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‘My school is a big school’: imagined communities, inclusion, and ideology in Indian textbooks

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the portrayals of schools in various textbooks used by the focal children at an anathashram (orphanage) in suburban New Delhi, India. It draws on data collected in the course of ethnographic inquiry on the language and literacy socialization of focal boys over the past decade. The texts selected for this study related to the topic of ‘school’ and were drawn from textbooks assigned to the focal children at their village school. I conduct a close analysis of the descriptions of schools that circulate in the children’s textbooks, focusing specifically on the imagined community of readers of these texts. The analysis highlights the marked differences between the schools depicted in the books and the actual schooling worlds of the children. Furthermore, I show how the use of person deixis in these texts implicates socioeconomically marginalized readers of these textbooks in profoundly problematic ways. Beyond pushing us to question the politics of representation within textbooks, this investigation contributes to the inter-disciplinary scholarship challenging the penetration of dominant ideologies through the school curriculum.