El silencio como forma de expresión artística

Ravi Nandan Singh

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter, attempts have been made to understand Indian democracy as an institution that is continually challenged and reshaped by various constituent institutions like caste, family, tribe, religion, education, bureaucracy, market and the electoral process. The individual social actor and his/her activity would, therefore, be seen with and within these institutional practices and not distinct from these institutions. One may refer to this as a socio-anthropological elaboration of democracy because the perspectives developed here use the conceptual trajectories of the discipline of social anthropology. Keeping the positive limits of the themes of this chapter in mind (universal adult

franchise and universalization of education), we are not going to trace the path these institutions have taken from the past to the present; so this is not a historical overview of events. Rather, we are going to reflect on them through the description of the establishment and the changing practices of universal adult franchise and the modern educational systems. Let us briefly sum up the scheme of discussion.

The chapter is divided into three, broad sections.

The three-part discussion is loosely separated, where each part purports to introduce the basic conceptual framework, followed by the analytical arguments with relevant exemplifications. Most scholars would agree that universal adult franchise by itself is a nominal or symbolic entry (that provides a kind of formal equality) in the working of a nation. It is the complex of education, social mobility and citizenship (which, if realized, leads us towards substantive equality) that signifies the extent of indifference or sincerity of the democratic governments. This is the main thread of the

arguments in the chapter, which are supported by examples. Illustrating this in detail, the first section tries to show that the history of the vote is deeply entrenched with the social divisions between

different groups of society.

The institution of universal adult suffrage that was put into practice revealed the schism between various communities that had existed in social ties before the ideological adoption of a democratic form of government in Europe and America. This schism is most severely exposed when one looks at the accounts of women’s movements for suffrage in Europe and America. Initially, the propertied White men were given voting rights, which they were ready to extend to the educated men amongst them. However, most of them opposed the idea of conferring the same right to women. A large number of White women then rallied to claim suffrage rights. Curiously, these women were either indifferent or vehemently opposed to the idea of extending the same right to Black men and women.

Soon enough, Black men and women voiced their protest against the discrimination by the White people and demanded voting rights. Thus, on the one hand, the White families were witnessing an

internal revolt and, on the other, the institution of racial relations was also questioned. Both these discourses have been crucial in setting the pattern for socio-political inequalities and their

negotiations in the 20th century and the times to come.

In the second section, we look at the basic concepts regarding access to education and the

difficulties in realizing the ideals of democracy and substantive citizenship by an examination of the theoretical perspectives put forth by Pierre Bourdieu and Michael W. Apple. In the final section, focusing on India, we trace the women’s movements for voting rights under the colonial government;

and as the discussion on Europe and America indicates in the context of family, race and class, we find that in the Indian cultural sphere, the familial structure and caste relations get questioned in the process of struggle over the vote. Notwithstanding these struggles, contemporary India inherits more of a half-formed agitation between various social groups that borders on a contested exclusion and participation of marginalized groups on the lines of caste, gender, class, tribe, religion and ethnicity.

Their aspirations for social mobility through education—more than any other media—calls for an empathetic understanding of the realms of opportunities that contemporary India represents and the ways in which it can be accessed through cultural, political and educational negotiations between the citizens and with the State.

Racial Relations of Gendered Families: Women’s Suffrage in 20th Century Europe and America The practice of democracy has undergone tremendous interrogation ever since its adoption by various post-revolution states in Europe and America and, indeed, it is part of the bases of democracy that it should have room for questioning—a questioning that is critical, substantial and, at times, threatens to be destabilizing too. One way to capture this conflict, which has never been without struggles

between various communities, is to analyse the history of the vote or adult franchise as it has also been called. Conceptually, as an idea, the vote signifies two important features in the history of political thought and practice. One, using the tool of vote, one gives nominal or symbolic consent or dissent to a person or a party; two, this consent or dissent is used by the said party or person to represent the people or the communities that may have voted in favour or against the prevailing stances of the government. It is also important to remember that the vote is anonymous and, thus, relations between elected ones and their represented ones is speculative and, owing to this speculative relation, the political equations may change, come elections. The shifts in political relations are structurally present within the practice of democracy and it is not a negative presence either. The voter and the elected are not eternally bound to each other and they are relatively free to make use of the changing socio-political contexts of the cultures within which they operate. One may argue that this nominal, symbolic and continuous relation of the voter with the socio-political system is mainly linked with the vote for an adult—and that this link gives rise to an entire range of features that can be accommodated under what is termed citizenship. In bureaucratic terms, this relation is also legalized and chartered: ration card, voter’s list, voter’s identification card, passport,

differential treatment with regard to entitlements over bank accounts, property holdings, political representation, professional choices, and subsidies are just some of the common ways to ascertain

privilege citizenship and also to hold a citizen under obligation to the country.

It is also important to remember that just as democracy did not get defined by its mere origin, similarly citizenship did not settle as a site of new socio-political identity over few years and at one place. As the interactions of the so-called traditional and modern cultures intensified and new

institutions like judiciary, international market economy, and schools and universities took firm roots, citizenship also acquired new dimensions in people’s lives. Be it in negotiating migration, poverty alleviation, minority or ethnic rights, reservation or parity rights or, in the contemporary world, the consumer-oriented policies and policing, the complexity of citizenship has to be seen in relation to social currents. These may be the key markers of a mature democracy, seen retrospectively or could be the central requirements of a normative democracy, but in practice, all of these issues have been elusive at different junctures. People have had to wage bitter struggles to redefine the prevailing social customs and cultural nuances so as to be better represented or represented at all in democratic systems. The redefinition acquires greater intricacy when the struggle involves the newly emergent, contested public spheres and some previously unquestioned quarters of the private spheres of

communities. In what follows below, we are going to look at the institutions of race and family through the women’s movements for suffrage in Europe and America in the late 19th and early 20th century, using the feminist scholarship, which critically evaluates the socio-political milieux of that time.

The history of the vote, or what one may call suffrage movements, has been chequered. The beginnings can be traced to the 18th century democratic revolutions of the propertied White middle class, if not the residual classes of aristocracy. Political subordination was challenged by the

doctrine of inalienable civil rights and this demand was first made by the White male ‘subject’

(subsequently a ‘citizen’). This is evident for instance in ‘The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’ of 1789. The celebrated declaration saw vote and suffrage as the exclusive prerogative of the male citizen. The declaration, however, provided the inspiration for the ‘second sex’ to claim similar rights for themselves. The well-known French playwright and revolutionary, Olympe de Gouges, revised the declaration of the rights of man and composed ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen’. Subsequently, one had Mary Wollstonecraft’s major text Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women (1873).

The texts may have prepared the stage for a long drawn arduous battle to obtain the political right to vote. However, it is crucial to observe that the White male citizen was thinking of himself alone and did not see women as worthy of the vote, as their social role was primarily seen as confined to the domestic and the familial spheres. In a similar vein, the White woman talked about political

emancipation exclusively in terms of the rights of White, middle-class women and shared the scorn of her male compatriot for the civil rights and liberties of coloured women and men. While many early White feminists were engaged in anti-slavery campaigns, they often saw themselves as carrying the burden for emancipation of the Black slaves. An example is Angelina Grimke, a White woman active in anti-slavery campaigns, who, in 1838, publicly declared that she could not emancipate the Negro slave until she achieved her own emancipation. Paradoxically, many White women involved in the anti-slavery campaigns of the time assumed a racist posture towards Black women. The class bias

and racism of the women suffrage movements was effectively voiced in articulations of the women of colour. Sojourner Truths’s Ain’t I a Woman is one of the most militant and important historical

statements in this respect. A Black American woman bom into slavery, she attacked the racism of the White women as well as the male supremacists. She pointed out that neither were all women White and nor did they enjoy the middle-class life of material comfort, and she became the voice for the civil and equal rights of women of colour.

Although this fragmented account does not enable one to generalize, one may still convincingly argue that the institution of democracy in its infancy displayed a yawning chasm between the ideals that it stood for and their practice. The dominant and privileged social classes arrogated to

themselves the right to decide the conditions of citizenship. As the struggles intensified, they were ready to accord only limited rights to the social groups that they otherwise deemed unfit for political discretion and participation. It is perhaps a mixed boon of democratic reason and social struggle that the universal adult franchise was won by people who were denied these rights but, if one looks at the socio-political history of any of these countries, one would find that the practice of the voting rights has been cordoned off from a direct acquisition of these people into the mainstream of these nations.

Even after obtaining citizenship, they stand relatively distant from institutions that facilitate social mobility and they are not so much a part of the face of those institutions that reflect successes in the society, viz. cinema, media, industries, high political offices, professorial posts and research labs.

When we look at the section on India, some of the structural similarities would stand out for us to see and compare to what is mentioned above. For now, let us conceptually analyse how education is the single most important site for social mobility and how it is also one of the most competitive ones. As already suggested, democracy seeks to resolve conflicts between communities and its greatest

strength is that promise, but its failures run parallel to its successes. Education reflects this

relationship, in the way it is accessible to citizens, the content or curricula on which students are honed to be citizens and through the researched disclosures of higher studies that may strengthen or threaten the settled truths of a nation-state.

Theories of Education in the Context of Democratic Social Changes Having evoked a view of the political situations in Europe and America at the time of

institutionalization of democracy, we move on to outline similar societal conflicts through the theories of sociology of education. The pre-existing political modes of being, before democratic

institutionalization, had one way or the other signified the ‘ruler’ and the ‘ruled’, which in democracy becomes the elected’ and the ‘represented’. Similarly, modes of educating or training the young and the newcomer have existed in all cultures. Just as the transition from the previous modes of political existence to a democratic one requires a systemic questioning of social customs and beliefs, similarly the transformation of educational means and methods requires an adoption of new values and

meanings. In both cases, the transitions and transformations are at times acceptable and at other times are posed in contrast to each other in a way that the values of the old and the new get caught in a never-ending façade, giving rise to cynicism and nostalgia in the everyday world of people.

Different social thinkers envisaged similarly paradoxical roles to modern education, as they spoke about the social transitions of cultures from the so-called traditional-rural to the industrial-urban domain. Emile Durkheim¹ argued that the existence of the institution of science would be crucial in the newly-emerged ‘organic solidarities’ (an organization of societies on rational thinking, with faith in the individual as a prime moral and intellectual agent) because it would be central in defining the specialized occupation people may have in the industrial societies. However, he also argued² that in these newly emerged societies, the new specialized roles and thus new communities of labour would have to understand the rationale behind their specialization—that every community is working for the greater good of the society. And, to make the greater good of the society sacred to everyone in the first place, Durkheim argued for a moral grounding of the future citizens in schools. Thus, it follows that schools have a greater function in democratic societies than merely imparting information;

according to Durkheim, they must prepare the student to accept and respect the moral fabric of society. Another theorist called Max Weber³ argued that to a large extent, the educational processes in industrial and modern capitalistic societies would be invested in the maintenance of the rational-bureaucratic systems of democratic institutions (which means that we have to be sufficiently literate in order to participate in most of the modern, social exchanges and contracts and, second, this literacy has to keep pace with legal and constitutional changes). So, at least three things emerge from the

above viewpoints: one, in the present world, education is the most basic platform through which we are made to relate with the required values of the civil world of family, bureaucracy and the ideals of the nation and their practice, through past and present, in a standardized manner. Many scholars call this part of education a ‘nationalistic agenda’: instilling of secular, multicultural, racially impartial, and gender-neutral values.

However, having said that, it is significant to take note that if all this is in the hands of the

government agencies to a large extent, it is very likely that the government can also use education to do the opposite of what has been mentioned. It can bring in communalism, xenophobia, class, caste and gender bias. In either case, most thinkers generally agree that the educational apparatuses are inevitably influenced by agencies that are bound to affect its content now and in times to come—be those agencies of State, market, communities, political parties or that of science. Let us call this dynamic system ‘mainstream education’. The second concern is: how do we keep producing

specialists or professionals who continuously avow to maintain or better the economic, cultural and academic institutions of the respective socio-cultural world? This introduces the aspect of education deciding the merit or capacity of every individual and accordingly making him or her eligible for various specialized jobs.

One of the central tenets of democracy is also that we do not allocate merit to birth-based identities (ascriptive identities) like caste, race and gender but rather see everyone through the merit of their abilities to compete on common grounds (achieved identities). This, in a certain way, means that in order to keep the social status of the family, it is not enough to be born in it; one has to try and at least equal it through educational measures, most of the time. It also means that families that are stigmatized in the society can hypothetically overcome their stigma, by possibly achieving respectable jobs (this is also the reason why education is always more than the sum of its parts; it is about the

transformation of social identities along with the enabling of jobs and occupations). The converse is also true, a respectable family may eventually bite dust if the new generation fails to live up to expectations. In practice, most of us wish to better our own individual positions and our familial positions in society. This could be called social mobility through educational and/or other means.

Social mobility is about maintaining (remember that maintenance also is about improving familial status, because the social context changes with time: parents would want their children to do better than themselves), improving (that is seen as real upward shift) or downgrading (that is considered embarrassing or disgraceful in most cases) our familial positions and that of the community to an extent as well. Needless to say that educational means are adopted and appropriated by particular classes, castes and professional families over time. In other words, mainstream education becomes more amenable to people of a certain class, caste, race, gender and ethnicity and is, thus, instrumental in promoting these people to better social statuses, at times at the cost of the ones left behind.

Therefore, we can say that mainstream education is the site of failure and success of the democratic

Therefore, we can say that mainstream education is the site of failure and success of the democratic