Politics of Education in Colonial India

Krishna Kumar

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317325628
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

In retracting from the popular view that India's modern educational policy was shaped almost entirely by Macaulay, this incisive work reveals the complex ideological and institutional rubric of the colonial educational system. It examines its wide-ranging and lasting impact on curriculum, pedagogy, textbooks, teachers' role and status, and indigenous forms of knowledge. Recounting the nationalist response to educational reforms, the book reinforces three major quests: justice as expressed in the demand for equal educational opportunities for the lower castes; self-identity as manifest in the urge to define India's educational needs from within its own cultural repertoire; and the idea of progress based on industrialization.

An exceptional contribution to educational theory, including a nuanced discussion of caste, gender and girls' education, this book will be invaluable to teachers, scholars and students of education, modern Indian history and sociology of education, and policy makers.

Part I

Dynamics of Colonization

II

Colonial Citizen as an Educational Ideal

We owe the concept of an educational ideal as a means of historical inquiry to Mannheim. He defined it as ‘a residue of attitudes, principles and forms of behaviour’ which shapes educational aims and arrangements in a period of history (Mannheim and Stewart 1962: 39). This concept enabled him to debunk the notion — which still prevails — that education has certain universal and eternal aims. He was able to demonstrate that educational aims have a historical character, that they change as much as the guiding ideals of other cultural activities change over time. The concept of an educational ideal also served Mannheim as a method of analysis. He used it both for historical investigations and for participating in the discussion of educational aims in his own day. I intend to use the concept as a means to identify an organizing principle in Indian colonial education during the nineteenth century.

The customary statement that colonial education was ‘aimed’ at producing clerks is both theoretically feeble and historically untenable. Its theoretical weakness lies in the fact that it does not help us distinguish between the ideas underlying the educational system and its practical purposes. But even if one saw it as a statement about the immediate outcomes of colonial education, one finds little evidence to support it. Colonial education produced political leaders, professional men and intellectuals, not just office clerks. No simple model or statement will help us understand why colonial education had the kinds of effects it had. It socialized many into colonial values; at the same time, it turned many of its products against those values. The rejection of colonial education may not have been sustained for long periods, but the broader rejection of colonial rule was sustained and we cannot ignore the role of education in inspiring this rejection. A plain, instrumentalist view of colonial education — as a factory producing clerks — prevents us from seeing this aspect of nineteenth-century Indian history. It also stops us from appreciating the contradictions in which the freedom struggle was caught. One contradiction related to the perception of the uneducated population as an object of moral improvement. On this matter, there existed a strange homonymy between colonial and anti-colonial discourses on education. To make sense of this homonymy against the broader context of the role of education in the nationalist struggle, we need a more adequate model than exists at present. Such a model should have the capacity to accommodate the contradictions that were inherent in the vision of colonial education as well as those that became manifest in its consequences.

PURSUIT OF ORDER

At the heart of the colonial enterprise was the adult–child relationship. The colonizer took the role of the adult, and the native became the child. This adult–child relationship entailed an educational task. The colonial master saw it as his responsibility to initiate the native into new ways of acting and thinking. Like the little elephant Babar in the children’s series of that name, some of the natives had to be educated so that they could be civilized according to the master’s idea.¹ This may be a simplistic summary, but it does capture the core agenda of colonial rule in education. The agenda was to train the native to become a citizen. Writing in The Citizen of India (a school textbook that lasted for many years) in 1897, Lee-Warner described the British empire as an educational experience for India. It did not matter that the system of education had remained rather limited, he argued, for it was wrong to judge the education of India merely by the development of the education system. The railways, the public works, the posts and telegraphs were all educational agencies of the empire. They all showed the benevolence, the industriousness and the dedication of English administrators, he said (Lee-Warner 1897).

For the English officers of the early nineteenth century in India, the concept of ‘citizen’ symbolized a new way of life and a new social order. It encapsulated the visions and tasks that post-Reformation social thought, science and literature had placed before the emerging urban bourgeoisie of England. The colonial administration in India had shown little interest in education before 1813 when the Charter of the East India Company was renewed and a modest provision was made for expenditure on institutions of learning. However, interest in education which was now expressed was conceptually consistent with the steps that had been taken earlier in matters of general administration. The creation of landed property rights was one such step. It was implemented somewhat differently in the three presidencies, but the ideological assumptions behind it were the same in all three cases. These assumptions were part of the social philosophy of liberalism (cf. Macpherson 1962, 1977). The state’s role, according to this philosophy, was to assist the civil society to fulfil its goal of ensuring individual rights, particularly the right to hold and increase property. Ownership of property was thus a key concept in liberal thought (Bearce 1961; Stokes 1959). It constituted the ground on which the emerging commercial class of English society had fought its battle against the powers of the church and monarchy. Several of the late eighteenth-century colonial administrators in India, who put in enormous efforts to establish the concept of private property, were inspired by early liberal political thought. They were also working under the imperative of creating a dependable fiscal base for the colonial state. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the empire had been more or less won. The job now was to keep it, and to use it for profit. The colonial adventure was in a sense over, ready to be exploited by writers of boys’ novels over the next 100 years. The construction of an imperial power structure was the task at hand. The East India Company’s monopoly over trade with India had come under pressure from a variety of business houses. With the advancement of industrial production, commercial interests in England had begun to be tempted towards the markets of Asia — markets far larger than England could ever provide. The East India Company was accused of monopolizing the Indian market, and of keeping it underdeveloped with its impractical policies. Among the critics was Adam Smith, who had criticized, as early as 1776, the Company’s monopoly of trade with India. He had found a serious contradiction between the Company’s role as an administrative body and as a trading concern. With the Company’s successes in subduing India’s native sovereignties and thereby in clearing away the insecurities that lay in trade with India, the demand for the end of the Company’s monopoly became increasingly stronger.²

The appropriate role for the Company was now believed to be that of a custodian of English trading interests. Accordingly, it was required to create congenial conditions in which the ‘free trade’ ideology of an ambitious English bourgeoisie could safely flourish. A commercial institution was thus made to become a colonial state, and to change its rhetoric from profit for itself into service of the empire. Involving dominant groups of Indian society in the functioning of the colonial state was part of the Company’s new job. It implied the creation of a new order in the colony, a civil society among the natives. The ethos, the rules and the symbols of the new order had to be constructed in a manner that would not disturb the ongoing commercial enterprise. The violence which had helped build the empire could henceforth be practised only on the outskirts of the proposed civil society. Within it, coercion had to be replaced by socialization. This is where education had a role to play.

The educational aspect of this role has not received much analytical attention. It is easy to place education within the broad context of empire building, but that does not help us identify the ideological roots of colonial education. We cannot make sense of the Company’s educational programmes if we only look upon them as variations on the utilitarian doctrine, or, alternatively, as steps to strengthen imperialist domination. These models may help us narrate what happened during the nineteenth century in India, but they do not impart to us any better understanding of the residues that the nineteenth century left for India to live with. This perhaps is not the historian’s job, but it is certainly an important task of educational theory. The residues are related to the idea of creating a civil society in India. It was a complex idea, constituting elements of several different kinds — liberal-economic and political doctrines, paternalism and evangelicism. But what gave it the edge of plausibility was the self-delusory confidence so typical of colonizers. Until the late nineteenth century, colonial officers worked in India with that supreme self-reassurance which demands superficial acquaintance with the colony’s society and geography. Colonization was a project undertaken with inadequate data, which is why it was the adventure depicted in many children’s novels of the nineteenth century (Parrish 1977). It was precisely the aspect of adventure in the colonial enterprise that gave the colonizer such craving for security mixed with a sense of prowess, his grand visions and his awe of expense, his paternalism and his readiness for military action.

In order to appreciate the role of education in creating civil society, and to analyse the assumptions behind the role, let us look at an early formulation of the problem. The following note was written by Lord Minto (Gilbert Elliot), Governor General from 1807 to 1812. The specific purpose of this note was to justify the setting up of two new Hindu Colleges and the reform of the existing one at Banaras. It is the wider rationale for the spread of education under British initiative that interests us. Minto wrote this note in 1811:

The ignorance of the natives in the different classes of society, arising from the want of proper education, is generally acknowledged. This defect not only excludes them as individuals from the enjoyment of all those comforts and benefits which the cultivation of letters is naturally calculated to afford, but operating as it does throughout almost the whole mass of the population, tends materially to obstruct the measures adopted for their better government. Little doubt can be entertained that the prevalence of the crimes of perjury and forgery, so frequently noticed in the official reports, is in a great measure ascribable, both in the Mohomedans and Hindoos, to the want of due instruction in the moral and religious tenets of their respective faiths. It has been even suggested, and apparently not without foundation, that to this uncultivated state of the minds of the natives is to be ascribed the prevalence of those crimes which were recently so great a scourge to the country. The latter’s offences against the peace and happiness of society have indeed for the present been materially checked by the vigilance and energy of the police, but it is probably only by the more general diffusion of knowledge among the great body of the people that the seeds of these evils can be effectively destroyed.³

Minto was talking about the moral role of education in the context of civil administration. ‘Happiness’ to him was that state of comfort which derives from being governed well. Lack of good governance obstructs the opportunities of pleasure — even in the case of those who could individually obtain pleasure through means such as literary reading. Their chances of enjoyment are clouded by the prevalence of insecurity. For others too, the government cannot offer sustained comfort as its own capacities are exhausted dealing with criminal tendencies. Efficiency of the police helps, but the spread of education would be better. It would make the maintenance of law and order easier. This was the gist of Minto’s thought according to Butler, who concluded his speech at the Imperial Legislative Assembly in 1911 after the discussions of Gokhale’s Elementary Education Bill by saying:

Exactly a century ago, in the year 1811, Lord Minto, who looks down upon us in this Council from that wall, penned his famous Minute in which he said — for the first time in the course of British rule, it was then said — that the ignorance of the people was subversive to good government and conducive to crime (Gokhale 1911).

The validity of Minto’s line of argument rests on eighteenth-century concepts of ‘happiness’, ‘cultivation’ and ‘ignorance’. Indeed, his line of thought can hardly be understood at all if we do not remember the extent of poverty in eighteenth-century England and the perception that the aristocratic elite had of the poor as a dangerous mass. Now, to proceed with Minto’s English, ‘happiness’ was the result of pleasure-causing sensations. The seat of these sensations was the mind which was regarded as a repository of forceful passions. Achieving happiness was like commerce, involving the ability to trade off a harmful passion with a profitable one. ‘Reason’ was the ultimate, defendable ally in the pursuit of happiness, but we will return to reason later. If circumstances and reason could ensure the formation of a series of profitable pleasant sensations, the amount of happiness produced by the sensations was supposed to be greater. This view of happiness, which was derived from associational psychology and was nourished by Newtonian mechanicism and the fascination of commerce, found a political context in the concept of the civil society under which the sensations causing happiness were deemed to proliferate. Security of one’s property was a key necessity in this regard, which the utilitarians were going to use later as the cornerstone of their model of protective democracy. Security would allow not only the enjoyment of available means of happy sensation, it would also give man’s mind the freedom to enhance the sources of such sensations. Indeed, freedom (of the propertied man to apply his knowledge and skills to increase his material comforts) became an aspect of happiness, and the insurance of both was expected to be provided by the state.

In the civil society that the English middle class regarded as its ideal and which Minto’s predecessors had inaugurated in India, rational behaviour or the application of reason meant translating one’s concern for the safety of property into the desire to strengthen the state’s efforts to establish order. This kind of civil rationality alone was supposed to ensure the ultimate advantages of leisure for cultivating one’s sensibility. Lack of such rationality meant ignorance. This was the philosophy of a rapidly rising and ambitious urban commercial class. Its determination to wed practical sense with personal morality had found ample literary expression throughout the eighteenth century, from Addison at the beginning to Jane Austen towards the end. The vision had already been scattered widely, not as a Utopia of the elite but as a viable dream for all. The dream provided the motive force for popular education movements in nineteenth-century England, movements which gradually pushed the state to assume responsibility for the education of the poorest.

This did not happen in India. Here, the dream of the English bourgeoisie merely provided the vocabulary with which a miniscule civil society could legitimize its rise in the midst of exploitation of the working population. The dynamics of colonial administration in India gave a very long life to eighteenth-century English diction, in which ‘people’ and ‘citizen’ meant only the men of status or property.

Others were not deemed to possess individuality. The labouring classes were perceived as the ‘masses’ among whom it was considered unnecessary to recognize individuals. They were used as cheap, often forced, labour by the bourgeois colonizer with the same indifference with which they had been used earlier and continue to be used now by feudal or quasi-feudal powers within Indian society. The use of the colonial government’s funds for the diffusion of elementary education among the masses was questioned within the bureaucracy on the ground of good business sense. Warden’s argument⁴ that ‘education, as a Government concern, will be expensive without being beneficial’, and that it could be made beneficial by ‘judicious encouragement’ of the better-off sections of Indian society, was shared by many English officers. Malcolm, the Governor of Bombay, stated that ‘the expenses of running the government could be reduced by allowing some of the public services to be performed “by natives on diminished salaries”’.⁵ Along this line of thought, state spending on education could be explained mainly as investment in the preparation of cheaper, trustworthy subordinates. The Charter Act of 1833 opened the civil services to Indians. From here on, every student was assumed to be aspiring for civil service, and the Indian civil servant was perceived as the heart of the small civil society.

MORAL AGENDA

The thought that the civil society in India could only be a miniscule minority disturbs neither the ideas nor the terminology we have examined. The perception of the usefulness of education as an aid to social order and peace, by virtue of being a morally uplifting influence, remained remarkably aloof from demographic and social reality. Trevelyan, writing in 1838, went so far as to predict that the educated classes, ‘a small minority’ then, would ‘in time become the majority’.⁶ For the colonial officers of the first ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• I Introduction
• Part I: Dynamics of Colonization
• Part II: Dynamics of the Freedom Struggle
• Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index