ABSTRACT
This article examines the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. This historiography is a contested terrain.1 India, like other present-day sovereign nations in the region of South Asia, such as Pakistan or Bangladesh, came under the direct purview of British colonialism from the late eighteenth century. India is also in its longue durée educational history characterised by huge diversities of religion, language, and ethnicities, with longstanding histories of encounters with other cultures, such as the Mughal and the British, which in turn created many, often hybrid, educational systems. How have histories of education of such a diverse part of the world been written for the post-1800 period? Although history of education is a relatively marginal part of the larger discipline of history in Indian universities and
*Email: B.Bagchi@uu.nl
1Some of the key debates in this historiography can be found in, for example, Hayden Bellenoit, “Paper, Pens and Power between Empires in North India, 1750-1850,” South Asian History and Culture 3, no. 3 (2012): 348-72, and in “Introduction: Perspectives Old and New,” in New Perspectives in the History of Indian Education, ed. Parimala V. Rao
Barnita Bagchi*
Department of Languages, Literature, and Communication, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
(Received 27 June 2014; accepted 10 July 2014)
This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education. Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational institutions and methods were present in pre-colonial India: in this context, the article discusses the work of historians who researched indigenous Indian village schools, key to educational transmission until the early nineteenth century. The educational work of the nationalist leader M.K. Gandhi inflected the work of such educational historians. The article devotes some attention to ways in which twentieth-century ‘new education’ reinvented aspects of pre-colonial South Asian education. Marxist, feminist, Dalit and Subaltern historians of education have analysed the differential and hierarchised spread of ‘western’ education in South Asia. Nonetheless, this article shows how the educational agency of Dalits, women, peasants and working people has been analysed by scholars. The article then examines recent scholarship which views the origins and growth of ‘western’ education in South Asia in the framework of transcultural transactions. It ends from the vantage point of connected and entangled histories of education, looking beyond the unit of the nation state.
