Experiencing Education at the Margins of the City: An Ethnographic Exploration of a Basti in Delhi

Through the ethnographic study of urban margins, this article explores the questions of statecraft that involve evoking aesthetic governmentality to ascribe illegalities onto the informalities of the margins. With an aim to understand the lived experiences of children, the article examines the role that education plays in maintaining the unequal urban order, and how it exists as a potent site for exploring the order-making function of the state. This calls for a perspectival shift that does not look at the margins but looks from there, obviating the conventional connotations of being a site of statelessness, chaos and disorder. Located in the anthropology of margins, the present article demonstrates that margins are the site that makes state functioning visible and not its failure. The article draws from our long-term engagement with a basti and several state-run schools in South Delhi, where children from the basti are enrolled. The article draws from scholarship in urban sociology to examine the site of education and finds how categories of spatial illegality and aesthetic rationality are activated to hone the earlier rational, calculative rationality of the state for its order-making purpose.