Critical Mind and Labouring Body: Caste and Education Reforms in Kerala

Abstract

Exploring the various educational reform programs implemented in primary schools and high schools in Keralam in India in the last two decades, this paper seeks to analyze the dichotomous concepts of mental and manual labour, theoretical and practical knowledge, and general and technical education which constituted the premise of these reform interventions. The paper attempts to understand the role of different conceptualizations of language and experience in reproducing the above dichotomies. Tracing the genealogy of the dichotomies in the colonial period, the paper argues that even in the educational reform programs which consciously challenge the colonial models, one can find the continuing separation of mental and manual labour in variety of forms and modes. This leads to the question (though not answered in this paper) whether the very concept of knowledge itself, deployed in the educational practice in India, is ordered through the prism of hierarchical practices of caste.