The Caste of Merit

Engineering Education in India

Ajantha Subramanian

• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780674243484
• Sujet: Sozialwissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

How the language of "merit" makes caste privilege invisible in contemporary India. Just as Americans least disadvantaged by racism are most likely to endorse their country as post?racial, Indians who have benefited from their upper-caste affiliation rush to declare their country post?caste. In The Caste of Merit, Ajantha Subramanian challenges this comfortable assumption by illuminating the controversial relationships among technical education, caste formation, and economic stratification in modern India. Through in-depth study of the elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs)—widely seen as symbols of national promise—she reveals the continued workings of upper-caste privilege within the most modern institutions.Caste has not disappeared in India but instead acquired a disturbing invisibility—at least when it comes to the privileged. Only the lower castes invoke their affiliation in the political arena, to claim resources from the state. The upper castes discard such claims as backward, embarrassing, and unfair to those who have earned their position through hard work and talent. Focusing on a long history of debates surrounding access to engineering education, Subramanian argues that such defenses of merit are themselves expressions of caste privilege. The case of the IITs shows how this ideal of meritocracy serves the reproduction of inequality, ensuring that social stratification remains endemic to contemporary democracies.

1

The Colonial Career of Technical Knowledge

TO UNDERSTAND THE elevated status of engineering in India today requires a foray into the pre-independence past. The career of technical knowledge from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century is one of shifts from guild to state, shopfloor to classroom, and lower to upper caste. These shifts were conditioned by processes at an imperial scale: the transfer of power from the East India Company to the British Crown in 1857, inter-imperial industrial competition over the latter half of the nineteenth century, efforts to minimize the cost of colonial rule, and nationalist critiques of underdevelopment. Over a century, technical knowledge went from being the purview of lower-caste artisans to becoming integral to state power, economic development, and upper-caste status. With the postcolonial transition and a fuller embrace of technologically driven development, the divergence between artisanship and engineering was further consolidated.

What does this account add to our understanding of colonial South Asia? The scholarship on South Asia has extensively covered the relationship between technology and power. Scholars have addressed how British technological dominance reinforced colonial racial hierarchies, consolidated state administrative authority, and advanced the project of human mastery over nature.¹ Less considered, however, is how these interventions interacted with a preexisting landscape of hierarchically ordered, caste-based forms of knowledge and skill. Similarly, the vast literature on continuities and shifts from colonial-era political economy to Indian developmentalism does not directly address the influence of a caste worldview on development imaginaries and practices. This is also the case for the much more limited social scientific scholarship on engineering. While the stratified structure of the colonial engineering corps has been referred to as a “quasi-caste” or even a “caste” system, the actual role of Indian caste differences in the making of colonial technical education is unclear.² Consequently, we know little about how caste assumptions and practices shaped technological development in general, and technical education more specifically, and the impact of these processes on meanings and practices of caste.³

Here I take up one piece of this larger story: the evolution of Indian technical education in a context of imperial transformation, and the centrality of caste imaginaries to that process. We will see how, in the early nineteenth century, the political terrain shifted to allow for the development of modern education in British India. This new arena witnessed key debates around engineering education, with different constituencies arguing over race, caste, technical aptitude, and the proper balance of mental and manual skill. Gradually, engineering came to be associated with classroom-based theoretical knowledge and professional service to the state and disassociated from an earlier British orientation around guild apprenticeship and private industry. The professionalization of engineering was part and parcel of the entrenchment of the colonial state as an infrastructural and administrative apparatus. The shift from shopfloor to classroom also clinched the identity of the British Indian engineer as a member of a colonial elite who was to embody the hierarchies of the colony. Initially, this meant racial exclusivity. But dual pressures—from England to do colonialism “on the cheap” and from nationalists charging Britain with underdevelopment—led to a lifting of the racial glass ceiling and entry of upper castes into the engineering service.

We will also consider the other side of technical training: industrial schooling for lower castes. While first intended as a response to the embattled status of artisanal castes under colonial free trade, industrial schooling eventually shifted toward an emphasis on producing labor for new industries. By the transition to independence, the engineering profession had effectively displaced lower castes with histories of technical skill and knowledge in favor of upper castes who previously disdained hands-on labor. Overall, the chapter will track how the divergence between professional engineering and industrial schooling both deepened the penetration of the colonial state and economy, and sutured the link between caste status and technical knowledge.

Modernizing Education

In British India, the question of whether and how to promote technical education was repeatedly raised beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Both colonial and nationalist advocates of Indian modernization pointed to the predominance of classical literary education and the need to cultivate other “practical” fields of study in the colony. The debate over the approach and scope of technical education revealed a range of positions on preferred forms of tutelage, what kinds of knowledge were perceived as most beneficial or transformative, and who was best suited to acquire this knowledge.

Before 1857, the colonial government moved slowly on provisions for modern education, primarily because of the powerful Orientalist lobby and an overall conservatism toward the existing status quo. Clause 43 of the East India Company Act of 1813 spelled out two goals: “The encouragement of the learned natives of India and the revival and improvement of literature; secondly, the promotion of a knowledge of the sciences amongst the inhabitants of that country.” The company’s Court of Directors determined that the existing institutional structures of formal education for social elites would remain, as the more extensive spread of modern public education would be incompatible with “the customs and mentality of the people.”⁴

Criticism of Orientalist approaches to education arose early. In 1823, Bengali modernizer Rammohan Roy wrote to Lord Amherst, the governor-general of Bengal, criticizing the proposal for establishing a Sanskrit college in Calcutta and urging the government to instead “promote a more liberal and enlightened system of instruction.” Roy felt that “the establishment of Sanskrit schools specializing in metaphysical niceties was regression to a pre-Baconian universe” and destroyed “the sanguine hopes of the native intelligentsia for courses in mathematics, philosophy, chemistry, and anatomy.”⁵ But his argument fell on deaf ears. In 1824, the colonial government opened a Sanskrit college in Calcutta and another in Delhi for “instruction in the three classical languages of India.”

The critique of colonial education policy leveled by Indian modernizers like Roy resonated with the position adopted by utilitarians within the East India Company directorship. In an 1824 despatch, they stated that the government’s original approach to education was “fundamentally erroneous. The great end should not have been to teach Hindu learning, but useful learning.… In professing, on the other hand, to establish seminaries for the purpose of teaching mere Hindu or mere Mohamadan literature, you bound yourselves to teach a great deal of what was frivolous, not a little of what was purely mischievous, a small remained indeed in which utility was in any way concerned.” Thomas Macaulay’s 1835 “Minute on Education,” which argued for a shift from classical Indian to modern European knowledge, tipped the scales and initiated a broader reorientation of Indian education. Inspired by Macaulay, Lord Auckland in 1840 called for education “through the medium of English and the Vernaculars, in accordance with modern ideas.” This modernizing vision was encapsulated in an 1854 despatch sent by Charles Wood, the President of the Board of Control of the East India Company, to Governor Lord Dalhousie, which advanced a new approach to Indian education as the general diffusion of European knowledge. Known as “Wood’s Despatch,” it highlighted the limitations of the dominant literary approach and urged professional training in law, medicine, and civil engineering through the establishment of vocational colleges and schools of industry. A noteworthy section attributed by some to John Stuart Mill argued the need for “useful and practical knowledge suited to every station in life” and underscored the critical role of the state in disseminating this form of knowledge “to the great mass of the people who are utterly incapable of obtaining an education worthy of the name by their own unaided efforts.”⁶ The point was clear: unlike in the metropole, the state in the colony would be integral to the advancement of modern education.

Before the 1854 despatch, there was already one engineering college in operation: the Thomason College of Civil Engineering at Roorkee. The college was founded in 1847 in response to the demand for civil engineers to aid the construction of the Ganges Canal in the Northwest Provinces.⁷ After the despatch, three more engineering colleges followed in quick succession: the Poona College of Engineering in 1859, the Madras Civil Engineering College in 1862, and the Sibpur College of Engineering in 1880. All four colleges were tied to employment in the Department of Public Works, which expanded rapidly after the Indian Rebellion of 1857–1858 as part of the shift in authority from the East India Company to the British Crown. The promotion of engineering as useful knowledge was thus intimately linked to the goal of expanding the presence and power of the colonial state.

After the 1880s, the colonial government made a more concerted effort to extend technical training beyond the collegiate level through industrial schooling. Industrial schooling was intended to mitigate the effects of colonial free trade by retraining and channeling displaced artisans into new industries. Unlike engineering, it targeted a very different segment of the native population: not disaffected elites but dispossessed subalterns who, as missive after missive stated, were “destined for industrial and commercial pursuits.”

Colonial technical education policy thus advanced in two directions: the first toward building a native cadre of college-educated engineers, and the second toward equipping artisans for modern industries. Policy, however, was not practice. Both college engineering and industrial schooling advanced in fits and starts. Engineering was stymied by the enduring English suspicion of the classroom as an appropriate site for training engineers and by an institutional investment in maintaining a racial hierarchy within the colonial engineering corps. Industrial schooling, on the other hand, suffered setbacks because of the tug of war between interventionism and laissez-faire and because of indecision over whether to promote small- or large-scale industry.

Despite the slow growth of technical education, there were some clear outcomes of the process. Most importantly, the development of technical training along two tracks was informed by and, in turn, reinforced caste differences. By the advent of independence, the status of technical knowledge had transformed; while engineering was now an upper-caste intellectual aspiration intimately tied to nation-building, artisanship had been demoted to a form of unskilled labor seen as far less instrumental to economic development.

Engineering Education: Defining the Professional

In advocating for the growth of professional engineering in India, colonial statesmen typically invoked the metropolitan engineer as forerunner and model. But in nineteenth-century England, there was little scope for technical training as a process of formal education. The pioneers of industry were workingmen trained by apprenticeship and self-taught in industrial science, and the leading engineers were products of the old system of guild pupilage. There was widespread conviction that factories, offices, and workshops were the nation’s “true technical schools.”⁸ This older vocational approach to engineering as a form of shopfloor learning persisted into the twentieth century, long after engineering had become an academic discipline in other parts of Europe. In 1901, Edward Buck, who was commissioned by the colonial government to conduct a study of technical education in India, offered a scathing critique of this English conviction: “In England people are still content to repeat that trades cannot be taught in a school. The Austrians and Germans have discovered that trades cannot be efficiently taught without a school. In many towns, employers are required to send their apprentices to a technical school for a certain number of days a week, and a breach of the law is followed by fine or imprisonment. Nor are the schools confined to a few large towns. In Austria, in particular, a great point is made of carrying technical training to the small towns and even to the villages.”⁹ But even Buck’s criticism of outmoded English ways was ultimately less about technical education as a path to professionalization and more as a necessary supplement to the existing set of trades. It was this argument for a more robust and systematic investment in the trades that he took from the Austrians and Germans and recommended for India.

In India, opposition to bringing technical training under the auspices of the Department of Education lasted into the early twentieth century. In 1908, John Wallace, the editor of the Indian Textile Journal, submitted this opinion to the Industrial Conference held at Ootacamund:

The cause of the present state of technical education in India is traceable to the constitution of the Educational Department which is controlled by University men, whose ideas of education are so built upon reading and writing as a foundation that they have overlooked the true relation of technique to science in a country whose industrial training is still in a very backward condition. In every other country, which has reached any industrial eminence, the knowledge of handicraft preceded by many generations, that of reading and writing. India has yet to recover from an educational impulse in the wrong direction. Reading and writing, which have been of incalculable value for certain classes, are not of use at all, and they become positively pernicious when they entice young men away from a sure living by handicraft to the overcrowded ranks of clerical labor.¹⁰

Wallace’s statement is striking for its social and developmental advocacy. His was a call for building technical education from the foundation of India’s handicraft traditions. As he saw it, technical education had been usurped by those who, with their faith in book learning, had little understanding of “technique.” In attempting to make technical education a mirror of what they knew, these “University men” were on shaky ground and sure to fail. Instead, Wallace urged a resuscitation of technical education as embodied technique through which India could advance more surely along the path to industrialization.

This sentiment in favor of “technique” as the appropriate form of knowledge for the majority of Indians was echoed time and again in government commissions and resolutions from the mid-nineteenth century. Initially, even those closely associated with the development of professional engineering institutions expressed this conviction. In 1857, Lieutenant Winscom, the first principal of the Madras College of Engineering, stated his preference for those with experience in hands-on work in this missive to the director of public instruction:

My own idea would lead me very much to prefer a rough steady man with good constitution and with strong natural good sense to a weakly bookworm. It i...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Colonial Career of Technical Knowledge
• 2. Building the IITs
• 3. Challenging Hierarchies of Value in Madras
• 4. IIT Madras’s 1960s Generation
• 5. Testing Merit
• 6. Contesting Reservation
• 7. Brand IIT
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index