Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India

Beginning in 1835, India’s British rulers funded schools and universities to disseminate modern western knowledge in the expectation that it would gradually replace indigenous ways of knowing. From the very start, western education was accorded great significance not only by the colonizers, but also by the colonized, to the extent that today all ‘serious’ knowledge about India–even within India–is based on western epistemology. Subject Lessons offers of fascinating account of how western knowledge came to be disseminated in India, such that it came to assume its current status as the obvious, and almost the only, mode of knowing India. Sanjay Seth investigates the reception, consumption, and transformation of this knowledge by the colonized and explains why a specifically modern and western conception of knowledge came to be seen not merely as one way of knowing among others, but as knowledge itself. The author interrogates the discourses, debates, and controversies surrounding western education. Among these were concerns that Indian students were acquiring western education by rote memorization–the ‘true’ purpose and objective of western knowledge was thereby undermined–and that western education had plunged Indian students into a moral crisis, leaving them torn between modern, western knowledge and traditional Indian beliefs. Questioning the homology between modern knowledge and modernity, Seth argues such knowledge was not producing the modern subjects it had presupposed. This work also explore the role education played in the nationalist imagination, and in the production of other collective identities. In offering new understandings of knowledge and education in colonial India, it reflects of important issues related to women, Muslims, history writings, governmentality, power, and modernity. Interdisciplinary in nature, this thoughtful and provocative work will interest scholars, teachers, and students of history, education, sociology, politics, and philosophy.