From: "Frank Conlon" <conlon@U.WASHINGTON.EDU>
To: <H-ASIA@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Sent: Monday, February 07, 2011 9:17 PM
Subject: H-ASIA: H-Net Review Publication: 'Education, Emotion, and
Nationalism' in India
> H-ASIA
> February 7, 2011
>
> Book Review (orig. pub. H-Education) by Christopher Bischof on Veronique
> Benei, _Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary
> Western India_
>
> (x-post H-Review)
> ************************************************************************
> From: H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
>
> Verronique Benei. Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and
> Language in Contemporary Western India. Stanford Stanford
> University Press, 2008. xix + 346 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN
> 978-0-8047-5905-2; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8047-5906-9.
>
> Reviewed by Christopher Bischof (Rutgers, The State University of New
> Jersey)
> Published on H-Education (February, 2011)
> Commissioned by Jonathan D. Anuik
>
> Education, Emotion, and Nationalism
>
> _Schooling Passions _is an anthropological work that explores the
> everyday production of local, regional, and national senses of
> belonging in the elementary schools in the locality of Kolhapur near
> the southern boundary of the state of Maharashtra, India. Kolhapur
> was an independent kingdom until 1949 and traces its origin to
> Shivaji Bhosale, a seventeenth-century hero-warrior who founded the
> Marathi nation. Equipped with a knowledge of Marathi and significant
> expertise in nationalism, citizenship, education, and gender,
> Veronique Benei conducted fieldwork at five schools in the late
> 1990s and early 2000s with the expectation that education would be
> less nationalistic there than elsewhere in India owing to its
> distinctive heritage. She instead found that a sense of regional
> belonging served as the pillar on which a sense of attachment to the
> nation stood. Her focus is on banal nationalism, the everyday acts
> that create and reinforce loyalty to the nation. She necessarily
> keeps the subject of her work from the teachers, pupils, and parents
> she observes to avoid artificially provoking such acts. Though much
> attention is paid to the content of these everyday expressions of
> nationalism and pupils' reception of that content, the real focus is
> on the form that its presentation took. Benei works quite
> successfully to recover "the _emotional and embodied _production of
> the political" (p. 5). In this theoretical framework, pedagogical
> content and form are inseparably intertwined; indeed, regarding young
> children, the form takes precedence.
>
> The importance accorded to form is apparent in attention to language
> throughout the book. The first four chapters examine schools in
> Kolhapur, catering overwhelmingly to Hindus, where instruction took
> place in the Marathi language. Teachers at these schools pressed
> pupils to use _pramanit bhasha _("the correct, authoritative
> language") rather than _boli bhasha _("oral language") in their
> answers to the teacher, songs, and morning liturgy (p. 94). Benei
> argues that the notion of _pramanit bhasha _renders meaning secondary
> to proper pronunciation, which becomes ideological in itself.
> _Pramanit bhasha _is cultivated through and thus becomes associated
> with morality stories and expressions of national allegiance.
> Students are also encouraged to "internalize _pramanit bhasha _[by]
> naturalizing it as their own _boli bhasha_" (p. 94). This incitement
> to internalization also demonstrates the way in which the schools'
> production of nationalism relies on blurring the distinction between
> public and private as students learn to apply forms learned at school
> to their personal lives and even, in some cases, to encourage their
> parents to adopt more nationalistic ways of behaving. Family life
> also serves as the basis for cultivating a love for nation.
>
> Students encounter the figure of the national mother goddess
> throughout the day in schools in songs, plays, the morning liturgy,
> and textbooks. Once a year schools in the city of Kolhapur host a
> presentation attended by the public, the culmination of which
> involves a student portraying Mother-India. This embodiment also
> takes place through other means on a daily level at schools. Pursuing
> teachers, students, and students' families into the wider community
> and their homes, Benei demonstrates how "life at school draws upon,
> and extends, a sensorium constituted in the intimacy of the family"
> (p. 105). The emotional intimacy of the family, particularly the
> mother-child relationship, is thus the model for the emotional
> attachment of pupils to the nation. This modeling of patriotism on
> familial relations has the consequence of reproducing patriarchy
> through "the conflation of 'good wifehood, good motherhood, and good
> patriotism'" (p. 122).
>
> In her last two chapters, Benei examines the education in an
> Urdu-language school in Kolhapur, catering to Muslims, and a military
> school in Pratinagar, twenty kilometers outside Kolhapur, to offer a
> comparative perspective that sheds light on Marathi-language schools
> as well. It becomes apparent that the bonds of attachment to the
> nation in Urdu schools are not mediated through a sense of regional
> attachment as they often were in Marathi schools, as evidenced by the
> lack of attention paid in Urdu schools to Shivaji, hero of the
> Marathi and Indian nations. Benei explains this discrepancy by
> arguing that "regional history is framed in anti-Muslim terms,"
> though she also notes that Indian Muslims are moving to reappropriate
> some regional histories as Muslim (p. 184). The final chapter debunks
> many stereotypes about military schools. Far from an agent of
> national homogenization and stern masculinity, the Pratinagar school
> worked to make citizens and soldiers through a constant spoken stream
> of emotional nourishment expressed in the regional and national
> vernaculars, as well as English. B??n??i portrays this military
> school as coming far closer than Marathi schools to transcending
> gender.
>
> On the whole, this is a very fine book, though at times the everyday
> life at schools, which is so wonderfully reconstructed, becomes lost
> in a sea of heavyhanded recapitulations of cultural theory. Benei
> consistently draws parallels between the pedagogical goals and
> processes in the schools of Maharashtra and the goals and processes
> that historians have described in contexts from around the world,
> particularly in nineteenth-century Europe. However, where historians
> have tended to privilege the written content found in textbooks,
> B??n??i's presence as an observer made apparent the role of emotion
> and embodiment in the making of patriotic citizens. She observes the
> passion evoked by, and represented in, singing, speaking properly,
> the sartorial self-fashioning of students and teachers, and bodily
> comportment during everyday rituals of nationalism--a passion that is
> in large part lost to the historian. For most historians of
> education, the reconstruction of emotion and embodiment will involve
> imagination and speculation. _Schooling Passions_ is an excellent
> guide to such worthwhile work.
>
> Citation: Christopher Bischof. Review of Benei, Veronique,
> _Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary
> Western India_. H-Education, H-Net Reviews. February, 2011.
> URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31484
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
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