ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the assumptions, and power, that underpin the English curriculum that Manju Waghekar, a Dalit, slum-dwelling student of University of Bombay, whose home is in constant threat of demolition by the Mumbai municipality, is forced to 'read', a curriculum that serves as a gatekeeper to her future. It focuses on the caste and class implications of English studies in contemporary India by juxtaposing the experience of a contemporary low-caste woman undergraduate, Manju, in Mumbai with the experience of studying in a government undergraduate college in a mofussil town in the 1960s' India. There are hardly any narratives of how students like Manju, from 'the weaker sections of society', cope with English education in general and English literary education in particular. Alok Mukherjee has described in depth the ideology of English literature education in India as the development of a sensibility that responded to the beauty of art.
