically helpless and awkward. A popular joke amongst educated
Chamar young men was that illiterate men pick up a telephone in a public
call box and shout loudly into the ear piece: ‘why can’t you hear me you
fool!’. This joke acted as a condensed symbol of illiterate incompetence
and typified the embarrassment that an uneducated person was said to
experience in various modern settings.
Young Chamar men’s sense of acquired dignity was also rooted in
notions of the distinctive nature of educated consumption (Miller, 1995).
For example, these men made a clear distinction between the films that the
‘educated’ watch and the films that attract an uneducated audience. The
educated film is usually devoid of violence or explicit sexual content, focusing instead on well-rehearsed popular dance and song routines. By contrast,
the uneducated film is a violent, crude and badly acted drama starring ‘wild
man’ actors. This notion of educated versus uneducated consumption
practices extended to discussions of clothing, hairstyles, room decoration,
magazines, alcohol and drugs.
Young Chamars frequently reflected on the myriad ways in which the
dress, speech and bodily demeanour of the ‘educated’ marked them out as
superior to illiterates. One young man described the differences between
‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’ speech: ‘the uneducated say ‘‘aabe oo ka j aara ?’’
[‘‘Oi! Where yer goin’?’’ — impolite, ungrammatical] and the educated say
‘‘aap kah aan j aa rahe hain ?’’ [‘‘Where are you going?’’ — polite, grammatical]’.
The key importance of demeanour was evident during discussions of how to
spend leisure time. Young Chamar men claimed that the educated are better
at ‘hanging out’ in street settings: they know how to wear modern clothes
and avoid bad habits. By contrast, the illiterates exhibit bad taste: they tuck
in their modern shirts, wear ostentatious charms around their necks and
harass young women. In this narrative, the illiterates not only chew paan
(betel nut) — bad enough in the eyes of educated young men — but also
dribble the paan juice down their fronts to create pools of betel juice under
their chins.
According to Chamar young men and their parents, educated people
internalize acts of good taste so that they became good habits (achchh ı
aadat ). Young men, in particular, intimated that education manifests itself
in unconscious traits and orientations to action formed through repeated
contact with such icons of modernity as the telephone, cinema and westernstyle shirt. Parents and young men considered educated habits to be an
essential qualification for marriage. In this view, only educated parents could
create a good environment (maahaul ) for bringing up children in the future.
These aspects of social change are crucial to understanding the emancipation of educated Chamar young men and their greater sense of confidence
974 Craig Jeffrey et al.within public space and vis-a`-vis upper castes. Young Chamars saw ideals of
educated behaviour as a much more acceptable basis for establishing a
person’s social value than caste. When one of the authors asked a Chamar
man in his late twenties with a Master of Commerce degree, how much caste
discrimination exists in Nangal, he responded by ridiculing the behaviour of
two Jat brothers in Nangal who had become addicted to narcotics, wore
torn clothes and slept in the sugar cane fields surrounding the village. He
argued that the demeanour of these men made it impossible any longer to
sustain the notion that caste determines a person’s social worth. We heard
similar arguments from other Chamar young men. Chamars regarded
themselves as being superior to higher caste men whose behaviour signalled
a lack of educated cultural distinction. They advanced this argument with
reference to those aspects of ‘Chamar behaviour’ historically identified as
characteristic of their ritual pollution. They chastized uneducated Brahmins
for their uncleanness and celebrated the meticulous hygiene and good
manners of local educated Chamars.
Chamar young men who circulated these new visions of social worth did
not argue for an end to hierarchy, but for the imposition of a new order of
distinction based on achieved rather than ascribed status. This constitutes a
limited critique of the caste system. Educated Chamar young men did not
reject notions of ‘impurity’ and ‘baseness’, but instead claimed that such
stigma and subordination should not be attached to them as educated
people (compare with Gooptu, 1993: 291). Educated Jat young men also
spoke of the myriad differences separating the ‘educated’ from the ‘uneducated’, but they sought to legitimize their privilege by noting differences
between those educated within the village and those, generally children from
richer Jat families, who had experience of private schooling outside the local
area.
This account of the social construction of education amongst the Chamars broadly supports the notion that education increases an individual’s
skill-base, dignity and sense of available opportunities (Dre`ze and Sen,
1995). It also lends weight to Pai’s (2000) thesis that rising investment in
school education, in combination with political representation at the state
level, has improved the confidence of Chamar young men.
THE SEARCH FOR SECURE EMPLOYMENT
The most recent generation of educated Chamar young men has failed to
convert this cultural capital into secure employment. In October 1990, ten
Chamar young men from Nangal were in higher education. In February
2001, six of these men were working as daily wage labourers in Nangal; one
had a small cigarette business; one made and sold glass bangles from a
wooden cart in the village; and one man described himself simply as khaal ı:
‘empty’ or ‘free’. Only one of the ten men studying for a degree in 1990 had
The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men 975obtained a government job in 2001 — as an office worker in a local land
reorganization office.
This pattern of ‘failed social mobility’ may be explored further with
reference to our census survey data. Between 1990 and 2001 there was a
sharp increase in the number of Chamar young men in the 25–34 cohort
(Table 2). Furthermore, the number of Chamar young men in this age group
who had more than eight years of schooling more than doubled (from 24 in
1990, to 57 in 2001). These increases have taken place against the backdrop
of public sector retrenchment and few emerging white-collar opportunities
in the private sector. There is an inverse temporal relationship between the
number of secure posts available to Chamars and the number of young men
trying to find such jobs.
Rapid changes in young men’s employment, over time and seasonally,
means that the census surveys only provide a snapshot of what is a highly
dynamic scenario. Nevertheless, these surveys suggest that there has been a
rapid decline in the proportion of educated Chamar young men entering
service employment. In 1990, 29 per cent of Chamars aged between 25 and
34 with more than eight years of schooling were in service employment, 8
per cent in government service and 21 per cent in private posts. In 2001, just
9 per cent of educated Chamars in this cohort were in service, only 2 per
cent in government and 7 per cent in private jobs. In 1990, 7 per cent of
educated Jats in this cohort were in salaried jobs, 3.5 per cent in government and 3.5 per cent in private positions. By 2001, 16 per cent of 25–34-
year-old Jats were in service jobs, 8 per cent in government and 8 per cent
in private posts. Jats, particularly from richer households, have been
able to improve their access to service jobs in the 1990s by investing
agricultural profits in their sons’ education, exploiting close social links
with local government officials and paying bribes in employment
competitions.
Table 2. Principal Occupations of 25–34-year-old Chamar Men by Schooling,
Nangal, 1990 and 2001
Up to 8 years schooling At least 8 years of schooling All schooling
1990 2001 1990 2001 1990 2001
Farming 1% 1% 8% 3% 3% 2%
Labour: in Bijnor 88% 89% 50% 49% 80% 78%
migrant 2% 3% 0% 7% 2% 4%
Business or semi-skilled 9% 5% 13% 18% 10% 9%
Service 0% 2% 29% 9% 6% 3%
Student, unemployed 0% 1% 0% 14% 0% 5%
N 98 149 24 57 122 206
Notes: Totals do not all add up to 100% because of rounding.
Source: Village censuses conducted by authors, Sept–Oct 1990 and February 2001.
976 Craig Jeffrey et al.In the case of applying for a single government post, the process of
registration, taking an exam, seeking out relevant social contacts, researching possibilities to bribe key officials and attending an interview may require
extensive travel and stretch over several years. During this period, young
men seek to avoid recourse to manual wage labour, which would have a
negative impact on their social standing and sense of self worth. As a result,
young educated Chamar men are forced to move between insecure and
poorly paid forms of clerical employment in the informal sector — jobs
that approximate to their image as ‘educated’ men. These fallback occupations are characteristically ‘semi-bourgeois’ (Bourdieu, 1984) and concentrated in newer areas of employment, such as car repair and phone booths,
where it is easier to invent ‘respectable’ jobs. Young educated Jat men, who
have better access to credit and superior social contacts outside the village,
tend to find more remunerative, secure and socially valued ‘fallback occupations’ than the Chamars.
Table 2 shows that very few Chamars have migrated outside Bijnor
district for labouring work. Similarly, most of the Chamars in business or
self-employment remain in Nangal. In this respect, the Chamars in Nangal
differ from the Muslim Sheikhs in Qaziwala, many of whom have moved to
urban centres for artisanal work. Unlike the Sheikhs, the Chamars in
Nangal do not have a tradition of migrating to urban centres for work,
nor do they have a developed set of social networks in nearby cities. Chamar
young men said that they feel socially isolated when they travel to major
urban centres.
Manual labouring work in the village is slightly more lucrative and
regular than most forms of non-manual work within the urban informal
economy. Thus, often under financial pressure from their families, many
educated young Chamar men who have been in irregular ‘semi-bourgeois’
employment are forced to return to exploitative and demeaning manual
wage labour in Nangal. The continued tight grip exercised by rich Jats
over local labouring opportunities exacerbates the humiliation of this return
to wage labour.
Chamars explained their exclusion from government employment with
reference to the sheer numbers of people applying for these posts. We heard
many stories of over 100,000 young people arriving at written examinations
for fewer than five government posts. Chamars pointed to the crucial
importance of money, social contacts and knowledge (jaank aar ı) in determining access to government jobs, and to the relative irrelevance of positive
discrimination, aptitude and educational qualifications. Chamars of all ages
distinguished between the 1960s and 1970s, when it was relatively easy for
educated Chamars to obtain government employment through taking
advantage of reservations, and the 1980s and 1990s when recruitment to
government service has become corrupt (brusht) (Jeffrey and Lerche, 2000).
The nature of this corruption is hotly debated. Many educated Chamars
maintained that bribery is now so widespread that there is a ‘price list’ for
The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men 977government posts: Rs 40,000 for a low-ranking job and up to Rs 400,000 for
a prestigious post, even within the reserved quota.7
These large sums are
beyond the means of most Chamar households in Nangal. Nevertheless,
Chamars argued that their exclusion from government employment was
mainly attributable to their relative social isolation. They maintained that
to obtain a government job one must build relationships of trust with a
‘source’ inside a government institution. This person supplies information
(jaank aar ı) about employment opportunities, provides a recommendation
(sifaarish ) for an applicant and acts as a facilitator in the payment of a
bribe. Where the source takes money in return for assistance they are
often referred to as brokers (dalaal ). Chamar young men emphasized their
exclusion from these social networks and the relative advantage of urban
Chamars and Jats within this field of competition.
Chamar attempts to compensate for their historical lack of social connections through building social links have been largely unsuccessful. Discussions with educated Chamar young men suggested that, even within the
few local schools where there is a good mix of pupils from different castes
and classes, Chamars cannot foster effective social contacts that might later
be useful in employment competitions. Schools did not act as melting pots
in which Chamar boys could compensate for their household’s social
exclusion by building lasting relationships with friends from more powerful
households. Moreover, the efforts of educated Chamar young men to buy
social influence through paying employment brokers had largely failed.
Chamars, and some of the poorer Jat respondents, reported angrily that
brokers had tricked them into giving money by making the false promise
that a government job would be forthcoming. Chamars said that they
lacked the knowledge required to make an informed judgement about
whom to trust, and the money to finance prolonged periods building a
network of reliable contacts.
Caste-based social connections have not been an effective tool for capturing jobs for Chamars. Chamars, who are low down within government
bureaucracies, fear losing favour with bureaucratic superiors and have
little influence within their organizations. In the face of these difficulties,
members of a small government-employed Chamar e´lite only tend to help
very close relatives in obtaining government service.
Formal education cannot compensate for Chamars’ lack of money and
social capital within the field of recruitment to government employment.
The efforts of urban Chamars and dominant Jats to obtain better qualifications, usually in private institutions, have resulted in the devaluation of the
rural Chamars’ educational credentials. Young Chamar men complained
about the worthlessness of their degrees. They also said that notions of
‘educated’ behaviour that provided cultural capital in Nangal failed to
7. In 2001, 72 rupees were roughly equivalent to £1.
978 Craig Jeffrey et al.signal distinction to key officials outside the village, such as interviewers in
competitions for secure white-collar jobs. In particular, these men said that
they lacked the competence in English characteristic of those people
schooled in private English-medium institutions. Some men referred to
open efforts on the part of higher caste Hindus to exclude Chamars from
government employment and associated corruption in the allocation of
reserved posts. It was more common, however, for educated Chamar
young men to attribute their failure in employment competitions to an
absence of the social connections, money and performative skill borne of
entrenched class privilege.
Our study shows that education combined with reserved employment has
not led to a virtuous circle of Chamar development through access to secure
jobs. Structural factors, particularly class, prevent Chamars from converting
educational credentials into economic security. Indeed, young men’s experience of competing for government employment is so negative that it threatens
their sense of the confidence and capabilities that education can provide.
REACTIONS TO THE CRISIS
Chamar young men experience their failure to obtain a white-collar job as a
personal loss. Chamar parents identified dissatisfaction amongst young men
as an important contributing factor in a perceived rise in alcoholism, suicide
and criminal activity in the local area, including murder, assault, sexual
harassment, rape, bullying and vandalism. It is important, though, not to
caricature the ‘protest masculinities’ (Connell, 1987) and social role of
educated Chamar young men. As the statements of these young men in
relation to education suggest, many young educated Chamars distanced
themselves from aggressive and criminal behaviour.
Some of these men channelled their frustration into political work and
local community improvement initiatives. Known in the village as ‘new
leaders’ (naye neta ), they played an important role in mobilizing opinion
and circulating political ideology. They are not always formal members of
the BSP, but they often derived their local standing from an assumed link
with BSP politicians. These men circulated political discourses that mixed
heroic tales of the former achievements of Dalit ‘great men’, with contemporary social critique aimed at exposing the discriminatory attitudes and
practices of village e´lites. These narratives were often interposed with optimistic assessments of the BSP’s capacity to improve the lives of Chamars
and statements regarding the power of the BSP’s leader, Mayawati, to end
problems of social deprivation.
The activity of these ‘organic intellectuals’ (Gramsci, 1971) must be seen in
context, however. Very few educated Chamar young men styled themselves as
local politicians in the making and most were resolutely pessimistic about the
capacity of the BSP to improve their access to secure employment. Outside a
The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men 979small circle of young netaas , Chamars argued that improvements in their
access to government employment would require a radical redistribution of
resources that could not be achieved by the BSP, or any other political party.
Rather than expressing their frustration through established political channels and in the language of Ambedkar, educated Chamar young men tended
to voice their resentment in informal contexts and with reference to their own
predicament as educated ‘unemployed’ young men. The informal nature of
this protest reflects the necessity of concealing resistance from higher castes
(Scott, 1985) and protecting a core of self-esteem through maintaining the
decorum associated with educated cultural distinction.
During informal discussion, educated Chamar young men frequently
emphasized the gap between their sense of self worth based on school
education and the reality of their social and economic position. This
occasionally manifested itself in quite explicit attacks on the notion of social
progress through education. In the words of an educated Chamar young
man running a small transport business:
The educated are useless. Educated people are trapped. They are restricted in the work that
they can do. Uneducated men are free; they can do whatever they like: labour, farming . . .
whatever. So I think that in today’s world, given the nature of unemployment, it is right to
be illiterate [. . .] In India there is hopelessness [niraash a ]. As a result of unemployment, people
have lost the desire to live [j ııne ki tamanna ].
This man also referred to the opportunity costs associated with spending
long periods in school education: the skills and habits that he had failed to
learn at school. Several young men said that schooling saps people’s
strength, encourages laziness and reduces a person’s capacity to perform
agricultural tasks requiring dexterity or physical toughness.
Educated Chamar young men expressed their resentment in discourses
that suggested their separation from a rural world of physical violence and
an association instead with ‘modern’ forms of disenchantment. The guiding
idea in these Chamar discourses is that of wasted potential. Educated
Chamar young men frequently made reference to being useless (bekaar ),
empty (khaal ı), wandering (ghoom rahe hain) and unemployed (berozgaar ).
In making these statements, the Chamars were not claiming that they were
incapable of performing useful work, or that they lacked employment: many
of them would refer to themselves as ‘unemployed’ while engaged in wage
labour. Rather, they used these terms to signal the disjuncture between their
present occupational status and their educated standing (see Heuze´, 1996),
and to signal their own sense that ‘something better must be just round the
corner’. These statements often emerged during angry and heartfelt outbursts regarding the nature of poverty. Yet at other moments, educated
Chamars joked about their predicament and made semi-humorous
references to their status as wanderers (ghoomnewale). Humour, joking and
horseplay are also important elements of young men’s reaction to a sense of
personal crisis.
980 Craig Jeffrey et al.These discourses of ‘uselessness’ were often linked to a notion of lost time.
Chamar young men occasionally referred to their activity, work and leisure,
as forms of ‘timepass’. Jat young men who had failed to find work consonant with their ambitions also spoke of their activities as ‘timepass’. This
word served both as a sign of resentment and as an expression of pain,
highlighting young men’s sense of the provisional status of their current
work but also connected to their frustration at the many years wasted in
applying for white-collar employment. ‘Timepass’ also suggested young
men’s acquaintance with the English language and urban college life,
where such phrases are popular.
The educated Chamar young men who circulated discourses of modern disenchantment had a powerful symbolic effect in Nangal. The
conspicuous failure of many educated Chamar young men to convert
their educated ‘cultural capital’ into economic wealth and social capital,
and the energy and inventiveness with which young men expressed the
tragedy of their position, appears to be influencing parental perceptions
of education. Several Chamar parents said that they now believed it best
to educate boys up to Eighth Class (junior high school) and then send
them for vocational training or an apprenticeship. These parents argued
that there is little point in investing money in formal education beyond
Eighth Class given the virtual impossibility of obtaining government
employment.
Such a shift in thinking is already having an impact on Chamar
educational strategies. While school education amongst Chamars
between 1990 and 2001 in the cohorts aged 8–12 and 13–17 increased
markedly, the proportion of young men aged 18–22 in formal education
declined, from 22 per cent in 1990 to 11 per cent in 2001 (Table 1). The
total number of Chamar men of all ages in higher education fell from
ten in 1990 to three in 2001. Figures for enrolment in formal education
amongst 18–22 year old men rose amongst Jats and other castes over the
same period. The fall in the number of Chamar young men studying into
their late teens and twenties may reflect increasing pressures on the
household economy, but this hardly squares with the large increase in
school education within the younger cohorts of Chamar boys and
among girls. It appears more likely that the widespread failure among
Chamars to obtain service employment in the 1990s encouraged members of this caste to re-evaluate their approach to the formal education
of boys. This concurs with our interview data, and also with the fact that
amongst the Jats, who have been more successful in obtaining service
employment during the 1990s, enrolment in formal education within the
18–22 cohort increased between 1990 and 2001. The new Chamar strategy focuses on concentrating resources in primary and early secondary
schooling to obtain key skills and some measure of cultural capital for
their sons.
The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men 981CONCLUSIONS
School education has given Chamar young men a sense of their individual
dignity and entitlement to equal treatment in different social scenarios, and
provided them with the confidence to advance arguments critical of caste
discrimination. This does not constitute a broad, Chamar-wide redefinition
of the caste’s position in the ritual hierarchy akin to caste-based ‘sanskritization’ (Srinivas, 1987). Rather, we have identified a more fragmented set
of ‘family-centred’ ambitions. This conclusion broadly supports Pai’s work
on Dalit social empowerment in western UP. It also points to strong
discourses at the grassroots level that link education to social capabilities
(Dre`ze and Sen, 1995; Sen, 2000).
This study departs from Pai (2000, 2002), however, in its focus on the
failure of educated Chamar men to obtain secure work. Social domination
based on landownership and dominance rooted in access to social networking opportunities tend to be mutually reinforcing in rural Bijnor district. As
a result of poverty and a lack of influential social contacts, educated
Chamar young men in Nangal have found that they are out-manoeuvred
in the search for secure government jobs, and many men have been forced to
return to exploitative manual labour in the village. An emerging culture of
resentment amongst educated young men has caused some Chamar parents
to rethink their educational strategies.
Two broader conclusions follow from these points. First, the failure of
formal education to alter the economic position of most Chamar young men
in rural Bijnor district highlights the enduring nature of social and economic
inequalities based on class and caste. The problems of Chamars in many
parts of western UP are too entrenched, varied and acute to be solved by a
development strategy focused solely on improving access to formal education. Genuine ‘social opportunity’, in Dre`ze and Sen’s (1995) sense, is a
contingent not a necessary outcome of prolonged participation in formal
education. Dre`ze and Sen are aware of this, but their emphasis on education
as a basis for emancipation risks drawing attention away from the equally
pressing need to challenge entrenched privileges in UP directly, for example
through land reform or improved agricultural taxation. Institutional reform
of schooling will fail to improve the economic security of Chamars to any
significant extent in the absence of a profound redistribution of material
resources and social networking opportunities or sustained broad-based
economic growth. Both these scenarios look highly unlikely in liberalizing
north India. As in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa (see Bryceson, 2002),
the UP government continues to withdraw from credible investment in state
education, but has been much slower in retracting financial support for
propertied classes.
In coming to this rather pessimistic conclusion, we do not wish to neglect
the multiple ways in which the skills and credentials that come with education improve the lives of Chamar young men. Education may enhance
982 Craig Jeffrey et al.Chamar men’s capacity to question higher caste dominance, through providing literacy and introducing new notions of dignity distinct from caste,
even if it fails to result in salaried employment. Rather, we wish to suggest
that development efforts must grapple with the enduring nature of pernicious social and economic inequalities, the multiple means through which
power is expressed (Bourdieu, 1984), and the energy with which upper
castes/classes ‘revolt against’ (Corbridge and Harriss, 2000) or ‘counterresist’ (Lynch, 1990) social threats.
Second, our study suggests that the educational strategies of formerly
disadvantaged social groups in South Asia may not follow a simple line of
increasing investment over time, but be subject instead to reassessment and
reversal as the expected gains from formal education fail to materialize.
Evidence from other areas of the global South (see, for example, Demerath,
1999; Oni, 1988) suggests that rural people may rapidly withdraw from
investing in formal schooling when educated young men fail to obtain
secure jobs. By contrast, in his observations on educational strategies in
France in the 1960s, Bourdieu argued that the working classes, formerly
excluded from school education, continue to imbue educational qualifications with ‘false value’ even after these credentials cease to provide leverage
in employment markets: ‘Relegated agents collaborate in their own relegation by overestimating the studies on which they embark, overvaluing their
qualifications, and banking on possible futures which do not really exist for
them’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 155). The Chamars in rural Bijnor district have not
abandoned formal education as a vehicle for improving their social position,
and are keenly aware of the continuing value of educational credentials and
skills. But neither are the Chamars being duped into educating their children. As awareness of formal education has spread, and educated Chamars
come to be parents, a more cautious evaluation of formal education has
become apparent.
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Craig Jeffrey is Lecturer in Geography at the University of Edinburgh
(Drummond Street, Edinburgh EH8 9XP, UK). His research interests
include state/society relations and the politics of agrarian change in contemporary India. His forthcoming publications include ‘Karate,
Computers and the Qu’ran: Zamir’ (with Patricia Jeffery and Roger Jeffery,
to appear in Mukulika Bannerjee (ed.) Muslim Portraits, Penguin forthcoming).
Patricia Jeffery is Professor of Sociology at the University of Edinburgh.
Her research interests focus on the interconnections between gender and
communal politics among Hindus and Muslims in South Asia. Her latest
publications include: ‘Islamisation, Gentrification and Domestication’ (with
Roger Jeffery and Craig Jeffrey, in Modern Asian Studies 2004) and
Educational Regimes in Contemporary India (co-edited with Radhika
Chopra, Sage forthcoming).
The Impact of Formal Education on Dalit Young Men 985Roger Jeffery is Professor of Sociology of South Asia at the University of
Edinburgh. His research interests include social demography, agrarian
change and education in post-liberalization India. Forthcoming publications include Confronting Saffron Demography: Religion, Fertility and
Women’s Status in India, Three Essays Collective (with Patricia Jeffery).
986 Craig Jeffrey et al.