Nidhi Gaur’s Gender and Craftwork in Rural Society: The Role of Education (published by Routledge in 2024) is a significant interdisciplinary work that bridges gender studies, educational sociology, and rural studies in India. Gaur undertakes a compelling investigation into how craft-centred education influences the gender socialisation of rural children. Drawing from philosophical, sociological, and psychological perspectives, she revisits Gandhi’s vision of education and the idea of swaraj, grounding her analysis in rich fieldwork conducted at Anand Niketan, a craft-based school in Sevagram, Maharashtra.
Gaur aims to assess how manual, embodied pedagogies can transform children’s self-perception, gender roles, and social relationships. What personally resonated with me the most is the book’s emphasis on the transformative potential of art. It is not merely practice or performance, but a profound act of becoming. Gaur, through her exploration of Gandhian pedagogical thought, illustrates how craftwork allows children to understand themselves. This deeply human act of becoming and discovering what one is made of is often lost in our current educational systems. The sharp critique of modernisation, as opposed to modernity, brings this home. Our education system, focused on technical efficiency, often ignores the artistic, sensory, and values-based aspects of learning that are essential to human growth.
In this context, I found her review of literature particularly striking. She explores the alienation that occurs between the home and the school in Western-centric education systems, which often invalidate the local knowledge and lived experience of rural children. This erasure creates a hidden hierarchy of knowledge, favouring abstract, context-free content over learning that is hands-on and connected to lived experience. Gaur also traces how gender roles begin to take shape within the very walls of the classroom, where children internalise social expectations and develop their first concept of “the other” through gendered socialisation.
Drawing on Leela Dube’s foundational work on kinship and gender, Gaur demonstrates how schools extend and reinforce gendered roles that often originate within the family. Her analysis deepens further with Michel Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power, framing the classroom as a site of regulation and subtle control over children’s bodies and identities. Through these lenses, schooling becomes not only a site of instruction but also a field of power, where social roles are rehearsed, reinforced, and occasionally subverted.
One of the most compelling aspects of the book is the portrayal of Anand Niketan as a relatively gender-neutral space. Here, children engage in various crafts without rigid gender demarcations, a meaningful departure from the binaries found in many mainstream schools. Gaur’s ethnographic descriptions are rich and immersive. I felt I was walking alongside her, noticing the quiet choreography of a child shaping clay or threading a loom. Her observations breathe with empathy and clarity. The book’s narrative tone was refreshing and unexpected in an academic text. It is an example of what research can become when it is both intellectually and emotionally invested.
I particularly appreciated how Gaur weaves theory with anecdotes. Her inclusion of thick descriptions and children’s voices ties the theoretical insights from earlier chapters to the living, breathing context of the school. The effect is that of real-time meaning-making. You move with the researcher as questions unfold, as insights emerge, and as tensions surface. As someone who values narrative in research, I found this deeply engaging. It models a way of doing scholarship that is rigorous without being distant, and critical without being dispassionate.
Gaur’s use of narrative-based qualitative methods, especially her projective techniques with children, is another standout. By placing children in realistic, culturally grounded scenarios, she uncovers the implicit norms that shape their understanding of gender, family, and aspiration. These exercises reveal not just what children think, but how they have come to think it. They show how values are absorbed subtly through everyday life. The way she connects these insights to thinkers like David Pye, with his notion of the “workmanship of risk,” and Richard Sennett, on the moral imagination of craft, frames these embodied learning moments as sites of ethical and emotional growth. The methodological sensitivity here reflects not just scholarly finesse but also a deep commitment to care and honesty.
Another important thread in the book is Gaur’s engagement with the realities of rural transformation. While families value the ethos of Anand Niketan, many express concerns about its long-term practicality. Their ambivalence speaks to the broader social tension between local, values-based education and the dominance of competitive, exam-oriented schooling. Gaur navigates this complexity with nuance, showing how caste dynamics can reappear in subtle forms, even within progressive frameworks. She resists easy binaries between tradition and modernity, offering instead a textured portrait of rural aspiration.
Throughout, pedagogy is treated not just as a curriculum but as a relational and transformative space. Teachers act not as instructors, but as facilitators of change. The classroom becomes a space for dignity, self-discovery, and quiet resistance. Gaur’s engagement with thinkers like Gandhi, Dewey, Dube, and Foucault adds depth and dimension to her argument that craft-based learning is more than vocational. It is ethical, embodied, and profoundly human.
Beyond its theoretical and methodological richness, Gender and Craftwork in Rural Society offers practical insights for researchers, educators, and curriculum designers. Gaur’s immersive, ethically attentive fieldwork is an excellent model for those working in gender, rural education, and narrative methods. Her use of culturally resonant, emotionally honest research techniques shows how deep truths can emerge when we meet children in their own worlds. For educators and curriculum designers, the book makes a compelling case for including craft and arts-based learning in formal education, not as decorative add-ons, but as central to fostering empathy, critical thinking, and self-worth.
What makes this book stand out is how it encourages reflection, not just on what we learn but on how learning is shaped, whose voices are valued, and what kind of futures we imagine through education. Rather than offering easy solutions, it reminded me that learning can feel real and alive when it connects with who we are and where we come from.
Gender and Craftwork in Rural Society: The Role of Education is a rare academic work, one that combines analytical sharpness with human sensitivity. Gaur provides a research model that is both rigorous and rooted, theoretical yet lived. The result is a book that stays with you. One that allows you to walk alongside the research, connect the dots in real-time, and return to your own questions with renewed clarity and depth.
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Parvathi Krishnan is a Master’s student in Sociology at the University of Madras.