Abstract
This book contains an editorial introduction and fourteen chapters arranged in three parts: ‘Making of a Knowledge Society’, ‘Institutional Sites’, and ‘Women and Education’. Of course, information about the eighteenth century is still awaited—a long-standing disconnect in the history of education in India—the book has a firm research base in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also provides important historical insights to understand the current situation. It should form compulsory reading for the scholars interested in the history of education and for everyone willing to understand the contradictory processes of modernity and tradition, change and stalemate, and equality and inequality in modern India with specific emphasis on the aspects of knowledge and agency. These emerge to be the focal point of the book in all three parts notwithstanding an otherwise somewhat loose-fitting thematic structure and omission of an explicit discussion on the related scholarship in sociology of education.
Apart from briefly reviewing the implications and nuances of the term ‘knowledge society’, the editors clarify that full trust or emphasis on the generosity of the policy pronouncement of colonial state ‘could be misleading, for they tend to hide the “real” requirements and intentions of a colonial power’ (p. 12). The volume tends to distance itself away from the renewed historiographical trend represented by the work of Clive Whitehead (2003), which opposes the idea that the British as ‘cultural and economic imperialists needlessly exploited the colonies for their own aggrandizement’. Nonetheless, the essays included in this volume do not overlook the celebratory work of individual officials. In the same manner, the contributors are also sensitive about the different aspects—positive as well as regressive—of the other agencies—the reformers, nationalists, and the Christian Missionaries. At times, we also get differing analysis of certain historical aspects. For instance, the assessment of Gandhian legacy in the essays of Deepak Kumar (pp. 45–61) and Parimala V. Rao (pp. 351–73) seem to rely upon differing attitudes. Kumar considers Gandhian stand as complicated by moral concerns but ultimately appropriate for science; and Rao views Mahatma’s opposition to modern education as antithetical to the ‘reformist’ programme of female education.
Through a brilliant comparison of Syed Ahmad’s stand with the pan-Islamism of Jalaluddin Afgani’s approach, S. Irfan Habib (pp. 63–97) underlines how the former left a ‘message for present-day proponents of Islamic science or Hindu science, viz., that fanaticism and taassub, i.e. prejudice, can never lead to the promotion of knowledge’ (p. 75). Deepak Kumar (pp. 45–61) surveys the different approaches and attitudes to modern science in colonial India and the challenges present before it, such as the deficiency of infrastructure, the split between pure and applied science, the foreign medium of education and the paradoxical attitude or compromising behaviour of the scientists embedded within superstitions.
Suvobrata Sarkar (pp. 99–124) touches on a fundamental issue that consolidation and extension of the British Empire in India made the training of the local youth in some useful branches of science inevitable. However, proper scientific and technical education did not fit into the exigencies of the Raj. Hence, there emerged a ‘careless fusion between industrial and technical education’ (p. 116). Her following two arguments need further attention. In order to maintain the status quo within Indian society, the colonial state favoured ‘the teaching of crafts and agrarian skills over academic education’ (p. 100). Second, the colonised demanded ‘an academic education based on higher level of science and technology rather than a training only in crafts’ (p. 100). Of course, some of this substantiation comes from the other essays in the volume, but how true it is at a macro level.
For instance, through a case study of Lucknow Industrial School in the period between 1880 and 1920, Bidisha Dhar (pp. 257–78) shows that while the emphasis of the authorities was on advancing the colonial project by solely imparting manual training to the artisans, the latter wanted to learn drawing to become draughtsman and also pick up English even though it was taught there at a very rudimentary level. Owing to this contradiction, they seldom succeeded in their objective. Similarly, Savitri Das Sinha’s essay (pp. 279–303) shows how some of the philosophy of Vernacular Medical Education (VME) is coming back in the recent proposal for a three-and-a-half-year Bachelor of Rural Medicine (BRM) course even though there were serious problems that had plagued it in the colonial period. These problems included the emphasis on barely elementary knowledge skills in the mode of selection; teaching functional medicine within the shortest possible time and with the most economical eyes ignoring related academic aspects; inadequate facilities and overcrowding; hierarchy of ‘native doctor’ and ‘hospital assistant’; and the difficulties in the massive exercise of translation.
The essay by I.K. Chaudhary on the decline of Sanskrit learning in colonial Mithila, (pp. 125–44) corroborates the findings of other scholars of the demise of indigenous education in India caused by the colonial assault (Dharampal, 1983; and di Bona, 1983, etc.). Dilip Chavan’s essay (pp. 187–226) takes the issue further to suggest that the colonial state implemented differentiated language policy with regard to different institutions, which resulted in the uneven distribution of English education amongst different sections of Indian society.
Joseph Bara (pp. 147–85) studies different shifts, strategies and strands in the agency of Christian missionaries in the sphere of higher education in colonial India. He underlines complicated aspects of the triangular relations between missionaries, colonial state and indigenous response. Bara identifies certain shifts in missionaries’ emphasis from evangelicalism to propagation of solid knowledge, secularism, modern science and the Indianisation of Christianity. Nandita Khadria (pp. 228–55) has analysed the chequered history of the establishment of Gauhati University in context of the growth of Assamese identity in language and culture; its manifestation as a reaction to the dominance of Bengalis; and the expansion of school education in Assam creating thereby further demand for higher education. Sushil Prasad (pp. 306–22) studies the functioning of the central advisory board of education (CABE) between 1920 and 1947 to demonstrate that its ‘failure to achieve the set goals’ may be seen not only as a result of the constantly changing imperialist designs of the colonial state and other related factors of political economy of education, but also because education was not an important agenda in the struggle for independence.
Gulfishan Khan (pp. 375–98) scrutinises the ideas of Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah (1874–1965) who radically departed from all previous Muslim reformers as they favoured the education of women in terms of its familial requirement whilst he emphasised on their empowerment with literacy and integration into public life. In his advocacy of rights of women, there are parallels and contrasts with those of the Arab Muslim reformers of the liberal age; the indigenous pluralistic discursive context; and direct comparison with the social reform movements in other parts of India.
Tim Allender (pp. 325–50) underlines the contradiction that colonial state opened female teacher training institutions without paying adequate attention on school level education of girls. Further, whilst it attempted to engraft western knowledge on indigenous base and vernaculars in popular education, it sought to promote Victorian moral norms through female education, which of course drew a complex and mixed response from Indian feminism. Similarly, Ch. Radha Gayathri (pp. 399–421) brings out how Indian women and maternal health care education was largely left to philanthropy and local governments in colonial period resulting in financial constraints, vast gap between supply and demand, sub-standard services of ill-equipped civil hospitals for the urban population and maternity and child welfare (MCW) centres and indigenous dais for rural masses.
Parimala V. Rao (pp. 351–73) also approves that notwithstanding the variations in the attitude of individual administrators—such as Cubbon and Bowring—the colonial state did little to start schools for girls. Moreover, the pro-reform stand of the Maharaja and Diwan of Mysore is contrasted with the antithetical attitude of Congress-led nationalism. Sections of indigenous elites made significant efforts, however, as she demonstrates through a study of Mysore, the contestations between the reformers and the opponents were entwined around caste, linguistic and regional identities, though none of them could be seen as completely static and watertight categories. Parimala Rao’s paper is premised on the understanding that the historically dominant position of elites in pre-modern India had nothing to do with economic capital. She also believes that colonialism impoverished this elite economically, but it continued to possess its cultural capital. However, following this framework, one would like to understand in more unambiguous terms that in what respect it was a newer elite. Her answer is that ‘Modern education gave them a tool to synthesize the European Enlightenment ideas with the liberal and egalitarian part of the Indian tradition. They played a transformative role in the transition of the Indian society from a feudal mooring to a modern liberal society’ (p. 351). Why did they do so? Could the agency of reformers be entirely ascribed to modern/Western/colonial education? Was this education that progressive?