‘The power of mantras’: postcoloniality, education and development

Abstract

The discourse of development or modernization and of ‘national integration’ or ‘nation‐building’ in India is inseparable from issues surrounding education and culture and their incorporation in definitions forged during colonialism. In this article I look primarily at the Kothari Commission Report (KCR) of 1964–66 and the New Policy on Education (NPE) proposals of 1986. These two documents, between them, chart the entire discursive territory of projected developments in postcolonial India. Ambitious in conception, they are blueprints for the transformation of a society. I focus on the relation between the NPE and KCR as evidence of policy and education in India, and attempt to relate them to previous proposals by Gandhi and others and to my own theoretical preoccupations, particularly those regarding discourse and counter‐players.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Brian Street and to the anonymous referees for providing comments for revision that have much benefited this article.

Notes

1. For current developments on this issue, see Thakore, 2004. Available online at: http://www.indiatogether.org/2004/dec/edu‐reform.htm

2. De Certeau in his The practice of everday life theorizes the difference between ‘place’ and ‘space’ (1984, pp. 29–42). Place, in simple terms, is the terrain where power is managed within its own boundaries. There is a strong sense of possession and policing of power. Space, however, is the transgressive creation of the powerless whereby deviance and subversion can take place within the demarcated place managed by the powerful.

3. Hindu Mahasabha, a Hindu nationalist organization, was founded in 1915 to counter the Muslim League and the secular Indian National Congress. It brought together the diverse local Hindu movements which had roots in North Indian public life.

4. This seems to be part of a wider general pattern. For instance, in Iran, similar arguments were put forward in the mid‐19th century (Arasteh, 1962). I am grateful to Brian Street for pointing this out to me.

5. Posing the question of whether education is for development or domination, Martin Conroy argues that:

There may be an inherent contradiction as well between the function of an educational system as seen by metropole educators and its function in the dependent society. Neoclassical development theory views schooling as being a ‘liberating’ process, in which the child is transformed from a ‘traditional’ individual to a ‘modern’ one. This transition is supposed to enable the child to be creative as well as functional. Schooling is also supposed to enable the graduate to contribute to the economy, polity, and society. But in dependency theory, the transformation that takes place in school cannot be liberating, since a person is simply changed from one role in a dependent system to a different role in the same system. (1974, p. 56)

6. In other words, one is arguing that we play, as Paul Feyerabend phrases it (not necessarily suggests), the ‘game of Reason’. ‘An anarchist is like an undercover agent who plays the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason (Truth, Honesty, Justice, and so on)’ (1975, pp. 32–33).

7. The ‘post’ here serves a similar function to the ‘post’ in postcolonialism, as theorized by Bhabha when he says that it must not be seen to add up but to add to (1990).