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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Are mega residential schools wiping out India's Adivasi culture? -Felix Padel and Malvika Gupta

-The Hindu

Mega residential schools are herding in large numbers of tribal children, ‘mainstreaming’ them rather than preserving their language and heritage

Tasvir, a young poet-author at Muskaan, a learning centre in Bhopal, tells us how writing can be used to empower his historically stigmatised community: “Pardhis have a rich history. But the way others label us today is wrong. I believe we should start writing and publish our stories. Our lives need to be heard. Our community is losing its identity, our culture is being erased, our connection with the forest forgotten.”

Pardhis were classified as a ‘criminal tribe’ by the British, and were re-labelled as a ‘denotified tribe’ after Independence. But the literacy Tasvir talks about comes from a pedagogy where Adivasi children are encouraged to teach their languages to their teachers and where education is rooted in the child’s social and cultural milieu. To understand what a departure this is from colonial-era hierarchies, which still overshadow most Adivasi schooling, we need to untangle several neglected strands of history.

In 1960, the Elwin Committee report (among the earliest tribal policy statements of independent India) recognised that tribal people have their own institutions of learning, and that a policy of ‘integration’, as opposed to ‘assimilation’, should treat these as allies, not rivals, of schools.

The best known of these indigenous institutions is the Ghotul in Bastar, where older Muria Gond children educate youngsters through a work-play continuum and a sophisticated etiquette of passing on knowledge orally. Children learn countless skills, while sharing myths, riddles, songs, dances, and an ethics based on values of sharing rather than competition. Similar institutions such as Dhumkuria and Dangribasa exist in Jharkhand and Odisha.

Literacy has prime value today. The question is: how to impart it without erasing Adivasi knowledge and value systems?

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