Adivasi Neighbourhood and Its School: A Critical Ethnography of Aspirations and Contours of Marginalisation in Kerala

This article looks into the school–neighbourhood interactions in one of the Adivasi-dominant villages in Kerala. It explores how the educational aspirations of Adivasi community are placed in the local development discourse. A brief review of the neighbourhood–school relationship, especially in the context of existing social inequality, is explored in the introduction. Then the article is divided into two parts. The first part of the essay focuses on the historical experience of marginalisation in the regional mainstream and the local imaginations of Adivasi development. The second part focuses on how the school has historically evolved within this regional mainstream and how it responds to the educational aspirations of Adivasi. This essay tries to understand how the experience of marginality is created and sustained in Adivasi neighbourhoods that are sandwiched in the regional mainstream in Kerala. How do Adivasi communities articulate their educational aspirations? And how does the school in the neighbourhood respond to these aspirations over a period of time? The empirical observations of the article is gathered through a yearlong fieldwork conducted in 2014 and a revisit conducted in 2019.