Metodología de evaluación de ofertas

Following is an excerpt from an interview with Rani (ST) and Roopa (SC) that captures some of the claste-based differences in the way people talk; that is, (re)present themselves and their views and worlds:

Reva: Rani madam, how long have your mummy-papa been in Indore? Rani: This, I don’t know.

Reva: Do you know whether they were living somewhere else earlier? Rani: Earlier my mummy-papa were living in the village.

Reva: So were they farming or doing something else? Rani: Yeah, they used to farm.

Roopa: Meaning, since when have they come to Indore? When this…your brother was born?

Rani: When my brother Pawan was born, that’s when they came. Roopa: When the younger one was born?

Rani: When Pawan was born. Roopa: How old is your brother? Rani: I don’t know.

Roopa: Must be…he must be sixteen or seventeen. Reva: Yesterday…

Rani: Yeah, the one we pointed out to you yesterday (they had pointed him out to me while we were sitting outside during the lunch break doing an earlier part of their group interview)

Delpit (1995) points out in her discussion of class, race and cultural practices how White, middle class patterns of language use – and thus, particular ways of being – become part of the ‘culture of power’ of the school. With reference to Shirley Brice Heath’s work Delpit points out that questions demanding factual information, as opposed to ‘questions probing the students’ own analyses and evaluations’ (p. 56) stories, centrally distinguished Black students’ participation in classroom interaction from the (White, middle class) ideal encoded in teacher talk. Similarly, based on Michaels and Cazden’s work Delpit shows that White and Black children (may) have culturally different styles of narration – ‘“topic-centred narratives’ being favoured by the former and ‘“episodic” narratives’ by the later (p. 55). As an ethnographer working with students from a range of backgrounds, in terms of familiarity with print and the language of power (that is, formalised, standard Hindi), or in other words, “schooled” ways of speaking/being/thinking, it took me some time to get used to the different patterns. It meant that what we could talk about, how long it took for me to “get at” some of the data I needed and the stories I could finally access, all depended on how the students and I came to an understanding of each other or, how we learnt to (or, in some events, failed to) relate across our socioeconomic and cultural differences. It also meant that generating basic information about family backgrounds and socioeconomic conditions was not possible beyond a point. Many students’ and my use of numbers (for example, to indicate height, age, time or duration of events) also differed significantly: they referred to events to locate other events while I was more used to the ways rewarded by formal education. Often students had a different vocabulary to refer to higher education too: for example,

many referred to undergraduation as Class XIII (terahvin) and XIV (chaudahvin) rather than first year or second year. Such differences in patterns of language use reflected differences in our socioeconomic locations while also capturing (potential) shifts in the way students and I both made sense of the range of relationships different class-caste groups have with systems of formal education (as a result of our interaction).

Data on wages and family incomes was difficult to compile for the following reasons: 1) students often did not know the total amount their parents earned in a month and instead knew the hourly rates for some kinds of labour. Some students did not know even these rates. 2) The situation was extremely precarious with parents having to change jobs/work, or being laid off without notice and even within weeks of beginning. 3) People were not paid at the same rate for the same kind of work. 4) When entire families worked in a unit the contractors paid a lump sum to the head of the family (often the father/husband or brother) on a weekly or monthly basis. Thus, the total income of a family was difficult to calculate without compiling data systematically and its impact could only be understood fully after documenting and classifying the various kinds of family structures – joint, nuclear, single-parent headed, students living alone or with relatives/family friends. I tried for two months to compile this data by gathering information from students and parents but it became apparent that short of a door to door survey this information could not be efficiently collected given the everyday struggles children and adults had to wage. Though this information would have been useful such an effort required far more time that my PhD programme structure allowed and/or a team of researchers working together rather than a lone ethnographer. The kind of surveys that Jeffery et al. (2005) conducted to supplement ethnographic data would be a far more desirable approach to understanding such communities of ‘first generation learners’. Methodological issues also figured in accessing narratives of caste in my ethnographic work: if the ethnographer is not from the same class-caste background it may take longer for trust to develop between her and the students. This meant that I needed more time to reach out across class, caste and religious differences, to let go of my own apprehensions. In terms of time too, interviews with adult family members would have to be planned differently as IWC lifestyles can be very

uncertain on an everyday basis. Even for short conversations with family members one may have to visit a student’s home several times. I suggest that planning a longer stay in the field and factoring in time for work outside the classroom may be useful when one wants to work on cultural differences and their implications. These, I think, are important insights from my study which is one of the few intersectional studies and is by necessity (lack of literature) exploratory in some ways. Lastly, in order to excavate the ways in which caste has worked to shape family histories, it may be more fruitful to work with parents, especially in the case of internal migrants.