Education and Inequality: Historical and Contemporary Trajectories focuses on the ways in which despite different claims of expansion and improvement, education in India continues to be marked by overwhelming levels of inequalities and exclusions in access, participation, completion and outcomes. The essays in this volume use the perspectives of class, caste, gender and disability, and the lenses of culture and religion to understand the overall normative pattern of education in the way it tends to exclude the majority of our population, its concerns, languages, and knowledge. The contributors to the volume are experts with diverse interdisciplinary interests. Besides critically examining contemporary education, the volume also deals with the historical context of modernity and inequality and its reciprocal relationship with education. It expresses serious concern about the increasing withdrawal of the State from education and the growing disintegration of structures of public education in our own times.