Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Politics, History, and Culture) - Softcover

Seth, Sanjay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822341050 ISBN 13: 9780822341055

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Subject Lessons offers a fascinating account of how western knowledge "traveled" to India, changed that which it encountered, and was itself transformed in the process. Beginning in 1835, India's British rulers funded schools and universities to disseminate modern, western knowledge in the expectation that it would gradually replace indigenous ways of knowing. From the start, western education was endowed with great significance in India, not only by the colonizers but also by the colonized, to the extent that today almost all "serious" knowledge about India-even within India-is based on western epistemologies. In Subject Lessons, Sanjay Seth's investigation into how western knowledge was received by Indians under colonial rule becomes a broader inquiry into how modern, western epistemology came to be seen not merely as one way of knowing among others but as knowledge itself. Drawing on history, political science, anthropology, and philosophy, Seth interprets the debates and controversies that came to surround western education. Central among these were concerns that Indian students were acquiring western education by rote memorization-and were therefore not acquiring "true knowledge"-and that western education had plunged Indian students into a moral crisis, leaving them torn between modern, western knowledge and traditional Indian beliefs. Seth argues that these concerns, voiced by the British as well as by nationalists, reflected the anxiety that western education was failing to produce the modern subjects it presupposed. This failure suggested that western knowledge was not the universal epistemology it was thought to be. Turning to the production of collective identities, Seth illuminates the nationalists' position vis-à-vis western education-which they both sought and criticized-through analyses of discussions about the education of Muslims and women.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sanjay Seth is Reader in Politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India and a coeditor of the journal Postcolonial Studies.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

""Subject Lessons" is a very important contribution to understanding of the coloniality of knowledge and of being. Imperial control is mainly control of subjectivity, and the control of subjectivity is largely based on education, on the formation of those to be subjected. Sanjay Seth's study of education in colonial India has implications far beyond the subcontinent. Touching on epistemology, politics (governmentality), religion (Muslims in India), the idea of the nation, gender and sexuality, ethics and history, Seth describes how the logic of coloniality has been and continues to be globally enacted."--Walter Mignolo, author of "The Idea of Latin America"

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Subject Lessons

The Western Education of Colonial IndiaBy Sanjay Seth

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4105-5

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................................................ixIntroduction.....................................................................................11 Changing the Subject: Western Knowledge and the Question of Difference.........................172 Diagnosing Moral Crisis: Western Knowledge and Its Indian Object...............................473 Which Past? Whose History?.....................................................................794 Governmentality and Identity: Constituting the "Backward but Proud Muslim".....................1095 Gender and the Nation: Debating Female Education...............................................1296 Vernacular Modernity: The Nationalist Imagination..............................................159Epilogue: Knowing Modernity, Being Modern........................................................183Notes............................................................................................197Bibliography.....................................................................................235Index............................................................................................259

Chapter One

Changing the Subject

Western Knowledge and the Question of Difference

Presiding over the "Anglicist" policy in education enunciated three years earlier, in 1838-39 the General Committee for Public Instruction in Bengal declared, "the ultimate object which we have in view is to infuse into the student, possessed of talents and leisure, a taste for literature and science," all of which would "hasten the regeneration of the country." The committee noted with satisfaction that western education was proving very popular with the middle classes, but also noted: "At present, education is for the most part appreciated only for the direct returns it yields." As the "at present" indicates, the committee was hopeful that over time education would be appreciated for other reasons; and in the meantime, its instrumental value constituted a useful and even necessary inducement. But a few years later the same body observed that while many more students were entering and completing school, thus achieving their goal of attaining "the qualifications requisite to perform the mechanical duties of a writer [a clerk]," "our object to raise the character of the people by education and not by their purses is still far distant."

The ensuing decades did not lessen the distance. The tendency to treat western education as a purely material or pecuniary asset came to be bemoaned with increasing frequency in subsequent years. In an exam answer at the Elphinstone Institution in 1850 a student wrote, "it is painful to write that the objects of the natives to send their children to the Government school are not the same as those of the Government. Their object is that their children may get a living for them." Over half a century later India's eminent chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray, writing on "The Bengali Brain and Its Misuse," declared that a "diploma is judged by its monetary equivalent-as something which can be turned into cash." These and numerous others observed, and usually lamented, that western education was treated as a means to an end, seldom valued in and for itself.

This chapter seeks to document in all its richness a discourse which spans over a century and which was generated from across all the usual cleavages demarcating opinion-the authors of it were British and Indian, loyalist and nationalist, humble and exalted, official and unofficial. What I call the "complaint concerning instrumentalism" and the closely associated "anxiety of cram" did not only voice the concern that there was a failure in the dissemination of western knowledge. When read carefully, this discourse can be shown to implicitly register and articulate the anxiety that western knowledge was failing to produce the subject who was the counterpart to this knowledge.

Contemporaries suggested that this failure was occurring because Indian students were appropriating the new knowledge much as they would have appropriated indigenous knowledges. I shall show that indigenous knowledges indeed posited and produced a different relation between knower and known, or between what we have become accustomed to see as the subject who knows and the object which is known; and the conclusion to be drawn, it would seem, is that cramming and instrumentalism testified to the (stubborn) presence of another subjectivity, an indigenous or premodern one. Such a conclusion would at once allow us to explain the failure being registered in the discourse of instrumentalism and cram, and moreover do so in a way which recognizes and remains sensitive to the different ways of relating to knowledge, tied to different ways of being in the world. But the category of "subjectivity" has a certain normativity built into it, and the question arises of whether it can be reworked to accommodate different ways of inhabiting the world, different ways of being a "self." Do such historicist emendations of our categories allow us to recognize difference, or do they unwittingly substantialize and universalize the difference to which they seek to attend?

"The Pinnacle of Bengali Ambition" ... The Complaint of Instrumentalism

It was frequently commented that education was not only regarded solely as a means to employment but more narrowly still: that it was treated (in the words of Viceroy Lord Irwin) as a "turnstile leading into the arena of Government service." Western education was valued, according to an inspector for schools, because the natives had the idea that it would lead to "what is the highest pinnacle of Bengali ambition-employment under Government." In the early years of the new education a middle school certificate was enough for a lowly position in government service, but very soon the requirements began to escalate, leading to the ditty,

idil midil ki chodo aas leke khurpa khodo ghaas

Abandon the desire for middle school and the like, get a scythe and cut the grass.

A middle school certificate usually meant education to a certain standard in the vernacular. However, it was reported, such learning was not much valued, and it became progressively devalued once the acquisition of a government job of even lowly rank began to require more advanced qualifications, and hence education in English. Thus when the Despatch of 1854 sought to redress the earlier emphasis on education in English by urging that the "grant-in-aid" system be used to establish schools teaching modern knowledge in Indian languages, government officials reported that the middle classes were only interested in contributing to the establishment of English schools which might lead to government employment, and would "not lift a finger to aid in the establishment of a Vernacular School"; "they will be taught English or not taught at all." This lack of enthusiasm for western learning conveyed in the vernacular, compared to the enthusiasm for western education in English, was seen to betoken a hardheaded calculation that only an English education would lead to a government job of the right sort of rank and income. The Calcutta Review noted that "for vernacular schools of an improved class there is little or no demand," "a knowledge of English ... pays so much better than anything else,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822341050
• ISBN 13: 9780822341055
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 276
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland