Study of Girls’ Madrasa Education in India

By Fatima Alam

Tags: India , Promoting Pluralism

This study is an attempt to look at the nuances of identity formation among Indian Muslim women; notions of identity and selfhood are a result of the intersections of caste, class, religion and gender, among other factors. This paper tries to understand the process of construction of identity of Muslim women through a study of girls’ madrasas. It also attempts to examine binaries such as modernity and tradition, the secular and the religious and, nationhood and religious minority, which debates on the subject usually focus on.

The paper begins with a historical introduction to the late 18th century and 19th century debates on religious and educational reforms, particularly with regard to women. It is interesting to note the interaction of the colonial state with the people it colonised, and its various political, economic, social and psychological consequences; one consequence of this interaction in India was the co-production of modernity and nationhood. The reform movements in Islam in late 19th and early 20th century India, which began as a response to colonialism, is an interesting example; the education of women was a controversial subject drawing a range of opinions. Women were seen as repositories and upholders of culture and civilization. As Robinson (2008) points out, these reform movements, which emerged in reaction to colonial modernity, also became a modernising force in their own right. The reform thought stressed personal responsibility before God, self-conscious self-examination and the need to act on earth and fashion a new Islamic society in order to achieve salvation. This idea that, in order to transform and refashion the community, it was important to first transform the self, also led to a growing discussion of family and domestic life in the public domain. It also appears that while earlier religious and educational reforms aimed at sharif women, the present day madrasas now invariably cater to the rural poor, the objective being their gentrification.

In the context of present day madrasas, the paper looks at how discourses of nationhood and liberal feminism, with their ideas of freedom and individual autonomy, inform the debate on Muslim women’s education in India. It borrows from Mahmood’s rethinking of the liberal understanding of freedom, agency, and subordination in her ethnography of the mosque movement in Egypt (2005). For instance, while the veil appears in secular discourse as a form of subordination, social protest, economic necessity or utilitarian strategy, thus treating women’s participation in religion merely as either subversion of norms or resistance to them, it is perceived very differently by the participants of the mosque movement. They see it as an act of disciplining the body and mind. To them, it is not an expression of passive religiosity but an active willing of the self. It is thus a transformatory politics that involves a reconstruction of the self. This paper also considers the negotiation and transformation of identities, and how they relate to the community, the nation and the ‘other’. Through a discussion of the curriculum, teachers and attending pupils, it also considers the role envisaged by madrasa authorities for women graduating from these institutions and examines the extent to which a madrasa education leads to the formation of wider social networks for women attending these institution.