Education, Assimilation and Cultural Marginalisation

of Tribes in India
Xaxa, Virginius

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ABSTRACT (ENGLISH)
The term residential schools refer to an extensive school system set up by the respective governments and
administered by the Christian churches—Roman Catholic, Anglican, United, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches
being the major denominations. [...]many of the hill towns in India developed around such a school system. [...]a
system prevailed till the early phase of post-independence India. [...]the Christian missionaries except in the hill
regions of North East India contributed towards integrating tribes to the dominant regional linguistic community
through adopting a system of education in practice in the region.

FULL TEXT
Virginius Xaxa (virg1978@gmail.com) is a visiting professor at the Institute for Human Development, New Delhi.

The cultural marginalisation of the tribal people in India through the school system in pre-and post-independence
India is discussed by drawing parallels with the residential school system that existed in the United States and
Canada.

On 28 May 2021, Canada became the centre of world news. The remains of 215 indigenous/first-nation children
were discovered at a burial site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Almost a month later,
another discovery of the remains of 751, mostly indigenous children in another residential school, this time in
Saskatchewan province was made. This unearthing is not new and forms part of a series of findings in Canada,
being uncovered from time to time. Interestingly, one does not hear much of such findings in the United States (US),
although the system of residential schools for indigenous children was well-entrenched there too. However, the US
unlike Canada has been reluctant to transparency and a commitment to open its historical past in relation to the
indigenous peoples and their children. The Canadian government openly apologised for the system in 2008.
However, following the findings in Canada, there have been stirrings in the US and the interior ministry has already
referred to the initiative to review the dark history of Native American residential schools.

The term residential schools refer to an extensive school system set up by the respective governments and
administered by the Christian churches—Roman Catholic, Anglican, United, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches
being the major denominations. The government’s partnership with the churches remained in place until 1969, and,
although most of the schools had closed by the 1980s, the last federally supported residential schools remained in
operation until the late 1990s (The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 2015).

What is being revealed in Canada today was hidden for most of Canada’s history until survivors of the system were
finally able to find the strength, courage, and support to bring their experiences to light in several thousand court
cases that ultimately led to the largest class-action lawsuit in Canada’s history. It is this that led to the setting up of
the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) in 2007. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
aimed to compile the complete history and legacy of Canada’s residential school system with the mandate of

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preserving a record of human rights abuses and promoting research and learning about residential schools. The
commission spent six years travelling to all parts of Canada and heard from more than 6,000 witnesses, most of
whom survived the experience of living in the schools as students.

The centre contains all of the residential school survivor testimonies, archival documents, and other materials
collected by the TRC from 2009 to 2015. The holdings include millions of church and government records, hundreds
of residential school photographs, and over 7,000 survivor statements collected by the TRC. The commission notes
that out of the 1,50,000 students who attended these residential schools, many never returned home because they
either ran away or died. Canada’s TRC has concluded that such residential schools were “a systematic,
government-sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so
that they no longer existed as distinct peoples.” TRC has also likened the motivations of opening and operating
these schools to cultural marginalisation (TRC of Canada 2015).

School System in India

The fi ndings at Kamloops have been widely reported in Indian newspapers and electronic and social media
channels. The objective of the residential sch ools in Canada and the US was to introduce the indigenous children to
modern education, but the key underlying objective was to indoctrinate them into the European Christian ways of
living so that they get assimilated into the European colonising society. The residential school system officially
operated from the 1880s to the closing decades of the 20th century. The system forcibly separated children from
their families for extended periods and forbade them from acknowledging their indigenous heritage and culture or to
speak their own languages. The agenda of education in the case of tribes in India historically and even in post-
independence India is very similar, if not identical to the one pursued in Canada. The only difference is whereas
Canada and even the US have abandoned the old policy leading to cultural marginalisation, India continues to
pursue it even today. The system of education, tribes have been provided with is the single most important
contributing factor to the erosion of language, culture, history, and life world of tribes.

The colonialists viewed the people of India as backward and among them tribal people as more backward. The
common terms used to describe the latter were aboriginal, savage, and primitive. The former needed to be educated
not only to man the growing colonial administration but also to raise a friendly subjectcomprador class from among
the upper classes and peaceful subjects from the lower classes—tribes in particular—as they had rebelled against
the colonial power from the late 18th century to the end of the 19th century.

The agenda of the colonialists towards tribes, as elsewhere in the world, was to civilise them. This task they did not
pursue themselves, but left to the missionaries whom they encouraged to work among tribes and supported them by
grants. The key agenda of the missionaries was to wean away tribes from their way of life to Christian beliefs.
Education was an important aid to this agenda and the residential school system, popularly known as the boarding
school in India, became an economical and effective strategy.

The modern boarding school system was the colonial implantation in India. Initiated to cater to the needs of the
children of the British residing in India, it gradually went beyond that and became a key system of schooling of the
emerging native middle class in India.

In this, the contribution of the various denominations of the Christian missionaries has been notable. Most of such
institutions were located far from the metropolis in the beautiful hilly regions in different parts of India. In fact, many
of the hill towns in India developed around such a school system.

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Christian Missionaries

As the missionary work spread to the tribal areas, they adopted a comparable system of education that they had
been engaged with within the case of the middle-class population. The system was similar but not the same. It
varied a great deal in ethos and values, curriculum, quality of services, and facilities offered as they addressed
different classes. The variance in the system rested on the class it catered, namely the topmost strata of the Indian
society, and the other, the lowest, most exploited, the savages. Unlike in North America, the boarding schools in
tribal regions of India were not state-driven. There was no coercion and force; rather parents made the choice.
Neither was it free. The fee was initially paid in kind in the form of a fixed quantity of rice and pulses. In fact, such a
system prevailed till the early phase of post-independence India. Maintaining hygiene and cleanliness of the school
and hostel, including the toilets, invariably fell on the boarders of the school. If the school had a paddy field and
kitchen garden, those too were in the care of the students. To carry on this everyday, normal, routine work, the
boarders were generally divided into teams that were assigned tasks to be carried out by each team on a weekly,
rotational basis. The academic curriculum pursued was one approved and prescribed by the state education board
which was oriented to the language, culture, and needs of the dominant subnational population of the territory and
province in which tribal regions were located.

While the formal academic curriculum was oriented to reading, writing, arithmetic, sciences, and languages such as
English, and the language of the dominant population referred to as a regional language, the informal educational
ethos and values were one oriented to move away from their traditional culture, customs and values to ideas,
morals, and practices associated with Christianity. The schools run by the Christian missions were an important site
of evangelisation activity. That they were keen to keep them away from their traditional lifestyle is evident from the
fact that the converts were encouraged not to live side by side with their fellow non-converted tribespeople.
Religiously, they were drawing them to Christianity, which was considered the epitome of civilisation. The
assimilation to the European way of life, similar to the ones in the US and Canada, was not the agenda in the case
of India. In fact, the Christian missionaries except in the hill regions of North East India contributed towards
integrating tribes to the dominant regional linguistic community through adopting a system of education in practice in
the region. In the process, the missionaries accounted in a significant way for the erosion of tribal language and
culture, an important marker of their distinct identity. With the missions now in the hands of the tribal people
themselves, the outlook and lens regarding the system of education is undergoing some change.

Ashram School of the Gandhians

This agenda of the Christian mission to civilise was taken up by the nationalists, especially those under the influence
of M K Gandhi. The nationalists’ conception of tribes was no different from the Christian missionaries. They too
thought of them as primitive and uncivilised; junglee (wild) is the common epitaph used to describe them. Even the
Hindu Sanskritic texts and mythology presented them as beastly (Bara 2002). Even though the term tribe may have
been a colonial construction, the idea underlying it was not. Hence, as a mission to civilise them, they too adopted
the boarding schools and adapted them to the Indian ethos, values, and social practices. To civilise in this case
meant to assimilate tribes to a way of life of the dominant community in the region, which was marked by a rigid
social structure of hierarchy and lack of freedom, a striking contrast to tribal society. Ashram school was the
nomenclature given to designate schools opened by them. The idea of the ashram schools had its genesis in the
relief work that Thakkar Bapa and Indulal Yagnik had taken in the famine-stricken districts in North Gujarat. The
tribal population predominantly inhabited these districts. Much of the problem of the tribes, in their opinion, was to do
with their lifestyles and social practices. They felt the need to uplift them and saw schools as the best way out. The
ashram school system started in 1922 from the districts in Gujarat that had suffered the famine. Within a few years
of its inception, several such ashram schools and hostels were established at various places in the district. Later on,

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Thakkar Bapa extended his activities and motivated special workers in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan,
Maharashtra, and Odisha to work among the various tribes inhabiting this region. This resulted in the establishment
of an all-India service organisation, known as the Bharti Adam Jati Sevak Sangh (Jojo 2013).

This added a new dimension to the spread of education and welfare activities among tribals in India. Since this
system of education was inspired by the vision of Gandhi, and the commissions and committees of the 1950s and
1960s emphasised its importance and recommended them, it has now become one of the mainstays of imparting
education by the central government, either through the state government tribal/education departments or voluntary
organisations through grants in aid. During the first Five-Year Plan to address the pre-and post-matric educational
needs of tribals, some 4,000 schools were established in tribal areas. These included 1,000 ashram (elementary
level) and sev ashram (primary level) schools and 650 sanskar kendras (cultural centres), balwadis (preschools),
and community centres in the central India tribal belt (GoI 2014).

This system of education, introduced in the 1920s, has not undergone any change in its basic thinking about tribes
and, hence, its orientation to the system of education they need. The ethos of assimilation remains. The guiding
principle underlying the expansion of the ashram school by the government in the 1950s was that the tribal social
and cultural life was not congenial to education. In fact, the sanskar kendras were opened to reorient the children to
upper-caste Hindu cultural norms (GoI 2014). It is somewhat surprising that the state did not make an effort to
reorient the system of education for tribes, even though the ethos of constitution and Jawaharlal Nehru’s enunciation
of five principles of tribal development were quite the contrary. Notwithstanding the great importance attached to the
ashram school for tribal children, the studies and literature point to poor conditions of classrooms, lack of desks,
leakage and seepage on walls, scarcity of bedding, unavailable or ill-maintained toilets and bathrooms leading to
open defecation, cases of molestation and sexual harassment of girl students, recurring incidents of death, poor
health and nutritional condition and many other issues related to it (Patil 2020: 8).

State-run Schools

Besides the two kinds of residential schools referred to above, there have been state-run non-residential schools,
which were also attended by tribes but their presence in these schools was nominal as such schools under the
colonial rule were mostly located in towns and cities. However, they became the dominant players in post-
independence India and spread far and wide into rural areas too. The genesis of such schools too had a colonial
lineage. The colonial government opened a few model institutions called Anglo-vernacular schools, which made use
of regional languages for modern education. These came to be called zila schools at a later stage. It provided
education till the high school level. Since the government agency was unable to carry forward the system at lower
levels, it granted aid to a private agency, which, in the specific situation of the tribal society, were Christian
missionaries.

The creation of the state in India is a product of subnational aspirations, and hence, the state-run educational
institution carries the stamp of a subnational identity which is reflected in their formal as well as non-formal
curriculum. At times, the states have been aggressive in imposing their subnational aspirations. The imposition of
Assamese as the medium of instruction in school in the 1960s is a case in point. This sparked widespread
resentment and became the catalyst for the autonomy movement leading to the territorial division of Assam. A very
large chunk of students goes through the general system of education run by the state of which they are inhabitants.
Indoctrination is not its objective; however, its syllabus, textbooks, workbooks developed by the State Council of
Education and Research and Training based on the National Policy of Education and National Policy Framework
hardly provide any place to tribal languages, culture, festival, and history; in short, the issues and themes related to
tribal societies. They learn and internalise everything of the dominant national group but nothing of their own

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societies, even in the elementary levels of schooling.

This means that the state believes that there is nothing worth learning from tribes, and hence, there is no need for
children of the dominant and subnational identities to know about them. This perpetuates stereotype notions that the
average non-tribal person has of the tribes, which is, they are junglee. Over and above, the medium of instruction,
from the elementary to higher school levels, is in languages that are alien. In short, what is taught is alien, the
language is alien and even the teachers are aliens. The orientation and attitudes of teachers and administrative staff
towards tribes are driven by the idea stemming from the uncivilised. Hence, their behaviour towards them is one of
ridiculing and shaming them. The interiorisation of these ideas enter deep into the psyche of tribal children, which an
average child finds very hard to shed, even in their later life. They do not see anything positive about them being
distinct peoples. The national policies of education have hardly acknowledged the issues of tribes and these have
not been addressed throughout post-independence India.

There is still another system of education in practice in tribal areas. These are schools run by the Sangh Parivar and
its affiliated organisations.

Hindutva Organisations and Tribes

These go by different names and it is often hard to discern their affiliation with the Parivar. The Vanvasi Kalyan
Ashram, Sewa Bharati, Ekal Vidyalaya, Vivekananda Kendra, Bharat Kalyan Pratishthan, and Friends of Tribals
Society are Parivar’s front-line organisations that are engaged with a range of issues of tribal communities. Of these,
education through primary schools, residential schools, and hostel facilities are the most important. At Ekal
Vidyalaya—a single-teacher pre-school centre—students are taught the basics of reading and writing plus
sanskaras (good behaviour) as envisaged under the Hindu tradition.

There has been little difference in the agenda of the ashram schools initiated by the Gandhians and those of the
Sangh Parivar, which is, the assimilation of tribes to the so-called dominant traditions of India. The only difference is
that Hinduisation was dormant and unstated in the former while it is an aggressive part of the curriculum—formal or
informal—of the latter. The indoctrination of tribes to texts, myths, stories, values, and social practices associated
with the majority religion remains the core of the Sangh Parivar’s agenda, and forming a majoritarian identity rather
than maintaining their own distinct indigenous religious identity their main thrust. The Sangh Parivar schools have,
however, even gone one step further in socialising them to hate those belonging to other religious traditions,
especially non-Indic, even if they happen to be their own tribespeople (Sundar 2004). The plethora of
nongovernmental organisations driven by the ethos and the agenda of the Sangh Parivar align to furthering this
purpose. Often, it is very difficult to detect their connections with the Parivar and its allied organisations. These
Parivar-linked schools have been getting generous support grants from the governments as well.

To conclude, all the systems of school, except state-run, have had the agenda of indoctrinating tribes away from
their language, tradition, culture, religion, and identity. To the Christian missionaries, it meant absorption into the
Christian faith and its practices. To the ashram schools as well as the Sangh Parivar-affiliated schools, it meant the
assimilation of tribes into the dominant Hindu social, cultural, and religious life—a route to a civilised, superior, and
developed stage of life. The state-run schools had no such schema but the curriculum developed was such that it
contributed enormously to the agenda of the erosion of tribal languages to which culture, tradition, folkways, and
their knowledge of biodiversity and world view were intricately linked. All these have greatly contributed to and still
continue to contribute to the cultural marginalisation of the tribal people.

An instance is language. Ganesh N Devy (2020) who documented 780 Indian languages while conducting the

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People’s Linguistic Survey of India in 2010, found as many as 600 languages as dying. Needless to say, a large
number of these have been tribal languages. At least there is a strong realisation of cultural marginalisation in
Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and many other countries. They have at least begun to acknowledge historical
wrongs and have been taking corrective measures. However, in India, there is hardly any understanding of such a
wrongdoing, and hence, the question of cultural violence does not even stir an average Indian mind. It is normal and
business as usual. What is even more disturbing is that, whereas the US and Canada pursued this policy in the
historical past, India is following this policy, even more systematically and aggressively, in the postcolonial era. India
may take pride in not having the absolute marginalisation of the tribal people on its hands, as in the new world, but
its record of cultural marginalisation and its agenda of dispossession and displacement thereby pushing them to a
state of deprivation, impoverishment, malnutrition, and high mortality rates remains an open book for everyone to
see.

References

Bara, Joseph (2002): “Tribal Beast or Tribal Man? Case for a New Concept of ‘Tribe,’ ”Social Action, Vol 52, No 2.

Devy, G N (2020): “There Are 600 Potentially Endangered Languages in India …Each Dead Language Takes Away
a Culture System,” https:// indianexpress.com/article/research/international- mother-language-day-2018-ganesh-
devyindian- languages-5072487/.

GoI (2014): “Report of the High-Level Committee on Socio-economic, Health and Educational Status of Tribal
Communities of India,” Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India.

Jojo, Bipin (2013): “Decline of Ashram Schools in Central and Eastern India: Impact on Education of ST Children,”
Social Change, Vol 43, No 3.

Patil, R R (2020): “Introduction,” Tribal Development in India: Challenges and Prospects of Tribal Education, R R
Patil (ed), Sage Publications: New Delhi.

Sundar, Nandini (2004): “Teaching to Hate: RSS’ Pedagogical Programme,” Economic &Political Weekly, Vol 39, No
16, pp 1605–12.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015): “Honouring the Truth,” Reconciling for the Future
(Summary of the Final Report).

DETAILS

Subject: Language; Students; Culture; Curricula; Religious missions; Values; Christianity;

Boarding schools; Reconciliation; Regions; Archives &records; Social exclusion;
Missionaries; Education; School systems

Business indexing term: Industry: 51921 : Libraries and Archives 61111 : Elementary and Secondary Schools

Location: United States--US; Canada; India

Classification: 51921: Libraries and Archives; 61111: Elementary a nd Secondary Schools

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 Publication title: Economic and Political Weekly; Mumbai

Publication year: 2021

Publication date: Sep 4, 2021

Publisher: Athena Information Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Place of publication: Mumbai

Country of publication: India, Mumbai

Publication subject: Business And Economics, Political Science

ISSN: 00129976

Source type: Magazine

Language of publication: English

Document type: News

ProQuest document ID: 2569945949

Document URL: http://0-search.proquest.com.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/magazines/education-

assimilation-cultural-marginalisation/docview/2569945949/se-2?accountid=14888

Copyright: Copyright 2021 Economic and Political Weekly, distributed by Contify.com

Last updated: 2023-11-05

Database: ABI/INFORM Global,ABI/INFORM Global

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