Sunday Posts

A close reading of India's New Education Policy illustrates a dilemma at the heart of India's Higher Education: Whether to become more Indian or more global?  For a service economy servicing a global clientele, a Higher Education system that prepares people with global service economy skills is critical for India to build. Higher Education is one sector in India that needs 'liberalisation', thirty years after the rest of the economy opened up. And, besides, it is hard to avoid the global drift when the Higher Ed policy narrative is framed within the human capital paradigm. On the other hand, there is a deep cultural agenda of the policymakers to make Indian Higher Ed more Indian. It is not just revivalism or Hindu fundamentalism. This is also based on an accurate reading of the chasm at the heart of the Indian society, between an English-speaking elite and vernacular rest, which is threatening the cohesion of the state. This is also about undoing the colonial legacy, th...

My blogging is inextricably connected with Lord Macaulay. Indeed, the root of all this is my belief that even if India was made, the task of making Indians is still unfinished; an education that combine cultural confidence, economic emancipation and political imagination fit for nation-building is yet to be found. But, more directly, I caught onto blogging as I came across the well-known meme about Macaulay conspiring to destroy a prosperous India with English language, wrote a casual and rather amateurish post debunking it and then got drawn into a debate that continued for more than a decade. Truth be told, that engagement was central to how my interests changed from the technical nuances of delivering education to the cultural history of it and why I came to commit myself to history of ideas as my field of study. But, then, it's not just a personal fixation; with the Hindu nationalists in ascendance in India, it has become a nation one. He is the bogeyman of English education, w...

As India's universities fail to cling to their already precarious positions on global league tables, old concerns about Indian higher education have been newly voiced. There is much to be unhappy about, not just the position on the league tables. The skewed structure of Indian higher education means the significant number of bright graduates, educated at great expense by the Indian state, leave India every year for fortunes abroad. Despite the overt focus on technology education in India, the technology gap with its neighbour and competitor for global influence, China, is alarmingly wide. And, for the all their swagger, Indian business schools have languished at the bottom of global league tables and their graduates still struggle to find good jobs in India. But I don't want to lament here about the obvious. In fact, I wish to make a point which is its opposite: The obsessions about global league tables, technology lead or employability, the three key factors dr...

I have traced the development of Indian Higher Education under a series of posts under two sections - The Road to Macaulay and Since Macaulay. This final post is about the formation of the Calcutta University, which is a unique university as it was formed solely with the purpose of granting degrees which would qualify the recipients for government jobs. It followed the University of London model, but in the limitations of its purpose, it was rather unique. However, it was not inconsequential or a temporary affair, but, I think, the first consumer university in the world. Here is the story of its foundation.  -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Lord Hardinge’s administration enhanced the bureaucratic-educational connections further  by making English education as a qualification for government employment in 1844 .. it is highly desirable to afford it every reasonable encouragement by holding out to those who...

Macaulay’s minutes were accepted by Bentinck readily and the government resolution of 7th March 1835 plainly stated His Lordship in Council is of opinion that the great object of the British government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India and that all the funds appropriated for the purposes of education should be best employed on English education alone. Bentinck’s plans were not to close any pre-existing institutions,but to stop funding new ones, abolish the unprofitable translation projects and withdraw the stipends granted at Calcutta Madrasha and Sanskrit Colleges. But this ‘all destroying’ edict met strong resistance, from just from powerful Orientalist scholars in the General Committee but also through petitions from Muslim and Hindu communities. James Mill passed away in June 1836 and Bentinck left India soon after issuing the legislation, on 20th March 1835. While Macaulay continued as the President of the General Committ...

At the time when the expansion of Company state in India brought about political, economic and social changes that led to a rapid transformation of Indian education system, the idea of a University was also rapidly undergoing a change in Europe and North America. Curiously, the history of Indian education has been conventionally analysed without reference to these developments, except for the obvious parallels between the newly established London University and the University of Calcutta, as the latter was based on the model of the former. But even such a parallel was conventionally used to highlight operational similarities rather than philosophical ones. However, the discussions in Indian higher education during the formative years of the Company administration was always global, as the British policy-makers brought with them the ideas and practices of the mother country, British parliament sought to influence policy in line with its ideological persuasion and educated Indians l...

When he presented his Minutes in 1835, Macaulay’s mission was to align the educational funds, after its ten-fold increase, with the Utilitarian project of administrative and legal reforms. This was a break with the past, of all reverence towards any ‘ancient constitution’, but a reaffirmation of some continuities as well : The vision of a Military-Fiscal-Pedagogical state, a statement of moral confidence and recognition of a modernising mission. The Orientalist corpus of Indian antiquity supplied the idea of an antiquated India that needed to be transformed with European knowledge, just as Peter the Great effected on ancient Muscovy. The post-abolitionist confidence enabled Macaulay to transcend the fears of an reawakened Indian nation breaking off from the British, that constrained the thinking of earlier generations; rather, he celebrated such a possibility. Macaulay’s arguments were based on appeal to pragmatic reason, and part of his own project of creating Codes of Law for I...

By the end of 1820s, the initial abortive efforts of Sir Thomas Munro in Madras and Mountstuart Elphinstone’s in Bombay to revive traditional Indian education were being replaced by programmes to introduce ‘useful learning’. Lord William Bentinck, whose Governor Generalship began in 1828, carried with him the reputation of  "a man of a violent and haughty nature, imbued with English prejudice and regarding the English constitution as the salvation of the human race," and an earlier failure, as Governor of Madras that ended in a recall after the Vellore Mutiny of 1806 (sparked by, among other things, attempts to change Sepoy dress codes and discipline). Bentinck was a reformer, deeply impressed by the Utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham (Bentinck, who met Bentham before he left for India, reportedly told the philosopher, “I am going to British India, but I shall not be Governor-General. It is you that will be Governor-General”) and his appointment marked a clean break with...

In 1813, when the Company’s charter came up for renewal, Company territories in India were already a vast empire and its supremacy, over all the regional rivals as well as the Mughal Emperor, had been decidedly established. The mercantile interests in England were a spent force and the combined demands of British and Indian merchants to abolish the Company’s monopoly and open the India trade were too powerful to be ignored again. The expansion of British manufacture made the demands for a reversal of trade flow - treating India as a market for the British products - the ascendant force against the quaint monopolist interests in Indian salt, tea and fabric. The Company Court duly resisted, but, unlike in 1793, it had to give up its monopoly (except for that on tea and China trade), setting in motion an economic transformation of India, opening its markets to the full force of competition from British textiles and other manufactured products. This economic change set off a new phase...

The Company state was in the middle of a rapid transformation in the 1790s. It was to be engaged in wars, with local rulers as well as in the broader global war with the French, for the next quarter century. Starting with Cornwallis’ wars with Tipu Sultan followed by Wellesley brothers’ wider conflicts across India and the Anglo-Maratha wars, the wars expanded the Company territories across the Indian peninsula and established the Company as the preeminent power in India. There were other changes equally as significant: The rise of evangelical christianity and the English nationalism rekindled by the French wars led to a separation between the English and the Indians in a much greater degree. Cornwallis’ administration had excluded Indians from all important government positions. The more moralistic positions of these administrations discouraged gambling, drinking, cohabitation with Indian women and embezzlement of government funds. Also, the conflicts between Indian and English ...

However, even when Hastings left Calcutta, forces that irreversibly altered India’s ‘ancient constitution’ were already ascendant. Paradoxically, the radical changes arose from the deeply conservative British attempts to preserve what they perceived to be the Indian culture and polity. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, an institution Hastings patronised, was established in 1784 and over the next half century, would take the lead in the production of ‘reliable legal knowledge’. William Jones, its Founder-President, with his colleagues and successors, would be engaged in a vast enterprise of translating ancient Hindu and Muslim legal texts, that would end up transforming India’s tradition and custom-based context-sensitive legal system (‘three thousand years of despotism’, as Macaulay would describe it in his speech) into an European-style legal code. In this ‘Orientalist’ enterprise, Jones and his colleagues were supported by Hindu and Muslim scholars, a collaboration that produced...