Educating India: Reform, Resistance and Social Change
Education in India has been one of the crucial tenets of social mobility and emancipation. Idea(s) of India may have disagreed on all and every aspect of the nature and project of good life, but education has remained central to all imagination of a Indian future. Therefore debates on Indian education have not remained limited to institutional and policy. From nineteenth-century projects of social reform to contemporary debates around universities, curricula, pedagogy and knowledge, education has remained an important site where social hierarchies are reproduced, challenged and reimagined.
The history of modern India can, in many ways, be read through competing projects of educating society. Social reformers and political movements have imagined education as a means of emancipation, self-respect, social mobility and political awakening. At the same time, educational institutions have been shaped by structures of exclusion and inequality. Questions of who gets to learn, what counts as knowledge, whose histories are taught, and who has the authority to produce knowledge have therefore remained central to the making of Indian society.
The relationship between education and social movements is particularly significant. Anti-caste movements, women’s movements, Adivasi struggles, student movements, labour movements and other emancipatory projects have treated education both as an object of struggle and as a resource for political transformation. Education has been invoked variously as a pathway to dignity, equality, liberation, while also becoming a terrain of contestation over curriculum, language, institutional access, historical memory and knowledge.
Educating India: Reform, Resistance and Social Change brings together books that illuminate these diverse histories and contemporary debates. The issue seeks to explore how recent and significant works help us understand education not simply as an institution, but as a political and social practice. It invites critical engagements with books across political theory, history, sociology, education studies, gender studies, Dalit studies, intellectual history and related fields.
Possible Sub-Themes
- Education and Social Reform
- Anti-Caste Movements and Education
- Gender and Education: women’s education, feminist movements and gendered access to knowledge.
- Education and Marginalised Communities
- Universities and Student Movements.
- Curriculum, Canon and Knowledge.
- Language, Education and Identity.
- Education, Citizenship and Nation-Building.
- Alternative Pedagogies and Counter-Education.
- Neoliberalism and the Contemporary University.
TheDaak Review welcomes critical reviews, comparative review essays and conversations between books. TheDaak Review approaches the book review not merely as an evaluative exercise, but as a space for dialogue, critical reflection and the rethinking.
Please make your submissions under the following categories on our journal page using the link here. The deadline for submission is 10 October 2026..
- Book reviews (not more than 1200 words)
- Review essays (not more than 2000 words)
- Commentary/Perspective/Opinion (not more than 1500 words)
Please note that if you are looking to discuss possible ideas under the current theme or want to discuss your book with our editorial team, you can write to us at editor@thedaak.in
Editorial Team
TheDaak Review
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