Education and Culture in North-East India (1826-2000)

This book provides a comprehensive account of the key issues that revolve around the interaction between culture and education in both, the colonial and post-colonial period of North-Eastern India. In attempting to do so, the author manages to produce a scholarly and a critical introduction to the cultural history of North-Eastern India, providing in the process a theoretical and a critical vocabulary to address as well as make an intervention into the contemporary cultural and political concerns of the region. The historical account generates an intellectual context to examine as well as critically comment on the key historical events and critical interventions in the period between 1826-2000 in North-Eastern India: the redrawing of boundaries and land systems in the colonial period as well as colonial policies towards education and language, the work of the Christian missionaries in creating cultural elites and opening up spaces for different identity formations, Assamese literary renaissance in the late nineteenth century, the impact of nationalist discourse, the policy of education and culture in post-colonial North-Eastern India shaped by a dominant nation-state. Given the context of the political mobilisations of identities, which has been the result of the practices and policies pursued during the colonial and post-colonial periods, the author argues for a system of education which resists both, the uniform claims of the nation-state as well as the claims of a unified ethnic subject. In this context, the author also provides a critique of three very significant novels written in Assamese. These novels are important; in that they manage to articulate the material realities and conditions of post-colonial society in North-Eastern India, particularly the voices and assertions of certain marginalised groups. A debate on the economic and political complexities of the problem of immigration into Brahmaputra valley provides the outline of a crisis deeply embedded in the identity conflicts in the region.