ABSTRACT
As the Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o has observed in Decolonising the Mind , the ‘most important area of [colonial] domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationships to the world’. The study of colonial education and the perusal of the larger historical processes that have determined the identity formation and subjectivity of the Indians bring people to some general observations. Colonial education no doubt changed the intellectual environment in India; it opened up a vista of western ideas which changed the very fabric of social life and thinking. The earlier system of indigenous scholarship and institutionalised learning with its imposition of authority continued under the British colonialists within a very similar framework. Even after more than seventy years of freedom from colonial rule, education in India still remains largely undemocratic and authoritarian, with a definite tendency to benefit the more privileged sections of the society.
