My positionality

All through fieldwork, there were many moments when I acutely felt the class difference between students and myself. In school, this was somewhat balanced by contesting discourses, for example, respect for adults, and my general alignment with teachers who resisted the dominant discourse around social class. However, meeting mothers in a one-to-one setting offered no such safeguards. One example is when mothers shared their plans for their children’s foreign studies. As I examine in Chapter 7, some families were planning not merely to finance the cost of their child’s foreign university education, but parents were also preparing to move to that country so that their child would have continued parental care. In these encounters, it was not just the material differences which struck me; what also impressed upon me was the immense differences in life chances such resources effectuated.

I often felt vulnerable, acutely perceiving class differences and on account of being a woman. When I started interviewing parents, I was googled 16 times within a month, most of the searches from the Coimbatore region. In my face-to-face encounters, I was continually sized up – students, teachers, generally though not exclusively women wanted to know my age, my marital status, about why I wore no insignia as was expected of married women and ‘any kuttis’27_{? I did not feel altogether powerless}

though and in some respects even enjoyed a privileged position – for instance, when it came to caste. Participants gauged my caste early on, both from my association with Subbu sir and when I spoke Tamil with a Brahmanical inflection. Studying in UK also secured for me considerable cultural capital, boosting my class positioning. Participants also saw me as someone from Delhi, a city most of them had not visited. On my part, my schooling experiences in Delhi in the 1980s and 90s were reference points for understanding KI schooling practices during fieldwork and analyses.

Even as I grew to be an insider, every once in a while, a sense of unease resurfaced. There were times when I wanted to ‘jump into’ the conversation, to intervene and even teach students. I always refrained, instead finding a release in my personal diary. And while for the most part, I felt so much to be an insider that I became amnesic about how exclusive this school was, there were moments when the sense of overfamiliarity with the school slipped off. One such occasion was in March 2016, when I was set to attend an orientation program for prospective parents and students. The teachers conducting 27 _{Kuttis - Children in Tamil.}

this program did not know beforehand that I had procured the necessary permissions. And since they were from the primary classes, they did not recognise me either. When I tried to walk into the seminar room to attend the programme, they would not let me. Their cold looks and curt behaviour clearly conveyed that I didn’t have the right. While this matter soon got resolved with the timely intervention of a senior IBDP faculty member, I caught a brief glimpse of the exclusions that lay at the boundaries of this community school. I was momentarily overwhelmed with a sense of unease and an intense awareness that perhaps, outside of the special circumstance of my research and the access secured by Subbu Sir, I might not have gained entry to this milieu.

My relationship with the school whose practices pivoted on multiple points of inclusion and exclusion remained fluid and shifting. While the school authorities had obstructed my meeting with parents and hesitated to let me attend an ‘open’ orientation, they also invited me to join an educational excursion to Kerala. True, they were running short of female chaperones, but even so this points to the ambiguities in their attitude towards me. During these four days, I began to feel like any other teacher, was overcome with a sense of responsibility for the students, even outsiders took to me to be one of KI’s staff. My transition to an insider was now ‘complete’ but would be shaken by experiences such as the orientation programme described above, which occurred a month later.

My research journey was also marked by theoretical shifts before, during and after fieldwork. Given my previous educational trajectory, I began the research from a psychological perspective, seeking to study the ‘social construction of intelligence’ in a private school catering to the Indian middle classes (Miguel, Valentim and Carugati, 2010). As I started reading theoretical writings and empirical studies on the educational practices of the middle classes, the notion of any individualised intelligence signifying inner characteristics became increasingly suspect (Bourdieu, 1984, 1986a, 1987, 1998, Nambissan, 2010; Reay, 2005, 2010). Bourdieu’s writings helped me to recognise social class as relational and as manifested in everyday practices. While conducting fieldwork, my predominant concern was on the question of social class. Therefore, even as I gathered data other issues like teachers’ analysis of the IB curriculum and the

knowledge content of pedagogic transactions, my analytical lens did not include these. Further, while doing fieldwork, my initial conceptualisation of social class was

became post-structural. During this period, I participated in reading groups which focussed on the works of Butler (1990,1992,1997) and Skeggs (2004a), among other feminist post-structuralist writers. This experience played an important role in shaping my theoretical positioning. As I discuss next, a post-structural lens allowed me to take up the intersections of class, caste and gender in my analysis.