Vismaya dowry murder, gender inclusivity and the road ahead

The Kerala government's move to make textbooks gender-inclusive is welcome, but a parallel process of educating teachers should also become mandatory

After Vismaya's brutal dowry murder, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan tweeted that his government will revise Kerala's school textbooks to make them more gender-inclusive. It is a welcome move. However, we need not wait for extreme violence against women to erupt before making such revisions in school textbooks.

Most textbook audits in India reveal the deep inequalities in the text and the accompanying visual images. Invariably, women are either absent or depicted as economically inferior, thereby perpetuating stereotypes about women's capacities as workers, and hence, socially inconsequential.

The vital question here is should textbooks function as mirrors of society? Or should they inculcate values, create role models, and build self-confidence? If it were the former, then it wouldn't be entirely misplaced to show women performing jobs that, while essential, are not valued or seen as particularly desirable (at least as jobs that boys or young men should aspire to). So while there is a tiny minority of women who've shattered the glass ceiling, most of them, if formally employed, perform lesser paid jobs and take longer to get promoted.

I would suggest that the purpose of textbooks should be both – as a tool to challenge prevailing inequalities even as they provide examples of those who overcame prevailing hierarchies and succeeded. In this way, children can grow up questioning widespread gender-blind or violent assumptions.

Here I wish to add a different dimension to the idea of gender inclusivity. Even if somewhat sensitive to societal gender differences, most textbooks assume a certain homogeneity amongst the groups under discussion. Invariably, this ends up replicating other kinds of hierarchies.

For instance, any discussion on a family will assume that it is upper-caste, Hindu, and middle class. It also assumes that the struggles for gender equality amongst different social groups and communities are identical. Such depictions perforce further marginalise, by erasure, minority communities.

What is perhaps worse is the inherent assumption that ideas of knowledge or success can only be measured against a single yardstick. Perforce, this eliminates all indigenous forms of skills and knowledge that different groups may possess, ranging from botanical and medicinal to culinary, retained mainly by women who transmitted such knowledge to the next generation.

Attentiveness to such detail would also entail that many supposedly 'unproductive' forms of labour, like housework and care-work, would be re-evaluated. Students must be encouraged to ask why domestic work, though monotonous, back-breaking and essential, is neither valued nor paid. The short-lived history of demand by the women's movements for paid household labour should be available to students to be inspired to pose similar questions themselves. Unless they are encouraged to value the work of their mothers, aunts and grandmothers, whether they be formally employed or homemakers, they will not learn to respect them as rights-bearing citizens. That aside, it is urgent that textbooks address questions about the historical construction of institutions such as marriage and family, intending to rethink these as sites of power. In other words, children will not recognise the routine violence they witness in their family unless exposed to the many ways families encode within them histories of violence and inequality.

Dowry cannot be understood as a life-destroying problem unless linked to marriage and family structures perpetuating it. Equally, children must know that neither heterosexuality nor heteronormativity is 'natural', even as they are taught that being gay or lesbian is not abnormal. Kerala's recent past has had many instances of lesbian suicides, primarily by schoolgirls or young women. So even as we recognise dowry-related deaths as murder, we must also see the other kinds of violence routinely perpetrated against young girls in schools that drive them to take such desperate measures as taking their own lives.

In this light, I wish to highlight a different problem – that of the gender sensitivity of teachers. Personally, I do not think that changing textbooks without conscientising teachers would work. How can one expect someone perpetrating, or being subject to, any form of gender violence to be in a position to teach a text that critiques such violence or exclusion?

Would teachers' training institutes undertake classes that address such issues? How can we open up contexts of rethinking for teachers to be more conscientised and bring to the subject forms of critique from their own life experience? Such issues cannot remain restricted to textbooks as parts of chapters but must be enlivened in a manner that genuinely pushes students to appreciate the value of such a lesson. In recent times, frightening cases have surfaced of violence, including sexual violence, by teachers against students. How does one ensure that the inclusivity in textbooks permeates into everyday forms of life?

As the exclusion of girls and women from textbooks is but a symptom of a broader culture of gender-based violence, it seems to me that it is essential that a parallel process of educating teachers should also become mandatory. Without that, a valuable exercise such as textbook revision may remain partial and incomplete.

(The writer is Professor and Director, Kerala Council for Historical Research Trivandrum, Kerala)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.