Abstract
Rao’s book is a sharply argued, empirically rich, comprehensive, thematic history of colonial education in India from 1780 to 1860. The volume comprises of 10 chapters including the introductory and concluding sections. Her central argument is that notwithstanding the progressive position championed by some non-aristocrat Scotsmen and British liberals serving as colonial officials in India, the generally prevalent conservative attitude and aristocratic disdain of the colonial state towards lower orders and its alliance with upper castes and classes of Indian society were the most important hindrances in the spread of education amongst marginalised groups and poorer classes. She shows that Dalits and other subaltern groups exhibited their intention to fulfil their intellectual craving for modern education by enrolling in it, but their efforts were frustrated by the colonial state dominated by the British aristocracy which argued that only the Brahmins and Muslim elites should be educated because ‘the light must touch the mountain tops before it could pierce to the levels and depths’. Further, the colonial preference for classical language and knowledge helped shape the conservative nature and thereby exclusionary design of colonial education in India.
In chapter 2, Rao challenges the beliefs that the indigenous education of India was oral and that the colonial rule destroyed it and imposed English education. She argues that rather than uprooting, the British colonial state in India had to adopt a policy of incorporation of indigenous schools so that it could show to the London authorities, particularly at the eve of the renewal of Charter Acts, the educational expansion with a nominal cost of 1 rupee per school. She also shows how the number of indigenous schools grew during 1845–1881 and became the main plank for the expansion of the colonial system. Rao believes that critical analysis of thousands of these indigenous schools upturns the popular theories that the indigenous education was oral, informal and Brahmin-dominated, and also, the popular argument that the British destroyed indigenous schools. Instead, according to her, the colonial state’s preference for appointing Brahmin teachers, the introduction of the modern notion of fee and the tendency to view vernaculars as originated from some classical language caused a significant alteration in the social profile of students and teachers as well as in the linguistic and epistemological character of these institutions. This colonial intervention deteriorated the quality of education earlier provided in them.
It is to be noted here that in an earlier essay, Rao (2014, pp. 27–29) had emphasised the casteist and patriarchal nature of education; the ruthless and arbitrary behaviour of teachers within pre-modern arrangements of education as centres of reproduction of Eklavya model of inegalitarian social order. In that earlier intervention, rather than finding fault with the historians of indigenous education, or acknowledging those who made a similar critique, she chose to react to Kumar’s (1991) argument about the dichotomy between space for oral tradition within indigenous education on one hand, and textbook culture introduced through colonial education on the other. While Rao continues to use the term indigenous, her critical focus earlier was on premodern arrangements of education of the Brahminical religion. However, the positive interpretation in the present volume is based on the study of the interface of indigenous schools with colonialism during the second half of the nineteenth century, for which, she even goes beyond the general chronological span of her present book which is until 1860. The author may like to consider the strong possibility that the compulsions of the interface between traditional and modern arrangements of education caused by the increasing power of colonialism might have brought about many of the progressively sounding features within indigenous schools as well.
Many of the positive features of indigenous education as underlined by Rao in the present volume are already part of the scholarship on the subject (Dharampal, 1983; Di Bona, 1983, among others). Our understanding of indigenous education has generally been limited to the insights gained from the early nineteenth-century official surveys. Aparna Basu (1984) had remarked long ago that there exists a gap in our understanding of indigenous education in the sense that the available scholarship does not inform us about the eighteenth century, a period of transition. Similarly, one can say that there is a lot to be unearthed about indigenous education in the second half of the nineteenth century as well. The writings of Suresh Chandra Shukla (1959), Qazi Shahidullah (1996) and I. K. Chaudhary (2013) among others, have tried to fill this void. The volumes by Nita Kumar (2000) and Parna Sengupta (2011) and the essays by Amar Farooqui, Janaki Rajan and Lakshmi Subramanian in Gupta et al. (2021) also provide significant insights about the transition from indigenous to the modern education system. Parimala Rao’s present volume can be treated as an important addition to this slowly growing body of literature on the interface of the indigenous system with the colonial one during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Rao clearly demonstrates the conservative and aristocratic attitude of colonial officials against the education of the masses and in favour of promoting the education of Brahmins and Ashraf Muslims. She also recognises how orientalism became an ideological instrument to achieve a conservative orientation of education. Rao demonstrates how the British elite redefined, nurtured and strengthened the caste system and started the process of the Brahmanisation of educational space. For instance, she documents in the fourth chapter how instead of undertaking to educate the masses, the colonial state openly promoted the education of Brahmins and Ashraf Muslims in Bengal and North India during 1810–1834. Orientalism became an ideological instrument to achieve a conservative orientation of education and Minto’s Education Minute of 1811 brought in the racist concept of a ‘civilising mission’ into the educational debate. Similarly, in the fifth chapter, instead of conventionally following a commemorative approach for Elphinstone’s work on vernacular elementary education, Rao carries out a meticulous examination of the educational debates and policies of the Bombay Presidency in the period 1820–1839 to argue that he favoured the Brahminical orientalist ideology and scorned the participation of lower castes and destitute people. In the sixth chapter, she focuses on the Madras Presidency. Here, Munro is portrayed in sharp contrast to Elphinstone as someone who favoured the modern education of Indians including those coming from diverse caste backgrounds. However, after the untimely death of Munro, conservative trends of colonial state again became dominant in Madras as well to rescind his measures, so much so that by the closing years of the EIC, there was not a single English school of the government in the Madras Presidency. Incidentally, opposite to R.E. Frykenberg (1988) who claimed that there was no impact of Macaulay’s Minute and Bentinck’s Resolution of 1835 in the Madras Presidency, Rao’s account shows that the government withdrew support to Munro’s schools in 1836 through a deliberate misrepresentation of them as vernacular schools. These important arguments of Rao are further additions in the growing body of literature on the processes of Brahmanisation in the field of colonial education in India as argued by G. Aloysius (1997), Veena Naregal (2001) and Dilip Chavan (2013) among others, who have tried to move beyond the historiographical framework of studying colonial education in terms of the hegemonic influence of English, its alliance with Christian morality and the political agenda of the colonial state. They have studied language politics on a broader canvas and have underlined the processes of the refashioning of an elite class and Brahmanisation in the field of colonial education in India.
In the seventh and eighth chapters, Rao shows how the educational work of staunchly liberal-minded Macaulay was also frustrated by the overall conservative orientation of the colonial state. There has been almost a century-long tradition of academic research and historiographical debate between the defenders and opponents of Macaulay’s role and objectives in modern Indian education as surveyed by the present reviewer elsewhere (Gupta, 2017). Rao has not, as such, surveyed the immense historiographical debate on the role and objectives of Macaulay in the present volume. Perhaps because her stand is already known unambiguously through one of her earlier essays where she tried to free Macaulay from various charges of culpability attributed to him by the scholars of Indian education (Rao, 2014). However, she has further substantiated her claims in the present volume with newer arguments and sources. She argues that Macaulay’s Educational Minute of February 1835 was written in a particular context of the debate with the Orientalist and a hard-hitting style of writing. Hence, there is a need to go beyond its rhetorical language and to study Macaulay’s other 41 minutes and examine his concrete educational work on the ground. She shows Macaulay to be a profound advocate of liberal ideology, a contrast to the generally conservative attitude of the colonial state which preferred to preserve caste-class distinctions owing to its political compulsions. Rao argues that a threat to these distinctions was posed by the schools established by Macaulay, where modern knowledge was imparted in the vernaculars along with the teaching of English (and even Sanskrit in some cases). In these schools, both Europeans and Indians were appointed as teachers and students from different socio-religious backgrounds and nationalities were provided with free education. Therefore, the colonial state closed Macaulay’s schools (except for the Bombay Presidency) immediately after his return to England.
She suggests as one of the concluding observations that the colonial state neither introduced nor imposed English education on Indians. It diverted the funds earmarked for education by the British Parliament. In fact, Indian education came up for discussion and half-hearted efforts were made by the British only at the time of the renewal of the Charter of the East India Company in 1813, 1833 and 1853. Rao argues in the ninth chapter that the elitist educational ideas continued unabated when the administration was transferred from the English East India Company to the British Parliament. Though the talukdars actively took part in the revolt, they got back all the privileges they had lost, and the government established special schools for them.
In order to explain the progressive interventions of some of the colonial officials who were ultimately frustrated by the dominant conservatism of the colonial state, Rao follows the line of argument offered by Avril A. Powel (2010) where the latter demonstrated how the spirit of Scottish Enlightenment inspired progressive stand of many colonial officials of Scottish descent working in India. Accordingly, Parimala Rao argues that the narratives of the British aristocracy were effectively countered by the Scotsmen in India. The list of those who advocated modern education and helped Indians to acquire it are all Scots beginning with Charles Grant, his two sons Charles and Robert Grant, David Drummond, David Hare, William Fraser, Alexander Duff, Thomas Munro, John Malcolm, Robert Shortrede, Alexander Duncan Campbell, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Charles Hay Cameron, Thomas Erskine Perry, John Peter Grant and Allan Octavian Hume. According to Rao, without the intervention from these people, modern education and English language would not have been introduced in India. This also shows that the powerful colonial state was not a monolithic structure during the first half of the nineteenth century and that Scotsmen and British liberals, though employees of the colonial administration, could effectively challenge it. However, she also acknowledges that the Scottish aristocrats, such as the Elphinstones, behaved exactly like their English counterparts.
The history of education in colonial India suffers from the shortage of detailed case studies of the Indian interlocutors of the system. This is true for the book under review as well. In order to differentiate between the English aristocratic conservatives and Scottish non-aristocratic liberals, the book provides a detailed examination of European officials of colonial states but does not venture on a similar path for Indian officials. They, at best, figure as examples to substantiate the larger thesis otherwise heavily plotted around the European actors.
It becomes additionally challenging to read the citations without compromising the flow of reading when these are provided in the endnotes instead of footnotes in a volume where every sentence is substantiated by rich archival material. Further, wherever the sentences do not mention the date of the referred communication in the main text (and there are quite a few), the reader is compelled to go to the end of the chapter.
Nonetheless, the book successfully unpacks the manner in which the colonial state (as opposed to some individual officials with liberal attitude) possessed an aristocratic disdain for pupils coming from dis-privileged castes and classes. The colonial state generally followed a conservative policy in terms of the kind of knowledge and social groups it preferred. As soon as any specific scheme of modern English education started drawing participation from the marginalised communities and poorer people, these were closed down by the government. Rao has documented multiple debates on modern education across British India through extensive research based on a wide range of archival and secondary sources to write this book. Hence, this should be an essential reading for anyone interested in the historical trajectory of the evolution of modern education in India, the interface of indigenous education with the modern education system, the fusion of liberal ideas with conservative biases and the politics of exclusion.
