London; New Delhi: Routledge, 2014. xii, 248 pp. US$105.00, cloth. ISBN 978-415-72879-9.
First published in 1991 as Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas, this third edition is a substantially revised one. Challenging the popular and simplistic view of colonial education—that it was designed by a “twisted mind” (x) to produce clerks to assist colonial administration—Kumar not only details continuities between colonialist and nationalist ideas of education but also analyzes colonial attempts to socialize and train “the native to become a citizen” (14). These processes and their residues continue to shape Indian schooling into the present. While the title refers to colonial “India” the primary focus of this book is the “Hindi region,” that is, the Central and United provinces of British India. Kumar, however, does highlight influences from other parts of India. One of Kumar’s biggest strengths is an engagement with vernacular scholarship in Hindi; he draws liberally from Hindi sources including speeches, autobiographies, fiction, magazines, and other documents. His other source materials include educational reports written by colonial officers and other official documents; works of social reformers and nationalist leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, and Rabindranath Tagore; and scholarly works that examine schooling and experiences of schooling in colonial India.
The book is divided into two parts, Dynamics of Colonization and Dynamics of the Freedom Struggle, each comprised of three chapters. Part 1 begins with “Colonial Citizen as an Educational Ideal” (chapter 1) and deals with the logic that informed the idea of creating a “little civil society” (26) in India and the role of education in this process. English education produced a civil society in India and simultaneously legitimized and accentuated traditional hierarchies, creating a “collaborating class” that shared in the colonizer’s paternalism towards the masses (31).
In “Appropriate Knowledge: Conflict of Curriculum and Culture” (chapter 2) Kumar elaborates on zones of “conflict” between the indigenous and colonial educational systems, and how resolutions of these conflicts “moderated the transition from old to new hierarchies” (65). Colonial education transported schools and teachers from community life—both the school and the teacher having been supported by resources drawn from the community—to state control. This impacted curriculum or what was considered “worth learning” (58). Curricular changes necessitated teacher training. It also marked the introduction of the examination system, thereby evolving a “bureaucratic, centralized system of education” (59). Schools thus emerged as a “certifying authority [that] regulated social mobility and moderated the transition from old to new hierarchies” (65).
“Meek Dictator: The Paradox of Teacher’s Personality” (chapter 3) juxtaposes a teacher’s identity prior to and after the introduction of colonial schooling, in which the teacher, who had once been a well-respected part of the local community, became a meek salaried servant of the government. The teacher’s concerns were no longer the selection, pacing, and transaction of knowledge, but pleasing school inspectors, covering textbook content, and preparing the students for examinations without disrupting the teacher’s authority in the classroom.
In the second part of the book, Kumar focuses on three “quests”—equality, self-identity, and progress—and the ways in which they inspired and inflected educational thought during freedom struggle. In “Pursuit of Equality” (chapter 5) Kumar takes up discourses on education vis-à-vis the lower castes and girls in colonial India, while being cognizant of regional variations. Nationalistic perspectives view the political awakening of the lower castes as an outcome of the spread of education among the oppressed classes. However, Kumar argues this does not account for the narrow spread of education nor the egalitarian struggles by lower castes. Rather, education “contributed” to these struggles by creating lower-caste elites, who found in the British “an audience and an agency for fighting against Brahmin domination” (103). With regard to girls’ education, Kumar points out that the educated Englishman and the colonial Indian elite were in agreement over socializing girls into becoming “better wives for English-educated Indian men … and more enlightened mothers” (121). While education might have widened the employment opportunities available for women, it “remained incapable of rivaling patriarchy as a socializing force” (122).
“Quest for Self-Identity” (chapter 6) illustrates that the search for an identity in a colonial society can be rife with conflict, and that education was one of the prominent arenas in which this quest and conflict found expression. For the educated colonial citizen, English education was a vehicle for exposure and social mobility even when it was considered alien and deficient in moral training. In the Hindi region, this conflict found expression in the development of Hindi prose as a language indigenous to India and untainted by external influences unlike Urdu. Through an analysis of Hindi literary history and school textbooks, Kumar illustrates that the entrenchment of Hindi in schools and colleges played a crucial role in the identification of Hindi with “Hindu.” The colonial administration further fuelled the Hindi-Urdu divide.
“Meanings of Progress” (chapter 7) highlights contestations over nineteenth-century ideals of progress. India’s backwardness was compared to the superior scientific knowledge of Europe, resulting in “ambivalence … in nationalist thought on education” (170). While nationalist leaders concerned with education did not fail to criticize the “alien character” of English education, its narrow curriculum, and its limited spread, they also acknowledged the necessity of this education for India’s material advancement.
To conclude, this book sheds light on the establishment of a “modern” system of state-sponsored schooling in colonial India. Unlike in colonizing countries (see I. Hunter, “Assembling the school,” in Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neo-liberalism, and rationalities of government, eds. A. Barry, T. Osborne, & N. Rose, London, UK: UCL Press, 1996, 143–165), in colonized India, associated transitions were inflected by the bureaucratic and disciplinary concerns of an ontologically exploitative state. Kumar regards the disconnect that colonial education policy wrought between school knowledge and everyday knowledge as “the most negative of all the consequences” (214) and one of the most enduring legacies of colonial education. A “history of ideas,” this seminal work is invaluable for those examining the legacies of pre-colonial, colonial, and nationalist thought on modern schooling in postcolonial societies.
Mary Ann Chacko
Columbia University, New York, USA
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