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to overcome the impasse and to stretch out in un-
tr ied directions. Sho rtly afterward s, in 1954, the
RSS supremo Golwalkar pronounced a revised and
refined ideological package, on the basis of which
the Right would venture into hegemony format ion
in the era of democra tic polit ics.
Uttar Pradesh was for qui te some t ime in the
initial stages the seedbed for the educational ex-
per iment .
A
Shishushiksha Prabandh Samiti was se t
up here to coordinate the Saraswat i Shishu Mandirs
at pr imary school level and th e Bal Mand irs at h igh
school level. Delhi, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh
picked up the ente rprise, each with i ts s tatewide
com mittee. An dhra Prad esh was the f irst place in
the So uth to develop its Sa raswati Vidyapith.6
A significant expansion occurred in the 1970s
especially during the Emergency period, when a
ban brought about an enforced lull in the RSSs
usual activities. In 1977 Vidya Bharati was set up
to coordinate efforts at the all-India level, and to
devise curricula for the additional course s that pro-
vide the main content of RSS pedagogy. In
1978
af ter the fal l of the Indira Gandhi government , an
all-India childrens camp w as org anized in D elhi for
three days in November and the Pres iden t inaugu-
rated i t . Ut ta r P radesh, Mad hya Prad esh, Delhi and
Andhra Pradesh started regular, f ive-yearly state-
wide camps. By the end of 1991 Vidya Bharati
claimed that i t was running the second largest
chain of schools in the country, next only to the
government schools. About 4000 schools were ei-
ther directly ru n or w ere affi liated to i t a nd ov er ten
lakh (one mil lion) chi ldren were being taugh t . I t
also ran
40
colleges and the teaching at various
levels was done by
36 000
teachers. I t was said that
the schools existed ever yw here in India, except in
Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram, where the
Christian affiliations of the people and missionary
success in the educational field were holding up
RSS entry . T o force i ts way in this region, and es-
pecially to undercu t Christian educa tional influence,
Vidya B harati developed the H aflong Pro ject. Vidya
Bharatis plans call for an in crease in the total num-
ber of its schools to 10,000 in the next f ive years,
and a school for every block in the country. Uttar
Pradesh retains the highes t concentrat ion of
schools, with 1325 schools and three lakh students
under the Vidya Bharati system at the end of 1991.
In Delhi , a t present , the Samar th Shiksha Samit i
( the Delhi wing of the Vidya Bh arat i ) runs
44
schools: there is one senior secondary level school
at Hari Na gar, s ix at the second ary level, f ive at the
middle school level and 3 at the primary level.:
Apart from regular schools, Vidya Bharati has
two othe r kinds of semi- formal program s. There a re
Shishu Vatikas for pre-school infants which have
been developed in reaction to the success of
wes ternized Mon tessor i schools w hich el iminate
the mother as the p r imary pedagogue a t a very
ear ly s tage. Having cr it ic ized them for doing
so
Vidya B harat i then proceeds to displace the m other
far more completely , wi th wide-ranging plans for
cultiv ating th e physic al, men tal, social, and spiri-
tual qualit ies of pre-school infants .
In backward areas of the country, where few
schools exis t and where most chi ldren do not at -
tend them , Vidya Bh arat i sets up Sa mskar Kendras
to imp lant the r ight qual i t ies and noble vi r tues in
children w ho are ta ug ht for a few hours a week by a
single teacher who looks after a locality. Inciden-
tally, the consti tuency of this project is not de-
scribed in terms of economic deprivation or caste-
based disadvantages which make children stay away
from school . Th ey are pol i te ly descr ibed as remote
areas wi tho ut an y ne arb y schools-that is, geo-
graphically inaccessible places rather than socially
deprived ones . Thi s coyness about men t ioning
so-
cial contradictions and problems is , as we shall see,
a marked characteristic of
RSS
discourses, and the
pedagogic designs have developed interesting ways
of handl ing i t .
T h e syl labus of these p ar t - t ime schools cons is ts
of elementary l i teracy and lessons in religion,
patr iot ism, Indian cul ture. The y exis t in four
kinds of locales, carefully selected by Vidya Bharati.
There are some rural ones , though the Vidya
Bharat i manuals say very l i t t le about thei r exact
locations and their social base, or their spread in
recent years . Th ey ment ion only projects and plans
in Ut t a r P radesh and Madhya Pradesh . There a r e ,
however , 500 such Kendras in urban s lums. They
also exists in urban localit ies which are centers of
convent and miss ionary schools . Abou t a thousand
have been set up in tr ibal areas, especially in the
Chhotanagpur region in Bihar , expl ici t ly to coun-
teract missionary educational influence, and to
teach H induism and nat ional ism to m isguided
tr ibals . Clear ly , th is i s the h ear t of the s t ruggle .*
T h e RSS sees i tself as contesting an alienated
and denationalizing heritage left behind by
Macaulay and the colonial masters which, i t says,
cont inues to inform the present educat ional main-
s t ream. I t a ims to replace this w i th a sys tem whose
single minded aim is to implant in the childs mind
a d om inan t s logan-Bharatmata
k
ai . T his i s , they
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say, the true national education that teaches the
s tuden t to be p roud o f h i d he r Hindu her i tage . Th a t
is why, instead of calling themselves schools, RSS
educational insti tu tions call themselves M and irs or
temples. Th e Indian ization of concep ts is obviously
taken to mean their s imultane ous Hindu ization
since a mandir is a Hindu place of worship. In othe r
words, education begins with planting a basic and
primary confusion and conflation between the
Hindu and the Indian.
The professed primary aim also includes the re-
making of the nation. Here th e pedagogical aim be-
comes explicitly and very directly political and im-
mediately l inks up with the RSS design of Hindu
rashtra. This is to be achieved through a combina-
tion of ancestral values and knowledge-i.e., Hi nd u
knowledge-with highly mod ern techno logy. Edu-
cation, therefore neatly selects and sti tches tog ether
two isolated and unrelated streams and excludes
everything else. Western knowledge, which has
repeatedly been denounced as alienated and cor-
rupting, is brou ght in to form o ne of the tw o consti-
tutive elements of knowledge, in the form of tech-
nological know how. Y et, it is delinked from associ-
ated developments in critical rationalism and sci-
entif ic explorations wherein i t is embedded. Thus,
cleansed and tamed, and debarred from intellectual
curiosity and qu estioning, i t is safely reinserted in to
approved modes of learning as mere mechanical
skills . Hindu knowledge, of course, is a tradition
that has necessarily to be invented in mode rn t imes
and contexts s ince the very notion of a s ingle, ho-
mogenized Hindu is an a-historical, ideological con-
struct. Since the RSS has promo ted itself as th e self-
appointed guardian of all matters Hindu, Hindu
knowledge by definit ion becomes knowledge pre-
scribed by the
RSS.
Since the aim is to compete wi th mains t ream
education and to su bve rt i t insidiously from w ithin,
rather than develop a comprehensive alternative,
Vidya Bharati fun ctions within the established for-
mat of syllabus and exa mina tion pattern of the dif-
ferent s tates. At middle an d h igh school levels, for
instance, i t even prescribes and uses the NCERT
social science textbooks which the
RSS
otherwise
maligns at every opportunity as false and pseudo-
secular . Th e reason is tha t these a re regarded in the
textbook market as the most comprehens ive and
successful books that are available and the Vidya
Bharati s tudents cannot afford to ignore them if
they are to compete wi th s tudents f rom dif ferent
kinds of schools. Howeve r, i t inserts i ts own unique
and indelible signature within the schools in three
distinct ways.
In all the schools in Delhi that we visited, there
is a s tr iking visual display of Hindu polit ical sym-
bols tha t blend m il i tancy wi th sacredness . T h e two
are then contained wi thin a f ramew ork that i s ex-
plicit ly polit ical and unmistakably oriented towards
the RSS. Rams pictures are ubiquitous and several
headmasters and headmis t resses spor ted VH P pos t -
ers and prints , calendars and small icons in their
of f ices . Hindu leaders who had fought agains t
Mu slims, l ike Rana Pra tap and Shivaji , were also
omnipresent as were por t rai ts of Hedgewar , the
founder of the RSS and Golwalkar , i t s ideologue.
T h e RSS map of undivided India, s traddled by a
divine Bharatmata was also much in evidence.9
Th ere are , fur thermore, annual inter -school events
with compet i t ions in knowledge of the epics and
oth er sacred te xts and in Sanskrit .10
At assembly t ime, the school head often make
speeches about current polit ical issues in which the
San gh combine have been act ive. Th e Ayodhya
temple issue was of ten brought up wi th such a
weal th of emot ion that , a headmis t ress told us
proudly, even five year-olds wou ld clenc h their f is ts
in anger and vengeance. Som etimes o vertly politi-
cal act ivis ts were brought in f rom the outs ide to
address s tuden t s on cur r en t themes . T h e head mas-
ter of the Har i Nag ar senior secondary school we nt
to Ayodhya as
a
kar sevak in October,
1990,
and
several s tudents of the school accompanied him.
The i r exp loi t s and the i r encoun te r s wi th Mulayam
Singh Yadavs law and order forces were elabo-
rately recounted and became part of the cherished
collective me mo ry of the sch ool.
There are certain carefully insti l led r i tual and
extra-curricular practices that reinforce proper
Samskaras among s tuden t s . No t on ly a r e a number
of Hindu ri tual occasions an d festivals meticulously
observed, but there is a lways a tem ple ei ther wi thin
the school premises or in close vicinity. They are a
par t of regular school l i fe for every s tudent . Stu-
dents a re expected to touch the i r e lders feet every
morning , to be dr i l led into habi ts of deference and
into proper ly Hindu forms of greet ing. Since chi l -
dren of the new generat ion f ind w es tern ways of
bi r thday celebrat ion, wi th cakes , candles and games
more fun, the school has an al ternat ive mode of
celebrating birthdays that is observed for each in-
dividual s tudent. In a public ceremony, the sacred
lamp is r i tual ly l i t , the s tudent i s gar landed and
blessed by teachers who recite Sanskrit holy chants,
and an audio casset te
of
patr iot ic and rel igious
son gs is played. The se cassettes a re for sale in every
school in the hope that they will travel beyond
school events and take their place within familial
12
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ones. Th e point of the a l ternat ive format i s not t o
counter the forces of conspicuous and competit ive
consumerism that bir thday celebrations often in-
volve, but to shield students from anything foreign
and non-Hindu. Even during school picnics, a
somewhat disenchanted ex-student of the Hari Na-
gar School told us, entertainment was l imited to
devotional music.12 Th er e is also a con sta nt en-
deavor to mix the domestic space of the student
with the insti tutional space, s ince the student must
carry school instruction into familial interaction.
This is , of course, furthered by very frequent par-
ent-teacher meetings and the cultivation of close
ties between stud en ts families and ind ividual teach-
ers who visit s tudents at their homes.13 The stu-
dents , who are recrui ted f rom neighborhood areas,
are entry points for the
RSS
ins t i tut ions and or -
ganization s into larg er localit ies .
Th e s t ronges t ins t rum ent for the making of de-
s irable s tuden ts are th e addi t ional courses that a re
compulsory in these schools. There is a s trong, al-
most mystical emphasis on physical cul ture , includ-
ing yogic practices that are considered to be in-
vested w ith extra-physical, moral properties. Not
only are they meant to tu rn s tudents into formida-
ble soldiers of the Hindu nation, they also impart
spiritual qualities. Yo ga, especially, is considered as
a uniquely Hindu way of developing physical and
spir itual s t ren gth in m utual harm ony. Th e Yoga
Room at the Hari Nagar school is also used for
meditation.
There are special courses on Sanskrit that fea-
ture modern Sa nskrit publications, prom oting R SS
values and teaching spoken S anskrit , brou ght o ut
by the Daivavani Prakash an at Kurukshetra . Inter -
estingly, s tudies of classical Sanskrit l i terature are
entirely neglected, modern pieces on suitable
themes are publicized.* T he re is also a special de-
partment of music that has a program graded ac-
cording to age. Again, train ing in classical music is
discounted in favor of mode rn dev otional music and
patr iot ic songs . T he cul tural ins t ruments of the
Sangh Combine unite with pedagogic tools to pro-
mote an exceptionally totali tarian and monochro-
matic ideological orien tation .
There are, f inally, courses on Indian civil iza-
t ion, again graded according to age, wi th text -
books for each year and compulsory examinations.
The textbooks are in brief question-answer format,
providing informat ion about geography, cul tural
features, historical eve nts and even science that , in a
seemingly objective, terse manner, not only distort
real events in c onte mp orary and historical l ife, but
also H induize each feature of our cou ntry. Heroes-
wh eth er historical or mythological-are uniformly
Hindus and overwhelmingly upper cas te . Rivers
and mountains have sacred associations. Cities are
given approximate ancient Hindu names , whether
the identif ication with modern places is accurate or
not. Each modern city is described with the nearest
Hindu pilgrimage site carefully mentioned. Scien-
tif ic information-whether on physics o r mathe mat-
ics-is alway s conclud ed wit h Hi nd u textu al ap-
proximat ion ment ioned as the real source of that
know ledge. History is full of brave upp er caste men
and women w ho have fough t Mus l ims . There is a
confident disregard of authenticated detail , and of
boundar ies between m yth and real i ty that pos tmod-
ernists would appreciate. Heroes include epic,
mytho logical, historical f igures and deities in equal
propor t ion wi thin the same category, wi thout any
men tion of the differences. Aga in, thro ugh a judi-
cious process of mixing and blurring, s truggles be-
tween divine f igures and demons, between colonial
rule and nat ional is ts , and between Hindus and
Musl ims are depicted in such a way that demons ,
colonialists an d M uslim s occupy th e sam e undiffer-
ent iated space wi thin a cont inuou s nar rat ive s t ruc-
ture. The textbook for Class IV also includes an
account of the pol ice f i r ing on the mob that had
tr ied to demolish the Babr i mosque in October-
November 199 with photograp hs of mar tyrs . A
whole lot of seemingly precise informat ion about
disjointed qu eries is actually systematically organ-
ized to project a communal myth as sacred narra-
t ive and nat ional is t h is tory, wi thou t any dis t inct ion
between the tw o. This o r ientat ion is conveyed
through a wide range of topics which methodically
produce an overarching Hindu supremacism dis -
guised as nat ional ism. Photographs of Sangh
mar tyrs are integral t o this or ientat ion and p ar t
of the syllabus for children.
The syl labus is genuinely ungendered and
courses are the same for boys and gi r ls . Gir ls are
given add itional train ing in dom estic science which,
however is common to most other schools . Gen der
ideology is inculcated th rou gh an insistence on th e
supremacy of parental decisions that must prevail
over the gir ls choice in educational, professional
and marital decisions.15 Home-grown gender no-
tions yet manifest themselves in essays writ ten by
s tudents for Vidya B harat i magazines . A s tud ent of
Class VIII wr ote ab out th e wife of the mythological
sage Atr i . Some gods wanted to tes t her chas t i ty
and demanded that she should s t r ip completely and
breast-feed them . She, wi th he r husbands consen t,
did jus t that , but wi th such a maternal aura that her
chas t i ty remained inviolate and the god s drank her
3
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milk with blameless filial emotions.16 Again, given
the uniformly h eroic mold of self-destructive and
necessarily violent ways of proving individual
wor th, e i ther agains t the Mu sl ims or the Br it ish , it
is not out of place that either a demonstration of
chasti ty should be demanded of the woman, nor
that i t would take the form of an act of great vio-
lence to her own disposition and sensibilities.
Again, the same value is upheld in textbooks on
Bharatiya Sanskrit? which ab ound w ith ex amp les
of Satis or wom en, whose self-destruction as proof
of their love for their dead husbands f i l led them
with supernatu ral pow ers that could then be used to
dest roy their enemies.1
Mainstream schools also use textbooks that are
equally marked by a ubiquitous accent on martyr-
dom in a nationalist and religious cause as the high-
est value in hum an life. And here, too, there is only
a short s tep from dying to kil l ing, and goodness is
often equated with the will ingness to kil l . History
becomes a way of asserting the greatness of ones
country, uncritical and unque stioning celebration of
i ts many great m en (and a few great w omen) , and a
masking of the problems of poverty, exploitation,
inequality and corruption in high places. Many of
the poems in the Hindi textbook used in a progres-
sive Delhi school, for instance, are also part of an
RSS songbook that is prescribed in the
shakhas.18
Heroes, in any case, in all schoolbooks, are almost
always upper caste and Hindu. I t is a s trength of
the RSS pedagogical system that i t does not really
have to force a departure from established main-
stream nationalist think ing. I t s imply closes
off
t he
multifarious possibilities and alternatives that are
also available within i t and brings to their logical
extre me some other possibil it ies that are laten t.
RSS schools in Delhi a re almo st invariably situ-
ated in a distinctive milieu. They are either in
neighborhoods that are filled with shopkeepers,
petty traders, small factory owners and business
people, or they are mostly occupied by middle
ranking service people. Their s tudents are drawn
from these areas and few come from distant places.
The monthly fees are about Rs .
100
for primary
schools and Rs. 150 for higher schools. The aim is
to have a fee structure that will occupy a middle
position between the expensive and exclusive public
decision to implement the Mandal Commission rec-
ommendations for affirmative action for backward
cas tes . A num ber of s tuden ts are f rom RSS families
and at tend thei r daily shakhas. A very l a rge number
of teachers and almost all the school heads are
similarly recruited from
RSS
famil ies . The others
are methodically trained at regu lar teach ers train-
ing camps that are meant to provide or ientat ion in
San gh values. Th ere is, then, an except ional ly high
deg ree of social cohesiveness and hom oge neity .
T h e broad purpose is to give the pet i te bour-
geoisie, even now the most f irm and primary social
base of the S ang h, a sense of purpose and confidence
in relat ion to the s tudents of more assured upper
middle class backgrounds who have access to and
ease in dealing w ith a m ore ex clusive Anglicized
educat ion. I t i s a lso to inte grate s tu dents f rom RSS
milieus more closely with their family training and
values . W it h school hours in day t ime and shakhas in
ear ly morning or evening, the whole day is disci -
plined by various agencies of the Sangh, s tretching
from family to school and
shakha
in an unbroken
and totali tarian circuit of influence and training.
T h e schools , wi th a c omm it ted lot of teachers and a
good record o r discipline, also act as pivotal po ints
of RSS influence within e ntire localit ies, wh ere they
funct ion in conjunct ion wi th other
RSS
facilities.
All these areas are usually also equipped with RSS
and VHP offices and therefore operate within a
broader orbi t of Sangh act ivi ty which they help to
deepen and ex tend . W e have r emarked e l s ewhere
that a di f ference between the Sangh Combine and
the classic fascist org aniz ation s is tha t t he accent is
on recrui tment at an infant i le rather than at a
youthful level.*O T h e school is , therefore, a n impor-
tant ingredient in the making of the r ight-wing
Hindu whose basic disposit ions need to be struc-
tured f rom th e t ime of thei r ear l ies t t ra ining. If the
first RSS shakha had been funded pr imar i ly to t rain
the upper cas te Hind u in leadership qual i t ies and to
prepare him for hegemonic funct ions wi thin a
deeply divided Hindu community at a t ime of social
turmoi l and communal t rouble, the schools serve
the same purpose, adding academic t raining to the
reper toi re . They have been planned to occupy
larger sl ices of the t ime and the minds of the chil-
d ren o f the Hindu Righ t w ho canno t be caugh t too
y o u n g .
schools and the cheaper model schools run by the
Government . 19 Notes
There are practically no non-Hindus and few
Th e research was done jo in t ly by Tan ika Sarkar and Tapan
low cas te s tudknts , fact the s tudents had been
very agi tated over the V .P. Singh Go vernme nts
Basu, and the mater ial has been analyzed and written by
Ta n ik a S a r k a r . Th i s i s p a r t
of
a l a r g e r o n g o in g wo r k o n RSS
i n D e ,h i ,
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Organzser N ov . 11
1978.
9 Tapan Basu , Pradip Da t ta , Sumit Sarkar , Tanika Sarkar and
Sambuddha Sen, Khaki Shorts and S a f ro n Flags (Delhi, 1983 .
4 Ibid. p. 3 2
5 Ibzd.
Organiser
op.
cit.
7 Vidya Bharati, Akhil Bharatiya Shik sha Sammela n, Alternative
Model
of
National Education Dec. 1990-March
1991.
8 Ibid.
9
Saraswati Shishu Mandirs at Sabzi Man dir and Jhandalwalan
and Saraswati Bal Man dirs at R amak rishnapu ram, Jhandal-
walan and Hari Nagar .
1 Sama rth Shishu Samiti, Sama rth Sandesh Delhi 1990.
11 Saraswati Shishu Ma ndir , Sabzi Mandir .
I* Interview with an ex-student, then a postgraduate student of
Delhi University, March 1991.
1s
IntervieM with teachers at schools mentioned above.
4 Alternative Model of National Education op. cit.
15
On th is , see Tanika Sarkar , The Woman as Communal
Subject: Rashtrasevika Samiti and Ramjan mabhum i Move-
ment, Economic and Political Weekly 3 1Augus t 199 I
I Sandip Arora, Saraswati Bal Ma ndir , Jhandalwalan, Samarth
Sandesh. Th e tex tbook a lso abounds w ith accounts of satis and
of the submissive chastity of ancient women, sadly missing in
the modern world.
1 Th e example of sati Kannegi is of ten invoked. See, for ex-
ample, textbook for Class IV, Sanskriti Gyan Parekha Series,
crp CZt
I s We owe th is in formation to Neera j Pant and Aditya Sarkar .
Y Interviews with the headmistresses of Saraswati Shishu
Mandirs of Sabzi Mandir and Jhandalwalan.
Po
Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags op. cit.
South Asia Bulletin/Compara tiue Studies of South Asia Africa an d the Middle East
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Khawateen Mahaz-e-Amal and Sindhiani Tehrik: Two Responses to Political Development in Pakistan
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The Legal Machin ery and Its Inability to Guarantee Democratic Rights by Ila Pathak
Nuclear Weapons, Resistance, and the Nation-State System by Lawrence S. Wittner
Hum an Rights in Sri Lanka: An Interview with Barnett Rubin
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