Confronting a pedagogy of assimilation: the evolution of large-scale schools for tribal children in India

Journal article

The policy of assimilating, ‘mainstreaming' or ‘de-tribalizing' indigenous communities by placing their children in boarding schools has been increasingly discredited and abandoned, most publicly throughout North America and Australia since the 1980s and 1990s. In India, this history and its dangers are little known, with relatively little awareness of how they are being replicated among many of India's tribal communities. Education-induced assimilationism has evolved more slowly in India, but has now reached a larger scale than in any other country, with many similar manifestations to the ‘stolen generations' model that has created outrage in Australia, Canada, the USA and elsewhere. This article traces the evolution and dangers of this history and the present situation in India.

Authors: Gupta, M; Padel, F

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Anthropological Society of Oxford
• Journal: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford Online
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 22-47
• Publication date: 2018-01-01
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-azzjke6ag
• ISSN: 2040-1876
• Language: English
• Keywords: JASO