Memories of Tomorrow: On Children, Labour and Postcolonial ‘Development’

Abstract

Colonial schooling efforts had actively augmented existing caste hierarchies by reifying the distinction between ‘mental’ and ‘manual’ work. Today, while traditional caste hierarchies may have become less apparent, formal schooling continues to keep alive the colonial association of schooling with the preparing of a person singularly for ‘mental’ work (Jeffrey et al., 2005; Kumar et al., 2007). Within such an opposition ’mental’ work becomes the idealized form of emancipation from ‘manual’ work and schooling becomes a form of instrumentality/immersion which enables this emancipatory transition. In this polarized view of the world, it is not surprising that children engaged in manual labour get viewed, often simultaneously, as terribly exploited as well as easily redeemable through formal schooling. Frequently, however, what is lost in translation and miscalculated within its assumed ease is the everyday density of children’s lives in ‘manual’ work. To attend to this density, we would need to suspend our faith in schooling’s potential rearrangement of lives and focus instead on these children’s practices of dwelling, a dwelling in which the ordinary certainty of labour does not make them immune to desiring, being challenged by and imagining lives within normative horizons of schooling, and the break from manual work that it signals.