Show or Tell? Instruction and Representation in Govardhanram’s Saraswatichandra (original) (raw)
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History Compass, 2009
This essay won the 2007 History Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Asia Section.Despite the extensive literature on the history of education in colonial India, historians have confined their arguments to very narrow themes linked to colonial epistemological dominance and education as a means of control, resistance and dialogue. These tend to mirror the debates of the colonial period, particularly regarding the Anglicist-Orientalist controversy. This article argues that such an approach is both gendered and hierarchical, and seeks to fundamentally redress the balance. It looks firstly at formal school education – colonial and indigenous – in both philosophical and technological terms. It then turns to education as experienced by the majority of Indian children outwith the classroom, either formally or within the domestic sphere. The article then looks at the neglected recipients of education, and seeks to re-establish children as agents within these adult-driven agendas. By considering educational discourse and practice, and the emerging historiography of Indian childhood and children, we can begin to establish a more rounded and inclusive picture of what education really meant.
This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education. Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational institutions and methods were present in pre-colonial India: in this context, the article discusses the work of historians who researched indigenous Indian village schools, key to educational transmission until the early nineteenth century. The educational work of the nationalist leader M.K. Gandhi inflected the work of such educational historians. The article devotes some attention to ways in which twentieth-century 'new education' reinvented aspects of pre-colonial South Asian education. Marxist, feminist, Dalit and Subaltern historians of education have analysed the differential and hierarchised spread of 'western' education in South Asia. Nonetheless, this article shows how the educational agency of Dalits, women, peasants and working people has been analysed by scholars. The article then examines recent scholarship which views the origins and growth of 'western' education in South Asia in the framework of transcultural transactions. It ends from the vantage point of connected and entangled histories of education, looking beyond the unit of the nation state.
Connected and entangled histories: writing histories of education in the Indian context
Paedagogica Historica, 2014
This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education. Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational institutions and methods were present in pre-colonial India: in this context, the article discusses the work of historians who researched indigenous Indian village schools, key to educational transmission until the early nineteenth century. The educational work of the nationalist leader M.K. Gandhi inflected the work of such educational historians. The article devotes some attention to ways in which twentieth-century 'new education' reinvented aspects of pre-colonial South Asian education. Marxist, feminist, Dalit and Subaltern historians of education have analysed the differential and hierarchised spread of 'western' education in South Asia. Nonetheless, this article shows how the educational agency of Dalits, women, peasants and working people has been analysed by scholars. The article then examines recent scholarship which views the origins and growth of 'western' education in South Asia in the framework of transcultural transactions. It ends from the vantage point of connected and entangled histories of education, looking beyond the unit of the nation state.
Debates on Schooling the Mind in Colonial Bengal
Social Change, 2022
The making of the enlightenment in the age of imperial expansion through the analytical frame of knowledge and pedagogies were subjects of debate in nineteenth-century India, and continue to remain so. There was a set of complicated political, social and psychological process involved in colonial schooling in India as a public site to frame native subjectivities. This has resulted in a unique formulation of racial-civilisational location of Indian subjectivity, with its alternate configuration of power. The article seeks to emphasise the disparate discourses on the prevalent education system, and the reaction of Bengali intellectuals towards ‘modern’ Western pedagogy in nineteenth-century Bengal. The critical debates, ranging from commendation to condemnation underline the dilemma of a period of transition. As a subject of experimental formulations of ideas and system, the native learner was at the centre of a cultural tussle that got torn between Western impositions and nationalist...