ABSTRACT

This paper examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of varied schooling agendas for poor and oppressed caste children and adults in the princely state of Travancore in nineteenth-century colonial south India. Schools became socially contested and politically charged spaces in which various subaltern castes, particularly the Dalits and Nadars, articulated a new language of social and religious self-fashioning. British Protestant missionaries played a crucial role in provoking these imaginations and yet, the joint workings of caste and racial prejudices resulted in ambivalent cultural encounters in the educational landscape. Caste was central to these contestations and negotiations in making modern child subjectivities and tended to produce new forms of inequality and reproduce existing ones. I argue that schooling campaigns for the poor resulted in the perpetuation of hierarchised, caste-inflected norms of childhood and produced multiple marginal children in local society. This paper draws upon British Protestant missionary archives to highlight the unstable and violent geographies in which children of subaltern castes navigated the sphere of modern schooling in colonial Travancore and the constitutive function of schools in the making of marginal childhoods.

摘要

本文审视了 19 世纪印度南部殖民地特拉凡哥尔 (Travancore) 王国中贫困和受压迫的种姓儿童和成人的各种学校教育议程的空间和时间维度。学校变成了充满社会竞争和政治色彩的空间，各种底层种姓，尤其是达利特人和纳达尔人，在其中表达了一种新的社会和宗教自我塑造语言。英国新教传教士在激发这些想象力方面发挥了关键作用，然而，种姓和种族偏见的共同作用导致了教育景观中矛盾的文化遭遇。种姓是这些使现代儿童成为主体的争论和谈判的核心，并且往往会产生新形式的不平等并重现现有的不平等。我认为，针对穷人的学校教育运动导致了等级化的、受种姓影响的童年规范的长期存在，并在当地社会产生了多个边缘儿童。本文利用英国新教传教士档案来强调不稳定和暴力的地理环境，在这些地理环境中，低等种姓的孩子在殖民地 Travancore 的现代学校教育领域中游刃有余，以及学校在塑造边缘童年方面的构成性功能。