Meeting with Cecil Abrahams

Last Tuesday I met with Professor Cecil Abrahams of the Syracuse University School of Ed. for advice on the IFP. On one side of his family, his grandparents are from southern India, his father from South Africa, which is where he is from as well.

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I met Dr. Abrahams at his office in the Huntington building on campus. As we shook hands and settled into chairs, he folded his hands into his lap and told me he was excited for my journey. He is a gentle and soft spoken man. I briefly recapped my research goals and chipped into discussion about general things such as matters of food and poverty. He remembered eating ice cream there. Clutching his stomach while leaning back in the chair, he laughed, "I thought I was dying." He was unable to climb out of bed for two days, not even to look at the Taj Mahal outside of the window. Most dairy products and anything with unboiled water is out of the question.

Drawing on his personal observations, he told me India is a country of variety. "I used to think that India was one of the most peaceful countries in the world," he said, citing the influence that Mahatma Gandhi's Nonviolence Movement once had. He decided, however, that the country is actually quite violent. India is geographically vast with the second largest population in the world. When the subject of the Partition came up, I was reassured that there will be little difficulty finding people who are willing to talk . Many of the problems India faced sixty years ago are still alive. Krishna Kumar has written despairingly about the seeming permanence of hostility between India and Pakistan.

Based on his answers, I gained the impression that Dr. Abrahams generally thinks I am steering in the right direction. I asked him for advice on where to specifically target my research. We decided I should focus on public schools sponsored by the Government because they are the most representative of Indian students. They are also probably the most influenced by political discourse. There is an abundance of private schools to examine for comparison; Catholic schools, Gandhian schools, and NGO based schools among them. Dr. Abrahams shared his knowledge on all of them. I suspect I will be able to perform considerable research with a NGO sponsored school in Varanasi, one that an anthropologist at Hamilton has recommended from his own fieldwork.

We also addressed the paradox of the English language, one that Dr. Abrahams described as "quite comical". On one hand, Indians seek to dismantle British influence as much as possible in the quest to cultivate a national identity. On the other, the elite class (much of which has been educated in England) speaks English in an accent that is often more polished than the Brits' --Abrahams laughed, "a more bookish accent." Much like the French language in Medieval Europe, English is increasingly utilized in the elite and bureaucratic spheres of Indian society; replacing Persian since the second half of the 19th century. A student who already went on this program commented in their account that Hindi is now sometimes called "Hinglish".

The meeting gave me some strategies to consider as well as some specific areas to magnify for research. I continue to read and plan for the trip, which is little more than one month away.

Fieldwork

I have been delving deeper into the independent fieldwork project as the departure date grows closer. My primary focus has been to narrow the scope of research: to do "more with less." This will hopefully aid in avoiding lulls or becoming overwhelmed during the four months of fieldwork.

My IFP examines the relationship of nationalism and education. Within school systems, there are certain beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that are placed above others, intentionally or unintentionally, which reinforce that country's cultures and political ideologies. The classroom fosters a national character that children identify themselves with from a very young age. Imparting a sense of national pride to children is a major priority in politics. Moreover, national consciousness is often most pursued in younger nation states that do not have as much history to build on or pedagogic leeway.

My research is thus two-fold. The first is examining how Indians define themselves on a national level such as what qualities and aspects of their history they most identify with. I will also observe how they compare themselves with Britain and Pakistan. The other facet is determining how this nationalism is communicated through education: textbooks, teachers, emphasis on particular values, etc. This is a project concerned with national hegemony and how education fits into that hegemonic apparatus. India's rich historical landscape will be used to survey how culture, beliefs, and attitudes toward Pakistan has been taught in schools. Perhaps this may yield a better understanding of why some of India's most prevalent issues, such as communal violence, persist.