Lausanne World Pulse – Dalit Education Centers: Delivering Emancipation and Building Leaders
By Joseph D’Souza
The dichotomy facing India today is incredible. The rich are getting richer and the poor are sinking deeper and deeper into an unbreakable cycle of poverty. The educated have access to the world, while the opportunities for the uneducated become less and less. The upper castes shine, while the lower caste and Dalits remain in their dull, lifeless existence.
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Take, for example, the stories of Sushma and Lakshmi, neighbors living in the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Both women are 21-years-old. Sushma comes from a high-caste family background. Her father studied abroad and served in the Indian military as a dentist making a significant wage. Sushma’s mother enjoyed the benefits of being a homemaker. She kept their large home clean with the help of lower caste servants, and her children were well-educated and immaculately dressed. Sushma is now privileged to attend one of the top universities in the nation and is studying to be a doctor. She knows that someday her parents will find her a handsome and successful upper caste man to marry. He will love her and help her raise beautiful children who will be afforded all the luxuries Sushma enjoyed as a child and as a young adult. Sushma’s future is certainly bright.
Lakshmi, however, is from a Dalit background. She lives in a small makeshift hut in the vacant lot immediately adjacent to Sushma’s mansion. Lakshmi’s parents were too poor to send her to school and thus, Lakshmi is uneducated and illiterate. Already married to a man who is an unemployed alcoholic and beats her, Lakshmi sits from sun-up until sundown on the side of the busy highway. There she crafts cricket bats out of wood to sell to passing motorists. Her four children do not go to school. Instead, they play alongside the road in the oncoming traffic. Everyday Lakshmi watches as Sushma and her younger siblings leave their upper caste home in their imported vehicle and go to university, to coffee houses, to bookstores, to nightclubs. Lakshmi, however, knows nothing of Sushma’s world. Lakshmi knows nothing of global news events. She will never experience the latest in fashion or computing. Lakshmi’s children will inevitably fill their parents’ roles in the lowest rung of society and will likely remain in the seemingly unbreakable cycle of poverty.
India is not shining for Lakshmi. Lakshmi and her children need an education. They need the English language and they need to be empowered.
Despite how obvious it is that English is the way forward for India’s Dalits, upper caste political leaders have thrashed and maligned the English language and English-based education, charging it to be the language of the colonial rulers even as all their own children have been educated in English schools and institutions. And this denial of empowering Dalits through education guarantees the future of upper caste power in India. Take, for example, the Woodstock School in Mussoorie, North India, which has been one of the world’s premier boarding schools for decades. It has top of the line academic and extracurricular facilities. Its graduates attend prestigious schools abroad. It draws its student body from both an international and domestic pool of potential candidates. Naturally, however, it is filled with wealthy upper caste children. Woodstock School is not a possibility for the Dalits. What was once a Christian institution for children of missionary children is now filled with children of the powerful upper caste elite in India.
In addition to international boarding schools, English-based international standard primary schools are popping up across the nation and are filled with the upper echelon of Indian society.
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