Abstract
For students of education, the study of the history of education often involves going through a chronology of events, facts, commission reports, and certain assertions and platitudes, which rarely add anything valuable in terms of training about how to understand education in a historical context. Education policymakers and teacher training institutions remain preoccupied with the immediate. In the context of our collective historical amnesia about how our notions of self, identity and citizenship were shaped by the experience of colonialism, it is no wonder that we hardly worry about the colonial legacy of education. The historiography of colonial education remains an underdeveloped area of research, even as historians of colonial India continue to explore hitherto little-used or little-known sources and offer fresh insights about the colonial period. It is against this backdrop that the volume under review gains significance, in addition to a variety of other reasons, which are discussed next.
This book has nine essays divided into two parts and preceded by a long introduction by the volume editor, Parimala V. Rao. Rao engages with the existing historiography of colonial education and classifies it as imperialist, anti-imperialist, post-modern and nationalist, with Bruce T. McCully, Martin Carnoy, Gauri Viswanathan and Krishna Kumar representing each category respectively. Rao’s essay is a scathing critique of ‘mutually exclusive, incompatible and impermeable’ binaries of East–West, coloniser–colonised and European–non-European (pp. 2–3) that characterise these ‘old perspectives’. This critique extends to other binaries like tradition–modernity, written–oral and colonial–anti-colonial. In contrast, Rao presents the ‘new perspective’ which reverts to ‘actual history-writing called narrative and chronological history’, which ‘does not ‘create [a] past to suit a theory’, which faithfully records ‘an historical event’ and gives voice to the maginalised (p. 30). Her discussion raises a series of questions about the supposed monopoly of the colonial state over colonial education, the significance of contesting voices among the colonial rulers, the agency of Indians and the role of missionaries.
Rao’s narration of the history of education in colonial India hinges on not only the continuities of pre-British practices in the colonial period and in colonial schools, but also on divergences between colonial rhetoric and actual practice, as well as a complex exchange of ideas among Indian and European interlocutors. She argues that Indians did not aspire for an instrumentalist use of English, but rather yearned for ‘new knowledge’, that ‘people simply take what they want and reject what they do not want’ and that ‘appreciation of knowledge was a continuation of the pre-existing intellectual curiosity’ (pp. 21–22). For Rao, the rupture between pre-colonial and colonial education was only a matter of ‘structure’ and ‘not essence’ (p. 22).
One can discern several unresolved tensions in this chapter. One such tension is how to think about human agency in the face of structural constraints. At a few places, Rao celebrates the agency of Indians in the pre-colonial and colonial periods, as is evident in the above-mentioned quotes. Elsewhere, she questions the role of ‘control’ in a ‘highly stratified caste society’ (p. 7). Similarly, her assertion that pre-colonial and colonial education did not differ in ‘essence’ (p. 22) stands in contrast to her later discussion about ‘representation’ in the context of ‘nation’, and the distinction made between the ‘pre-modern feudal order’ and the ‘modern’ (p. 36). Contemporary historiography of colonial education recognises continuities between pre-colonial and colonial education, but to simply assess these continuities with reference to a yearning for knowledge ignores the multiple intentions and the power effects of colonial education and of the colonial state. Further, in a few cases, Rao seems to simplify the positions of scholars whom she is criticising. For example, Krishna Kumar is not a ‘nationalist’ who operates through the binary of colonialism versus nationalism. His work, Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas, which is examined by Rao, also points to homonymy between colonial and nationalist discourse. One feels a sense of lost opportunity, as Rao was moving creatively beyond the binaries towards pointing out and investigating the possibilities of exchange, learning and appreciation, as well as the criticality of knowledge and cultural traditions.
In Part I, ‘Forms of Discrimination in Education’, two chapters each are organised around the categories of caste and gender.
Eleanor Zelliot documents a series of Dalit initiatives in education in different parts of India from the 1880s to 1992. Here, the history of education of Dalits is no longer confined to the efforts of the colonial and post-colonial state, nor to the activities of missionaries or upper-caste social reformers. Zelliot brings to the fore Dalit actors, institutions (schools, libraries, night schools and hostels) and societies. She points to the use of the print media, and examines the intersection with existing religious practices and beliefs and how these made a difference to the self-definition, self-identity and action of Dalit students.
The next chapter by Laura Dudley Jenkins on historically ‘Dalit colleges’ compares these institutions with racially segregated colleges for Blacks in South Africa and for African Americans in the United States (US) to ask whether these integrated educational institutions serve the historical function performed by Dalit institutions in India. Jenkins notes that these institutions provided access to knowledge, resources and opportunities to members of historically marginalised groups, nurtured leaders and fostered extensive alumni networks within the community. In contrast to the experiences of discrimination and abuse in other educational institutions, integrated educational institutions created a supportive educational space that developed self-confidence, pride in one’s identity and belief in equality. The continuing stigmatisation of Dalit institutions and of their alumni shows that unique historical origins are insufficient to counter historically accumulated inequities. In this case, the history of education can offer us a ‘usable past’ (McCulloch, 2011) to address contemporary issues of policy and social justice.
The next chapter by Radha Gayathri examines the works of seven women writers, most of whom lived through the nineteenth century, to explicate how these individuals challenged gender constructs, images, norms and prevailing gendered social practices. She elaborates how the colonial state, reformist organisations and the nationalist elite came together to assign a new significance to women’s education and how women’s education found an important place and justification in the writings of these women. What is intriguing in this chapter is the absence of any recognition that education is not always a liberating force, but may also reproduce social inequalities and hierarchies, or may rework patriarchy in new ways.
In the next chapter, Mahima Manchanda compares two educational institutions for girls established in the last decade of the nineteenth century in Punjab. In this fascinating study of the Sikh Kanya Mahavidyalaya (SKV), founded by Bhai Takht Singh, and the Kanya Mahavidyalaya (KV), established by the Arya Samaj, Manchanda examines the complex interplay of forces influencing colonial schools, religious and linguistic identities, framing of self and other, gender politics, and anxieties about missionary schooling, proselytisation and caste status. She shows how all these forces shaped the curricula and subjects considered desirable or undesirable, relevant or irrelevant, for girls.
The five chapters that comprise Part II of the volume, ‘Political Context of Education’, focus on the ideas, writings and initiatives of political leaders and missionaries in diverse settings. In an absorbing essay, which testifies to her deep knowledge and sensitive use of archival sources to develop an argument, Parimala V. Rao details shifts in the attitudes of British colonial officials towards the expansion of education for the masses. She eloquently describes how the idea of mass education stirred anxieties among the Indian upper-caste landed gentry about the possibilities of their entrenched hierarchical status being challenged and led to their opposition to proposals of compulsory education and fee exemption, and how these privileged groups drew on categories of national culture and claims to represent nationalist opinion. Rao uses the frame of the ‘nation’s interest’ towards the end of the chapter to examine how Indian political leadership gave primacy to its ‘caste and class’ interests (p. 175). This frame not only underscores the historical resilience of the trope of the nation but also signals the possibilities of inclusive nationalism.
In his richly textured and nuanced essay, Hayden Bellenoit problematises the often-repeated assertion that missionaries were the handmaidens and agents of colonialism. With his focus on the activities of the Anglican missionary societies in the United Provinces during 1880–1920, Bellenoit builds a credible case distinguishing between colonial officials and missionary functionaries and teachers. The latter were in constant interaction and conversation with students, local communities and religious heads, and were far less racist, unlike the former. Colonial officials were out of touch with local sensibilities and feelings, as well as with emerging nationalist ideas and aspirations. They employed surveillance in an endeavour to secure the raj. Bellenoit presents sufficient archival material to convince readers that missionaries indulged in ‘pedagogical patriotism’, provided tacit and open support to Indian nationalism and themselves critiqued colonial policies. However, Bellenoit fails to use this intellectual dexterity of distinguishing between colonial bureaucrats and missionaries to critically engage with the forms, tenor, nature, character and social composition of Indian nationalism and the students who were part of the nationalist movement. This issue is still left unexamined.
Simone Holzwarth and Veronica Oelsner compare the proposals and policies of the Argentine President, Peron, and the Indian nationalist leader, Gandhi, through the frame of vocational education. They examine the values, convictions, concepts of work and education, global influences and symbolic and institutional constructions that informed vocational education in the schemes of Peron and Gandhi, and what led to the eventual discontinuation of these programmes and projects.
Suresh Chandra Ghosh situates the university reforms introduced by the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, in the context of previous histories of the establishment and functioning of universities; the role of their senates, fellows and affiliated colleges; and the bitter confrontation over the adoption of a textbook, Citizen of India, by a former colonial official, in schools across the country. Then, the theatre of action shifts to the appointment of the vice chancellor of Calcutta University as an aide tasked with carrying out Curzon’s intention of redesigning the university. The tale is eerily similar to contemporary events in the arena of higher education reforms in India.
The last chapter, by Preeti (she uses only one name), is a well-informed and insightful essay on the changes in the indigenous system of schooling in Punjab in the second half of the nineteenth century and meticulously details the different phases of colonial politics concerning textbooks and school subjects. Her wide ambit of enquiry includes the social composition of students and disciplining through examination, inspection, time table and physical and sanitary education to point out the changing nature of disparities and hierarchies within the field of education. But this focus on the distinct ‘technologies of education’ leaves little space for reading these shifts in relation to the wider social changes and forces at work in colonial Punjab.
This volume is a welcome addition to not only the literature on the history of education in general, but also the literature on comparative education and education in colonial India in particular. It addresses questions that are being debated in the contemporary context as well. It offers a wide range of comparisons across space and time, as well as of social groups. It lives up to its promise of paying attention to the voices that are often unheard, although the domain of the ‘political’ examined here is still one of high or official politics. Taken together, the essays offer diverse theoretical, methodological and historiographical perspectives on the history of education in British India. The contributors examine a wide range of historical sources and offer insightful interpretations in lucid language, making the writing accessible to both scholars and general readers.