Within cities across the world, communal violence has often led to the formation of neighbourhoods segregated on religious lines. Colonies identified by the religion of its residents are now found in Indian metropolises such as Ahmedabad, Mumbai and New Delhi, occupied mainly by the Muslims who were pushed involuntarily to these spaces after decades of sociopolitical marginalisation and targeted communal violence. Due to their identification with the religious identity of its residents, these colonies faced systematic state neglect and lack of infrastructural development pushing them further towards spatial stigmatisation and social segregation (Gayer and Jaffrelot 2012; Mahadevia 2002). Given their specific context, these spaces are identified in both academic literature and policy papers as ‘ghettos’, pointing in turn to the many stigmas attached to them. These neighbourhoods are part of a city but ‘insulated’ and ‘do not benefit from the same kind of attention from the state as other parts of the city’ (Jaffrelot and Thomas 2012: 70). Tellingly, they lack state-run schools, colleges, technical institutions, healthcare amenities and other basic facilities like sanitation and water (Jaffrelot and Thomas 2012: 70).

This chapter examines the many exclusions and marginalities faced by residents of one such neighbourhood in New Delhi called Tilak Vihar. The context of this West Delhi space is distinct from other neighbourhoods that are formed as a result of communal violence. Tilak Vihar is a Sikh neighbourhood of nearly 1,000 families headed by the widows of those men who were killed in the 1984 anti-Sikh violence in Delhi. It is important to emphasise here that Tilak Vihar is not a self-segregated space. Tilak Vihar was demarcated by the state in order to rehabilitate women who lost their husbands in the 1984 violence and were hence displaced.

In 1974, I travelled as a young graduate student volunteer to join Kishore Bharati (KB), an organisation working for rural education and development in Palia Pipariya village on the eastern tip of Hoshangabad district in Madhya Pradesh. The train made a short halt at Pipariya station, leaving me with only faint memories of yet another nondescript small town. Over the next 20 years, however, Pipariya was to be my nearest market town, and eventually my home. It also became a major centre of KB's educational and social mobilisation activities.

After moving to Delhi in 1992, I continued to visit the town and kept in touch with its people. Over the years, the educational landscape of the town and the aspirations of its young population underwent a striking change. Young students started to enrol in private engineering and management colleges across the country. Graduates from the town gained employment in national and international companies in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune, the United States (US), Europe and Canada. I was curious to know what developments had made these changes possible and who had been left behind.

On one such visit to Pipariya in 2018, I met two old friends: a couple who work as schoolteachers and who graduated from the Pipariya Government College (PGC). Hailing from the Other Backward Class (OBC) social category, they were among the last few young science and mathematics graduates recruited as permanent government schoolteachers in the mid-1980s. At their home, the couple introduced me to their two children who had completed secondary education in Pipariya.

In the prevalent modes of reckoning of the Indian middle classes, education has long remained a crucial factor in achieving social mobility and improving social status. During the period of colonial modernity, the appeal of ‘modern’ education had been one of the major factors that pushed many to migrate to the upcoming urban centres in hopes of securing education and accessing the new occupational opportunities presented by an expanding colonial regime. In many cases, such efforts had also helped individuals to shed the dictates of tradition and escape the deep-seated hierarchies of the Indian village. The liberating potential of modern education has since been evident in the ways it has helped individuals and communities to overcome the compulsions of class, caste, language and religion to join the modern workforce and secure employment premised on the tenets of equality and dignity. While the relationship between education and urbanity has remained deeply and historically intertwined, perceptions around what qualifies as ‘desirable’ education have evolved over the years in keeping with the shifts in the broader sociopolitical trends in the country.

Particularly, in the last three decades or so, neoliberal social and economic policy has made deep inroads into Indian society, once again leaving its mark on its burgeoning urban fabric. Apart from introducing ‘global urban imaginaries’ (Anjaria and McFarlane 2011) around consumption and lifestyle choices, it has also produced new bases of inequality based on digital literacy and global access that have further fragmented an already divided urban landscape. The deep inequalities thus created between the dominant and the marginal social groups are evident in the layered access they have to the city and its amenities. Education, apart from housing and healthcare, figures prominently in this discourse.

Bombay's cotton mills and their relation to the city's emergence over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as India's prime metropolis have been extensively studied from various perspectives, and this is a wide and ever-expanding area of critical scholarship. Within this rich corpus of literature, the development of public education in the city of Bombay and its place in the wider imagination of the emerging industrial city remain a virtually uncharted area. The diverse historical trajectories of state-funded education in the city point to how education discursively constructed the ‘public’ in Bombay in the early part of the twentieth century.

This chapter attempts to trace these developments in the mill district of colonial Bombay (now Mumbai). It provides a descriptive and thematic account of the expansion of education through the implementation of free and compulsory primary education (FCPE) in Girangaon, literally ‘the village of the mills’. The wards that make up the Girangaon area were selectively chosen for the FCPE when it became operational in the city in 1925. Girangaon covers the administrative wards of F and G, as well as parts of E ward, although this was not included in the initial scheme. With the caveat that the archive we have had to work with is largely limited to official records,1 we look at debates on FCPE in the city and attempt to chart the contexts within which policies on primary education in the Girangaon area were being discussed and enacted. The chapter aims to move away from colonial and nationalist narratives of well-known elite educational institutions in Bombay to interrogating the contexts within which children of the working classes were intended to be educated.

Chapter 11 highlights the need for ground control, such as GNSS survey points, to bring InSAR deformation measurements into a geodetic reference frame. It also explains the theory for projecting vector GNSS displacement into scalar line-of-sight (LOS) InSAR displacement and the computation of strain rate from InSAR.

While education studies and urban studies have flourished as rich areas of research in South Asia, the interface between education and the urban has received little scholarly attention. It is quite difficult to trace any mention of the processes of acquisition, allocation or demarcation of land for the universities in the archival records on education. Similarly, specific discussions concerning university land seem to be largely absent from land department records in post-independence India. This is perhaps why the literature on the land question in India, in the fields of both agrarian and urban studies, rarely mentions the histories of land acquisition for universities. That the first education commission formed after India's independence was the University Education Commission of 1948 indicates that higher education was meant to have a significant role in the planned development of the new nation state. Many such institutions were built in the 1950s and 1960s, often at the fringes of big cities. The earliest were the higher technical institutes, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the first campus of which was opened in Kharagpur, a little far from the city of Calcutta (now Kolkata). A study of the architectural history of the institute argues that patterned on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, IIT Kharagpur was India's first ‘college town’ (Jain 2020). An Indo-American partnership enabled the establishment of agricultural universities in various states between 1952 and 1973. The ‘land grant university’ model in the United States served as the basis for envisioning these universities (Goldsmith 1990).

Shahjahanabad, a city that the Mughal emperor Shahjahan (1627–1658) named after himself, was a walled city and had seven gates. The Red Fort (Lal Qila) was home to upper-caste Muslims and Hindus, while areas near the walls were inhabited by various craftsmen and workers. The transformation of these caste-and craft-based spaces into communal areas during colonial and postcolonial India has been a long and complex process (Parveen 2021).

Historians describe Shahjahanabad as a place of ‘composite culture’, where both Muslim nobility and upper-caste Hindus shared cultural practices, learned Persian and etiquettes (Gupta 1981). The city was known for its diverse population living in mixed urban spaces, fostering close relationships between Hindus and Muslims across social classes (Chenoy 1998).

Referring to significant changes in the sociocultural and political landscape of Delhi over time, Narayani Gupta (1981) points out: ‘Delhi has died so many deaths.’ Poet Altaf Hussain Hali echoes Gupta's feelings in this couplet:

Three major shifts in social relations are clearly visible over time. First, the Britons, after the 1857 revolt, treated communities differently based on their loyalty towards them. They labelled Muslims as ‘traitorous’ and Hindus as ‘loyalists’. This marked the symbols of Muslim presence as ‘contested sites’ for the first time (Parveen 2014). Many older inhabitants, including the tyre biradri (caste brotherhood) and the Punjabis, discussed later in this chapter, shifted to areas outside the city walls and were permitted inside only with passes issued to them.