Connected and entangled histories: writing histories of education in the Indian context

Abstract

This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education. Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational institutions and methods were present in pre-colonial India: in this context, the article discusses the work of historians who researched indigenous Indian village schools, key to educational transmission until the early nineteenth century. The educational work of the nationalist leader M.K. Gandhi inflected the work of such educational historians. The article devotes some attention to ways in which twentieth-century ‘new education’ reinvented aspects of pre-colonial South Asian education. Marxist, feminist, Dalit and Subaltern historians of education have analysed the differential and hierarchised spread of ‘western’ education in South Asia. Nonetheless, this article shows how the educational agency of Dalits, women, peasants and working people has been analysed by scholars. The article then examines recent scholarship which views the origins and growth of ‘western’ education in South Asia in the framework of transcultural transactions. It ends from the vantage point of connected and entangled histories of education, looking beyond the unit of the nation state.

Keywords:

• India
• connected history
• Gandhi
• education
• transcultural

Notes

¹ Some of the key debates in this historiography can be found in, for example, Hayden Bellenoit, “Paper, Pens and Power between Empires in North India, 1750–1850,” South Asian History and Culture 3, no. 3 (2012): 348–72, and in “Introduction: Perspectives Old and New,” in New Perspectives in the History of Indian Education, ed. Parimala V. Rao (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014), 1–42.

² Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, address given at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, London, 20 October 1931, quoted in Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (1983; repr., Mapusa: Other India Press, 2000), 6.

³ This correspondence and the debate between Hartog and Gandhi are excerpted at length in Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree, 346–383.

⁴ Philip Hartog, Some Aspects of Indian Education Past and Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939).

⁵ On G.W. Leitner’s educational reforms in Punjab, including his work to impart higher educational degrees taught in local languages of India, see Tim Allender, “Bad Language in the Raj: The ‘Frightful Encumbrance’ of Gottlieb Leitner, 1865–1888,” Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 3 (2007): 383–403. For a very critical analysis of the development of British colonial educational policy in north India in the course of the nineteenth century, see Tim Allender, “Surrendering a Colonial Domain: Educating North India, 1854–1890,” History of Education 36, no. 1 (2007): 45–63.

⁶ Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree, 18.

⁷ For such recent scholarship, see, for example, Jana Tschurenev, “A Colonial Experiment in Education: Madras 1789–1896,” in Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post) Colonial Education, ed. Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, and Kate Rousmaniere (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 105–20.

⁸ Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree, 20.

⁹ Ibid. 21.

¹⁰ See Krishna Kumar, Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas (1991; repr., New Delhi: SAGE, 2005).

¹¹ Parimala V. Rao, “Compulsory Education and the Political Leadership in Colonial India, 1840–1947,” in New Perspectives in the History of Indian Education, 151–75.

¹² Parimala V. Rao, Foundations of Tilak’s Nationalism: Discrimination, Education and Hindutva (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010).

¹³ Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,” in Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989), 233–53.

¹⁴ Eleanor Zelliot, “Experiments in Dalit Education: Maharashtra, 1850–1947,” in Education and the Disprivileged: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century India, ed. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2002), 35–49; Eleanor Zelliot, “Dalit Initiatives in Education, 1880–1892,” in New Perspectives in the History of Indian Education, 45–67.

¹⁵ Padma Velaskar, “Education for Liberation: Ambedkar’s Thought and Dalit Women’s Perspectives,” Contemporary Education Dialogue 9, no. 2 (2012): 245–71.

¹⁶ Ranajit Guha uses the Concise Oxford Dictionary definition of the word “subaltern” as “of inferior rank” (vii) to explicate the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s notion of subaltern groups (those groups in society who are subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes) strongly inflected the work of these historians. See Ranajit Guha, preface to Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), vii–viii.

¹⁷ Bernard S. Cohn, “The Command of Language and the Language of Command,” Subaltern Studies IV: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 276–329.

¹⁸ Bhattacharya, Education and the Disprivileged; see articles in this volume such as that by Zelliot mentioned in footnote 7, and Joseph Bara, “Tribal Education, the Colonial State and Christian Missionaries: Chotanagpur, 1839–1870,” in Education and the Disprivileged, 123–152. See also Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, The Contested Terrain: Perspectives on Education in India (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 1998).

¹⁹ Mushirul Hasan, “‘Notre Eminent Contemporain’: Assessing Syed Ahmad Khan's Reformist Agenda,” Economic and Political Weekly 33, no. 19 (May 9–15, 1998): 1077–1081.

²⁰ Syed Ahmed Khan, A Voyage to Modernism, trans. and ed. Mushirul Hasan and Nishat Zaidi (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2011).

²¹ S. Irfan Habib, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and the National Education System (New Delhi: National University for Educational Planning and Administration, 2010).

²² Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, B.M. Sankhdher, Joseph Bara, and Yagati Chinna Rao, eds., The Development of Women’s Education in India: A Collection of Documents 1850–1920 (New Delhi: Kanishka 2001).

²³ See Tanika Sarkar, Words to Win: The Making of Amar Jiban, a Modern Autobiography (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1999).

²⁴ See, for example, Meera Kosambi, “A Window in the Prison-House: Women’s Education and the Politics of Social Reform in Nineteenth Century Western India,” History of Education 29, no. 5 (2000): 429–42.

²⁵ Ramabai Saraswati, and Meera Kosambi, Pandita Ramabai through Her Own Words: Selected Works (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).

²⁶ Meera Kosambi, Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007).

²⁷ Meera Kosambi, Women Writing Gender: Marathi Fiction Before Independence (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2012).

²⁸ Ramabai Saraswati, Returning the American Gaze: Pandita Ramabai’s The Peoples of the United States, ed. and trans. Meera Kosambi (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003).

²⁹ Christopher Alan Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

³⁰ Christopher Alan Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

³¹ See, for example, Connecting Histories of Education; see Mary Hilton, “A Trans-Cultural Transaction: William Carey’s Baptist Mission, the Monitorial Method and the Bengali Renaissance,” in Connecting Histories of Education, 85–104; Simone Holzwarth, “A New Education for ‘Young India’: Exploring Nai Talim from the Perspective of a Connected History,” in Connecting Histories of Education, 124–39; Tim Allender, “Transcending the Centre-Periphery Paradigm: Loreto teaching in India, 1842–2010,” in Connecting Histories Of Education, 227–43.

³² See, in this context, Eckhardt Fuchs, “Trends in Historical and Educational Scholarship,” in Connecting Histories of Education, 11–26.

³³ Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals across Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).

³⁴ Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, 290.