ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a study of contemporary and historical educational landscapes and the accumulative disadvantages school students from marginalised communities experience in the state of Bihar. It provides a new framework to understand the problems of poor learning that the majority of first-generation learners face by examining colonial surveys and census data on Bihar’s literacy rates in tandem with India’s post-independence educational policies. The study’s findings document how long, and to what extent, education in Bihar has continued to lag behind and how this development continues to cast a shadow over the school careers of a large percentage of elementary and secondary school pupils in one of the most populous states of India.
