Finding ‘Who’ Is Imagined As ‘the Normative Indian’: A Study of School Textbooks
It is widely accepted that knowledge production and circulation in schools are not neutral but selective (Apple and Christian-Smith, 1991). The politics of knowledge in education has a significant impact on school textbooks reflecting the “educational ideals” and aims of a particular society (Mannheim and Stewart, 1962). The educational ideals, however, imagined in educational policies are different from what constitutes curriculum and correspond more to the unequal realities of society. The privileged sections of society find more space inside these textbooks when compared to the marginalised. The dominance of the normative Indian - the able-bodied north Indian Hindu male- that these textbooks represent leads to the marginal representation of marginalised identities such as women, differently-abled persons and minorities, tokenistic in nature. The textbooks also exclude Dalits from the textbooks’ social space, which shows how school knowledge reproduces the unequal relations of society. This paper examines the textbook as a site of curriculum to understand the type of knowledge is provided to students in India. On these lines, I look at the questions of representation, inclusion and exclusion of various identities by analysing English language textbooks published by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (known as NCERT) for classes I to VIII i.e. elementary levels of education. In addition, I also discuss how these textbooks constitute a hidden curriculum (Jackson, 2004) and a null curriculum (Moore, 2015) when representing identities.