The debate over educational disparities across religious communities in India, especially those concerning the Muslims, is as old as the history of the modern education system in the country. This debate has yielded several explanations for educational backwardness among the Muslims which evoke a supposedly low value placed on modern education by Islamic theology, the status of Indian Muslims as a minority, and invidious discrimination against the Muslims in India. Largely cast in a polemical and impressionistic mode, this debate has long awaited empirical underpinnings. The recent upsurge in ... More

The debate over educational disparities across religious communities in India, especially those concerning the Muslims, is as old as the history of the modern education system in the country. This debate has yielded several explanations for educational backwardness among the Muslims which evoke a supposedly low value placed on modern education by Islamic theology, the status of Indian Muslims as a minority, and invidious discrimination against the Muslims in India. Largely cast in a polemical and impressionistic mode, this debate has long awaited empirical underpinnings. The recent upsurge in empirical studies on the topic requires an explanatory frame that admits of precision and complexity. Despite the renewed interest in this subject following the Sachar Committee Report, considerable knowledge gaps continue to exist in our understanding of the dynamics between religion and access to education. The present work brings to fore the spatially contextualized historical trajectories that have shaped educational development and various forms of disparities therein. It argues that religious communities, such as the Muslims, have to be seen as spatially and economically differentiated across regions rather than as homogeneous socio-cultural aggregates. This argument draws upon disaggregation of national-level secondary data and is supplemented by a primary fieldwork-based comparison of the educational status of Muslims in Patna and Purnia districts of Bihar. The relative educational backwardness of the Muslim community is thus seen to have underlying spatial and class patterns that are often overlooked.