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ABSTRACT
Schoolchildren’s embodied subjectivity has often been understood as a bio-political tool to ‘clean up’ and modernize poor and marginalized communities. In many post-colonial contexts, school uniforms frequently appear as visual symbols of a child’s clean, schooled body and democratic access to education. Through ethnographic research with 10–14-year-old schoolchildren in urbanizing areas in northern Tamil Nadu, my paper asks how children inhabit and co-construct the school uniform code’s cleanliness discourse in their everyday lives. Studying plural school uniforms through a spatial lens, I explore schoolchildren’s embodied and relational work in negotiating with the equalizing school uniform codes within the schools and the circulation of multiple school uniforms in the community outside. Engaging with a shifting visual aesthetic of embodied cleanliness in a context of class segregated schooling. I argue that school uniforms are discursive sites where exclusions of class and gender, with undertones of caste and age, are simultaneously reinforced and negotiated.
Acknowledgements
I sincerely thank Sarada Balagopalan, Kate Cairns, Divya Kannan, R. Maithreyi, Hia Sen, the editor, and the reviewers for their careful reading and feedback on the manuscript. The input on initial drafts by Meredith Bak and Sneha Krishnan contributed much to this paper. I am immensely grateful to all the interlocutors whose voices have been shared and the institutional administrators who permitted and supported my research in their schools and organizations. All errors are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 Schools in Tamil Nadu, as in other parts of India, are differentiated and varied by the nature of administration, average income levels of parents, school fees, etc. Broadly, they include government-funded and administered schools run by municipal, state or central government; government-aided schools which receive funding support from the government but are run by a private body; or private schools catering to varied economic class groups (Mukhopadhyay and Sarangapani Citation2018).
2 Names and identifiable details are modified to pseudonymize the interlocutors and their institutions. Ethnographic conversations quoted were primarily in Tamil and English bilingual speech. Tamil to English translations are by the author.
3 Examples include Avvaiyar’s Aathichoodi, Nalvazhi, and Naaladiyar. The instructions on bathing, temperance in eating, and health, are spread across texts with varying religious ideologies.
4 Hygiene as a ‘modern’ school subject was enforced in British India based on the recommendations of the textbook examination committee report (Citation1878).
5 The indicators pertaining to access to hygiene and sanitation in most northern districts of Tamil Nadu in 2016–2017 were measured higher than national averages. Gender segregated toilet facility provision is about 99–100%, and over 60% of the schools, government-aided and private, have functional WASH facilities (NIEPA Citation2019).
6 Peri-urban and sub-urban are different administrative categories for municipalities within Tamil Nadu based on demographic density and nature of land use. I describe these as dynamic categories in this paper as they have been changing during the past few decades due to urbanization, migration, and civil contestations. Some municipalities from which the children travelled were reclassified during my fieldwork.
7 Students’ and teachers’ caste identities within these schools were usually hinted, albeit unreliably, through the kind of language one spoke or in discussions of food or ritual codes. Apart from the school’s policies, the students and teachers implemented different caste identity modification/neutralizing strategies in their everyday language and food practices. Caste was an undertone legible across schools. For instance, owing to the caste-class nexus, more expensive and urban schools often had fewer students from the Scheduled Castes as observed in the self-reported data from schools (NIC Citation2021).
8 WASH stands for Water Hygiene and Sanitation sector as indicated in the Sustainable Development Goals as declared by the United Nations in 2015. Handwashing days were enacted relating to WASH within the Swacch-Vidhyala (Clean-Schools) campaign, a government and UNICEF collaboration project.
9 For a critique of WASH’s focus on individual behavior-oriented intervention in the face of collective infrastructural constraints, see McCarthy (Citation2015) and Desai, McFarlane, and Graham (Citation2015).
10 Personal Hygiene or ‘than suttham’ is the term used within the cleanliness curriculum to refer to bodily ablutions.
11 A salwar is a pleated pair of trousers held on the waist by strings or naadaa. It is worn by many South Asian women as a part of traditional ‘salwar-khameez’. It has become a commonplace feminine attire in Tamil Nadu only in the past few decades. Earlier, stitched long skirts, or variations of unstitched drapes (saris/mundus/kailis) were more common among adolescent girls here.
12 This has increasingly been changing within elite and upper-caste settings in cosmopolitan and urban contexts, where some uniforms also adopt unisex designs or knee-length skirts and blouses for middle school girls.
13 The daytime temperature in the non-hilly northern districts of Tamil Nadu ranges between 21°C and 40°C and the humidity, 50–90%.
14 Feminist geographers argue that embodied social experience of sweat often maps to ideas of masculinity (Waitt and Stanes Citation2014).
15 See also Lewis (Citation2011).
16 Apart from the government school colours, the specific set of colours carries the schools’ identity where I worked. Mentioning the colours can make them recognizable to local readers.
17 Translated from Tamil by the author (Twitter @KASengottaiyan 12.43 PM IST 7 April 2018. https://twitter.com/KASengottaiyan/status/982516656478961664).
18 During the span of my fieldwork, the Tamil Nadu Director of State Education issued a circular to District officers disallowing students wearing coloured threads as caste-markers. The education minister responded to this circular by revoking this, stating that it was issued without his knowledge. He later clarified that his move was due to the absence of any complaints about these coloured threads. The exchange was followed by a heated debate in the media regarding the ‘cleansing’ caste politics in the state’s public schools, informed by the idea that modern schools ought to be free of any markers of caste apart from those towards affirmative action.
19 Though students could not be expelled legally, the informal student circles in the schools were influenced by these rules implemented and circulated.
20 The uniform clothes and footwear provided to the government students are interpreted within the realm of what Kalyan Sanyal (Citation2008) discusses as ‘welfare governmentality’.