Domesticating Markets: Early-Years Education and Middle-class Parenting in India 
Introduction 

Over the last two decades much has been written about India’s new middle classes and their lifestyles, but little attention has been paid to the way liberalisation policies and the attending neoliberal ideology is transforming the family. In this chapter I will discuss some of the changes pertaining to the way children are brought up in this social strata based on two decades of fieldwork in Calcutta/Kolkata, India.
This chapter employs a comparative perspective and argues that where in China extensive government intervention, and in Malaysia Islamist agendas frame the  reordering of the social world of early childhood under processes of globalisation (see Stivens 1998; Naftali 2010), in India economic  liberalisation and neoliberal ideology shape the same processes. This is the case even where they are introduced as part of a Hindutva (Hindu way of life) agenda (see Benei 2008) and they affect middle-class children and their families in multiple ways. More specifically, the chapter shows, how the middle-class family becomes a prime site where neoliberal values are reproduced and enacted in relation to new government agendas and economic conditions. 
With reference to Bengal, the role of formal education in the establishment of speciﬁc ideals of being middle-class and therefore modernity is closely related to reconfigurations of the family through ideologies pertaining to motherhood during the colonial period. Appropriate femininities played a key role in the teachings of Hindu reformers concerned about the lifestyles of the emerging middle-class, and thus nationalist discourses highlighted the importance of mothers as emblems of Indian womanhood (Bagchi 1990; Chatterjee 1993;Walsh 1995; Sangari 1999; Kumar n.d.). In post-independence India the link between middle-class identities, schooling and parenting became even more accentuated. The idealised and educated middle-class mother was opposed to the undesirable motherhood of the poor, on whom government concerns focused. 
As I have argued elsewhere, the post-liberalisation period has seen a sharp rise in emphasis on women as mothers (Donner 2008), this time as educators of future consumer-citizens. This is partly achieved by a mother’s focus on education, and a renewed emphasis on maternal roles in relation to the transmission of culture. 
Kumar suggests with reference to literature on education in South Asia, that mothers are absent due to the ‘unattractiveness of certain spaces inhabited by women’, which ‘lies in the categories themselves: ’mother’, ‘home’, ‘childcare’, versus ‘intelligentsia’, ‘the nation’, ‘education’ (Kumar, n.d.). This chapter addresses this lacuna by focusing on a group present in writings about the middle-class more generally, namely Bengali-speaking middle-class families in Calcutta/Kolkata, whose parenting trajectories have been well-represented during the colonial period. Focusing on early-years education I will discuss how the ongoing processes of globalisation, locally enabled from the 90s onwards by economic liberalisation, the emergence of a consumerist culture associated with global lifestyles, and the attending neoliberal ideologies, have brought change to families. Since the families I study are middle-class families and education plays a major role in suitably modern middle-class personhood, I am focusing on early years education as a site that allows us to understand the transformation of childhood under new economic and social conditions. My argument is that in this context, the early years of childhood have taken on new, and very significant meanings, which can best be described as the extension of economic logics and the importance of ‘markets’ to encompass all spheres of life, beginning with the parent-child relationship. In the wake of liberalisation education has become fully commodified and having gained access to private education, a process that middle-class parents embrace and describe through neoliberal idioms of choice and merit, the contestations that come with it causes extreme anxiety. In this chapter I will discuss how the production of global Indian citizens starts with preschool education, a novel and spreading practice that is changing the roles of the family members, but especially the role of mothers. Thus, let me sketch the historical and cultural context within which these transformations are situated.
Contextualising Early Years 
Child-centred pedagogies, and therefore extensive advice for parenting, can be traced back to Western, bourgeois ideals of childhood as a period of innocence, spent in the family home – the site of ‘true’ relationships. Today embellished with attending ideas about developmental phases and psychological understandings of relationships between parents and children, such idealised imagers are certainly not universal. However, Indian folk models depict early childhood as a phase of carefree enjoyment, and identify logical steps in the maturation of children, which match such pedagogies in popular consciousness. Based on these models and the introduction of formal schooling for middle-class boys and - gradually - girls, from the beginning of the 19th century, whilst childhood as such changed dramatically, its early phase was until very recently still devoted to play and socialisation in the family home. Clearly distinguished from the extremely rigid regime imposed on schoolchildren, at home younger members of extended families were mostly left to their own devices and enjoyed the attention of multiple carers, including grandparents, older siblings, and servants.
But more recently, this picture changed drastically from the 1980s onwards, when Kolkata’s Bengali-speaking middle class came under pressure as the much coveted secure employment in the public sector began to dwindle, and privatisation reshaped formal education. Significantly, parents now felt that English-medium education, earlier a privilege of the upper middle-class elite, which had been abolished by the ruling Left Front in state primary schools, was now a precondition for even less prestigious jobs. As a consequence of both, the language policies and the squeeze of the job market for graduates, metropolitan middle-class parents sought entry into private English-medium schools. By the 1990s, all middle-class parents I spoke to were adamant that their children needed English language skills to gain employment, and all but the most disenfranchised parents agreed that early years education would provide the basis of English-medium schooling. It was during that decade that private nursery schools teaching some basic English and other kinds of ‘modern’ attributes parents imagined would provide competitive advantages mushroomed all over the city. As will become clear, these nurseries, or ‘Montessoris’ are representative of an assortment of neoliberal ideas, shared between those founding and running the nurseries and the parents. They are, I argue indicators of the change in middle-class lifestyles, aspirations and values. Invested with parental hopes for children’s success in a competitive educational system, they function as institutional nodes for the association of the family and neoliberal ideologies. 
The households we are concerned with here are usually extended, with more than one couple sharing living space and finances and women working together in the home. Before 1990, children entered formal schooling only once they were between 4 and 6 years of age. Today most middle-class urbanites send their kids to pre-school, which may take pupils after their second birthday. Contrary to what has been reported in other contexts, neither the joint family nor nurseries are a matter of childcare (pace Fuller and Narasimhan 2013), as mothers are not usually in employment. Secondly, the vast majority of children spend their early years in a joint family with more than one female household member looking after them, which is seen as highly desirable. Early years education is here clearly related to shifting parental aspirations, as the skills it enables are seen as predisposition for employment in very specific kinds of global workplaces. Furthermore, liberalisation has also brought wider cultural shifts, and the Indian middle-class today identifies with a transnational lifestyle and often the dream of migrant fortunes. These new trajectories require different and novel kinds of traits in a person that can claim middle-class status, for example confidcence, English-language skills and computer literacy, but above all a degree of engagement with individualism as a value. Lastly, there is the commodification of educational institutions and the proliferation of certificates to be taken into account. All these factors, I argue have changed the way early childhood is conceptualised and experienced by children and their carers in Indian middle-class families. 
Experiencing the Educational Environment
While walking down the road in Central Kolkata, my three-year-old son remarked ‘This place is full of school children’ and pointed at groups of pupils at the gates of a Central Calcutta nursery school. But equally conspicuous are their mothers, who are sitting next to the gates or stand in the shade under a tree, waiting for their sons and daughters to emerge. Mothers can be seen in the morning on the way to school, and afterwards, when those who travelled from further a ﬁeld delivered pre-schoolers for morning sessions, and sit on the steps of a shop nearby, chatting. They reappear in the afternoon to collect children, hurrying home before they accompany them to tuition classes, music and computer lessons later in the evening. On special occasions they attend school events and during the various exams anxious mothers guard the entrances of the various venues. If this is a city of school children, it is equally a city of their mothers, who relate to this ‘educational environment’ (Jeffery et al. 2005.) and have to constantly adjust to the changes education is undergoing in the post-liberalisation period. 
Schooling has for long played a role in the way that early childhood was conceptualised since middle-class Indian families came under the spell of reform in the 19th century. During the colonial period, formal education for boys became the norm, whilst girls’ mass education only really took off in the 1920s. Whilst all the mothers in my interlocutor’s homes had attended school, the degree to which schooling was supported by the family varied, and some had to leave after class 10. 
Speaking to mothers and grandmothers of adolescents in the mid-90s, early childhood had in their view been an important period of socialisation, explicitly achieved at home and within a family environment. In the accounts older women provided on their own schooling careers, school presented a desirable – and often still contested – achievement in many families, but also became a serious concern in later childhood. Early childhood was constructed as liminal, explicitly idealised where it occurred in a multi-generational, ‘joint’ family that shared a residence with collaterally-related households. Furthermore, parents never fail to mention that the city boasts some of the country’s finest secondary schools, and that the Bengali middle-class sees itself as particularly well educated. However, a few notable vernacular schools aside, provision for those not able to join prestigious schools was often rather poor up until the 90s. Thus, a sharp divide prevailed between those with access to the few elite English-medium schools, who would join prestigious universities, and those educated in the vernacular, whose best possible option would have been ‘service’, work for the government.  
Today pressure on middle-class parents to provide their children with new types of knowledge has increased. Pre-schools, which became conduits of these changes, were first introduce in India to help poor pupils in the transition to primary schools (Rana et al. 2002; Sreeranjan et al. n.d.). However, once they were introduced, this notion of intervention began to encompass middle-class families as well. Thus, most parents I worked with have come to see early childhood as a prime period within a framework of ‘developmental stages’, and though critical, adopted this rationale for early-years education. 
The notion that children should be shaped early on is of course not new. Although folk models associated few traits beyond parental social status with young children are alive, middle-class family life was from the 19th century onwards marked by pedagogical intervention. How to bringing up suitably modern sons (and later on daughters), and the notion that mothers need to be educated in order to so, is well-established (see for example Walsh 1995). Within this discourse early childhood figured as a period when parents ought to foster very close emotional bonds with their children, and mothers were to model positive values to be inculcated in the ‘perfect Indian child’. Today, early childhood is presented as a phase during which children are particularly susceptible to acquiring discipline and ‘manners’ – only today they should do so through schooling. Just as it was the parents’ duty to develop a child and nurture their abilities, today the same parents are asked to create a success citizen through an early focus on academic performance. Extending the age old idiom of maternal sacrifice, mothers agree that in today’s competitive urban educational landscape, one of the sacrifices to be made is sole control over a child’s development. 
The Pre-School Environment 
All Indian middle-class parents, just as many middle-class parents across the globe, fret and worry endlessly about schooling – often from the day a child starts to walk. With entry into a ‘big’ school constituting the moment when successful parenting is confirmed, the preparations for that day start early on in the home. Regardless of household income and set-up, admission of a son or daughter to a school of choice is a major labour of love, even where money places no obstacles in the way. To enhance the chances of success, two-year old boys and girls were enrolled in pre-schools, some locally and others in well-known larger institutions further afield.
A good number of children from more affluent homes had been practising for the ‘tests’, but mothers across the board assumed that at the tender age of two few truly academic means would be employed. In the school my son attended the headmistress was meant to place particular importance on independence and children not being tutored. This did not stop parents from purchasing primers intended to teach basic skills, which were usually counting up and identifying colours and animals in English.  
Here as at primary level, a standardised and highly bureaucratic procedure was implied, with mothers frequently queuing for hours to collect admission forms. In some cases parents would be able to then ‘put down’ the name of the child against payment of a deposit, in others they would sign their children up for an interview. 
Although only a few ‘reputed’ Montessori nurseries in Calcutta are oversubscribed, admission to non-selective, mostly local kindergartens, emulates procedures of prestigious schools. To parents enrolment itself was a major effort and successful admission represented a rite of passage. In the case of prestigious kindergarten’s or the newly emerging nursery sections of sought after schools, the process also involve bribes and the cultivation of patron-client relationships. 
But most parents choose small establishments situated in a residential unit with large classes of up to 30 two-year olds in one group. They are usually run by a female founder/proprietor, although there are some upmarket franchises. Whilst their quality varies, they promise to teach children basic academic skills, mainly the three Rs and English vocabulary, as well as preparation for interviews in ‘big’ schools. However, interviews are ‘sat’ between the ages of three and ﬁve, and only selective schools expect good ‘Montessori’ nursery education. But even less competitive schools ask their prospective pupils to come for a test during which they may be asked to produce English phrases, alphabets, numbers and songs as part of the admission procedure. Whilst this functional aspect of nursery education is highlighted by parents, longer conversations offer other, more complex explanations for the rise of early-years education. They mention old-fashioned the ‘civilising’ agents of discipline and obedience, but they are also keen on ‘development’ and ‘maturity’ associated with the notion of ‘exposure’. 
Where a son or daughter was admitted for preschool education depended on three factors: the ﬁnancial circumstances of the household, the place of residence, and the ethnic identity of the parents. Fees in selective institutions varied between 700 and 1200 rupees per month at the beginning of the 2000s, whereas many local ‘Montessori’ schools located in the garage of an apartment building or the spare rooms of a family home charged less than 500 rupees. Both types may offer different ‘classes’ for each grade, and the age of admission can be as low as eighteen months. In both settings, prospective students are carefully screened with a view to economic and ethnic homogeneity, but depending on the location, neighbourhood ‘Montessori schools’ can nevertheless be mixed, so that local shop keepers, doctors and the children of teachers may attend the same preschool for a while. Preschools may or may not employ trained teachers but always have helpers (ayahs) to deal with children’s physical needs. 
When speaking to parents about nursery education it is apparent that Indian pre-schools are in the business of creating global – and assumedly transferable - experiences of education. These are  modelled on ideals of schooling associated with US, Europe and South East Asia, and are consumed by all newly entitled middle-class consumers. Because pre-schools stand for a global lifestyle that middle-class Indians are aspiring to or tie in with, these playschools emphasise their cosmopolitan character, and unlike proper schools they do not display any Indian national symbols like ﬂags or portraits of nationalist leaders and ‘indigenous’ educationists. Pre-schooling is very clearly about tapping into what is represented as a ‘global’ middle-class lifestyle, and this also implies that in a setting where subtle signifiers of ethnic and religious community are present in almost every context, no identiﬁable communal or Indian imagery is associated with pre-school education in these urban settings. The reality of such markers of class-based appropriations of a global form, does however also speak of intra-class differentiation. Although English as medium of instruction is highlighted in the way all the nurseries present themselves, the knowledge of staff might be limited and in less prestigious places children may not be exposed to much regular teaching in English. All nurseries are using vernacular languages as well, for example when ayas (lower class helpers) deal with children. As teaching at this level is not standardised, many teachers do hold language degrees in Bengali, but may not have been trained in English-medium environments themselves. But the nurseries manage to tie in with the demand for globalised cultural discourses by using signifiers of global culture, for example in names like Little Angles, Morning Glory, Blooming Rose or Playhouse Montessori, which act as markers of an English medium orientation. Furthermore, indicating ‘fun’ and ‘playful learning’, the sites draw on similar imagery – the walls are adorned with popular cartoon characters and English alphabets and number charts. Another global reference is the display of foreign-made or counterfeit toys and books which nurseries never fail to show parents and visitors as ‘equipment’ to emphasise their pedagogic program.
The Ideal of the Committed Mother 
The novel practice of pre-schooling and the resulting ‘common sense’ that  nurseries are useful for children can only be attributed to the wider narratives that are related to the way education is perceived today. In many conversations it became clear that with admission to preschool, middle-class parents and in particular mothers feel that they are involved in the wider project of producing global graduates - Indian white collar workers for a global market. Much has been written about the way neoliberal values, apparent in talk about choice, self-improvement and market mechanisms, are key to envisage, represent and condition these new subjects. In the Indian context, the imagery of small children going to nursery, being trained in English and computer skills, and being removed from the home environment in order to be ‘exposed’, has all the makings of a neoliberal reframing of childhood. Nurseries are therefore prime sites that  make such global Indian citizens, in the same way early-years education affects families in China (Rofel 1994; Anagnost n.d.; Zhao and Murdock 1996; Fernandes 2000; Donner 2005). In this section, I will analyse how the reproduction of the related values relies on preschool education, and subjects mothers and children to the related disciplining regimes. 
The changes that the introduction of early-years education has brought affect all members of the family, but mothers are more involved in managing the new field of schooling than others. I have written elsewhere on how globalisation and the changing educational strategies employed by the middle-class in India contest and challenge the way intra-household relationships are conducted and understood (Donner 2005). 
Like Malaysian middle-class mothers studied by Stivens (1998), Bengali middle-class mothers compare their own parenting practices with supposedly ‘Western’ ways. This opposition dates back to the colonial period, when nationalist discourses and regional variations on the theme of motherhood produced a distinct modernist version of ‘traditional motherhood’ in Bengal (Bagchi 1990:65). 
But while institutional childcare was earlier associated with negative cultural stereotypes, ‘nurseries’ are today seen as markers of distinction. Earlier, those same families referred to these institutions as ‘unsuitable for Indian families/children’. However, those from similar backgrounds would today send her children to nurseries ‘study’. The ambivalence, still very much at the fore in the 1990s, has given way to a more or less complete embrace of preschool. 
It is clear from what has been said before that nurseries represent novel ideas about education, but this does not necessarily imply a radical break with older ideas. Some of the owners are well-trained, like the head of my son’s nursery, who had ‘real’ Montessori education. Consequently, she was quite cynical about parental expectations as well as the level of pedagogic involvement in other nurseries. However, mixed in with her general liberal and pedagogically-framed outlook were distinctively Indian footnotes, which came to the fore when we were talking about admission procedures. Like teachers I met, she argued that strict admission procedures, a rigid schedule and attention to even minute details in the behaviour of pupils was a must, as ‘Indian children’ were not usually brought up to cope with ‘non-domestic environments’. Lack of discipline was a result of joint family life, where mothers deflected responsibility and children were spoilt by competing caretakers. She asserted that demographic change, and the new affluence of the 1990s had transformed that caring environment into a space for consumerist indulgence. And finally, she explained what she was looking for in the ‘interview’:
‘In the interview I am looking for a well-rounded child—, I show them this pencil holder here for example, and say ‘this is a key’ and wait how they react, and if they react—if they shake their head or if they say no, then that is a good sign. I ask them ‘what have you had for breakfast ?’ and if they say chicken then that is a good sign… ()…Of course you cannot expect a two-year old to say much, what can you see in a two-year old—but I rarely make a mistake, I can tell. In general I am looking for a well-adjusted child, not for one clinging to his mummy ...’ 
Self-help books provide guidance for parents who feel under scrutiny during interviews. They also provide general guidance bridging the gap between old-fashioned lines linking parenting and civil virtues and new demands: 
‘An ordinary child with average intelligence and initiative, when treated with respect and dignity as an individual, and is given proper guidance & motivation by you, will turn out to be a great citizen. Here comes the best gift you can give to your child: the most wanted qualities of the 21st century’ (Jain 2000:9). 
The author then provides a list of ﬁfty traits ranging from pride to sincerity, and from courtesy to love for nature. The accompanying text emphasises that parents ‘cannot expect overnight results’ but will have to ‘spend endless hours, months, years together with hard work, sleepless nights and total dedication’ to make a child a success (Jain 2000:19). Bringing this project back home, the author asserts that tests and interviews are in the interest of the school and the child, because the authorities ‘have to assess in what type of environment the child is growing and how much committed you are towards your child’. But, ‘no matter how much committed, and sincere the teachers are, it is the parent’s commitment and sincerity towards the child’s education that plays the most effective role as the child spends most of the time with his/her parents’ (Jain 2000:20). Finally, parents are asked to be ‘very frank  and let them know exactly how much intelligent (sic) your child is. And please don’t tell us, that you don’t know, as that will clearly indicate that you haven’t given proper time to your child.’ is the slightly threatening advice provided for parents (Jain 2000:20).  
Far from being regarded as naive, such books reﬂect popular ideas about the role of parents in early childhood today. Mothers in particular are cast as facilitators of future success. Although the home-environment of a child is checked in interviews with both parents, fathers attending the ‘interview’ for admission are assumed to engage with their children’s ‘education’ as part of their leisure pursuits. Mothers, on the other hand, cannot get away that easily, as their role in the education of children is changing drastically in line with neoliberal ideas about the person, interviews have become quite tricky. Firstly, they are asked about employment, which may go in their favour where mother is a doctor, but which will be seen as problematic with less prestigious jobs. Teachers will ask direct questions like ‘When do you come home at night?’; ‘Who cooks for your child and feeds her?’ to express their concern about the degree of commitment displayed by a working mother. Only teachers and doctors are much-sought after brides, as they are expected to be able to combine maternal commitment with professional experience. As one of the mothers explained: ‘I was a teacher and all my sisters-in-law are teachers, you see, my in-laws were very keen that the women should be well-educated so that they can help their kids with the homework’. 
Apart from employment, the interviews at preschool level explore other social relationships which impact a child’s schooling. Since siblings are increasingly rare, teachers focussing on social skills will zoom in on the presence of grandparents and servants in the home. Both sets of relationships may in the view of the mothers involve different moralities—grandparents are loving carers who have rights and are often seen as co-carers, whereas servants may be loving but represent a potentially bad inﬂuence. Where it would have been entirely acceptable a generation of two ago that a servant delivered a child to school and that a grandfather took responsibility for a child’s schooling, ‘other people at home’ and the presence of grandparents at the gates or a servant picking up a child is today often interpreted as an indicator of neglect on behalf of the mother. Today, mothers are expected to be the main contact between the school and the home. If they don’t come in daily they are quickly cast as problematic. 
This morality is significant, as does ideologically construct the parent-child relationship as exclusive, where a nuclear family may be the exception and residential patterns work differently. One Montessori teacher argued ‘Parents have to work with the children at home—we expect them to do the homework themselves, but you can always help that with reading, writing and little number games—after all parents know what the child needs and wants.’ Here, as in many other cases, the discursive construction of a child’s needs is linked exclusively to the parental bond, and in particular the mother, even if homework is set by the school in the ﬁrst place and arguably a grandparent might be equally well-equipped to do it. And, where it was earlier sufficient for a middle-class mother to be fairly educated, it is today necessary to buy into a whole set of ideological stances that highlight the nuclear family unit as the main unit of social and economic advancement. Thus, mothers are expected to utilise the readily available labour power of servants and grandmothers, but these roles are to be channelled towards the more ‘mundane’ tasks in the house. In theory at least, only the mother and her child are involved in schooling, and the mother is encouraged to devote her day to school-related activities even where children spent the majority of hours either at school or at tuition. 
This practice is premised on the ideological construction of an exclusive mother-child bond, which at the same time diminishes her role to that of a facilitator of smooth transactions between the many players in a child’s education. Far from being easy, or lightweight in terms of commitment and effort, mothers are kept on their toes with constant demands and errands, many of which pose a challenge to those in employment. Furthermore, it is during these years that the values of maternal care and intimacy between mother and child are redirected away from the home environment. By ignoring other carers, the institution enforces the global imagery it tries to project and frames mothers in relation to schooling as most significant others. This exclusive relationship is often embraced by mothers, who might complaint about the fact their children won’t ‘work’ by themselves or with anyone else than them, but use this to gain more control over their offspring in a joint family setting. ‘She will not learn anything with her father, she doesn’t listen to what her grandmother says, and anyway, the old lady has no idea about Montessori education, the numbers games etc.—I am the only one, with whom she would study—and I am worried what will happen once she joins ‘big’ school and has to attend tuition classes’ is a common refrain, here articulated by the mother of a four-year-old girl. 
Unlike the ‘culture of care’ (Hochschild 2003) emerging in China or many Western countries, and even other cities and communities in India, the vast majority of Bengali-speaking middle-class mothers are housewives. Here, as in the case of some European countries, modern motherhood implies the withdrawal of women as mothers from paid work, and my interlocutors were more often than not proud to not need to go out for employment. Thus, whilst a discourse on women’s engagement in paid employment forms an important part of debates about liberalisation and its effects, jobs are largely confined to young women (see Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase 2008).  
In spite of this, Bengali middle-class families, like most middle-class families in India, rely heavily on domestic workers, who perform a wide range of tasks related to childcare in the home. In affluent families, very young children are looked after by domestic workers, whose main responsibility is the feeding and bodily care of the toddler. The management of servants, is a crucial task of mothers in these families and teachers regularly dispense advice on the topic of relationships between servants and children. As Sneha, mother of a three-year-old recognised, the presence of servants in the home might compromise the demand for the ‘right environment’: 
‘As I go along I decide what she can do and what she can’t do, and obviously with my daughter going to school now there is less for her to do—she cannot read and playing with a four-year-old is more demanding than the earlier stages. It is ﬁne as long as the children cannot really speak, but after that you have to be careful, because they will pick up foul language from them, and I don’t want that.’. 
This brief passage reﬂects concerns raised by teachers and mothers alike, and highlights implicit assumptions about childhood and developmental stages. Whilst concerns about language are not new, the importance given to educational games and knowledge about child development is of very recent origin. 
It appears that child-rearing is seen by mothers themselves as status production work (Papanek 1989:103), and mothers constuct this  as a professional relationship, with knowledge acquired in routinized ways and employed in a strategic fashion to enable ‘results’.  In order for their engagement to be successful their domestic environment must be adjusted to the task at hand as well. 
Pedagogising the Domestic Environment 
In this section I will discuss how pre-schooling promotes a focus on the parental bond through discourses on a variety of knowledge and practices. The emphasis on the domestic environment and how it can support was diffuse and often contradictory, but along with a general critique of what the domestic environment usually looked like, focuses specifically on two areas, namely language acquisition and the consumption of food. Both are arenas that play a huge role in the local construction middle-class identity, and mark differences between different communities in this multicultural setting. Mothers felt that schools now asked them to engage ‘actively’ with their children in educational games and the like, and some articulated their concern about these new demands. 
Generally speaking, whilst homework is not usually set for pre-schoolers, mothers are reminded that they should spend time on useful activities at home to support their children’s development.  
Interestingly, it was never stated that grandparents should take on that responsibility, instead teachers cautioned against the inﬂuence of family members, who they argued may not be as committed to the individual child’s education: ‘It is you, who has to ensure that a two-year old is learning the English numbers, while the child herself may want to go upstairs and play hide-and-seek with the grandmothers’ Tanuka’s mother was reminded by a teacher when she picked up her child from nursery. 
Many mothers were concerned about these demands on their time and worried that they lacked the knowledge to provide such apparently necessary kinds of engagement.
Their concerns stemmed mostly from the fact that they felt such activities could only be conducted and appropriately understood with a command of English. Given the close relationship between intra-class differences and English medium education it is hardly surprising that mothers who do not speak English feel inferior when confronted with ideas clearly related to upper middle-class educational formats. Thus, mothers mentioned that they themselves were aware of the need to employ new methodologies like ‘playful’ learning and many emphasised that they had to learn how to make use of educational resources, in particular English books, and media. However, in practice this engagement did usually not exceed young children performing simple English rhymes and the alphabets, numbers and commercial jingles. 
Whilst English was coded positively, other the fact that as Viruru points out, many schools in urban India are multilingual environments (Viruru 2001:134–136) was not seen by Bengali mothers as desirable. In most cases nursery staff reported that vernacular languages were used for ‘extra-curricular activities’ and English was reserved for ‘study’ purposes. At home the way English-medium preschooling was understood varied with the background and individual capability of mothers, most of whom expected their children to become conﬁdent in using English phrases and expressions by repeating them to them. But more importantly, very young children were encouraged to learn English by watching children’s programmes on TV, which was among all mothers seen as a valuable educational resource for pre-schoolers. 
Thus, the nursery environment was clearly marked as a place where vernacular languages needed to be disciplined, had no practical value in relation to schooling and were not supported because they were ‘second best’. The acquisition of English, was, on the other hand, approached as a skill and seen in rather functionalist terms. Seen as related to numeracy, literacy, and IT skills it had to be actively pursued. In this context the ‘work’ mothers would ideally envisage themselves doing would involve activities centred on training materials related to these areas of learning. Some households had a computer, but in all cases children were given a supply of small books and games to enhance literacy and numeracy skills, practice colour charts and instil simple moral messages in English. Most of these ‘teaching aids’ resembled textbooks in the way they were compiled and laid-out. Parents took the position of a teacher supervising the ‘work’ done by the child, and they are very didactical, as this example shows:  
‘The child is more interested in playing rather than in studying. Hence it is very difﬁcult for the parents to prepare him or her for school admission. Keeping this fact in mind this book includes study materials for your child which help in playing and learning at the same time.’ (Karn 2003:V). 

Where mothers themselves had attended English-medium schools ‘learning English’ was slightly more broadly conceived. Thus, they would also try and teach children tales and increasingly storybooks related to TV serials and movies to make learning English fun. In these households children were more often than not never expected to read in the vernacular. Furthermore, spin-offs of Disney productions were popular as well. Teaching the preschool child English at home does therefore include familiarity with a set of narratives and artefacts largely identiﬁed with ‘Western’ consumer culture, which mothers introduce as part of the preschool system. 

Next to concerns about English-language education, the preparation and consumption of food plays a crucial role in the way Bengali middle-class family life is subjected to new discourses. 
At nursery stage, the tiffin (lunchbox) presented a second important arena for parenting to be assessed. Whilst pre-schooler only spent a couple of hours at school, this period warranted a snack. Mothers were very concerned with issues around those meals. Here as elsewhere, conversations about children’s eating habits and their preferences, aversions and daily routines, are of utmost importance to most mothers. 
As pre-school is in many ways a test run for big school, the content of the lunchbox is taken very seriously be mothers, and provides the stuff of endless discussions at the school gates. As a continuation of such conversations about children’, exchanges with teachers, and tales of love and betrayal between mothers and their children. Often when children were picked up from nursery school I overheard a mother asking her child: ‘Did you have your tifﬁn?’ On opening the container she would then turn around to a wider audience and continue ‘I don’t know what to do, he never ﬁnishes his lunch’. Here as elsewhere, conversations about children’s eating habits and their preferences, aversions and daily routines, are of utmost importance to most mothers.
In Bengali households in particular, the preparation and consumption of full meals represents the hallmark of a distinctive Bengali domesticity, and ‘Bengali cooking’ features as the most distinctive feature of ethnicity among the middle-classes. Just as in the case of Stivens’ study of the Malay middle-classes, the domestication of middle-class mothers within a nationalist discourses relies on a ‘cuisine’ promoted as part of class-speciﬁc child-rearing practices  (Stivens 1998:62). 
In Bengali middle-class families and in some cases in Hindi-speaking families as well, children’s tastes in foods are taken very seriously, and are actively developed by mothers and grandmothers. Once a son or daughter enters school the preparation of a lunch box (tifﬁn) becomes a major signiﬁer of ‘good mothering’. For nurseries, these lunch boxes are matter of concern and are a prime area for the imposition of discipline—via discourses on practicality, hygiene, and cleanliness. 
Even the small neighbourhood nurseries made it a point to send notes regarding suitable foods and the right packaging home with the students, and teachers emphasised that with respect to lunch boxes all mothers, regardless of economic standing or education, were irresponsible and unreasonable. In return, many mothers I spoke to displayed contempt for the nurseries policies regarding food, and subverted the attempts to impose order in the school environment by sending ‘inappropriate amounts’ and ‘unsuitable food’ on a daily basis into the preschool. I would like to suggest that far from being a mere boycott of the nursery’s teachers this attitude can be read as a refusal to accept the school’s messages about good and reasonable mothering and probably also contests the need for education outside the home at this young age. 
When a son or daughter entered school, mothers often felt that their loving and controlled ‘education of the senses’ was disrupted. Furthermore, they had to rearrange the whole routine around the lunch taken in the nursery. Anxieties about social status, urban environments, and the contaminating effects of modernity, which are translated into negative discourses about eating ‘outside’ more generally, were implied in talk about lunch taken at school. One major concern was the widespread and very culturally appropriate fear of contamination, which was raised in discussions through debates on where, when and with whom lunch was taken at school. The children I spoke to did often see lunch as enjoyable occasion for chat, mucking about and for complicated exchange relationships. The mothers, on the other hand, saw this arrangement in terms of contamination, social boundaries and adequate care: they worried about the cleanliness of staff, the floor and mats, the ability of different children to fed themselves (as many Bengali children are fed by hand at home up to at least three years of age). Mostly they worried about  inter-community interaction. 
Although teachers acknowledged that children needed a snack, depicting lunchtime as an important opportunity to teach children manners, the values of sharing by encouraging them to lay a table, take turns, and emphasise tidiness, they felt that a nursery could not channel the various meanings of food and the related maternal transgressions very well. Moreover, increasing consumerism tended to aggravate the problem of lunch boxes through the introduction of new, and in the view of teachers highly competitive, foods, marketed by multinational companies. Teachers and mothers alike felt that such foods, starting with the ubiquitous Maggi instant noodles, made the children greedy and seemed to contain inappropriate messages about being a child. But over the last twenty years huge number of processed and commercially available foods associated with new middle-class lifestyles have entered homes and schools. Today, even very young middle-class children demand snacks advertised on TV or in the shops for their lunch boxes, and mothers need to accommodate such commodities, as they have become an important part of symbolically constructing appropriately constructing ideal middle-class families (Donner 2008). 

Modern Times 
Far from being seen as a necessary evil, preschools are largely conceived as an environment that opens opportunities, nurtures and creates desirable traits and skills, and is in that way – probably even more so than further education, which can rarely be entirely divided from state interference and day-to-day politics, provides the most purified institution associated with markets, and therefore desirable future careers. On the surface preschooling, it seems, brings all the positives of neoliberal ideologies, including the vocabulary of opportunities, exposure, and choice within reach – as it is expected to provide social skills and a ‘well-rounded personality’ not produced by the home environment. However, it is also the case, as the example of the lunchbox shows, that the practices and discourses that reproduce the wider field of preschooling beyond the nursery devalue a number of cherished relationships, values and institutional arrangements. This is at the same time a continuation of older tropes, for example where mothers and their children are not disciplined enough, but also new challenges, where mothers need to ‘smarten’ up and learning includes ‘exposure’ beyond the family. If this new approach rests on the promotion of early learning institutions as ‘just like home’ to make early separation of mother and child more palatable, this implies not so much that nurseries become more homely, but that homes become more like coaching stations. The new maternal ideal is not only a teacher, but a mentor as well, who takes full responsibility and extends opportunities for learning of a single child to encompass new areas of knowledge and engagement. 
The need for children from middle-class families to attend nursery schools is no longer a recent trend, but reflects the experience of mothers and their children, and evokes larger images of globalisation and India’s integration into global employment markets. These depend on discourses of skills and the conditions of upward mobility, which mothers and their families have internalised. The new focus on early years is therefore no longer merely reflective of competition for entry into secondary schools, though this is very important in the Kolkata context as well. Unlike the discussions of schooling in general, preschooling suggests an embrace of privatisation and services, and its provision is always discussed from a consumer point with a focus on the individual learning programmes on offer. 
In many instances, earlier mothers would focus mostly on behavioural aspects of early years education, with the more educated mothers emphasising the preschool’s importance in establishing discipline. However, today, such a focus on behavioural patterns is intimately related to neoliberal ideologies of entrepreneurial selves - independence and smartness, self-assured behaviour as and exposure were valued alongside the older ideals about good schooling. 
Accordingly, mothers chose a mix of strategies to help their children, involving classic root-learning at home and learning-is-fun educational toys instilling the same kind of knowledge. Indeed, since preschool education has become synonymous with Montessori, which some of the better educated mothers identiﬁed as ‘child-centred’ learning, a more labour-intensive type of home-schooling has emerged. Mothers educated to degree level and from upper-middle class families were mostly conversant with the educational tools and the ‘method’ employed at the preschool their child attended, which was constructed as the opposite of ‘rote-learning’ and discursively represented in terms of individual development. Here, to be a modern mother clearly implied a critique of the old regime, but was not translated into actual activities through which a son or daughter acquired skills and knowledge beyond a set of already popular skills. Enhanced through the common practice of recommending speciﬁc material, mothers could easily be convinced that in order to be a competent consumer they themselves had to ‘learn’ about such child-centred approaches education. 

Conclusion 
Earlier on I had identified processes of ‘nationalising a foreign product’, in the process of which early years education becomes part of wider middle class formation in an era of economic restructuring (Fernandes 2000:615; Donner 2006). Now, two decades after I first started my work with middle-class mothers and their families, it has become clear that framing these processes through a nationalist lens does limit the class-based aspects shaping them, which can be much better observed when middleclassness is compared across the globe. 
As research on places as socially diverse as China and Fiji (Naftali 2010; Brinson 2011), suggests, early years education and primary schooling are prime sites for the negotiation of neoliberal values. This is due to the spread of modern pedagogies, including the association of specific age groups with developmental stages and the psychology of child development. However, these may be key words promoted by teachers, but as my material suggests, parents interpret them in a much wider framework. Thus, the idea of developmental stages and special needs in early childhood, so closely associated with play and the acquisition of social skills, is framed by these middle-class parents in terms of neoliberal demands of self-regulation, self-assertion and flexible work places. Key values that nurseries promote are interpreted in terms of competition and the imagery of global markets in education and employment. Clearly, household strategies were directed towards future upward mobility for the family. Thus, whilst there is a high degree of intra-class differentiation apparent, the symbolic dominance of specific careers and global lifestyles cuts across regions and unites this section of the Indian middle class with others elsewhere in the aim of producing migrant workers for global industries. 
The neoliberal market logic driving other domestic strategies, notably family planning, as Chatterjee and Riley argue, can easily be attributed to debates on new educational regimes as well : ‘While individual’s happiness is linked to material and physical, rather than spiritual, well-being, the materialism promoted has a recognizable Indian, local and middle-class character’ (Chatterjee and Riley: 2001). 

Where pre-school education has elsewhere allowed for an insertion of the state into home lives (see Naftali 2010), with the deliberate objective of reforming parenting to fit wider developmentalist agendas, the new demand for early years education in India is closely related to the privatisation of services and consumerist middle-class identities. But within families, these wider frameworks are realised step-by-step as part of multiple decisions over children’s education, which on the one hand are important and far-reaching but need to be integrated into household strategies beyond the child and his or her parents. Here, older idioms, for example the opposition of the joint and the nuclear family, the controversies about servants and grandparents interfering in education, and lastly the idea that early childhood should be carefree need to be considered and reinterpreted as well, before they are inserted into such new discourses. 
Clearly, a market-driven educational provision and a rhetoric of choice determine what may appear as an opportunity and the shape global Indianess will take in the minds of children and parents alike. Thus, the provision of nursery education brings a huge number of outside processes to bear on the family, through the highlighted relationship between mothers and their children. 
The emphasis on global markets is reﬂected in the way in which preschool education is helping to reorganise the mothering practices in an environment where increasingly ‘the idea of early childhood represents a ‘latent potentiality’ that must be seized‘ (Anagnost n.d.). Mothers and teachers are not alone in making this child/citizen happen. Increasingly their efforts are supported by expertise and services, which in the absence of state institutions are dispensed more often than not by commercial providers and a variety of often self-styled specialists. Their suggestions, predictions and solutions address the anxieties of their customers, and affect more and more middle-class children. Furthermore, the making of middle-class persons is markedly communalist (that is, identifiable Hindu)  here as in any other regions. Where in the Malay example Islam and state-sponsored religiosity feature at school, regional and language-based identities are emphasised in Bengal. But apart from Hindu nationalist discourses (Benei 2008) many scholars have emphasised children as pupils have become the subjects of multiple practices resulting from liberalisation policies. Preschools, with their easily interpreted idioms of ‘personhood’ are a perfect site for this. In Kolkata, as middle-class families are anxious to create a ‘global lifestyle’ in the city itself, this desire often sits uncomfortably with local idioms of appropriate personhood. Pre-schools are part of this framework and are promoting a neoliberal ideology of entrepreneurial selves and self-regulation, which ‘reorganise(s) the family from within’ (Anagnost n.d.). Considering children as part of wider families helps us to see how preschools make neoliberalism, and its prioritisation of markets as productive of social relationships, tangible in the lives of a great number of people.

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