Organizer, Chair, and Discussant: Hayden John-Andrew Bellenoit, U. S. Naval
Academy
This panel will explore education in South Asia between
roughly 1700 and 1950 by assessing the degree of change in Indian education
over the course of the colonial and pre-colonial periods. All three papers
are threaded together by this central issue of continuity vs. change. Methodologically,
this panel seeks to move beyond an overly-institutional and high-policy approach
to Indian education by shedding light upon how Indian society molded and shaped
the emergence of its English and Anglo-Vernacular educational systems. All
three papers aim to offer more penetrating accounts of the impact of education
in Indian society by looking at how Indian social, religious, merchant, and
caste groups responded to the transition to – and proliferation of – English and Anglo-vernacular
forms of education in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Dr Bellenoit explores
the pre-English and late-eighteenth century period by examining the role Indian
social gentry castes played in shaping the emergence of English education. Ms.
Denault’s paper extends this analysis further chronologically by shedding
light upon the ways in which gentry Hindu families used education as a means
of reproducing “traditional” caste and class values through the
medium of “modern” educational reforms. Dr Kumar’s paper complements
and builds upon these issues of reproduction, tradition, and continuity versus
change by examining the discourse surrounding scientific education in the vernacular
public sphere. He explores how presumed trajectories of science as a motor of
change were vigorously contested and appropriated by Indians in the early twentieth
century to revitalize the “traditional” agricultural sector.
Hayden John-Andrew Bellenoit, U. S. Naval Academy
This paper explores a realm of South Asian history that is relatively untouched:
the history of learning in India before the introduction of English education.
In contrast to most studies on Indian education – which focus on high
policy and institutions - this accounts for the role Indian society played “on
the spot” in the transition from pre-colonial forms of learning and pedagogy
to colonial (English) ones. It does this by exploring how merchant and gentry
groups, particularly Kayasthas (an Islamised, Persian-speaking Hindu gentry
caste), started to re-assess their educational experiences before the introduction
of English education in 1835. In terms of sources, it utilizes private papers
from Kayastha families, European travelogues in north India, and Persian sources
on courtly rule and bureaucracy. Specifically, it looks at the system of Muslim
maktab schools and how Kayasthas’ (and other Hindus’) demographic
majorities engendered a secular ethos in these schools. This in turn – the
paper argues – facilitated (and in some cases predated) the emergence
of secular English education in the 1830s. This paper also explores the relationship
between schools, the agrarian economy, and warfare in eighteenth-century South
Asia by looking at how funds for schools were raised from agrarian taxes in
the locale, which were in turn affected by warfare and regional state consolidation.
By exploring these sources, it suggests that Indians were already moving towards
embracing English and – perhaps more significantly – Anglo-vernacular
forms of learning and education before the high-tide of Anglicizing reform
in the 1830s.
Leigh Denault, Cambridge University
This paper will analyze Hindi pamphlets from c.1870-1915, tracing the development
and spread of new ideas about parenting, early education, and institutionalized
learning among “middling” and, later, self-consciously “middle-class” Indian
families. Many historians have focused on the stri shiksha (women’s education)
movements among Urdu and Hindi-speaking social reform groups in northern India,
but few have explored how these groups saw female educational initiatives as
a means of controlling the education of male children within the household.
It explores how the decline of certain household-based apprenticeship schemes
and older patronage networks forced aspiring families to make radical changes
to the ways in which they invested in their children’s education. It also
looks at how families forged new social relationships and institutions, most
notably schools funded by religious sects, caste associations (particularly
Kayashas and Khattris), reform groups, and the role of the household and parenting
in shaping children’s life choices. Through an analysis of palan-poshan
or child-rearing texts and primers and some contemporary vernacular debates
on the role of the household in early education, this paper explores the
ways in which educational reform and the diffusion of new educational values
became closely tied to the reproduction of certain gendered caste and class
values and thus to the creation of new kinds of family relationships and social
networks during this period. Through this analysis, this paper places debates
over the value of Anglo-vernacular education versus more vocational training
in the wider context of colonial education.
Prakash Kumar, Colorado State University
This paper will explore the discourse of scientific modernity in the visions
of agricultural development in late colonial South Asia. This modernist discourse
was instantiated on heterogeneous and disconnected occasions and appeared
on numerous local sites within the colonial order. However, this paper will
particularly focus on the voices envisioning agricultural progress through “science” in
the vernacular literature. The vernacular public sphere provided an appropriate
site for articulation and contestation of competing visions of change. But despite
the internal tensions implied in the vernacular program for agricultural transformation,
the vision implied a common assumption that science introduced by foreign rule
had the potential for improving native lands and bringing indigenous “progress”.
In this version, science became the terrain that enabled the ruler and significant
elements among the ruled to jointly aspire to reach a unified goal. The counterpart
of this discursive device was a trivializing of the divide between the “privileged” and “dominated” in
the colonial society. What were the important nodes of this discourse? Who sought
such fraternization at the epistemic level, and for what purposes? This paper
will explore the configuration of classes and interests that underpinned the
demand for science for revamping colonial India’s agricultural landscape.
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