ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a subject that Rabindranath Tagore was particularly passionated on education and schooling during the early years of childhood. It shows the practices related to schooling within ongoing processes of socio-economic change and their effects on the domestic sphere. Children and childhood is analysed as a part of schooling in relation to regional modernities and the emerging cultures of globalization among the Asian middle classes, contemporary parenting and in particular the role of mothers, who are heavily implicated in educational practices. The chapter focuses on how mother's involvement with pre-school education can be interpreted within the framework and how early learning produces distinct discourses on domestic relationships, motherhood and modernity, discourses within which a view of mothers as educators associated with a new workforce appropriated. Regarding the importance of food, Maila Stivens suggests that with reference to the domestication of middle-class mothers within a nationalist discourse, the development of a 'cuisine' is of utmost importance.
