Education and the Constitution of the Contested Social-National: A Conceptual Excursus

This article, with its main focus on the colonial period, highlights two interrelated aspects as far as education and the constitution of the social are concerned: (a) the centrality of the state in the constitution of the social through the instrumentality of education, and (b) a deep and continuing contestation of the intermeshing of the social and the national. Whereas colonial modern education offered nationalist elites an opportunity to conceive the social qua national, the same impetus gave rise to the very questioning of the national by the subaltern thinkers. While nationalist elites invariably drew upon the conceptual resources of the high culture emanating from Sanskritic intellectual traditions to forge and forage an oppositional discourse against colonial rule, the subaltern thinkers incessantly questioned the feigned inclusivity of the nationalist discourse owing to its lack of engagement with the social question of the day. By demonstrating the deep-seated fault lines of the nationalist imagination of India, they brought to the fore such uncomfortable questions that undermined the supposed historical roots of the Indian nation. The subaltern thinkers’ privileging of the urgency of the social question, as against that of the nationalists’ political one, is symptomatic of this cavernous conceptual divide, nay, competing imaginations of the national and the social. Viewed thus, the larger ideational movement from the colonial-modern to the national-modern has been implicated in the fractious conceptualisation of the social. And, modern education has been the seeding ground for these contending visions of the social, and by implication, the national. As a consequence, it would be a trifle premature to assert the fraying role of the state in the shaping of the social simply because the field of education appears hospitable to a range of non-state actors. By mainly drawing upon the works of Sudipto Kaviraj, this article is a preliminary attempt to engage with the conceptual landscapes of the colonial-modern and the social-national in its analysis of the state apparatus and practices of regulating the educational discourse in India.