Tim Allender

Learning abroad: the colonial educational experiment in India, 1813–1919

This paper contributes to the special issue by offering a new framework in time periods that demonstrates the changing nature of the intellectual transfer to and from colonial India and to posit the imperatives that drove these changes. It shows that the nature of educational exchange in India was transformed in elemental ways during the colonial phase. And that this transformation ultimately produced an intellectual separation between East and West; a separation that pre‐empted what was to happen on the broader canvas of Indian national politics in the early twentieth century. For studies such as this one the state remains paradigmatic. The colonial experience in India was highly nuanced as indigenous collaborators, settler societies and ex‐patriots formed networks of exchange that fed into the empire at large. Understanding this complexity is essential groundwork for better analysing broader networks that transcended nation and empire, metropole and colony. Colonial rule valorised particular institutional forms of education, some imported from the “home” country, some from other domains, as part of the uneven process of empire‐building. In reaction to this the nationalist struggle did not construct its own educational idiom, it adapted the one already shaped by experimentation and imposition mostly created by the Empire at Home/Empire Abroad relationship of the colonial era.

Surrendering a Colonial Domain: Educating North India, 1854–1890

Postcolonial research has often assumed that colonial education fell victim to the forces of nationalism, like other areas of Raj governance in the early twentieth century. However, European‐led education that aspired to reach the general population had already failed a generation earlier, at least in north India. This was after highly imaginative and expansive systemic village schooling experiments had been attempted in the 1850s. A poorly conceived but well‐meaning crusade against female infanticide, a linguistically tenuous curriculum, a drive for Middle School English instruction and a policy of ‘decentralization’, which handed ‘lower‐order’ schooling to apathetic local committees, all played their part in a progressive disengagement between populace and department over the next three decades. Finally, the 1882 Hunter Commission demonstrated to Europeans that they had permanently lost their earlier educational initiative.

Anglican evangelism in North India and the Punjabi missionary classroom: the failure to educate 'the masses', 1860-77

Even today a few former, central mission schools of the British period remain educational citadels in both India and Pakistan. In the north of the subcontinent these include St Stephens College in New Delhi and Forman College in Lahore, the Alma Mater of the President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf. They have endured largely to serve an Indian and Pakistani elite. However, much to do with the missions and their educational efforts in the nineteenth century remains untapped by postcolonial research. The most recent analysis regarding them has been to do with the co-paradigms of masculinities and gender. Mrinalini Sinha’s Colonial Masculinity and Gail Minault’s Secluded Scholars are two such innovative works. Looking laterally across the subcontinent these able books have found educational territory, once etched out by the missions, fruitful to deconstruct as part of their broader discourses to do with the European in India. What has been missing in recent research efforts is an explanation as to why the missions in British India failed to recruit a clientele beyond their central city schools despite their expansive programmes of evangelism and conversion into the mofussil (rural areas) in the middle of the nineteenth century. To attempt an explanation of this I have decided on a microstudy approach in just one province in the latter half of the nineteenth century. My justification for this approach is because the extent of the impact of the missions on the agricultural population was variable across the Raj. In the south, especially in Madras, this was greater than the more recently annexed territories of the north. As well, the reasons for the ‘success’ or otherwise of the missions were different in each province. Most specifically, this article focuses on the dominant Anglican mission schools in the Punjab (a province which stretched from Delhi in the East to Peshawar on the strategic North West Frontier). It once included both St Stephen’s College and Forman College before it was divided into two (one part into India, the other into Pakistan) at the time of partition in 1947. The Punjab, under the British, was roughly the size of England (in terms of both population and land size) and its society was predominantly village based. My analysis seeks to move beyond a discussion about the general cultural incompatibilities to be found throughout the Raj. As well, my contention is that the period of genuine government experimentation with grant-in-aid mission schools was much shorter than is

Bad Language in the Raj: The ‘Frightful Encumbrance’ of Gottlieb Leitner, 1865–1888

This article traces the exceptional career of Gottlieb Leitner, one of the most significant European educators in north India in the second half of the nineteenth century. Leitner’s career is important because he was responsible for changing government attitudes about teaching in the local languages and he was pivotal in the foundation of the Punjab University. The article is also part of a move since the mid 1990s to rediscover the European educator in India. This has been necessary because postcolonial research has neglected such men and women and subalternist approaches have concentrated, instead, on using European‐constructed text to decipher the histories of mostly marginalised and oppressed indigenous groupings on the subcontinent. Leitner’s appointment as Principal of Lahore Government College in 1865 was a deliberate step on the part of authorities in Calcutta and London to see a language expert and educator take up the position. The Punjab, the province where the college was located, was of importance to the British. It had been annexed just fourteen years earlier and it contained the strategic North West Frontier, adjacent to Afghanistan. Its languages were especially difficult for the British to understand and Leitner’s expertise offered a chance to facilitate translations of Western knowledge into the local languages, and especially the medium of instruction which was Persian Urdu. However, his brash approach to raj governance soon provoked hostility from his superiors that was to endure until his departure from the province 33 years later in 1888. This article demonstrates that Leitner’s long career in the Punjab was part of a generally fruitless debate about education in the province. It also shows how other political agendas easily intervened in educational matters in British India in a way not found elsewhere in the empire. However, Leitner’s thinking, the strategic alliances he was able to form with indigenous groupings, and his ability to understand the politics of the raj, resulted in an important change in government attitudes, especially concerning university education taught in the local languages. The structure of the Punjab University and the local language degrees it could confer were unique in the raj at the time of its foundation in 1881. Much of this was the result of Leitner’s clever lobbying that Calcutta, despite its distaste for the troublesome Lahore College principal, ultimately could not afford to ignore. Most significantly, Leitner’s career is illustrative of how the British lost the initiative on the question of ‘language and education’ in little over one generation despite a deeper understanding of the subject in the early half of the nineteenth century. At the time of Leitner’s departure from India in 1888 this increasingly polemical issue was being incorporated, instead, into nationalist narratives that were to grow more stridently anti‐British in the early twentieth century.

Robert Montgomery and the daughter slayers: A punjabi education imperative, 1855–1865

Since the 1930s little research has been attempted on government educational policy and performance in the Indian subcontinent. In the late British India period sanitised government reports were used by Raj apologists to construct a vision of a flawed, but benevolent, system. Among more recent studies, the best known is that by Nurullah and Naik, but, for all its outward objectivity, this volume does little more than sketch a basic narrative of educational initiatives.

Malfeasant bodies, Orientalism, and colonial image-making, 1850–1912

Abstract Using a wide array of photographs and other examples of the visual, this article reveals the distinctive messaging of the image when situated within empire, with colonial India as a case study. The author analyses the making of the image in the hands of the colonial master but where it becomes uncontrollable, if not revelatory, in its messaging about the true nature of the colonial domain. Two main categories of image are examined. The first category is about the messaging around conventional transferrals of white culture and practices of rule. This is where messages are created about the colonial imposition that offer up favoured, yet flawed, projections of the European in empire. A second category, deeply about the interaction of the colonial body, is more penetrating. Here, the imagery around the malfeasant and disobedient “native” body reveals the complexity of entangled imperial race, culture, and gender imperatives. The image conveys insurgent messages about colonial rule and undoes the white cultural language of empire.

Household bibis, pious learning and racial cure: changing feminine identities in colonial India, 1780–1925

Abstract Based on the keynote address the author gave at the ISCHE conference in Turkey in June 2015, this article examines how female identities, in a predominantly non-white colonial setting, were variously constructed over a 145-year time period. The paper also sees some resonance with the power structures that drive female oppression in former non-white colonial domains today and begins with that discussion. The author then turns to develop a largely historical perspective concerning this issue and is interested in the changes in the interaction between females living in India and the colonial state over this extended time period. In so doing, the article illustrates the activism of females who were caught within the imperial ambit as they responded, with varying degrees of intensity, to the broader racial and class agendas, which were internal to British colonial rule. The article uses the paradigm of “femininity” to trace the self-actualisation of these females, as well as the official impositions placed on them; and how, even from this position of powerlessness, coercive agendas could still emerge as a result of their activism that the state, itself, was then forced to accommodate.

New perspectives in the history of Indian education, by Parimala V. Rao

It is always pleasing to see more work on the history of education in India where new perspectives are posited regarding a very complex interplay of epistemological, socio-cultural, institutional, ...

Identity dystopias, empire framing and theoretical hegemonies: two case studies, India and Ireland

This article explores the connections between official contemporary identity formation and colonial pasts. Using the case studies of India and Ireland the article explores how different traditions of theorisation are powerful in these formations. India and Ireland were two colonial domains that had many linkages outside the ambit of the British. These linkages are made sense of using methodological approaches like those deployed by Dick Selleck and Geoff Sherington in key works. Yet the colonial stories of these two countries are also distinctive, offering up strong trajectories that inform different contemporary controversies from uncomfortable yet stereotyped perspectives.

Historical Analysisanalysis historical : New Approaches to Postcolonial scholarship postcolonial Scholarship and the Subcontinent

Historical analysis is a broad church and its methodologies depend on the categories of evidence in play. Powerful critiques emerge as analysis is variously derived from oral sources, from careful collation from pre-organised databases, from obscure documents hidden in long-forgotten corners of archives, or even from well worked over texts as the arrival of a new paradigm allows new ways of looking at old problems. This chapter focuses on one aspect of historical research, that of post-colonial scholarship; a field that has witnessed much innovation in the last 15 years. Most especially, it examines knowledge transfer. In addition, in terms of overused globalisation critiques, the chapter explores how new histories are being written that emphasise the way history is referenced to deepen comparative analysis between national domains. Lastly, textual, subaltern and gender approaches are examined in the context of research into the educational history of colonial India.