Postcolonial challenges to madrassa education reform in India: Bureaucracy, politics, resistance, and cooptation

This qualitative study examines ways in which the Indian State and Islamic madrassas interact with each other, and attempts to shed light on the various social, political and economic factors that determine the nature of this interaction. The study is located within the existing policy context generated by the government of India to "modernize" madrassas and to improve the socio-economic conditions of Muslims, who constitute the largest minority population in the country. This research argues that the present relationship between the government and madrassas is reminiscent of the colonial relationship between these two institutions. This hypothesis is based on facts about attitudes of resistance and assertions of religious identity developed in response to cultural, economic, and political oppression by the British government, which has been transposed onto Hindu majority rule since India's independence in 1947.;For this research, data about policy processes were collected at the national level in New Delhi, at the provincial level in Uttar Pradesh, and at the district level in Barabanki, Azamgarh, Bareilly, and Saharanpur. Across these four districts, 28 madrassas were sampled to capture a classification of madrassas based on their relationship with government funding as well as their sectarian ideology for religion and education. In the process, a total of 148 interviews, 25 focus groups, and 32 sessions of non-participatory observations were conducted.;Dichotomization of knowledge into religious and secular, and development vision into traditional and modern, was found to be at the core of most contemporary arguments for and against the State's vision and plans to modernize madrassas. Within the broad framework of postcolonial critique, this dissertation presents an educational application of cooptation theory (Selznick, 1949) that explains various ongoing transformations of and resistances within the madrassa system of education in India. By deconstructing the role of government into political and bureaucratic, this study distinguishes between authorized and unauthorized policies that govern local interactions between the State and madrassas.