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Talk:Sarada Balagopalan

From Hindupedia, the Hindu Encyclopedia

By Sachi Anjunkar


Sarada Balagopalan is an Associate Professor of Childhood Studies in Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey[1] as of April 2024. According to his profile, his research engages marginal children’s experiences with compulsory schooling, labor, gendered school-spaces, children’s rights discourses and pedagogies of ‘citizenship’.

He has published no books, papers, or research pertaining to Hindus, the Indus Civilization, or caste.

On November 5, 2017, he signed the letter submitted by the South Asia Faculty Group (SAFG) to the California State Board of Education[2] where he:

  • Misrepresented scholarship stating "Mythological terms substitute for historical ones for example the 'Indus Valley Civilization' (a fact-based geographic term) appears to be replaced with a religiously-motivated and ideologically charged term 'Indus-Saraswati/Sarasvati Civilization'. The Saraswati is a mythical river"[3][4][5]
  • Implied that Christians and Muslims existed in Ancient India, prior to the founding of these religions ​

In 2016, he signed a letter endorsing a letter submitted by the South Asia Faculty Group[6][7] where it addressed the State Board of Education, California Department of Education, dated May 17, 2016. In this letter they requested removing the word India from textbooks. In addition, they falsely[8] stated:

  1. "There is no established connection between Hinduism and the Indus Civilization."
  2. "It is inappropriate to remove mention of the connection of caste to Hinduism."


Publications related to India[edit]

  1. Balagopalan, Sarada. Inhabiting 'Childhood': Children, Labour and Schooling in Postcolonial India. Springer, 2014.
  2. Balagopalan, Sarada. Constructing Indigenous Childhoods: Colonialism, Vocational Education and the Working Child. Childhood, vol. 9, no. 1, 2002, pp. 19-34.
  3. Balagopalan, Sarada, and Ramya Subrahmanian. Dalit and Adivasi in Schools: Some Preliminary Research Themes and Findings. IDS Bulletin, vol. 34, no. 1, 2003, pp. 43-54.
  4. Balagopalan, Sarada. Introduction: Children’s Lives and the Indian Context. Childhood, vol. 18, no. 3, 2011, pp. 291-297.
  5. Balagopalan, Sarada. Childhood, Culture, History: Redeploying 'Multiple Childhoods'. Reimagining Childhood Studies, 2018, pp. 23-39.
  6. Hanson, Kristen, et al. Global/Local’ Research on Children and Childhood in a ‘Global Society'. Childhood, vol. 25, no. 3, 2018, pp. 272-296.
  7. Balagopalan, Sarada. Memories of Tomorrow: Children, Labor, and the Panacea of Formal Schooling. The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 1, no. 2, 2008, pp. 267-285.
  8. Balagopalan, Sarada. ‘Neither Suited for the Home nor for the Fields’. IDS Bulletin, vol. 35, no. 1, 2004.
  9. Balagopalan, Sarada. Why Historicize Rights-Subjectivities? Children’s Rights, Compulsory Schooling, and the Deregulation of Child Labor in India. Childhood, vol. 26, no. 3, 2019, pp. 304-320.
  10. Balagopalan, Sarada. Rationalizing Seclusion: A Preliminary Analysis of a Residential Schooling Scheme for Poor Girls in India. Feminist Theory, vol. 11, no. 3, 2010, pp. 295-308.
  11. Balagopalan, Sarada. An Ideal School and the Schooled Ideal: Education at the Margins. Educational Regimes in Contemporary India, 2005, pp. 83-98.
  12. Balagopalan, Sarada. 'Afterschool and During Vacations’: On Labor and Schooling in the Postcolony. Children's Geographies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2019, pp. 231-245.
  13. Balagopalan, Sarada. Understanding Educational Innovation in India: The Case of Eklavya Interviews with Staff and Teachers. Contemporary Education Dialogue, vol. 1, no. 1, 2003, pp. 97-121.
  14. Balagopalan, Sarada. Teaching ‘Global Childhoods’: From a Cultural Mapping of ‘Them’ to a Diagnostic Reading of ‘Us/US’. Global Childhoods beyond the North-South Divide, 2019, pp. 13-34.
  15. Balagopalan, Sarada. Precarity and the Question of Children’s Relationalities. Childhood, vol. 28, no. 3, 2021, pp. 327-332.
  16. Balagopalan, Sarada. 'Unity in Diversity’: Social Cohesion and the Pedagogical Project of the Indian State. Thinking Diversity, Building Cohesion: A Transnational Dialogue, 2009, pp. 133-150.
  17. Balagopalan, Sarada. Free and Compulsory Education Bill, 2004. Economic and Political Weekly, 2004, pp. 3587-3591.
  18. Balagopalan, Sarada. Does ‘Gender’ Exhaust a Feminist Engagement with Elementary Education? Contemporary Education Dialogue, vol. 9, no. 2, 2012, pp. 319-325.
  19. Subrahmanian, Ramya, et al. Education Inclusion and Exclusion: Indian and South African Perspectives. IDS Bulletin, 2003.
  20. Balagopalan, Sarada. The Politics of Deferral: Denaturalizing the 'Economic Value' of Children's Labor in India. Current Sociology, 2021.
  21. Balagopalan, Sarada. On Freire’s Critical Optimism. Contemporary Education Dialogue, vol. 8, no. 2, 2011, pp. 203-228.
  22. Balagopalan, Sarada. 'These Children are Slow': Some Experiences of Inclusion, Formal Schooling, and the Adivasi Child. Perspectives in Education, vol. 21, no. 3, 2003, pp. 25-37.
  23. Balagopalan, Sarada. Understanding 'Inclusion' in Indian Schools. Reflections on School Integration, 2004, pp. 125-146.
  24. Balagopalan, Sarada, et al. Diverse Unfreedoms: The Afterlives and Transformations of Post-Transatlantic Bondages. Routledge, 2019.
  25. Balagopalan, Sarada, and Claire Bergère. Postcolonial Childhoods. Oxford University Press, 2017.
  26. Balagopalan, Sarada. The Politics of Deferral: Denaturalizing the 'Economic Value' of Children's Labor in India. Contemporary Sociology, 2021.
  27. Balagopalan, Sarada. Postcolonial Childhoods. SAGE Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood Studies, 2020.
  28. Balagopalan, Sarada. Colonial Modernity and the Child Figure: Reconfiguring the Multiplicity in Multiple Childhoods. Childhoods in India: Traditions, Trends, and Transformations, 2018, pp. 23-43.
  29. Balagopalan, Sarada. Early Childhood Education: Post-Colonial Perspectives from India. Sociological Bulletin, vol. 51, no. 2, 2002, pp. 304-306.

References[edit]

  1. ↑ Sarada Balagopalan University Profile accessed 9 April, 2024
  2. ↑ 2017 South Asia Faculty Group (SAFG) Letter to the California State Board of Education
  3. ↑ Chakrabarti, Dilip, and Sukhdev Saini. The Problem of the Sarasvati River and Notes on the Archaeological Geography of Haryana and Indian Punjab. Aryan Books International, 2009.
  4. ↑ Danino, Michel. The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati. Penguin Books, 2010.
  5. ↑ McIntosh, Jane R. A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization. Westview Press, 2002, p. 24. ​where she stated "Suddenly it became apparent that the “Indus” Civilization was a misnomer—although the Indus had played a major role in the development of the civilization, the “lost Saraswati” River, judging by the density of settlement along its banks, had contributed an equal or greater part to its prosperity. Many people today refer to this early state as the “Indus-Saraswati Civilization” and continuing references to the “Indus Civilization” should be an abbreviation in which the “Saraswati” is implied. There are some fifty sites known along the Indus whereas the Saraswati has almost 1,000. This is misleading figure because erosion and alluviation has between them destroyed or deeply buried the greater part of settlements in the Indus Valley itself, but there can be no doubt that the Saraswati system did yield a high proportion of the Indus people’s agricultural produce"
  6. ↑ 5-17 Prof. S. Shankar et al support letter
  7. ↑ 5-17 Kamala Visweswaran South Asian Faculty Group
  8. ↑ Gupta, S. P. 'The Dawn of Civilization.' In History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization: Volume I: Part 1, edited by G. C. Pandey and D. P. Chattopadhyaya. New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 1999.
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