ABSTRACT
How was the hand to be guided, the eye to be trained, the senses sharpened to prepare the child for an adult world? In princely Mysore, located in southern India, both the missionaries, who took the inaugural steps in opening up education beyond those entitled to forms of knowledge, and the governmental efforts that followed were faced with new and complex challenges in a society wracked by the proscriptions of caste and gender. On the one hand, the classroom presented opportunities for ordering space and time and for remaking bodies and habits in the process of building new skills. Teaching aids, training tools, and educational methods were oriented afresh towards emphasising tactility over aurality, the cultivation of attention, and the building of perception in new ways. Fields of knowledge introduced ideas of historical time, a geographical sensibility, mathematical reasoning, and linguistic skills but also styles of observation, recording, measuring, and comparison.
But the classroom and the boarding school were perforce also sites of unlearning and of breaking down habits and prejudices relating to touch/sight, as well as older skills and styles of learning, to enable the modern educated subject to emerge. How was the relationship between active and passive learning renegotiated? What role did the educational expert play in resetting the relationship between mental and physical training, mental and manual labour, and experience and knowledge? Were the new skills that were taught and learned also oriented to other moralised – and gendered – goals? The small but suggestive body of visual and other records allows for speculations about the experience of schooling in late-19th- and early-20th-century Mysore.
