The cultural production of an ‘employable person’: A case of madrasa students in West Bengal, India

Abstract

Madrasas are increasingly being reformed across South Asia with the intended aim of ‘social change’ through mainstreaming its marginalized Muslim population. While the transformative change, as promised in policy and popular discourse, remains distant, a vernacular cultural variant of this ‘change’ is intimately felt in the changing subjectivities of the students. As future holders of degrees now recognized by the government, the students imagine themselves as ‘employable persons’. In so doing, they challenge their long drawn marginal position in the economy and society as ‘unemployable persons’. By separating ‘being employable’ from being employed, the students are social agents innovatively responding to the broader socio-cultural and political economy, to achieve an elevated status for themselves, despite their likely unemployment and continued socio-economic marginality. While the madrasa students fail in accessing social mobility, they reproduce their condition in an agentive manner – through contestation and ‘partial penetration’.

Keywords:

• Education reforms
• Muslim youth
• madrasas
• social change
• employment

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my MPhil supervisor Prof. Masooda Bano for her immense support and guidance throughout the research, and Joyeeta Dey for her incredible research assistance. Special thanks should also go to the two peer reviewers and the editors of Contemporary South Asia for their very useful suggestions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Garima Jaju is a PhD researcher at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford.

Notes

1 100 INR = 1 GBP in May 2014

2 1 Lakh = 1,00,000

3 The fieldwork and data collection was conducted in accordance with the ethical guidelines as laid out by the Central University Research Ethics Committee (CUREC), University of Oxford.

4 Under the UGC Act, the degree conferred in Arabic was immediately recognized. However, UGC, while recognizing ‘Comparative Religion’ did not separately include Theology in its list of recognized subjects. Benefits accruing from recognition could not, therefore, be fully extended to students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate studies in Theology. This was a cause of much resentment and concern among the students. In a notice of March 2014 and the Government of India Gazette July 2014, the UGC announced granting recognition to graduate level degrees in Theology as well.

5 1 Crore = 1,00,00,000