Teachers’ narrative

This chapter connects teachers’ particular interpretations of the ‘difference’ in relation to Muslim girls with the tensions between equality and difference in the policies this chapter argues that teachers in Assam constitute Muslim, Hindu, Bengali and Assamese identities in ways that normalise middle-class Hindu Assamese identity and pathologise ‘difference’ from these norms, illustrated through four constructions of ‘difference’ from teacher’s narratives, namely: (a) appearance as pathological, (b) material deficit as cultural deficit (c) lacking in merit and (d) linguistic difference. In the process of constructing difference, it is argued that the teachers lay out a blueprint for Muslim girls (and Muslims generally) to become full members of the society or as ‘appropriately Indian’ (Radhakrishnan, 2011).