ABSTRACT
In our last chapter we saw how Indians came to be subjects of the IndoBritish state partly through becoming educated in both English and other languages in state and missionary schools. In the last part of the chapter we saw how many Indians resisted becoming subjects in the Revolt of 1857, a process that mostly involved those in north and central India. We also saw that the whole process of becoming educated in India was fraught with substantial discussions about which language was appropriate to teach and to learn. In the case of Bengal, we witnessed a process in which an attempt to conquer India and particularly Bengal by violence threw into sharp relief both a demand that Indians be taught English, more or less in a move towards sovereignty rather than by allowing Indians to participate in what was essentially a process of self-discipline and governmentality. Governmentality, we shall recall, operated in Bengal in 1839 when local
residents of Calcutta protested against being forced to learn English instead of their native Bangla or Bengali. These petitioners, we remember, informed us that the Muslim rulers had “ignorantly and injudiciously” decided to use Persian rather than Bengali. After such a long time, the petitioners thought it “impossible” that the Company state was now going to eliminate Bengali, “the language and literature of this Country [and to] disseminate those of England.” All this, they wrote, will “do more harm than [it did] formerly.” What was even more interesting for us was that the petitioners wrote that, although they were “independent in our natural wants we had already become in many respects subservient to the English, and to the productions of their Country.” Were they now to “be made to depend on them with regard to our reading and writing also, we shall only be rendered still more miserable.”1
