Devika Mittal, School as a Secular Space in Contemporary India: Everyday Practice in Azad Bharat Vidyalaya

School as a Secular Space, the 6th monograph in the Oxford University Press series on Education and Society in South Asia, tries to understand the meaning-making processes around secularism in an educational setting.It is an ethnography of an English-medium, co-educational Delhi school called Azad Bharat Vidyalaya (ABV), where the author spent over 10 months between 2015 and 2016 to explore how secularism is practiced, negotiated and contested in everyday life.One can delineate five key pivots that constitute the larger argument that this ethnographic study makes on secularism.First, it highlights the school as a discursive space where meanings are produced through language, rules, practices and everyday interactions.The meaning-making processes are continually shaped and reshaped through discourse, power and practice.For example, the curriculum definitions of what is the 'correct' history change.The author highlights how the earlier history textbooks had a chapter based on the National Curriculum Framework 2005 titled 'our pasts' in plural to teach diverse perspectives (that the history of ordinary women and men is different from the history of kings and queens).However, in the new textbooks, this dimension of subjectivity is diluted, and there is an attempt to highlight a distinct Indian identity and its civilisational roots.Employing Gordon et al. (2000) evocative analogy of dance, the work brings out the interplay between the official school (correct steps), the informal school (the improvisation by the dancer) and the physical space