From the Archives: Two researchers argue that India’s large-scale tribal boarding schools revive features of 19th- and 20th-century boarding schools in North America and elsewhere that sought to strip Indigenous peoples of their cultural identities.
The Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India, is the world’s largest boarding school. KISS is a private school that some people within India’s government promote as the new model of tribal education. The student body totals 27,000 pupils from kindergarten to postgraduate, all from tribal communities. KISS’ website claims the school and its associated university are the world’s largest “anthropological laboratory.
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission—for all its shortcomings—concluded in 2015 that the residential schooling system in Canada amounted to “cultural genocide.” Might such a conclusion also apply to what is happening in India? India has the largest Indigenous population in the world. Officially termed Scheduled Tribes, a majority call themselves Adivasis . A recent government report does not mention KISS specifically but characterizes India’s tribal policy as inherently assimilationist. Based on our reporting and observations, it appears to us that for many Adivasi children, boarding school represents the first stage of an assimilation process.
India’s tribal residential schools offer education to an extraordinarily large number of children, including many from communities whose land is sought by extractive industries. Foundations set up by several mining companies have signed deals with KISS for joint education projects in recent years. We believe that these funding links play a role in undermining resistance to mining on Adivasi lands.
In tribal boarding schools throughout India, children are brought into a different world of values and knowledge. In this alien social construction of reality, which, in describing KISS, Finnan and her co-authors refer to as the “KISS culture,” most knowledge and values of tribal children’s families have little currency.KISS’ model, therefore, can come as a major shock to children who have grown up in distant tribal villages. Its industrial scale and hierarchy contradict their lifeworlds.
Beginning in the mid-19th century, Christian missionary schools created an educated tribal elite in India. From the 1920s, a reaction to missionary education led to a proliferation of residential “ashram” schools for tribal children. Many of these schools are widely understood as forming part of an extensive Hindutva education program aimed at Hinduizing Adivasi children.
Since 2000, critics, including Adivasis, have highlighted tribal children’s alienation from their families and traditions as a result of the residential tribal educational system in India. Moreover, journalists have reported sexual abuse, rapes, and deaths, including suicides, in tribal boarding schools and hostels; these often go underreported, not least in Odisha.
Former students have told us that when KISS is in session, they could not maintain regular contact with their families. As noted in the CWC report, children do not understand their rights. In such cases, how will they come forward if they do not have a clear grasp of the state or national protections in place to keep them safe? How will they know when their rights are being violated? Meanwhile, there have continued to be unsettling reports that children at KISS have run away.
Regarding religion and the question of Hinduization, many parents ask why the school has such a prominent temple to the Hindu god Hanuman on its premises. Those we interviewed reported that Hindu prayers take place daily and that festivals such as Ganesh and Saraswati Puja are celebrated, while diverse Adivasi and Christian rituals and festivals are marginalized or absent.
Many KISS pupils are labeled as “first-generation learners,” a routine description that discounts Adivasi learning systems, such as the celebrated ghotul, where elder children guide youngsters toward a vast range of skills and knowledge through work and play. Adivasi societies regard elders and ancestors as sources of wisdom and guidance.
Another revealing phrase, used by KISS, as well as in Finnan’s SAPIENS article, is “poorest of the poor.” Such “deficit discourse”—as some education scholars refer to this kind of language—was emphatically repudiated in B.D. Sharma’s landmark report as chairman of the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes Commission, which made the point that tribal people are not poor, but disinherited.
In the words of one ex-student, among several who spoke to us anonymously because of great fear about speaking out: Though delivered with charisma, Samanta’s talks, in our opinion, often indicate a clear cultural bias. The idea that certain tribal people “don’t understand anything” would be absurd to any anthropologist, and it reveals an intrinsic lack of respect for tribal peoples’ ways of life.
Many visitors to the Kalinga Institute of Social Sciences are taken to Bhubaneswar’s Odisha State Tribal Museum, at the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Research and Training Institute , a center for anthropology under the Odisha government According to those we spoke with who work at the institute, it maintains a close, informal connection with KISS.
This exoticization extends into the way that KISS has its students perform tribal dances for visiting dignitaries, in contravention of Adivasi values. A radical expression of Adivasi democracy is transformed into artificial folklore. In contrast to how KISS students are encouraged to express their traditional practices through rote performance, genuine Adivasi dance is under people’s own control.
Assimilation has only just begun to be analyzed in postcolonial states that promote “mainstreaming” Indigenous citizens through internal colonialism and a homogenizing cultural nationalism. So far, these practices have been critiqued more in Latin American countries, such as Chile, than in South Asia.
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