It is generally accepted that education was formally established in India in an organised fashion around 1500 BC. Over subsequent centuries the spread of education thrived to the extent that Nalanda University became an international centre of learning after being established around 600 BC. Admittedly, the spread of education in India, beginning from those early days, was not holistic but restrictive, being deeply rooted in teaching, learning and understanding the Vedas, the scriptures of ancient Indian civilisation. The book under review is a learned work of ‘applied’ rather than ‘pure’ history of education.
Aptly the four editors of whom each is a seasoned academic with excellent credentials describe their work as providing ‘historical insights’ rather than history per se. Understandably, for reasons of space, ‘colonial India’ is defined as the time span of their research which is wide enough since the Indian colonial phase lasted two ‘long centuries’ — i.e. the 19 and 20 plus extra decades before and after each side of the timeline. This covers both pre- and post-independence periods.
The year of Independence, namely 1947, can be reckoned as the very apogee of the ‘colonial India’ era. India was not a poor nation during this era, being self-sufficient in rice and wheat and with comfortable export earnings from tea, opium, indigo, jute, silk, ivory et al India could have been rich if Britain had not adopted the age old dictum that a conqueror had the right to loot conquered territory. And so it came about that by 1947 India was an impoverished, illiterate land.
The 19th century witnessed the formal creation of the Indian Empire ruled by Queen Victoria with the Mughal Empire vanquished and as this volume establishes in some detail India as a colony saw several changes in the content of disseminating knowledge as well as in its implementation simply because colonial knowledge systems attempted to nullify pre-colonial institutions. The editors sarcastically show how the Viceregal administration always cited paucity of funds to justify inaction in the field of ‘native’ education.
Another important point this volume makes is its detailed account how the colonial master utterly neglected the cause of ‘native’ women’s education. Not that male education was well looked after. Reliable statistics stem from the Census of 1951 and establish the fact that when independent India was born only 18.33 % were literate (counting both sexes). Happily free India tells a vastly improved tale. From the Census of 2011 figures it is known the literacy rate in 2011 was 74.4% — a vast improvement albeit with still some path to go.
Meanwhile an important change had occurred in the field of Indian education. Early in the volume, in pages 11 and 12, the editors cogently say that “big changes in both knowledge production and generation came riding the wave of colonisation.” They go on to significantly add in their consistently genteel tone of conveying facts without passing value judgment an example of how “big change”. came about. Justifying their theory of big change the editors establish precisely how colonial India’s educational construct was irrevocably revolutionised. They explain how “under the East India Company, perhaps for the first time in Indian history, the State had emerged as the producer of knowledge and the sole arbiter of what was to be delivered and to whom. The recipients had limited options and limited access.”
Not surprisingly a State enjoying absolute rule being unanswerable to ‘native’ subjects embedded all regulatory and financial powers of educational governance firmly in itself. So “big” was the change noted above that this state of affairs continues unchanged till today, 67 years after independence. Except for very few privately endowed ‘deemed universities’, the educational sector wholesale is governed and funded by government.
The book comprises 14 chapters that collectively span a vast swathe of historical insights captured in thematic titles ranging chronographically from “Lessons from the Colonial Past”, “Reconciling Science with Islam in nineteenth century India”, “Quest for Technical Knowledge 1830-1900”, “Higher Education and Christian Missionary Manoeuvres in India 1818-1910”, “Technical Education in late nineteenth and early twentieth century India”, “Vernacular Medical Education” and towards the end of the timeline, the “Central Advisory Board of Education 1920-1947”.
This excellent volume owes its conception to birth from deliberations of a panel titled “Emergence of Knowledge Societies and Educational History” in the 20th Congress of International Association of Historians of Asia (IAHA) organised by the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2008.
