Contextualising Colonial Education from a Historiographical Perspective in the Nineteenth Century: Institutions and Policies

The real power of those who built colonial empires lay less in their guns than in the educational systems they introduced: the gun coerces the body but the school bewitches the mind.

—Cheik Hamidou Kane1

Establishment of authority in modern times requires control over instruments and institutions of knowledge. The colonial rule, more than any other system of governance, therefore, requires control over the knowledge system of the colonised population. The colonisers, as the critiques of Orientalist thinking have pointed out, try and constitute an entire knowledge system among the colonised through which the colonial subjects see themselves in the light of the knowledge produced by the colonial rulers and their canons and institutions which in essence legitimised the colonial rule. Education in modern India has been a prime example of such colonial efforts at control over knowledge and the institutions which produced and disseminated them. ²

The colonisers, as the critique of the works of Orientalists have pointed out, tried to constitute an entire knowledge system among the colonised, through which the colonial subjects would see themselves in the light of the knowledge produced by the colonial rulers and their canons and institutions, which in essence legitimised the colonial rule. ³ British imperial educational measures began in India in 1813 and the intent was to encourage both Oriental learning and Western scientific learning. Some of the landmark policies were the Charter Act of 1813, Macaulay Minute of 1835, Wood’s Despatch of 1854, the University Act of 1857, the General Report on Education of 1886 and Curzon’s University Act of 1905. In this context, the French politician Joseph Chailley, examining the British imperial educational measures in India for the benefit of the French colonial policymakers, remarked that ‘All colonizing nations are sooner or later faced with the problem of the education of the natives. It is a grave, a difficult, one may say a distressing, problem which cannot be evaded and which involves a conflict between interest and conscience’. ⁴ John Marriot, a British historian writing two decades later in 1932, has also argued along similar lines and said that ‘education was, of all the problems that have confronted the British Government in India, perhaps the most tangled and obstinate’. ⁵ On a more forthright note, the Tanzanian thinker Walter Rodney in the post-colonial context has argued that colonial teaching aimed at instilling a conscious feeling of submissiveness for all that was European and Capitalist. He said,

Colonial schooling was education for subordination, exploitation, the creation of mental confusion… an instrument to serve the European capitalist class in its exploitation of Africa. Whatever colonial educators thought or did could not change that basic fact… with regard to colonial education policy one comes closest to finding the elements of conscious planning by a group of Europeans to control the destiny of millions of Africans. ⁶

Samir Amin, the Egyptian-French Marxian economist, has argued that colonial imparting of knowledge had two fundamental aims: the obliteration of indigenous system of learning with an aim at destroying the native culture and consciousness and creation of a privileged section of people who would essentially be subordinate servants.

The main purpose of educating this group was neither to train a bourgeoisie in the likeness of that of the metropolitan country, nor to train scientists and technicians capable of developing technology, but only to produce individuals alienated by the very content of what they had been taught deliberately (a foreign language, the history of the metropolitan country, etc.). Neither the content of this education nor the quantity of men trained in this way could lead to any autonomous development of society. ⁷

Martin Carnoy, also writing in the 1970s, has argued along similar lines and said that by definition, imperialism was meant to be the supremacy of the strong over the weak. Thereby, meaning that imperial educational measures were formulated with the intention to colonise or dominate the intellect of native populaces. ⁸

The British imperial educational measures started in India in the beginning of the nineteenth century, nonetheless it is appropriate here to bring about the connection between British imperial educational measures in India and that which afterwards got formulated and implemented in Africa and other parts of the imperial empire. J.S. Furnivall has said that ‘an examination of educational policy and practice in tropical dependencies must start from India, for this has led the way.’ ⁹ Eric Ashby has also said that the case of India was always quoted by the advocates of the British Colonial Office as it debated on educational measures leading to the formulation of its policy throughout the interwar years and primarily in the establishing of new institutions of higher education in Africa after 1945. ¹⁰

The state of affairs started changing with coming of European missionaries from the 1820s. Eric Stokes in his book English Utilitarianism and India clearly enunciates the views of the Clapham sect—namely, Charles Grant, Zachary Macaulay, William Wilberforce and others. The religious practices of India, their arts, handicrafts, agricultural practices, laws and so on were observed with contempt/derision. The British embarked on a mission to make the Indian mind receptive of Christian truth, but all misconceptions needed to be dispelled first. Education was the least conspicuous way of evangelising, the least likely to cause political and social disturbances. They further argued that education would also benefit trade and commerce in the longer run. To quote Charles Grant: ‘In every progressive step of this work, we shall also serve the original design with which we visited India, that design is still so important to this country—the extension of its commerce’. ¹¹

By the 1820s and 1830s, the British administrative policy was influenced by a new spirit in this direction. Now they firmly believed in establishing the British government as an English government, instead of masquerading as a trading company. Viceroy William Bentinck, legal member of his council Thomas Macaulay and political secretary Charles Trevelyan passionately supported and promoted this new spirit. To substantiate a quote from Trevelyan’s notes Education of India would be apt here:

The political education of a nation is a work of time and while it is in progress, we shall be as safe as it will be possible for us to be. The natives will not rise against us. We shall stoop to raise them…. the national activity will be fully and harmlessly employed in acquiring and diffusing European knowledge and in nationalizing European institutions. The educated classes, knowing that the elevation of this country on these principles can only be worked out under our protection, will naturally cling to us. ¹²

Visalakshi Menon draws our attention to the efforts made by the British administration, missionaries and philanthropes in setting up educational institutions in India in general, and in UP in particular. ¹³ She says that the British were not interested in meeting the educational needs of the masses. They were only interested in educating the upper crust of the Indian society so that the British could have lower rank administrative support to govern India smoothly. The British believed in the trickledown theory, that is, after receiving the education the upper crust would educate the masses. She further says that the British were not interested in spending more than a very small amount on educating the Indian masses. The missionaries and philanthropes tried their best to establish many important institutions in UP. She talks about individuals like Karamat Hussain who along with others established the Crosthwaite School in Allahabad.

Presenting the same argument in the specific context of science education, Deepak Kumar gives a detailed account of how Indian scientists had to face hindrances and difficulties during the colonial period. ¹⁴ He points out that the British never wanted the Indians to become good scientists or engineers. They needed the Indian as subordinate assistants to help them in the laboratory and in other situation. The British established the first engineering college in Roorkee where no specialised branch of technology was taught, and only a very basic technological knowledge was imparted. If any Indian wanted to go for higher education in the field, they were not given laboratory or proper funding to assist them in their endeavour.

A dimension that is overridden by the emphasis on colonial education is the indigenous systems that prevailed in India. Dharampal talks about the educational situation in India in the eighteenth century. ¹⁵ He says that the Indian indigenous education system was very elaborate and diverse at this time. The British essentially destroyed the indigenous education system completely over the colonial period. He also talks about the indigenous education system being inclusive in nature. He focuses extensively on the funding agencies of the institutions and the subjects taught. He also highlights how the funding dried-up as the East India Company started spreading its roots and, in the process, destroyed the beautiful tree. Other scholars such as Muhammad Sahidullah and Kazi Din Muhammad have shown how the traditional system of education in Bengal, the tols and pathshalas, were almost decimated by the colonial system. ¹⁶

In these decimations of the institutions, one saw a pattern: a colonial pattern, a completely new set of schools dependent on the state funding and geared towards employment in the government became the order. Thus, it was, in many senses a subservient education system. Many historians have shown that these institutions or, for example, as Deepak Kumar has shown, the institutions of science, not only facilitated a completely distant colonial mode of approaching knowledge but also impeded innovations.

Nita Kumar analyses the dissemination of knowledge as it played itself out through the case study of Banaras, between 1850 and 1950. ¹⁷ Through her writings she tries to remind us that, before modern schools were normalised in India, they were bizarre new buildings, which meant little for commoners and signified the uncomfortable presence of British rule. For our better comprehension, she narrates in distinct ways the whole scenario in which different strata of society, professional groups, and women first opposed and then integrated the new approach of knowledge dissemination that was the colonial school system.

Kumar puts forward the argument that colonial schooling system seemed to be a distinctive and eccentric institutional system in the socio-cultural backdrop of British India. For the first time in India that a single agency, the British state, wanted to regulate and control the social reproduction of all the populace, and in the process, as Kumar shows ‘rendering local truths, ways of life, cosmologies, epistemologies, logics and ethics progressively marginal’. ¹⁸ Further, she says that this sole agency was entrusted the task of formulating a syllabus that the colonial government expected that the whole population of the empire would learn. Thus, the knowledge being disseminated turned out to be homogenised and so not differentiated for each distinct social group or area according to their needs as it used to be previously. Simultaneously, the curriculum was conceptualised in a manner that led to a split between useful knowledge, ‘what they considered scientific knowledge and “culture”, resulting in a crude objectification of ways of life’ ¹⁹ and belief systems that had up until then been rooted in all facets of social existence. The prerequisite of colonial modern schooling was an independent school structure, mostly newly introduced for the single purpose of establishing a government or government-aided school. Kumar talks about the cultural and social transformative effect and influence that this structure acquires, manifesting itself as a material object both symbolically and literally, detaching the process of knowledge dissemination from the day-to-day lives of learners. Kumar also points out how the whole process of knowledge dissemination leads to the emergence of an unparalleled divide between school and home.

Radha Gayathri has examined women’s education in colonial North India, and has highlighted the efforts of the Arya Samaj and missionaries in establishing educational institutions for girls and women. Focusing on the medical institutions established during the colonial period in North India, she elaborates on the difficulties of getting girl students for medical studies as it was time consuming and also no parents wanted to send their daughters to these institutions initially. Apart from longer duration of the course, the fee was also high and so it was very difficult to convince the parents to send their daughters for medical education.

In all these writings, we find that the colonial education was premised on the colonial idea of the backwardness of Indian society and the concern of how to rule the colonial population. And here, it is important to revisit the authoritative analysis of colonialism by various historians.

Colonisation as a mode of production, in Bipan Chandra’s analysis, comes into operation in order to integrate and entangle the colony’s economy and society to the metropolis coloniser in the context of the expansion of world capitalism. ²⁰ The colonial competition in India was intense in the eighteenth century when the British and the French competed for supremacy over the subcontinent, resulting in the defeat of the French by the end of the eighteenth century. The changing mode of the colonial policies went along with changing modes of exploitation so vividly explained by the early nationalists in their critique of the colonial rule. ²¹ In India, the authority of the British government in this second phase of the three phases of colonialism as outlined by Chandra was restrained by the diversity of Indian society. The British colonial knowledge production about India, its traditions and its history were assumed from the liberal imperialist view of bringing about a positive transformation of the colony. ²²

While colonial ascendancy led to increasing decline of the hitherto existing forms of governance, there was also evolution of a new set of institutions, namely the schools set up by the colonial administration and later on by the church missionaries and other philanthropes. This also meant that India witnessed the new and ‘modern’ forms of education being brought in through these schools.

This was also the period of a new development. While Britain was experiencing a rise in its income and increasing pace of industrialisation, the Indian leadership began to talk about the poverty and misery that stalk India. It is this asymmetry that Dadabhai Naoroji described through his drain theory. Irfan Habib and Aditya Mukherjee have shown how India in fact contributed to the Industrial revolution in Britain by not only supplying raw material but also massive capital. As has been pointed out, the massive system of economic exploitation also coincided with coming up of educational structures in India, that is, the development of school and college education. From Macaulay’s Minutes to Charles Grants’ Note on it, the mood of the British rulers was to start institution at all levels for small numbers. As has been noted by many scholars, even this very small number of institutions was charged with ideological dissemination.

A very common argument in the Indian colonial context is about the advantages of British rule, and always attention is drawn through these arguments on the education system introduced by the British. It is said that Western colonial ascendancy coincided with the growth of modern Western knowledge; in turn the latter served as an apparatus of the former to establish British authority in obvious ways. The new education system resulted in integrating more subjects of study and also a change in the pedagogical foundation of education.

Many scholars have talked about the legitimacy which the colonial institutions and colonial knowledge dissemination processes provided to the British Empire. The cultural turn in history writing has also led to a move away from any ‘instrumental’ pinning of responsibility on the British colonisers, and towards a more nuanced reading of the multifarious ideological strands in the context of colonial education. Sanjay Seth tries to identify and explore the defining themes in British educational policies and ideologies in British India. ²³ His main premise is concentrated around the categories of selfhood, subjectivity and gender. The focus of his work centres around the issues of gender, selfhood and subjectivity. He bases his study on the relation between theories of knowledge embedded in different cultural and historical mores. He tries to underline the link between several of the themes and discourses in colonial knowledge with broader deliberations and negotiations of that period such as ‘symbolic status of women’ in Indian nationalist discourse. ²⁴

Michael S. Dodson has formulated his arguments on colonial education based on archival sources and published colonial works. ²⁵ His work is centred around a specific time period, 1770–1880, and on a specific institution—the Benares Sanskrit College. Javed Majeed, reviewing the works of both Dodson and Seth on colonial education in India and the different perspectives taken by them to study the issue, raises several points. ²⁶ While for Dodson, the turning point as far as British policy on education in the colony is the Charter Act of 1813, for Seth, it is the mid-nineteenth century colonial enactments in terms of policy and institutions that led to a clear-cut colonial education system. Majeed appears to agree with Dodson’s analysis that Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Education of 1835 has been overemphasised in scholarship on colonial education, and that instead a more nuanced position in which Macaulay may be seen as one among others in the ‘pedagogic landscape of India’ may be appropriate in this regard.

Gauri Viswanathan talks about the institutions, practice and philosophy behind the introduction of English studies in India under colonial administration. ²⁷ She discusses the ideological and political factors leading to the commencement of English instruction in colonial India. She also talks about the association between culture and power and how cultural hegemony functions by consent precedes physical subjugation by force. She analyses the shifts in the educational curriculum and tries to focus on the linkage between such developments and discussions on the intentions of English learning amongst the colonial bureaucrats and also between missionaries and colonial administrators. She says that colonial bureaucrats initiated English learning in India in the 1820s to develop the moral fabric of the Indians. As Britain implemented a policy of religious non-involvement, Christian philosophies could not be imparted directly in India, as was done in Britain. To circumvent this, British bureaucrats began teaching English literature, imbued with Christian images, for government-run schools. Viswanathan categorically demonstrates through her work that it is fundamental to assess the discourse and the context of the formulation of educational policies to better comprehend educational history of colonial India.

In conclusion, it can be said that despite the efforts to take the colonial context out of colonial education, it appears clear that without situating the institutionalisation and transformations in this field within the changing phases of colonialism, we would not be able to comprehend the processes at work. In fact, the colonial education was premised on the colonial idea of Indian society, and the main concern for them was how to rule the colonial population.