Education and women’s lives in India
As feminist educators, we have always been interested in thinking about (and rethinking!) some of the themes and values central to our work. Are they still relevant, and how, in today’s context? Nirantar was started in 1993 in Delhi, as a feminist group that worked on women’s education. Over the last 20 years it has, through grassroots programmes with women and girls in rural north India, as well as research studies, courses and trainings and advocacy, looked at education from a critical and political lens, bringing in concerns that the women’s movement has raised – about power, history, gender, sexuality, culture, knowledge – into this important arena.
Recently, in a study that traced back participants of a residential education programme (the Mahila Shikshan Kendra or MSK) – Nirantar had designed and implemented from 1993-1997 - we took on contemporary concerns over ‘results’ and ‘outcomes’ of women’s education. We attempted to look afresh at what ‘empowerment’, key to our feminist praxis, as well as in mainstream development discourse, actually meant in the unfolding of women’s lives.
“The biggest impact of the MSK was that I got tremendous courage in myself. I was able to make decisions for myself. I could understand what was right and wrong. Education was my biggest weapon, and it helped define my identity… If I hadn’t stepped out into the world, I wouldn’t have reached where I am now. I met different kinds of people, and I learnt many things.” – Kavita, MSK batch of 1994, now regional editor, Khabar Lahariya newspaper.
Kavita - MSK participant with colleagues, preparring for a monthly Khabar Lahariya newspaper meeting
At the MSK (as in later interventions), we had worked on creating a curriculum based on pedagogical principles that informed popular education programmes elsewhere in the world: we drew on participants’ lives and experiences, interrogated the relationships between the teacher and learner, and used these as the basis for empowering education strategies. We expected that the curriculum and pedagogy at the MSK should first enable women to analyse structures of power, including gender, and then use this understanding to interrogate, negotiate and change such relationships, both in the private and public sphere.
When we went back to the lives of some of the women who had been part of the MSK – not 6 months or 1 year, but 15 years later – we came across a range of life experiences. Some had gone on to further education, jobs, politics; some were trapped in poverty, unemployment, violence or lack of access to information or further education. We struggled to pull out the criteria that labeled women ‘empowered’ or not and how far this linked to their education – however holistic and innovative it may have been. The women did not in fact see ‘useful’ outcomes, like helping with their children’s homework as the most significant impacts of their education. We saw that not only strong assertion and agency, but also the process of negotiation of oppressive structures and institutions in women’s lives – like marriage, the family and local politics – need to be seen as a measure of the empowering potential of education. We also saw that where women had access to long and sustained networks of support and resources, they were more likely to build on the foundation of their education.
To have a broader impact, educational programmes for women cannot be limited to engaging with individual women over the short term, but must engage with larger structures within which women exist, and make possible and support their presence there.
Sabla - MSK participant with a trunkful of her carefully preserved notes from her MSK days, 15 years earlier
Written by Malini Ghose and Disha Mullick, authors of ‘Empowerment in Educational Processes: Feminist Re-appropriations’, in More Powerful Literacies (2012).
