Can a Feminist Sociology of Education Re-imagine India’s Educational Future?

A Book Review of Re-Imagining Sociology in India – Feminist Perspectives

by Devika Bahadur

In ‘Re-Imagining Sociology in India: Feminist Perspectives’, editors Gita Chadha and M.T. Joseph marshal a wide range of feminist sociologists to offer not just critiques, but conceptual openings for how we might think about education in India, beyond statistics, school infrastructure or policy frameworks. While not written explicitly as a history of education text, the book offers fertile ground for exploring how gendered experience, caste location, institutional legacy and cultural values shape what education means in people’s lives.

Drawing richly on ethnography, everyday experience and conceptual provocations, the chapters complicate familiar binaries, rural vs urban, traditional vs modern, elite vs marginalised, to show how educational desire and anxiety are shaped by relational inequalities. By foregrounding feminist praxis and intersectional thinking, the text shifts our attention from formal education policy to what Chadha terms the “lived sociology” of education in India: where textbooks, tuition centres, hostels and homework are not neutral but charged with symbolic and social meaning.

Feminist sociologists have long insisted that the personal is political. This collection exemplifies that ethos by starting with everyday experience, how girls are taught to sit, speak and stay safe while boys roam free; how transgender students navigate bureaucratic hostility; how Dalit students are often marked by silence in elite classrooms.

At a time when educational discourse is dominated by learning outcomes, global rankings and tech-driven reforms, this book reclaims education as cultural performance. Chapter after chapter highlights how the act of learning, especially for marginalised groups, becomes performative: one must study, but also demonstrate worth, discipline and “fit”.

In this context, the text aligns with global feminist interventions that argue for a cultural sociology of education. Educational institutions are centres of social reproduction rather than fair playing fields, as demonstrated by Annette Lareau and Madeleine Arnot. School uniforms, English accents and hostel rules are all sites of social conflict and Re-Imagining Sociology provides a fully detailed, locally based study of these dynamics.

Throughout the book, time and space appear often as compelling motifs. Chapters examine how education permeates households, marketplaces, cybercafés, temples and streets in addition to traditional educational settings. In one chapter, we read about Adivasi girls who use their weekly market visits to consult college forms, using smartphones borrowed from brothers. Somewhere else, Joseph writes about aspirational time: the anticipation of “becoming someone” that education promises and the temporal drag when that future fails to materialise.

These tales are consistent with current research by academics such as Shalini Grover and Craig Jeffrey, who have demonstrated how education serves as both a tool and an aspiration, a means of determining one’s position in society. But as Chadha points out in her introduction, this imagination is historically contextual, gendered and caste-marked. For various people, “becoming a teacher” can signify different things. Because there are not many alternative jobs available, some people might educate to inspire others.

One of the most compelling aspects of this text is its commitment to resisting dominant epistemologies. Chapters challenge the presumed neutrality of English-language education, the idea of STEM as superior, the valorisation of academic success and the marginalisation of vocational and local knowledge systems. These critiques are not new, but they are made newly urgent by India’s rapidly expanding (and unequal) education market.

In doing so, the book contributes to a broader project of feminist knowledge-making in South Asia. It is in conversation with works like Doing Feminisms in the Academy and Gendering Caste through a Feminist Lens but brings that critical lens into the education sphere, an area where feminist insights are still too often sidelined in favour of developmentalist discourse.

Why should historians of education read this book?

First, it expands our methodological repertoire. By centring oral narratives, everyday practices and vernacular idioms, the book reminds us that archives are more than just colonial documents and policy files, they are also tucked into tuition notes, WhatsApp messages and hostel gossip.

Second, it urges a rethinking of periodisation. Instead of framing educational change around policy milestones (like the RTE Act or NEP 2020), we are invited to trace transformations through embodied experience; how liberalisation changed school choices, how migration shaped learning rhythms, how digital aspirations reconfigured rural study patterns.

Third, it helps resituate the field. The history of education in India is often narrated through elite figures; reformers, bureaucrats, visionaries. This book turns the lens downward and sideways, asking: what about those who quietly resisted exclusion, carved out learning spaces or translated syllabi into everyday survival strategies?

The book’s feminist perspective gives us tools to ask: whose aspirations count? Who gets to imagine a future through education? And how do we honour the labour; emotional, cultural, domestic, that underpins every school report and college degree?

For educators, policy researchers and historians alike, this text offers an invitation: to re-centre the voices and struggles that conventional education narratives often overlook. If education is both a pathway and a prison, how might we remake it as a commons, where care, critique and courage can co-exist?

So I ask you: What stories of education are missing in your own research and how might feminist sociology help you find them.

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Sources:

1. Arnot, M., 2002. Reproducing gender? Essays on educational theory and feminist politics. London: Routledge.
2. Chadha, G. and Joseph, M.T. (eds.), 2021. Re-imagining sociology in India: Feminist perspectives. London: Routledge.
3. Grover, S., 2020. Daughter-citizen: Feminist ethnography of education, marriage and mobility in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
4. Jeffrey, C., 2010. Timepass: Youth, class and the politics of waiting in India. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
5. Lareau, A., 2003. Unequal childhoods: Class, race and family life. Berkeley: University of California Press.