Organizer: Christopher J. Fuller, London School of Economics
Chair: Sylvia J. Vatuk, University of Illinois, Chicago
Discussant: Sheldon Pollock, University of Chicago
The papers in this panel are concerned with 'traditional' Hindu and Islamic education and its transformation in colonial and contemporary India. The two papers on Hindu education focus on the transmission of religious knowledge and the training of Brahman ritual specialists in contemporary Andhra Pradesh and Tamilnadu, while the two on Islamic education explore its development during the colonial period in Hyderabad and Madras.
All four papers are concerned with a common set of issues. These include the nature of 'traditional' knowledge and how it is constituted in relation to religious and textual authority; how this knowledge is transmitted by education, and how educational systems primarily based on orality and memorization actually operate; and what those involved in the educational system see as the purpose and meaning of education. Moreover, the papers also focus on the relation between 'traditional' education and the modern world, either through the ways in which Islamic education was caught up and transformed by its interaction with western educational ideas during the colonial period, or through the ways in which Hindu religious education has been changed by developments affecting the life of Brahman ritual specialists and their training in contemporary India.
In each of these cases, it is clear that 'traditional,' religiously-sanctioned knowledge and the 'traditional' education system through which it is transmitted are themselves constituted in relation to a complex set of wider, changing factors, even though the traditions in question are indigenously conceptualized in highly conservative terms. This conclusion, of course, is neither original nor surprising, but 'traditional' education in India is a field on which there has been little modern research, so that sweeping generalizations about the contrast between orality and literacy, memorization and creativity, religion and rationality, and so on, have largely dominated the received wisdom. Through its presentation of research, the papers on this panel will help to dispel these generalizations and place the study of education within the context of up-to-date knowledge about Indian society and culture.
Agamic Religious Education and Brahman Temple Priests in Contemporary Tamilnadu
Christopher J. Fuller, London School of Economics
This paper is based on fieldwork among the Adisaiva Brahman priests of the Minaksi temple in Madurai, and on research in the religious schools (vedagama padasalai) which they now attend in increasing numbers. Priests' sons usually enter these schools either when they are about 12 or after completing school or college education. A full course lasts between four and six years. In the schools, the most important sections of the curriculum cover Agamic and Vedic Sanskrit texts, and the overriding objective of the pedagogic system is memorization of the texts, taught orally by the gurus, so that students can recite them accurately by rote.
The paper will discuss the curriculum and the definition of Agamic education implied by it. It will explain that what students actually learn is a selection of Agamic, Vedic and other textual passages, rather than a full Agamic text, and that these texts are important because they ought to be chanted during ritual, rather than because they lay down a set of norms for ritual. In other words, students are primarily learning the spoken component of the rituals, and only secondarily directions for them. Priests who have graduated from the schools are therefore more proficient than their uneducated colleagues, and the value of Agamic education is now assessed in relation to modern reformist demands for the creation of a 'professional' priesthood properly educated in the Agamic ritual tradition. The paper will explore how reformist concepts of the Agamas (themselves influenced by orientalist scholarship) and modern notions of professional training have shaped 'traditional' Agamic education, and it will also consider the impact on it of contemporary Hindu revivalism and religious nationalism.
The Vocation of Vedam, the Selection of Srautam: Vedic Brahmans in
Coastal Andhra
David M. Knipe, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This paper is based on fieldwork in the Godavari River Delta of coastal Andhra since 1980, for periods of one to eight months during ten of the last sixteen years. The focus has been life histories of Vaidika Brahmans, a hereditary elite devoted from childhood to learning, maintaining and teaching vedam (the Vedas) and, for a select few, going on to perform the great soma and other sacrifices in their regional tradition of srautam. The site is two adjacent village agraharams and a nearby town that have housed five ahitagnis, i.e. somayajis (sacrificers of soma) who have at the peaks of their careers maintained the sacred fires. One ahitagni is deceased (1993 at age 89); the others are now in their seventies and eighties. Some have been unsuccessful at teaching a single son. Others have taught not only sons but also grandsons through the complete Taittiriya course of vedam in a rigorous instructional process of eight to fifteen years beginning at age five to seven. At this date, although several contemplate the step, no one vedam-certified in either the middle or younger generation has set the fires, performed the agnistoma, and thereby advanced the srautam.
The descriptive side of this paper will focus on the complex features of late twentieth-century agraharam life that lie behind the changing educational patterns of life "in the Vedas," as the Telugu phrase has it. The interpretive and predictive side of the paper will assess the many-sided ways in which this local, oral, ancient, venerable and vulnerable Vedic tradition looks at itself and at the modern world that now imposes radical transformations.
Teaching the Islamic Sciences in Asaf Jahi Hyderabad
Gregory C. Kozlowski, De Paul University
Education in the Islamic Sciences such as theology (kalam), Quranic commentary (tafsir) and law (shariah/fiqh) changed in the wake of the Revolt of 1857. Madrasahs such as that at Deoband reorganized the curriculum known as the Dars-i Nizamiyyah (pioneered by the scholars of the Firangi Mahalli family) to place more emphasis on hadith and less on the rational sciences (ma'qul). In other North Indian schools, such as Aligarh, the study of kalam, tafsir or shariah/fiqh disappeared almost entirely to be replaced with brief and occasional catechism classes.
As the largest of the "native states," Hyderabad was able to conduct its internal affairs, including education, without having to focus exclusively on models provided by the British educational norms that influenced the work of both Deoband and Aligarh. Even so, the development of education in Islamic Sciences in Hyderabad developed a two-tiered approach to teaching kalam, tafsir, and shariah/fiqh. Schools directly established by the Nizams and their notables (e.g. Sir Salar Jang I and Sir Salar Jang II) tended to de-emphasize the Dars-i Nizamiyyah. Though Hyderabad's Dar al-Ulum professed to be "Oriental," its curriculum followed that of Panjab University whose courses in Oriental studies were prescribed by British scholars. Other schools such as the Madrasah-yi Asafiyya conducted classes in Urdu, but eschewed the Dars-i Nizamiyyah. Only one school, the Jamiyyah Nizamiyyah Madrasah, founded in 1875, taught the Dars-i Nizamiyyah. Though the founder of the school, Shaykh Anwarullah, received a personal stipend from the Nizams Mahbub and Osman while also acting as their tutor, the Nizam's government did not directly support the Jamiah until the 1920s. This paper will argue that the tendency to support the "traditional" Islamic Sciences indirectly reflected the religious preferences of Mughal-era notables. Mughal political elites understood Islam as a series of personal attachments to individual learned and holy men rather than as a set of learned disciplines. Only in the twentieth century did the ruling elites of Hyderabad-both Muslim and non-Muslim-come to think of religions as sets of mutually exclusive doctrines.
"Learning for the Sake of God" vs. "Useful Knowledge": Muslim
Scholars Confront the Spread of Western Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Madras
Sylvia Jane Vatuk, University of Illinois, Chicago
The spread of Western education and the English language in Madras in the first half of the 19th century, greeted with enthusiasm by many upper-caste Hindus, received responses ranging from disinterest to active opposition from the Muslim elite, especially those of the scholarly class. By the 1840s, a British discourse was developing as a consequence of this, on the theme of "Muslim educational backwardness." To ameliorate this unfortunate situation, as he saw it, the Government Agent to the Nawwab of the Carnatic began to try to bring the benefits of Western education to the "respectable classes" of Muslims. He initiated plans for a Muslim public library, a "Society of Arts and Sciences" (where Muslim men would meet for intellectual discussions), and a school for upper-class Muslim boys. In this paper I will describe the conflict that arose, between the leading 'ulama of Madras and the Government Agent and his supporters, over the founding of this school and over its curriculum. I will examine the rhetoric on both sides of the issue, showing how divergent cultural understandings about the meaning, methods, content, and purpose of learning produced "conversation without dialogue" between Muslims and Englishmen in Madras. The outcome-given the unequal power relationship between the parties and the inevitability of the onward march of "progress"-was a foregone conclusion. But a close look at the terms on which the confrontation was fought reveals key differences between indigenous and colonial education philosophies, not only in what was taught and how, but in the meaning of knowledge itself to its respective carriers.