Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post)Colonial Education 9781782382676

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Connecting Histories of Education

CONNECTING HISTORIES OF EDUCATION Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education

Y Edited by

Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2014 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2014 Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Connecting histories of education : transnational and cross-cultural exchanges in  (post)colonial education / edited by Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere.     pages cm    Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-78238-266-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-78238-267-6 (ebook)   1. Education—Philosophy. 2. Transnational education. 3. Postcolonialism. 4. Globalization. I. Bagchi, Barnita.   LB14.7.C66 2013  378'.0162—dc23 2013023298

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed on acid-free paper ISBN: 978-1-78238-266-9 hardback ISBN: 978-1-78238-267-6 ebook

Contents

Y Introduction. Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere

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Part I. Historiographical Reflections Chapter 1. History of Education beyond the Nation? Trends in Historical and Educational Scholarship Eckhardt Fuchs

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Chapter 2. Towards a Global History of Education: Alternative Strategies Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

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Chapter 3. Writing Histories of Congolese Colonial and Post-Colonial Education: A Historiographical View from Belgium Marc Depaepe

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Chapter 4. Range and Limits of the Countryside Schooling Historiography in Latin America (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries): Some Reflections Alicia Civera

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Part II. Travelling Concepts Chapter 5. A Transcultural Transaction: William Carey’s Baptist Mission, the Monitorial Method and the Bengali Renaissance Mary Hilton Chapter 6. A Colonial Experiment in Education: Madras, 1789–1796 Jana Tschurenev v

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Contents

Part III: Indigenous Education and Resistance Chapter 7. A New Education for ‘Young India’: Exploring Nai Talim from the Perspective of a Connected History Simone Holzwarth

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Chapter 8. Colonial Education and Saami Resistance in Early Modern Sweden Daniel Lindmark

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Chapter 9. Constructive Orientalism: Debates on Languages and Educational Policies in Colonial India, 1830–1880 Hakim Ikhlef

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Part IV. Women’s Education Chapter 10. Raden Ajeng Kartini and Cultural Nationalism in Java Joost Coté

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Chapter 11. Women’s Education through Women’s Eyes: Literary Articulations in Colonial Western India Meera Kosambi

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Chapter 12. Connecting Literature and History of Education: Analysing the Educative Fiction of Jean Webster and Lila Majumdar Transculturally and Connotatively Barnita Bagchi

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Chapter 13. Transcending the Centre-Periphery Paradigm: Loreto Teaching in India, 1842–2010 Tim Allender

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Introduction

Connecting Histories of Education Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere

Y Connecting Histories of Education bears a double meaning. The volume connects historians of education from South Asia and other parts of the world to enhance a comparative perspective and create a wider research network beyond the Euro-Western world. In addition, it presents local, regional, national and transnational research, with the goal of highlighting the interconnectedness of histories of education in the modern world. The volume thus upholds a commitment to the transnational history of education located in a non-Eurocentric framework, with encounters taking place between South Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia and the Americas. Our argument for a volume on transnational exchanges and cross-cultural transfers in the history of education is that globalization processes require new research that goes beyond the traditional historical narratives based on the nation state. However provocative an approach, the ‘transnational turn’, often addressed in the historical, educational and political sciences, has with few exceptions attracted little attention in the field of history of education, which still tends to a national orientation geared to the modern period. Only gradually are historians of education taking small steps towards transnational and global concepts and approaches that have been developed in other disciplines. Therefore, this volume aims at widening the arena of history of education by analysing transnational exchanges and cross-cultural transfers in 1

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the field of education between the Euro-Western world and Asia from the eighteenth century onwards. In doing so, it considers research trends in the historical scholarship of the past decade or so. Using various case studies, the authors explore educational transfers in different cultural settings, focusing on local-level transformations and reinventions of the meanings and forms of colonialism. Although the regional focus on South Asia means the majority of chapters focus on colonial issues, this is not a volume on the history of colonial education. Rather, the work as a volume emphasizes the ways in which a transnational perspective deepens and complicates our understanding of colonialism, the nation state and the responses of local communities, institutions and individuals. In this respect the colonial context is a particularly appropriate theme, as it allows scholars to highlight a variety of transnational and cross-cultural transfers. The volume is divided into four parts. The first introduces main concepts of world and transnational history (Eckhardt Fuchs) and generally discusses the colonial and national discourse on education (Sabyasachi Bhattacharya), but it also reviews historiographical developments using the concrete examples of the Belgian Congo (Marc Depaepe) and Latin America (Alicia Civera). The following case studies focus on cross-cultural transfers within the context of colonial education (part II), varieties of indigenous education and educational resistance (part III), and the unique role of women’s education and expression (part IV). Part I, Historiographical Reflections, starts with a summary of current research trends within the historical profession that aim at transcending national borders. As Eckhardt Fuchs shows in his introductory overview of the historiographical traditions and recent developments in the field of world, global and transnational history, these trends are based on the assumption that the globalization process requires new perspectives for research that go beyond traditional historical narratives based on the nation state and thereby re-contextualize the notion of space. Ever-increasing volumes, channels and speeds of transnational motion of ideas, goods and people are compelling scholars to find new ways to conceptualize historical actors, their movements and the transnational networks enabling or hindering the interaction and circulation. Both social sciences and humanities are therefore increasingly investigating global diffusion and transfer in education in a historical perspective by going beyond the traditional concepts of space, especially the notion of ‘nation’, and considering the processes of denationalization and redefinition of territorial boundaries. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s chapter connects well with Fuchs’s by bringing up methodological issues pertaining to transnational history of education. Looking at the attempts to push forward towards a global history, he

Introduction

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observes two kinds of research strategies in the historiography of education. First, there is a trend towards a diffusionist viewpoint that emphasizes the spread of educational phenomena. Second, the research tends to equate an aggregative approach with transnational, global history, that is, to put together and add up the history of separate national histories on the assumption that the aggregate of those discrete histories is global history. The first approach offers a narrative of what is diffused and adopted, but it seldom addresses the larger systemic questions about diffusion as a process. The second approach, attempting a transition from a discrete to an aggregative treatment of educational history, does not go far enough and often leaves unexplained how discrete histories are interconnected by integrative tendencies to enable us to arrive at a transnational history. Facing the limitations of both approaches, Bhattacharya looks for a research strategy that circumvents these limitations. He argues that since the interface, confrontation and transactions between civilizations were inherently transnational, the discourse on civilizations forms a part of a global history of education. Therefore he suggests studying national histories of education under the rubric of a civilizational framework to understand international exchanges and comparisons. Taking this as his point of departure, he provides an intellectual history of the encounter between two civilizations in colonial India and in doing so offers a genuine non-Western approach to the debates on transnational history. Marc Depaepe explores recent trends in the general postcolonial historiography of Belgian educational work in the Congo, turning attention from the earlier historical emphasis of Belgian educational colonialism to studies of the influence of the Congolese on Belgium. Historians have shown how Belgian education contributed intentionally to the patronization of the Congolese people. This chapter deepens that understanding by providing the ‘contextualization’ of that patronizing in the light of the pedagogical theories, mentalities, and practices of the time – in Belgium as well as in Congo. The chapter studies how colonial educational historiography, more sharply still than the Western history of education, exposes the systemic faults and paradoxes of Western modernization and the associated ‘educationalization’. Alicia Civera examines the historiography of rural schooling in Mexico and Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She particularly highlights the approaches of distinct disciplinary areas, such as the history of education, rural studies, historical anthropology and sociology, focusing on different nations and regions. Such disciplinary variety has largely escaped the nationalist narrative and led to development of a rich analysis of local-level school practices throughout the Latin American countryside.

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Part II, Travelling Concepts, includes two historical case studies that re-examine colonial educational ventures through a transnational lens. The chapters address the ways in which colonial transfer of education became transnational, transcultural interaction and modification. The topics covered here are traditionally examined in colonial history, one of the few areas that has attracted attention in the field of history of education with regard to transcultural relations. However, this section moves beyond the concept of education as a colonial project in which pre-existing metropolitan educational institutions, pedagogical models, school curricula or even educational systems were exported to colonial contexts. Rather, the chapters show a multi-centric and entangled history of modern education in both its formal and informal aspects and processes. Through an examination of the educational and religious ideology of Baptist missionary William Carey, Mary Hilton explores the legacies and hybridities of colonialism and intermixing of cultures by analysing Carey’s journal and letters from early nineteenth-century Bengal. Hilton examines the transcultural ways in which Baptist missionaries’ religious and pedagogic beliefs provided the early linguistic and scientific tools that soon enabled the flowering of Indian literature – the very imaginative dimension of prose and thought that Carey himself considered unstable and potentially idolatrous. Jana Tschurenev investigates the emergence and spread of monitorial education, a new, publicly funded form of popular elementary schooling in early-nineteenth-century India and Britain. Tschurenev argues that the global monitorial model originated not in ‘the West’ but in an abandoned military fort in the vicinity of Madras. The so-called monitorial system of education – one of the first international currents in the field of pedagogy that has been interpreted as a precursor of state educational systems – was therefore introduced as the hybrid product of the encounter between South Indian (Tamil) pedagogical practices and Scottish enlightenment moral philosophy. Part III, Indigenous Education and Resistance, presents variations of indigenous education in India and Sweden. Its three chapters highlight the ways in which indigenous populations tried to come to terms with colonial education and develop alternative concepts. This process was no one-way avenue: resistance to acculturation and attempts to establish indigenous educational structures included the adaption and re-contextualization of ‘Western’ educational knowledge and policies. Simone Holzwarth analyses the way in which the Indian independence movement perceived the ideas of Reform Pedagogy and tried to adapt them

Introduction

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to the specific Indian context. In particular, Gandhi’s Nai Talim (Towards New Education) was proposed as a national model for education at the educational conference held at Wardha in 1937. Gandhi’s vision of national self-rule, economic self-sufficiency and abolition of caste-based social hierarchies was centred on an educational system that combined intellectual work and manual labour. Holzwarth investigates the principles of Nai Talim and the way in which four actors – two Indian men and two European women – developed and implemented Gandhi’s educational model within the transnational context of progressive education discourses. Daniel Lindmark’s chapter examines the state education of the indigenous Saami population in early modern Sweden as a colonial relationship, highlighting the Saami resistance to this education. Lindmark presents two examples of Saami students’ responses to the acculturation policy of state boarding schools, which kept Saami children isolated from their native culture and under constant supervision. Oppressive though such colonial educational experiences may be, Lindmark notes how they highlight the double face of education. Whereas it managed to break a first student’s resistance, it placed tools in the hands of a second student, whose schooling enabled him to became an articulate advocate of Saami rights and indigenous culture, heading up a long line of Saami political activists whose ability to formulate their resistance to the state educational system was itself learned from that system. Hakim Ikhlef’s chapter analyses the question of vernacular languages (Hindi/Urdu and Bengali) in relationship with the diffusion of European knowledge/science through education based on a selection of mid-nineteenthcentury debates between Bengali and British members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. To carry out educational policies, the colonial power had to cope with the complexity of the issue of language in India, as its colonial projects of education could only work via negotiation with native languages and native knowledge systems. In this context, Ikhlef examines the life of Rajendralal Mitra, the first Indian historian and India’s most important Sanskrit scholar, who outlined possible rules for providing the vernaculars with the means to become suitable vehicles of technical and scientific concepts. Ikhlef argues that Mitra exemplifies Indian intellectuals’ re-appropriation of colonial forms of knowledge that were previously developed by British Orientalists. Part IV, Women’s Education, looks at the particular transnational elements of women’s education in colonial sites, with special attention to narratives, language and literature. The different transnational and transcultural interactions that mark the history of women’s education in colonial sites in-

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clude the recasting and questioning of gendered roles; conflicts around, and reinventions of, tradition and modernity; the creation of unusual registers, idioms and styles of articulation and writing; and highly creative transcultural exchanges. As noted in the literary texts of women writers, the particularly ambiguous, contradictory attributes of gender relations under colonialism allowed for creation of certain moments of agency and autonomy. Joost Coté’s chapter examines the correspondence and life of Raden Ajeng Kartini in early-twentieth-century Java. In the process of expressing her own aspirations and a vision of the modern Javanese woman, Kartini also articulated a sense of a modern Javanese identity. In many ways her conception of nationalist identity prefigured that of the first generation of Western-educated, male Javanese cultural nationalists who, writing a decade later, pushed beyond colonial orientalist interpretations. Kartini’s letters, published in Dutch in the Netherlands 1911, describe her efforts to gain further Western education. Coté argues that this correspondence, by linking the feudal Javanese society that Kartini was embedded in to her colonial interlocutors and using her mastery of the Dutch language and exploitation of the letter and postal service as enabling technologies, constitutes an act of ‘speaking’ transculturally. In her chapter, Meera Kosambi examines four women writers’ responses to women’s education in late-nineteenth-century India. The social reform discourse, constructed as a male project intended for the benefit of ‘passive’ and ‘helpless’ women, received its impulse from British colonial rule in various ways. Women themselves, denied a space in the discourse but neither unaware of nor insensitive to the reform process, expressed themselves instead through various genres of creative literature. In her analysis of the voices of four iconic women writers, Kosambi reveals that education and its intended benefits for women did not follow a linear progression but involved unexpected twists and turns. The close relationship between models of education and the transcultural reception of literature is also a major concern in the chapter by Barnita Bagchi, which examines fictional writings by two women who wrote primarily for children and young adults in two different parts of the twentieth century and in two different countries and continents: the late-nineteenthcentury American Jean Webster and the mid-twentieth-century Bengali Lila Majumdar. The liberal, reformist context and spirit in which they wrote reveals affinities between the two writers. Women’s welfarist and associational work figure strongly in their works. Both wrote in marginalized groups, and both were popular, respected entertainer-educators whose work expands our notion of history of education to encompass the important educative work performed by fiction for children and young adults.

Introduction

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Tim Allender’s chapter examines the Roman Catholic order Loreto’s educational work for girls in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Loreto’s original mission of educating middle-class, Anglo-Indian populations was transformed by the state’s neglect of poor girls, widows, the diseased and even full-blooded Indians. Like the Jesuits, with whom they most closely identified, Loreto’s efforts were not coterminous with the British Raj, and this chapter focuses on the tensions that arose between the state and Loreto as the religious order recruited its preferred schoolgirl clientele in India. Allender also examines how Loreto, despite its strong antagonisms with the state, adopted its own accommodative approach to new female education mentalities emanating from Europe by the late nineteenth century. All chapters presented in this volume move beyond nation-centric terms to explore what constitutes ‘transnational influence’ in various contexts. They also pay close attention to the transnational discourses that local actors mobilized to construct their own adaptation of colonialism. In this way they demonstrate that transnational and cross-cultural transfers have never been unidirectional but instead are characterized by adaptation, re-contextualization and hybridization. Indeed, rethinking the local, and how local communities engaged in resistance, adaptation or accommodation to colonial and transnational influences, is a core element of the collection. This volume arises out of deliberations within the international professional association, the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE), about furthering research in the transnational history of education, with particular attention to South Asia, in collaboration with the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata (IDSK), an independent research institute whose core area of interest is education. The volume is a conversation between scholars from all over the world, in deliberately nonEuropean and non-Eurocentrist contexts, regarding a subcontinent, South Asia, where the legacies and hybridities of colonialism and intermix of cultures in education past and present are still central. This volume could not have been published without the support of many colleagues. Frank Simon and Joyce Goodman, former president and secretary respectively of ISCHE, enthusiastically supported the conversations that began this work and kept the editors to the highest academic standards. The editors also found it a pleasure to work with colleagues at the IDSK, namely Ramkrishna Chatterjee, Kaustav, Bijoy, Ashok and Kakoli. We are grateful in particular to IDSK’s director, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, who helped every step of the way and contributed richly to the discussion. Just as those initial conversations overflowed the boundaries of formality and became a transnational meeting of minds, we hope that this volume too will contribute to further connecting historians with histories of education, offering new

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perspectives for a transnational and cross-cultural history of education. Our most grateful thanks also go to Insa Loewe and Michael Ammon for their invaluable help with the manuscript and its finalization; the support they provided went above and beyond the call of duty.

Part I

Historiographical Reflections

Chapter 1

History of Education beyond the Nation? Trends in Historical and Educational Scholarship Eckhardt Fuchs

Y The de-specialization and denationalization of political and social processes constitutes a key topos of the current globalization discourse and shifts the category of the nation, the central frame of reference for modern scholarship, into a new perspective. This paradigm shift seizes upon fundamental claims of the constructivist turn, a perspective in which spatial social units such as the nation serve as ‘imagined’ forms of collective identity processes (Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm 1996) and space is not seen as an objective category but as a form of specific collective spatial interpretations and representations – ‘mental maps’ – of social groups and communities. Amongst scholars this debate on space and the dissolution of boundaries is reflected in various ways: in historical sciences by a rising interest in global and transnational history and in educational sciences by concepts such as ‘world culture’ or ‘educational multilateralism’. Considering the fields of history of education, historical writing and comparative education, my chapter attempts to give an overview of current trends that go beyond the traditional narrative based on the nation-state and try to redefine spaces and the relationships between them. I will begin by briefly surveying recent developments in the history of education. Then I will outline the main trends in global and transnational historiography and introduce current concepts on global phenomena within educational sciences. 11

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HISTORY OF EDUCATION Ever since its emergence in the nineteenth century, historical research on education, like historical scholarship, has conceived of itself as a history of nations in which one’s own nation forms the central point of reference. A glance at the research of the past two decades seems to indicate that this focus has barely changed. An analysis of the titles of essays published in history of education journals from 1990 to 2005 conjures up preferred topics, historical periods and investigative scope.1 Thematically, the wide range of issues was dominated by school history and the history of teachers and individuals, though this dominance consistently declined over the analysed period. Further key topics included education policy and institutions of higher education as well as theory, method and historiography. From a geographical point of view, nation-state perspectives clearly prevailed, followed by essays on individual European countries, international topics (usually relating to at least two countries) and North America. Very few essays addressed North Africa and the Islamic world, Sub-Saharan Africa, South-east Asia or South America. In the latter two regions, where European history of education was a strong point of reference, reception was seen as a one-way system. With regard to temporal allocation, modern education since 1800 predominated, especially research on the twentieth century, contrasting with the focus on the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period that dominated history of education research in the 1960s and 1970s. The relatively high proportion of essays on theory, method and historiography is astonishing and indicates a growing need within the field for self-reflection and self-definition. The Zeitschrift für pädagogische Historiographie,2 which was probably the most international of the national journals, attracted authors from various countries beyond Germany. Moreover, it was the only journal that was not merely national in scope and that treated a relatively high number of historiographical, theoretical and methodological topics. The only truly international journal, Paedagogica Historica, is, as Marc Depaepe (2004) has noted, less a trendsetter in historical education research than a reflection of historical education research at the international level. It addressed a wide variety of issues in the analysed period, although its geographical focus on Europe and North America cannot be ignored. Further, the English language prevailed, and therefore also the Anglo-American discursive context (Depaepe and Simon 1996; Lowe and McCulloch 2003; Depaepe 2004). Since 2005 the history of education field has gradually taken small steps towards new spatial concepts and trends developed in other disciplines (Lowe and McCulloch 2003; Burke, Cunningham and Grosvenor 2010; Fuchs,

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Kesper-Biermann and Ritzi 2011). This is particularly noticeable wherever comparative international education science thematically or institutionally overlaps with historical education research (Crook and McCulloch 2002; Baker and LeTendre 2005; Beech 2006a, 2006b). Several studied published over the last few years, especially in Great Britain, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands, but also in Latin America (Werle 2007; Acevedo and Quintanilla 2009), expand upon the national history approach by analysing transregional or imperialist phenomena (Charle, Schriewer and Wagner 2004; Schriewer and Caruso 2005; Tanaka 2005; Sprogoe and Winther-Jensen 2006; Fuchs and Schriewer 2007; Myers, Grosvenor and Watts 2008; Sobe 2008; del Mar del Pozo Andres 2009). Attempts to link global history and transnational approaches from historical scholarship and network analyses with the history of education have led to the first case studies (Roldán and Schupp 2005; Fuchs 2006b, 2007a, 2007b; Fuchs, Lindmark and Lüth 2007). Recent publications in the field of gender research have emphasized transnational, transfer and exchange relations and mutual influences, thus focusing on new actors and spaces (Goodman and Martin 2002; Cortina and San Román 2006; Goodman, McCulloch and Richardson 2009; Goodman 2011). Colonial education and the history of educational missionaries, which are a major focus of this volume, have become one of the most attractive research fields in the history of education (Altbach and Kelly 1978; Lindmark 2000; Whitehead 2003; Fischer-Tiné 2004; Madeira 2006; Bellenoit 2007; Allender 2009; Tschurenev 2011). Altogether, there seems to be an indisputable need for the history of education to address global processes and for globalization processes to be examined with a strong theoretical grounding. Such an approach would necessarily be interdisciplinary and would have to catch up with the trends already developed in the fields of history and education in order to closely investigate the dialectic of de- and re-territorialization and de- and renationalization on the one hand, and on the other, the overlaps between different, often rival, spatial concepts.

GLOBAL AND TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY As both a subject and a discipline, world history has a long tradition dating to eighteenth-century enlightenment in Europe. A close relationship between research and teaching has characterized its development ever since. Originally a concept developed in and for Europe, in the twentieth century it spread to the United States, where world history has been a major part of the profession since the 1960s (Fuchs 2006a). Since the mid-1990s, in par-

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ticular, research and teaching programs at the secondary and college levels have expanded immensely within the U.S. and other countries. At the institutional level, newly established structures point to growing interest in global history inside and outside the United States. (Middell 2005; Sachsenmaier 2007). Besides the Journal of World History, new journals have been founded, such as Comparativ and the Journal of Global History. The U.S.-based World History Association now has counterparts in Europe (European Network in Universal and Global History) and Asia (Asian-Pacific Organization of World Historians), and at the World Congress of Historians in Amsterdam in 2010 a new global organization, the Network of World and Global History Organizations, was founded. In addition, compared to its early days as a field, world history has extended its scope of research tremendously (Pomper, Elphick and Vann 1998; Dunn 2000). New issues, such as gender, diaspora, slavery, disease and consumerism, have been discovered in highly traditional topics like environment, economics and migration, as well as in anthropological, ethno-historical and comparative macro-sociological studies (Bentley 1996). In consequence, a vast array of different labels and concepts circulate in this new field today, and the fragmentation is increasing. Besides world history, there are global, transnational, entangled and translocal histories, and very often these terms are used synonymously. All these trends aim to overcome the traditional national-history-oriented historiography and therefore focus on spatial, as well as temporal, categories. At the same time they differ less in method than in their perspective on the subject of study. In one view, the field of world history takes the shape of a chronological history with a master narrative. This strand would include Big History, which encompasses the history of the universe since the Big Bang (Christian 2011), or a rather Eurocentric ‘integrated’ world history of (the nine) great powers, based on the modernization theory as conducted in China (Sparkowski 2009). But on the other hand, world history can also be interpreted as ‘connective’ history, which builds upon global cultural encounters and focuses on certain themes like food, migration, trade and ecology (Manning 2003: 331–32). Meanwhile, the terms global history and transnational history seem to be gaining popularity within the profession, and although global history often appears to be used as a synonym for world history (O’Brian 2006), there is a significant difference between the two. Global history is a reaction to current and real processes marked by rapid changes in world order. Thus, global history raises questions of transnational and global governance, territoriality and sovereignty beyond, or as an extension of, the nation state (Middell and Naumann 2010). Transnational entanglements and global networks demand analytical strategies that lie beyond national narratives, and at the same

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time they call for an interdisciplinary procedure that connects perspectives from history, social science and economics. Globalization can be interpreted as a dialectical process of re- and de-territorialization that takes as its starting points the dissolution of hierarchical spatial order geared towards the nation state, the increase of social and political actors, and the plurality of space in which they operate, which in turn form the point of departure for global history. A specific strand within global history refers explicitly to the history of globalization and thus to the historical period since the mid nineteenth century. Like the term ‘globalization’, which came into wide use only in the second half of the last century, the term ‘transnational’ has a short history. Coined in the United States, in the early twentieth century, only in the last two decades has the term become established in historical scholarship (Budde, Conrad and Janz 2007; Patel 2008; Middell and Naumann 2010). The differentiation between transnational history and international history, though long established, has until now primarily concerned the context of diplomatic history focused on state or other institutionalized stakeholders. It also differs from area studies in that it does not limit itself to marginalized or subversive stakeholders seeking emancipation. The fact that transnational history remains restricted to modern history can be seen as a characteristic distinguishing it from global history, as the term cannot be applied to early or pre-modern societies. Accordingly, the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History begins with the year 1850 (Iriye and Saunier 2009). The concept of transnational history as a history that crosses boundaries refers to three aspects (Geyer 2006). Firstly, it focuses on non-state actors and spaces that do not fall into national categories but can be described as redefined territories and territorial regimes that are in a state of constant change (Maier 2006). Whereas it shares this aspect with global history, transnational history is generally more restricted spatially. Secondly, transnational history is seen as an extension of national history when the latter is placed within the contexts of translational relations, entanglements, dependencies, and so on (Bender 2002; Conrad and Osterhammel 2004; Conrad 2006; Budde, Conrad and Janz 2007; Tyrrell 2007). This advances key results from European research on nationalism and cultural transfer (Espagne and Werner 1988) with regard to translocal and transregional relations and networks, especially within the fields of migration, trade, culture and the environment, and subjects them to methodological reflection (Patel 2008). Essentially it is not a matter of deconstructing national history but of contextualizing it, and thus renouncing concepts such as exceptionalism (United States) or Sonderweg (Germany). Thirdly and finally, transnational history examines the development of the nation as a global phenomenon.

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Global history is not only an academic endeavour but also a highly contested political issue, in research as well as in teaching. ‘Neo-Marxist world historians’ like Immanuel Wallerstein and Arif Dirlik point at the history and injustice of capitalism and use their work as a means for social reform. ‘Postcolonial world historians’, such as Ashis Nandy and Vinay Lal, see the field of world history as a critical tool against Eurocentrism and postcolonial renunciation (Bentley 2005). The same political argument is true for transnational history. The U.S. example illustrates that this extension of national historiography can attract intense controversy (Patel 2009). As Ian Tyrrell has noted, transnational history in the United States was considered both less and more than global history in the sense ‘that not all history across national borders is global or the product of globalization, but all – at least for modern history – is transnational’ (Tyrrell 2007, 2009). Even as the first proponents of transnational history in the United States aimed to encompass global history, they protested strongly against being considered a part of world historiography. Thomas Bender, the pioneer of American transnational history, made this clear in 2001 when he stated that contextualizing the United States on a global scale ‘does not propose to subsume United States history under the umbrella of world or global history. We would not have United States history thus erased’ (quote from Tyrrell 2009: 459). Translocal history is a new term originating from area studies and postcolonial studies. It seeks to operationalize transnational history for area studies; in other words, to include the ‘southern’ perspective in transnational history, which is otherwise primarily geared to northern and western standpoints (Freitag and von Oppeln 2010). In doing so, the term both describes relationships between local spaces and serves as a specific research perspective from which to examine not only transfer processes and boundary crossings but also the establishment and institutionalization of cultural, social and political structures and orders. Despite their conceptional innovations, both global and transnational historians face several methodological challenges: a) The source material: traditional national historiography has been based on a repository of sources, mostly of state origin, that are of limited use for new topics and perspectives. b) A transnational or indeed global perspective demands extensive specialist and linguistic competencies, exceeding the capabilities of an individual researcher. World history thus appears feasible only as a collective and interdisciplinary venture. c) To date, comparative methods have been used to examine history beyond the borders of purely national history. These methods have

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been criticized for using predetermined units of analysis, usually of a national nature and considered static and isolated from one another. d) In turn, the ‘cultural transfer’ method introduced primarily by French scholars in the field of German studies (Espagne and Werner 1988), addresses the mutual exchange and influence and ultimately the objects’ ability to alter under observation, based on the context of the nation state. e) On the other hand, analysis such as those implemented in the social sciences have been little used in historical scholarship until now (Fuchs 2007a). In particular, the quantitative approach associated with such analyses often cannot be implemented with historical sources. Global and transnational historians are often rather hesitant regarding their theoretical foundations. Although heated debates surround the terms and definitions of what world/global/transnational history constitutes, there is still little consensus about theoretical approaches. Proponents of the transnational approach are still pressing for a methodological repository and theoretical foundations – the most theoretically substantial approach so far probably being (historical) world system theory (Wallerstein 1974–89) – while the social and political sciences have already developed sophisticated models that explain globalization and transnational processes by scientifically reconstructing these processes using globalization theory and/or world-society theory. The difference between these is less in their empirical findings than in their conceptual interpretation (Caruso 2008). The former focuses on the process of networking, the dissolution of boundaries and the awareness of a ‘world’ in an international system determined by nation-states, whereas world-society theories use their macro-sociological approach to look more towards a global context that yields a new form of social organization with specific structural features and, as a system, constitutes the requirements for other social phenomena (Lechner and Boli 2000). Critiques of world-society and/or world-politics models point primarily to the a priori assumption of a Eurocentrically defined world society, a hierarchical top-down concept and ultimately the normative, and thus allegedly legitimized, behaviour of participants (Anghel et al. 2008).

CONCEPTS OF GLOBALIZATION IN EDUCATION SCIENCES International and global processes in the area of education are examined from both the globalization approach and the world-society theory. Accord-

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ingly, studies by social scientists have used convincing empirical findings to diagnose the development of global trends in the field of education (Meyer 2005). The institutional assimilation that accompanies this development is based on the establishment of a grammar of education, valid worldwide, that is reproduced and altered in interaction with various national systemic characteristics. Here, transnational organizations play a key part by disseminating structural models, ideologies, theories and practices and thus constitute the most important mediators between the global grammar of education and national education systems. Since the 1970s, John Meyer and his colleagues at Stanford University have been developing a theory under the concept of world polity. Geared towards institutional theory, macrosociology and culturalism, the theory assigns a central role in transnational development to world culture. World polity refers to a global cultural order based on the origins of Western societies, their rationalization processes and the diffusion of the latter, thus in theory explicitly distinguishing itself from world system analysis. World system theory, however, though arguing from the same macro-sociological perspective, emphasizes the world economy’s central role in the inequality inherent in globalization processes, thus retaining the realistic elements of functionalist theory (Meyer 1987). From the neo-institutionalist viewpoint, on the other hand, worldwide cultural models construct social identities, defining roles and determining actions of various actors. Accordingly, these actions cannot be said to ‘act’ but rather to ‘enact’ or ‘script’; that is, actors (primarily nation states) behave actively and reflectively when they move in accordance with culturally prescribed models. While this enactment of cultural models is a worldwide homologous phenomenon, since actors everywhere define themselves in a similar manner and pursue similar goals using similar means, the actors’ actual behaviour varies depending on the specific context. These principles and models of world culture primarily exist on the cognitive level. World culture therefore means, on the one hand, definitions, principles and objectives that are cognitively constructed globally and follow the same pattern; and on the other hand that culture is global in that it enjoys universal validity (Boli and Thomas 1999). The five characteristics of this world culture are to be found in (1) universalism, which emphasizes the universal structure of human nature and its externalization in society; (2) individualism, a principle that deems individuals to be the main players in societal action; (3) the orientation of progress; (4) the capacity for voluntary, rational and self-organized actions, and (5) the concept of world citizenship. From a technical, functional and rational standpoint, world culture is thus highly sophisticated and above all a Western phenomenon. It is hardly surprising that it is precisely education

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and academia that constitute the essential components of world polity: they indeed embody symptomatic values such as universalism, world citizenship, purposive rationality and the belief in progress, but at the same time they consider mass education to be an institutional mechanism through which to mould individuals into citizens and thus a key scientific and rational method of social reform. Transnational organizations are the main proponents and disseminators of these cultural principles and consequently of the world polity model. In turn, these organizations, which emphasize rationalization and standardization, legitimize themselves with the scientific and legal knowledge of experts and specialists who at the same time function as mediators of global diffusion. For the most part this diffusion takes place in four ways: the exchange of information, organizational statutes, funding and more or less binding multilateral declarations. The result of this process, so it is claimed, is a worldwide convergence of national educational practices (McNeely and Cha 1994). If we take seriously the discovery that these trends towards isomorphization constitute an inherent component of globalization processes, we must inquire as to the emergent history and mechanisms of this global development in education. International education policy, which emerges from cooperation between states and organizations of both state and non-state origin, is based on a formal network that evolved into a system of multilateral education over the course of the twentieth century. Parallel to this macro-sociological global educational culture approach, an explanatory model of globalization theory has been established with recourse to theories from political science. Traditionally, long-standing research by international regimes was limited to state politics, but for some time now it has been broadening its horizons to incorporate non-state actors and global political networks in its explanations of international political systems. International educational organizations and transnational education networks thus come to the fore in discussion of globalization in the area of education. The point of departure of this later research is a new concept of international political rule, emerging from internationalization research in the field of political science, that considers international organizations to be new actors on the international stage working alongside the traditional politics of states. From this perspective, the development and mechanisms of the resultant multilateral education system are of central importance for the analysis of international education policy. Although a shortcoming of global educational culture theory is that macro-sociological phenomena have only seldom been historically contextualized and regionally specified by empirical studies, the transnational approach of multilateral education has to date

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been limited to only a few key organizations and, for the most part, current processes (Mundy 1998, 2006; Mundy and Murphy 2001; Jones and Coleman 2005). For the analysis of transnational transfer processes in comparative and historical education research, the methodological concept of ‘lending and borrowing’ has been suggested. Gita Steiner-Khamsi has investigated this through three consecutive phases: reference to an external model (externalization), local modification of the latter (re-contextualization) and gradual metamorphosis into a native model (internalization). These phases can be described as active reception, implementation and indigenization (SteinerKhamsi 2002; Steiner-Khamsi and Popkewitz 2004). David Phillips, meanwhile, has divided ‘borrowing’ into four phases: cross-national attraction, decision, implementation and internalization/indigenization. The first phase describes the external impulses and social contexts for transfers. In the second phase, participants react to these impulses through various stages of decision-making; then the third phase integrates foreign models into the native system. Ultimately, in the fourth phase, the adaptation has progressed far enough to be considered part of the local system (Phillips 2004). This concept has recently been expanded to include unintentional transfer processes or ‘silent borrowing’ (Waldow 2009). Robert Cowen, on the other hand, opens up a perspective beyond education policy, as his differentiation between transfer, translation and trade allows room for all kinds of transfer and attempts to reconcile the analysis of transfer with that of contexts (Cowen 2006). The first two concepts work well from a history of education standpoint, but the transfer model, despite its use by education sociologists and comparativists, has not been explicitly applied to historical phenomena until now.

CONCLUSION For more than a decade, the field of history of education has been said to be in crisis because it is characterized by de-institutionalization and has thus lost touch with developments in other disciplines, both thematically and methodologically. This alleged crisis, however, contrasts starkly with the impressive results of historical educational research, where numerous studies that far exceed the traditional historiography of educational and classical historiography have emerged in the wake of the paradigm change in social and cultural studies in the humanities. Demands for theoretical and disciplinary self-reflection, and for international comparison and transnational perspectives, have been positively received and are leading to new research

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approaches (Fuchs 2008, 2010; Caruso, Kemnitz and Link 2009; Tröhler 2011). And in the course of the ‘spatial turn’, the field historical education research has recently adopted themes of de-territorialization, de-governmentalization and denationalization, allotting increasing attention to the concept of space. This chapter has provided a short overview of current research trends of global and transnational phenomena within the history of education, historical and educational sciences. Clearly, globalization is now a topic of historical research. Global and transnational history approaches are trying to transcend traditional narratives by focusing on new concepts of space. However, there is still little transfer of concepts between the fields. Global and transnational historians are seldom interested in educational history, comparative educationalists only rarely tackle historical phenomena, and educational historians hesitate to use concepts from the two other fields. Unquestionably, there is a need to examine how the complexity of interrelations between global developmental processes and national or specific cultural configurations can be analysed and explained from a historical perspective. It is not a matter of simply dismissing the nation altogether as the context of education history, but of deconstructing its hierarchical position in the context of divergent perceptions of space. Only such a perspective can apprehend the paradoxical nature of the globalization process, the dialectic in the complexity of world relations and the diversity of assimilation logic, worldwide diffusion and the indigenous, culturally dependent reception of homogenization and pluralization. Transnational and global historical approaches, still struggling with their theoretical sources and methodological instruments, as yet possess no conceptual or methodological nucleus. However, conceptually challenging models for explaining globalization and transnational processes can be found in the educational sciences. These also affect the field of history of education and therefore offer educational historians attractive possibilities for interpretation of historical phenomena.

REFERENCES Acevedo A. and S. Quintanilla. 2009. ‘La perspectiva global en la historia de la educación’, Revista Mexicana de Investigación Educativa 14(40): 7–11. Allender, T. 2009. ‘Learning Abroad: The Colonial Educational Experiment in India, 1813–1919’, Paedagogica Historica 45(6): 707–22. Altbach, P. and G.P. Kelly (eds). 1978. Education and Colonialism. New York: Longman. Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

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Anghel, R.G., et al. (eds). 2008. The Making of World Society: Perspectives from Transnational Research. Bielefeld: Transcript. Baker, D.P. and G.K. LeTendre. 2005. National Differences, Global Similarities: World Culture and the Future of Schooling. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Beech, J. 2006a. ‘Redefining Educational Transfer: International Agencies and the (Re)Production of Educational Ideas’, in J. Sprogoe and T. Winther-Jensen (eds), Identity, Education and Citizenship: Multiple Interrelations. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, pp. 175–96. ———. 2006b. ‘The Theme of Educational Transfer in Comparative Education: A View over Time’, Research in Comparative and International Education 1(1): 2–13. Retrieved 20 December 2012 from doi:10.2304/rcie.2006.1.1.2. Bellenoit, H.J.A. 2007. Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860– 1920. London: Pickering & Chatto. Bender, T. (ed.). 2002. Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bentley, J.H. 1996. Shapes of World History in Twentieth-Century Scholarship. Washington, DC: American Historical Association. ———. 2005. ‘Myths, Wagers, and Some Moral Implications of World History’, Journal of World History 16(1): 51–82. Boli, J. and G.M. Thomas (eds). 1999. Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Budde, G., S. Conrad and O. Janz (eds). 2007. Transnationale Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Burke, C., P. Cunningham and I. Grosvenor. 2010. ‘“Putting Education in Its Place”: Space, Place and Materialities in the History of Education’, History of Education 39(6): 677–80. Caruso, M. 2008. ‘World Systems, World Society, World Polity: Theoretical Insights for a Global History of Education’, History of Education 37: 825–40. Caruso, M., H. Kemnitz and J.-W. Link (eds). 2009. Orte der Bildungsgeschichte. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt. Charle, C., J. Schriewer and P. Wagner (eds). 2004. Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Christian, D. 2011. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Conrad, S. 2006. Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Munich: Beck. Conrad, S. and J. Osterhammel (eds). 2004. Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Cortina, R. and S. San Román (eds). 2006. Women and Teaching: Global Perspectives on the Feminization of a Profession. New York: Palgrave. Cowen, R. 2006. ‘Acting Comparatively upon the Educational World: Puzzles and Possibilities’, Oxford Review of Education 32: 561–73. Crook, D. and G. McCulloch. 2002. ‘Introduction: Comparative Approaches to the History of Education’, History of Education 31: 397–400.

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Del Mar del Pozo Andres, M. 2009. ‘The Transnational and National Dimensions of Pedagogical Ideas: The Case of the Project Method, 1918–1939’, Paedagogica Historica 45: 561–84. Depaepe, M. 2004. ‘Die europäische Dimension in der pädagogischen Historiographie: Rhetorik und Realität’, Zeitschrift für pädagogische Historiographie 10: 3–9. Depaepe, M. and F. Simon. 1996. ‘Paedagogica Historica: Lever or Mirror in the Making of the History of Education?’, Paedagogica Historica 32: 421–50. Dirlik, A. 2005. ‘Performing the World: Reality and Representation in the Making of World Histor(ies). Keynote Speech at the Conference “Teaching World History” at the GHI Washington, March 2005’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute Washington, D.C. 37: 9–25. Dunn, R.E. (ed.). 2000. The New World History: A Teacher’s Companion. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s. Espagne, M. and M. Werner. 1988. Transferts. Les rélations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand XVIIe et XIXe siècle. Paris: Éd. Recherche sur les Civilisations. Fischer-Tiné, H. 2004. ‘National Education, Pulp Fiction and the Contradictions of Colonialism: Perceptions of an Educational Experiment in Early-Twentieth Century India’, in H. Fischer-Tiné and M. Mann (eds), Colonialism as Civilizing Mission, Cultural Ideology and British India. London: Anthem, pp. 229–47. Freitag, U. and A. von Oppeln. 2010. ‘Introduction: “Translocality”: An Approach to Connection and Transfer in Area Studies’, in U. Freitag and A. von Oppeln (eds), Translocality: The Study of Globalising Processes from a Southern Perspective. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, pp. 1–21. Fuchs, E. 2006a. ‘Curriculum Matters: Teaching World History in the U.S. in the Twentieth Century’, in Q. Edward Wang and F.L. Fillafer (eds), The Many Faces of Clio: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Historiography. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 279–92. ———. 2007a. ‘Networks and the History of Education: Preliminary Remarks’, in E. Fuchs, D. Lindmark and C. Lüth (eds), Networking and the History of Education = special issue of Paedagogica Historica 43(2): 185–97. ———. 2007b. ‘“Children’s” Rights and Global Civil Society’, Comparative Education 43: 393–412. ———. 2008. ‘Die historische Bildungsforschung im Spiegel ihrer Fachzeitschriften – ein Überblick’, Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 14: 269–96. ———. 2010. ‘Historische Bildungsforschung in internationaler Perspektive: Geschichte – Stand – Perspektiven’, Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 56(5): 703–24. Fuchs, E. (ed.). 2006b. Bildung International: Historische Perspektiven und aktuelle Entwicklungen. Würzburg: Ergon. Fuchs, E., S. Kesper-Biermann and C. Ritzi (eds). 2011. Regionen in der deutschen Staatenwelt. Bildungsräume und Transferprozesse im 19. Jahrhundert. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt. Fuchs, E., D. Lindmark and C. Lüth (eds). 2007. Networking and the History of Education = special issue of Paedagogica Historica 43(2).

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Fuchs, E. and J. Schriewer (eds). 2007. Internationale Bildungsorganisationen als Global Players in Bildungspolitik und Pädagogik = special issue of Zeitschrift für Pädagogik 52(2). Geyer, M. 2006. ‘Transnational History: The New Consensus’. Retrieved 30 September 2013 from http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/rezensionen/type=revsy mp&id=812. Goodman, J. 2011. ‘International Citizenship and the International Federation of University Women before 1939’, History of Education 40(6): 701–21. Goodman, J. and J. Martin (eds). 2002. Gender, Colonialism and Education: The Politics of Experience. London: Woburn Press. Goodman, J., G. McCulloch and W. Richardson (eds). 2009. ‘“Empires Overseas” and “Empires at Home”: Postcolonial and Transnational Perspectives on Social Change in the History of Education. Abingdon: Routledge. Hobsbawm, E. 1996. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Iriye, A. and P.-Y. Saunier (eds). 2009. The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jones, P. and D. Coleman. 2005. The United Nations and Education: Multilateralism, Development and Globalisation. London: Routledge. Lechner, F.J. and J. Boli (eds). 2000. The Globalization Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Lindmark, D. (ed.). 2000. Education and Colonialism: Swedish Schooling Projects in Colonial Areas, 1638–1878. Umeå: Umeå University. Lowe, R. and G. McCulloch. 2003. ‘Introduction: Centre and Periphery – Networks, Space and Geography in the History of Education’, History of Education 32: 457–59. Madeira, A.I. 2006. ‘Framing Concepts in Colonial Education: A Comparative Analysis of Educational Discourses at the Turn of the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century’, in J. Sprogoe and T. Winther-Jensen (eds), Identity, Education and Citizenship: Multiple Interrelations. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, pp. 225–38. Maier, C. 2006. ‘Transformations of Territoriality, 1600–2000’, in G. Budde, S. Conrad and O. Janz (eds), Transnational Geschichte. Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 32–56. Manning, P. 2003. Navigating World History. Historians Create a Global Past. New York: Palmgrave. McNeely, C. and Y.-K. Cha. 1994. ‘Worldwide Educational Convergence Through International Organizations: Avenues for Research’, Educational Policy Analysis Archives 2(14): 11 pp. Retrieved 20 December 2012 from http://epaa.asu.edu/ ojs/article/view/677/799. Meyer, J.W. 1987. ‘The World Polity and the Authority of the Nation State’, in G.M. Thomas et al. (eds), Institutional Structure: Constituting State, Society, and the Individual. Newbury Park, CA: Sage, pp. 41–70. ———. 2005. Weltkultur: Wie die westlichen Prinzipien die Welt durchdringen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

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Middell, M. 2005. ‘Universalgeschichte, Weltgeschichte, Globalgeschichte, Geschichte der Globalisierung – ein Streit um Worte?’, in M. Grandner, D. Rothermund and W. Schwentker (eds), Globalisierung und Globalgeschichte. Vienna: Mandelbaum, pp. 60–82. Middell, M. and K. Naumann. 2010. ‘Global History and the Spatial Turn: From the Impact of Area Studies to the Study of Critical Junctures of Globalization’, Journal of Global History 5: 149–70. Mundy, K. 1998. ‘Educational Multilateralism and World (Dis)Order’, Comparative Education Review 42: 448–78. ———. 2006. ‘The Evolution of Educational Multilateralism from 1945 to 2005’, in E. Fuchs (ed.), Bildung International: Historische Perspektiven und aktuelle Entwicklungen. Würzburg: Ergon, pp. 181–99. Mundy, K. and L. Murphy. 2001. ‘Transnational Advocacy, Global Civil Society? Emerging Evidence from the Field of Education’, Comparative Education Review 45: 85–126. Myers, K., I. Grosvenor and R. Watts (eds). 2008. ‘Education and Globalisation’, History of Education 37: 737–41. O’Brian, P. 2006. ‘Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History’, Journal of Global History 1: 3–39. Patel, K.K. 2008. ‘Überlegungen zu einer transnationalen Geschichte [2004]’, in J. Osterhammel (eds), Weltgeschichte. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, pp. 67–89. ———. 2009. ‘“Transnations” among “Transnations”? The Debate on Transnational History in the United States and Germany’, Amerikastudien 54: 451–72. Phillips, D. 2004. Educational Policy Borrowing: Historical Perspectives. Oxford: Symposium Books. Pomper, P., R.H. Elphick and R.T. Vann (eds). 1998. World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Roldán E. and T. Schupp. 2005. ‘Bridges over the Atlantic: A Network Analysis of the Introduction of the Monitorial System of Education in Early-Independent Spanish America’, Comparativ 15(1): 58–93. Sachsenmaier, D. 2007. ‘Debates on World History and Global History: The Neglected Parameters of Chinese Approaches’, Travers. Zeitschrift für Geschichte 40(3): 67–84. Schriewer, J. and M. Caruso (eds). 2005. Nationalerziehung und Universalmethode. Frühe Formen schulorganisatorischer Globalisierung = special issue of Comparativ 15(1). Sobe, N. 2008. Provincializing the Worldly Citizen: Yugoslav Student and Teacher Travel Narratives in the Interwar Era. New York: Lang. Sparkowski, N. 2009. ‘National Aspirations on a Global Stage: Concepts for World/ Global History in Contemporary China’, Journal of Global History 4: 475–95. Sprogoe, J. and T. Winther-Jensen (eds). 2006. Identity, Education and Citizenship: Multiple Interrelations. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Steiner-Khamsi, G. 2002. ‘Re-Framing Educational Borrowing as a Policy Strategy’, in M. Caruso and H.-E. Tenorth (eds), Internationalisierung. Semantik und Bildungssystem in vergleichender Perspektive. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, pp. 57–89.

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Steiner-Khamsi, G. and T.S. Popkewitz (eds). 2004. The Global Politics of Educational Borrowing and Lending. New York: Teachers College Press. Tanaka, M. 2005. The Cross-Cultural Transfer of Educational Concepts and Practices: A Comparative Study. Oxford: Symposium. Tröhler, D. 2011. ‘Historiographische Herausforderungen der Bildungsgeschichte’, Bildungsgeschichte. International Journal for the Historiography of Education 1: 9–22. Tschurenev, J. 2011. ‘Incorporation and Differentiation: Popular Education and the Imperial Civilizing Mission in the Early Nineteenth Century India’, in C. Watt and M. Mann (eds), Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development. London: Anthem, pp. 93–124. Tyrrell, I. 2007. Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2009. ‘Reflections on the Transnational Turn in United States History: Theory and Practice’, Journal of Global History 4: 453–74. Waldow, F. 2009. ‘Undeclared Imports: Silent Borrowing in Educational Policymaking and Research in Sweden’, Comparative Education 45: 477–94. Wallerstein, I. 1974–1989. The Modern World-System. 3 vols. New York: Academic Press. Werle, F. (ed.). 2007. Educacao rural em perspectiva internacional. Intituicoes, practicas e formazao do prodessor. Brazil: Editora Uniji. Whitehead, C. 2003. ‘Overseas Education and British Colonial Education 1929–63’, History of Education 32(5): 561–75.

NOTES 1. These results are based on an analysis of forty-two journals on history of education published between 1990 and 2007. Altogether, 4,701 titles were recorded. See Fuchs 2008. 2. It was renamed Bildungsgeschichte. International Journal for the Historiography of Education. The first volume appeared in 2011.

Chapter 2

Towards a Global History of Education Alternative Strategies Sabyasachi Bhattacharya

Y In attempting to advance towards a global history beyond national histories, historiographers of education avail themselves of two common kinds of research strategies. First, they trend towards a diffusionist point of view that stresses the spread of ideas and practices – for example, pedagogical methods, patterns of textbooks or, at a higher conceptual level, paradigms in the philosophy of education – beyond national boundaries. More often than not, the narrative is one of diffusion from Western metropolitan centres to the less developed countries at the periphery. A reverse flow has sometimes been noticed, for instance the monitorial system in schools that spread from India to England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But the general tendency is to focus upon the dissemination of the European knowledge system, institutions, and so on. The diffusionist approach links histories of education from different parts of the globe; hence it represents a step towards global history. The second, aggregative approach puts separate national histories together and adds them up. Thus we may have, for instance, narratives of pedagogical methods in different countries juxtaposed in a sequence that sometimes aims at some kind of comparative framework. This attempt to arrive at a global or transnational level rests on the assumption that the aggregate of those discrete histories is global history.

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Each of the above approaches has its merits, but certain limitations are obvious. The first approach offers a narrative of how and what educational ideas, pedagogical methods, and so on were diffused and adopted, but it seldom addresses the larger systemic questions about why diffusion, as a process, draws into its orbit different participating agents or subjects from different parts of the world. The second approach, attempting a transition from a discrete to an aggregative treatment of educational history, does not go far enough and often does not clarify how discrete histories are interconnected by tendencies of integration to enable us to arrive at a transnational history. Indeed, in both approaches the agenda raises the question whether national histories constitute the best point of entry into transnational or global history. Thus, although the above approaches have their uses in the historiography of education, it may be useful to seek a research strategy that might get around their limitations. Can a focus on issues that are inherently universalist and transnational lead to a point of entry into the global history of education? Can we identify, as one such issue in the history of ideas, the theme of interface between civilizations and its role in the educational discourse of civilizations facing each other? Reflection on these questions in a global perspective may be worthwhile. This preliminary, tentative attempt will be limited to a particular phase of world history, namely, the encounter between two civilizations in colonial India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent years have seen several attempts to understand transnational cultural transactions and their reflection in global history in terms of relationship between civilizations (e.g., O’Hanlon and Washbrook 1992; Nandy 1995; Huntington 1996; Chakrabarty 2001). However, these and allied explorations have overlooked the aspect of the relationship between the discourse of civilization and the discourse of education. This chapter tentatively proposes that the encounter between European and Indian civilizations successively produced a colonial educational paradigm, a nationalist reaction against colonial education and, finally, a universalist approach positing a reconciliation between the two civilizations. This brief chapter can only touch upon this historical story. What is more important here is the methodological point that the discourse of civilizations, which is inherently transnational, provides the best point of entry into any effort to explore the global or transnational history of education. Studying national histories of education under the rubric of a civilizational framework may improve understanding of international exchanges and comparisons, as well as the causes and processes promoting or impeding the diffusion of educational ideas, resources and technologies across national boundaries. In so doing I shall draw upon a

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recent book authored by me (Bhattacharya 2011). The essence of the present chapter is its focus on a proposed strategy for freeing educational history from the conventional framework of ‘national histories’.

EDUCATION AND THE FIRST OF THREE MOMENTS IN THE DISCOURSES OF CIVILIZATION ‘Any relationship of hegemony is necessarily an educational relationship and occurs not only within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in the international and world-wide field, between complexes of national and continental civilizations’ (Gramsci 1976: 350). Gramsci does not elaborate this statement, but he commented elsewhere in his prison notebooks that ‘European culture . . . is the only historically and concretely universal culture’ (ibid.: 416). That was perhaps a rather Eurocentric point of view, but basically he quite perceptively posited a relationship between hegemony and education that is very relevant to any attempt to develop a global history of education in the context of encounters between civilizations in the last two centuries. Modern world history began at a time when colonizers, backed by the imperial metropolises in Europe, maintained an overarching cultural hegemony over the colonized societies and cultures of Asia. State power was the coercive means of establishing European control, but imperial cultural hegemony was based on other means as well: (a) attribution of cognitive authority to metropolitan Western culture, which was buttressed by the reality of scientific progress since the seventeenth-century scientific revolution in Europe, (b) centralization of knowledge production in the metropolis – as distinct from the education system in the colony, which was assigned the more limited task of knowledge transmission, (c) the marginalization, tantamount to state-mandated de-legitimation, of knowledge systems and educational institutions indigenous to the natives of the colony. As far as India is concerned, I have elaborated elsewhere the processes I have theoretically summed up above (Bhattacharya 2002: 3–22). As we shall see below, empirically well-documented histories have described this posture of affairs, the encounter between Indian and European civilizations and its impact on educational history in the nineteenth century. This is identifiable as the first moment in the discourse of civilization and its consequent educational discourse. More specifically, we may choose to focus on the publication of James Mill’s multi-volume history of India (Mill 1820). It was for decades thereafter a standard textbook, particularly in the training of civil servants of the East India Company at Haileybury College,

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and thus became a formative influence in policymaking. Mill completely rejected the favourable picture that late-eighteenth-century Orientalists like Sir William Jones had presented of India’s civilization. For example, in the introduction to his translation of the Sanskrit classic Shakuntalam (appreciated by Goethe and Schlegel among others), Jones had written that in ancient India, kings ‘gave encouragement to poets, philologers and mathematicians, at a time when the Britons were as unlettered and unpolished as the army of Hanumat,’ the monkey who served Rama (cited by Mill 1972 [1844]: vol. 1, 370). That enraged Mill. ‘It was unfortunate that Sir William Jones should have adopted the hypothesis of a high stage of civilization in the principal countries of Asia’, he commented; – perhaps Jones’s motive was the ‘design of exalting the Hindus in the eyes of their European masters, and hence ameliorating the temper of the government.’ That is to say, Jones was not objective, according to Mill (ibid.: 458). Mill disregarded Orientalists’ admiration of Sanskrit poetic texts. Poetry, he said, is produced by people in a low state of civilization, but ‘a degree of culture is needed’ to produce works of history, and there the Indians failed. The Hindus were actually ‘little removed from . . . the half-civilized nations’ in old times, and Mill points to ‘the low state of civilization in which they remain’ in the nineteenth century (ibid.: 389). James Mill, an enthusiastic Utilitarian and friend of Jeremy Bentham, believed that since Britain’s mission was to improve India, it was ‘an object of highest practical importance’ to British rule in India ‘to ascertain the true state of the Hindu in the scale of civilization.’ That last phrase was significant. It was the beginning of the characterization of India as an ‘arrested civilization’ that had failed to grow after a certain stage. That was the theme of the proponents of Social Darwinism who wrote in the nineteenth century that India needed British rule to raise it on the ladder of civilization – a ladder that England had scaled to the top. The paradigm of educational thinking that developed in this context can be labelled ‘the Pupil’s Progress’ paradigm. The core idea was that the backward colonized people must learn the minimum necessary to step onto a somewhat higher rung in the ladder of progress; the pupils were the wards of the British, who had reached the highest rung on that ladder of civilizational progress. To this moment belongs the famous pronouncement of Lord Macaulay that a shelf of European books was of greater worth than the entire Sanskritic literature produced in ancient India. To this moment belongs the invention of the ‘essentialized’ Orient, the Other of Europe, which Edward Said (1978) insightfully analysed. Also part of this paradigm was the idea that the British had a mission in the colony: to secure ‘Moral and Material Progress’, the subject of annual reports to Parliament from

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the British Indian government. On the positive side, however, certain governmental interventions were actuated by the same pattern of thinking, the most important being the institution of the first three universities in the year 1857, when the great uprising against the British known as the Indian Mutiny rocked the empire. Alongside Edward Said (1978, 1993) and his elaboration of the theme of civilization as a theatre for the assertion of European superiority, many others have written about the cognitive authority assumed by the West (Cohn 1988: 224; Nandy 1988; Adas 1989; Viswanathan 1989; Kumar 1995; Baber 1998). Historical writings and documentation also confirm the design of concentration of knowledge production functions in the European metropolis and use of education as an instrument of cultural hegemony (Naik 1964; Carnoy 1974; Altbach and Kelly 1978; Kumar 1991) as well as the marginalization of indigenous knowledge systems (Dharampal 1983; di Bona and Adam 1983; Bala 1991; Shahidullah 1996; di Bona 1998; Kumar 1998). On the whole these processes meant a valorization of European civilization in relation to backward India. To the extent these propositions are generalizable, the discrete or separate histories of many colonized countries in Asia and Africa may be integrated on a theoretical plane as a system. How was this paradigm regarded by the first generation of graduates of the universities the British founded? Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–94) and R.G. Bhandarkar (1837–1925) were both in the first batch of graduates of Calcutta and Bombay Universities. They were familiar with James Mill’s pronouncements and also a milder version of colonialist judgement in the history textbook written by Mountstuart Elphinstone (1844). Bankim severely criticized European scholars who delivered judgements without possessing any knowledge of Indian languages, including Sanskrit – Mill knew not one and had never been to India. Bhandarkar was less vocal in his criticism of European attitudes to Indian civilization. Bhandarkar was the first professional Indian historian; unlike many others with comparable expertise in epigraphy and Sanskrit texts, he held a university degree and therefore enjoyed government patronage. A teacher of history all his life and the author of numerous books on ancient Indian history and culture, Bhandarkar rounded off his career with a vice-chancellorship at Bombay University. Compared to Bhandarkar, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee was more critical of the British as rulers (he condemned British administration, taxation policy, and the drain of wealth from India to England), but like Bhandarkar, he acknowledged that India had much to learn from their culture. The two things Bankim Chandra held as exemplary were the English education system in India and the national spirit displayed by the English people – ironi-

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cally, for the former created the class of people who led the anti-imperial struggle even as the latter provided the ideological basis of that struggle. Notwithstanding the points he thus conceded to Europe’s civilization, his was an admiration for an adversary, a relationship he characterized as jatibaira, or national animosity. He thought Indians were fortunate to have as their adversary the British, who were at the cutting edge of progress in civilization (Chatterjee 1954 [1873]). An intense nationalist, he tended in his later writings to glorify ancient Hindu civilization. Thus the products of the universities, which the British were wont to regard as a benevolent gift, took a rather ambivalent attitude towards European civilization. Both of them generally held European science and scholarship in high regard and regarded the education system the British had created as highly beneficial.

THE NEXT MOMENT: M.K. GANDHI AND ‘NATIONAL EDUCATION’ The discourse of civilization was but a monologue when James Mill published his adverse evaluation of Indian civilization in the early nineteenth century. In Chatterjee and Bhandarkar’s day, there began a dialogue. At the turn of the century, India was talking back. M.K. Gandhi, not yet known as the Mahatma, marked a new moment in the discourse of civilization in 1909, when he wrote Hind Swaraj, the first of many tracts he would publish. It is an odd sort of political tract, concerned primarily with India’s civilization and subordinating the political programme of nationalism to a cultural agenda. He focuses on civilization in the preface itself: ‘these views are held by many Indians who are not touched by what is known as civilization’ (Gandhi 1963 [1910]: ‘Preface’). He goes on to say: ‘It is my deliberate opinion that India is being ground down not under British heel, but under that of modern civilization’ (ibid.: 24), and again: ‘It is not necessary for us to have as our goal the expulsion of the English . . . We can accommodate them. Only there is no room for their civilization’ (ibid.: 39). A little later, he wrote in the journal Indian Opinion, which he edited from South Africa: ‘it is not so much from British Rule that we have to save ourselves, as from Western civilization’ (Gandhi 1910). To Gandhi, European civilization constituted the ‘other’ of Indian civilization. At the root of Gandhi’s exposition lie four binary oppositions: (a) competition versus cooperation, (b) machine versus nature, (c) consumerism versus voluntary denial of self-indulgence, and (d) statism versus communitarianism. Analysis of the text of Hind Swaraj reveals simplistic contrapositions between essentialized representations of Europe and India in terms of

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these contrapositions. Thus he easily arrives at a glorified vision of Indian civilization. ‘I believe that the civilization of India is not to be beaten in this world. Nothing can equal the seeds sown by our ancestors . . . India has nothing to learn from anybody else and that is her glory’ (Gandhi 1963 [1910]: 36). This unthinking glorification of an imagined past was a formative influence in the attitude of several generations in India and is yet to be found in schoolbooks. Notwithstanding that tendency, a remarkably positive feature of Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj is his view of India as a syncretic civilization. Throughout this manifesto Gandhi speaks of an ‘Indian civilization’ and not of a Hindu civilization. Further, Gandhi writes that Indian civilization has a ‘faculty of assimilation’, citing past conflicts between Vedic and Jain religions, Shaivite and Vaishnavas, and so on, which were resolved in an assimilative process (Gandhi 1963 [1910]: 52). This idea of syncretism was an obvious necessity given the fact of ethnic and religious diversity. This became a fundamental part of the nationalist representation of Indian civilization. The British response to Gandhi’s and other Indian nationalists’ reactions to Western evaluation of Indian civilization was diverse in detail but in overall perspective a defence of the imperial point of view. For instance, Sir Alfred Lyall, in his Rise and Expansion of British Dominion in India (1907) reiterated the nineteenth-century view that India’s was an ‘arrested civilization’ (Lyall 1907). Sir William Hunter, in his famous Rulers of India volume series (e.g. Hunter 1891), highlighted hardboiled empire builders (Stokes 1961), sending the main message that India needed an iron hand to keep her united and on the path of progress. That was also the message in the Oxford History of India by Vincent Smith (1919), the standard book on Indian history at colleges and universities till 1950s. All these authors were civil servants and considerable scholars. The next generation of professional historians, such as P.E. Roberts or H.H. Dodwell, who occupied positions in the Indian Education Service or the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, did not depart from the line laid down by the more distinguished and influential civil servants who had preceded them. The dialogue between spokesmen of two civilizations was inflected by the increasing distance between the rulers and the ruled as the nationalist struggle intensified in the political arena. Gandhi did not stop at asserting the superiority of India’s civilization – he built an educational model in his Phoenix School (a name inspired by Tolstoy) in South Africa, a model that was intended to free the students’ mind from the domination of Western civilization. Rabindranath Tagore’s educational thinking and experiment in the school founded in Santiniketan in 1901 resonated with Gandhi, especially Tagore’s emphasis on a pedagogi-

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cal scheme incorporating the best elements of indigenous culture, language, world outlook, and so forth. What has been described as the National Education Movement developed over time. Starting around 1905, the leaders of the nationalist movements in Bengal, Maharashtra, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu in particular created ‘national schools’, promoted local languages instead of English as the medium of instruction, rewrote history textbooks, boycotted schools and colleges sponsored by the British Indian government and generally made education a means of ideologization (Bhattacharya 2003). National education failed to make a lasting impact on institutional education, but the movement generated a large and influential literature by Aurobindo Ghose (2003 [1908]), B.G. Tilak (2003 [1908]), Annie Besant (2003 [1910]), Lajpat Rai (2003 [1920]) and other opinion leaders who urged the installation of Indian culture and civilization at the centre of the education process. The original impetus of the National Education Movement died down in the 1910s, but Gandhi revived the call to boycott government institutions in 1919–21 and helped establish many nationally oriented schools as well as colleges and at least two universities that still exist today. High on his agenda in the last ten years of his life was a scheme of national education reaching out to the village poor (Gandhi 1939; Patel 1953; Gandhi 1962; Ramanathan 1962). The well-known proponent of the idea of national education, Rabindranath Tagore, however, had become sceptical of it by the 1920s and moved towards a more universalist conception of education, contra the nationalist scheme.

THE THIRD MOMENT: RECONCILIATION OF CONTESTING CIVILIZATIONS The third moment in the intellectual history traced here is identifiable in the debates between two representative thinkers of twentieth-century India, Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, in the 1920s (Bhattacharya 1998: 97–132). Although the educational models Gandhi and Tagore held up as ideal in the first two decades of the twentieth century had some common elements, as of the early 1920s Tagore’s position evolved in a different direction. Unlike Gandhi, Tagore did not accept the proposition that ‘India has nothing to learn from anybody else’ or variants thereof. An inheritor of the Enlightenment tradition, Tagore was unwilling to assert India’s superiority in these terms. But he agreed – and in fact anticipated Gandhi – with the portrayal of Indian civilization as different from that of Europe. From 1902 onwards Tagore repeatedly asserted that whereas the European tradition eliminated diversities and established national unity by coercive assimilation of alien

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elements, with European nationalism carrying this aggrandizing spirit into the imperialist era, the Indian tradition synthesized religious, cultural and ethnic diversities into a civilizational unity. ‘The aim of Bharatvarsha [India]’, Tagore believed, ‘has always been to establish unity amidst differences, to bring to a convergence different paths, and to internalize within her soul the unity of the severalty, that is to say to comprehend the inner union between externally perceptible differences without eliminating the uniqueness of each element’ (Tagore 1998 [1902]). In the 1920s, he extended the idea of the assimilative tendency in India’s civilization – enabling India to establish unity within diversities – was extended by Tagore in the 1920s to encompass the notion that it was India’s destiny to be the site of a confluence of Eastern and European civilizations. Although Tagore was a staunch nationalist in the first decade of the twentieth century, he wrote in 1917: ‘Even though from my childhood I have been taught that the idolatry to Nation is almost better than reverence to God, I believe I have outgrown that teaching’. He went on to say that he had eventually arrived at the conviction that it was wrong to accept the view that ‘a country is greater than an ideal of humanity’ (Tagore 1996 [1917]: 456). This concept of humanist universalism accommodated both Western and Indian civilization and upheld an ideal of a comprehensive human civilization. How did Tagore arrive at such an intellectual position? On the one hand, the impact of the First World War led him to believe that the brutalization of the highly civilized peoples of Europe was due to the influence of aggrandizing nationalism in their civilization. On the other hand, he also underwent an agonizing rethink of his faith in Indian nationalism. Looking at the fault lines within India, he considered how division between religious communities and the ‘social slavery’ of the backward or depressed castes characterized Indian society, reflecting on the fact that despite these aspects, ‘we have accepted as the creed of our nationalism that this social system has been perfected for all times to come by our ancestors’ (ibid.: 459–620). Tagore elaborated these ideas further. For instance, in the famous essay ‘Kalantar’ (New Age) of 1933, he recalled that from the French Revolution up to the Civil War in the United States, many in the West had been inspired by human values unconstrained by national or racial prejudices. He saw the impact of these humanist values on the Indian mind in a positive light (Tagore 1933: 17). In 1937, in a little known convocation address to the University of Calcutta that was not included in his Collected Works, Tagore spoke of the intellectually reawakened India’s debt to the West and at the same time pointed to the degeneration of Western civilization, blinded as it was by nationalist aggrandizement in the twentieth century (Tagore 1937). The outcome of this course of thinking was the prescription that India should

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free her mind of narrow nationalism and glorification of her past. India should serve as a site for the commingling of the best elements of Western and Indian civilizations, and Tagore had conceived the university he created as serving that great purpose. He was, of course, aware of the distance between the idea and the institution he created. But he propagated a universalist ideal of education beyond nationally bounded patterns of thinking as the ideal, though unattained. Another important intervention traceable to this third moment in the civilizational discourse covered here is Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India, written in 1945–46 in Ahmednagar Fort Jail and published in 1948. This work was far more influential than any textbook studied in colleges and universities. Nehru began the book with the question ‘What is this India, apart from her physical and geographical aspects?’ and ended it with reflections on his belief that India is ‘a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by strong but invisible threads . . . She is a myth and an idea, a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive’ (Nehru 1948: 378). Gandhi and Tagore had once confidently asserted India’s unity as an enduring fact of history, but Nehru spoke of it as a dream. This poignant moment when the nationalists’ struggle was about to succeed was also the moment when their fond belief in India’s assimilative civilization nearly received a death blow in the Partition of 1947. At the same time, the universalist notion of a human civilization transcending national boundaries was at the core of Nehru’s approach. This was, he said, natural for him because of his education and upbringing: ‘I was a child of Asia with her tradition in my blood, and with pride in her past and faith in her future, and I was foster-child of the Western world, knowing it fairly well and appreciating its great achievements’ (Nehru 1942: 613). In thus representing himself, he showed a measure of intellectual honesty often lacking in the middle classes who to varying degrees shared his experience of a cross-cultural upbringing and education and hence were similarly open to cultures other than India’s. Nehru and his peers formed a bridgehead into a new era that sought reconciliation between the civilizations of India and the West. In the domain of education, this was reflected in the high priority the Nehruvian scheme accorded to the introduction of Western science and technology. This post-Independence policy had been prefigured in Nehru’s strong critique of Gandhi’s views in 1945. ‘It is thirty-eight years since Hind Swaraj was written’, he wrote in a private letter to his mentor Gandhi, ‘the world has completely changed since then . . . In the present context of the world we cannot even advance culturally without a strong background of scientific research in every department . . .” and so forth. In this correspondence of 1945 Nehru explicitly rejected the Gandhian idealization of

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the Indian past in civilizational terms (Nehru 1945: 535, 554). For better or worse, colonial rule had ended and India was entering a new era in which the discourses of civilization and education were to change forever.

RELEVANCE OF THE DISCOURSE OF CIVILIZATION What is the significance of this civilizational discourse outlined in the history of education? In the last decades of colonial rule there were, so to speak, two parallel conversations at work, for while the recommended textbooks in schools and colleges reflected the imperial government point of view, the interpretation offered in the literature in Indian languages told a different story. The influence of the nationalist intellectuals and spokesmen seems to have outweighed the message in the officially accepted textbooks – otherwise one cannot explain the depth and spread of nationalism among the educated section of the population. Their education was not limited to the institutions they attended. In this context, a broad definition of the process of education, inclusive of the influence ‘exerted by all the educated members of a social formation’ and ‘family education’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977: 5) appears to be more appropriate than a definition that limits the learning process to institutional education and formal pedagogy. This larger discourse was located in perceptions of the conflict between civilizations. Next, one might observe that from Tagore and Gandhi onwards, the idea of India’s assimilative civilization was central to nationalist thinking. The post-Independence period has also seen efforts to instil that message in institutional education through textbooks and the like. The need for a pluralistic conception of India remains obvious, given the diversity in religious belief systems and other kinds of perceived differences in contemporary India. However, we Indians tend to take for granted the old message of ‘unity in diversity’, conveyed in our day through mindless repetition by government agencies and politicians of different hues. We err in taking it for granted, as becomes obvious upon looking at certain other Third World countries where no such accommodating concept holds sway. This accommodative concept of syncretism or assimilation prepared the way for a universalist conception allowing reconciliation of the Western and Indian civilization, as seen in Tagore and Nehru’s approach. Meanwhile, a question we have left implicit is why India needed a discourse of civilization in the first place. Many countries appear to do without it. Why did it find a place on the nationalist agenda to educate the public? One answer to that question may be that discussion of the superiority of Indian civilization was necessary to counteract Western disesteem for it and

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salvage self-esteem. But that answer does not seem adequate; indeed, many Indian intellectuals from Bhandarkar to Tagore forbore to claim that India’s civilization was superior to that of Europe. Perhaps the answer is that civilization was a surrogate for nationhood: the factors that contributed to the making of Western nation states as of the fifteenth century were not present on the Indian subcontinent; therefore, the process of nation building in India required an appeal to civilizational unity and continuity. I contend that the discourse of civilization was needed to make nationhood thinkable. If correct, this helps explain why the discourse of education blends with that of civilization. Finally, we might consider that the interface, confrontation and transactions between civilizations, being inherently transnational, became part of a global history of education. What are the parallels and convergences between the historical experience of India and that of other countries, especially Third World countries? Answers to that question will help push the separate histories of national education towards a global history. This chapter has outlined a pattern of attribution of cognitive authority to the West, centralization of knowledge production in the metropolis and the marginalization of colonized people’s indigenous knowledge systems. To the extent that the pattern is generalizable, we have clues to develop a systemic approach to inter-civilizational and transnational transactions in the history of education. If this preliminary attempt to outline the civilizational discourse in India draws the attention of historians of education to the questions I have raised, my purpose will have been served.

REFERENCES Adas, M. 1989. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Altbach, P. and G.P. Kelly (eds). 1978. Education and Colonialism. New York: Longman. Baber, Z. 1998. The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India. New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bala, P. 1991. Imperialism and Medicine in Bengal: A Socio-Historical Perspective. New Delhi: Sage. Besant, A. 2003 [1910]. ‘Hints on National Education in India, 1910’, in S. Bhattacharya (ed.), Educating the Nation: Documents on the Discourse of National Education in India, 1880–1920. New Delhi: Kanishka, pp. 213–15. Bhattacharya, S. 2011. Talking Back: The Idea of Civilization in the Indian Nationalist Discourse. New Delhi and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bhattacharya, S. 2002. ‘Introduction’, in S. Bhattacharya (ed.), Education and the Disprivileged: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century India. New Delhi: Orient Longman, pp. 1–32.

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Bhattacharya, S. (ed.). 1998. The Contested Terrain: Perspectives on Education in India. New Delhi: Orient Longman. ——— (ed.). 2003. Educating the Nation: Documents on the Discourse of National Education in India, 1880–1920. New Delhi: Kanishka. Bourdieu, P. and J.-C. Passeron. 1977. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage. Carnoy, M. 1974. Education as Cultural Imperialism. New York: McKay. Chakrabarty, D. 2001. Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and Historical Differences. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, B. 1954 [1873]. ‘Jati-baira’, in J. C. Bagal (ed.), Bankim Rachanavalee [Collected Works of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee], vol. II, Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad, pp. 884–85. Cohn, B.S. 1988. An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Dharampal. 1983. The Beautiful Tree: The Indigenous Education in India in the Eighteenth Century. New Delhi: Biblia Impex. Di Bona, J.E. and W. Adam. 1983. One Teacher, One School: The Adam Reports on Indigenous Education in 19th Century India. New Delhi: Biblia Impex. Di Bona, J.E. 1998. ‘Going Back to the Educational Future: Using Indigenous Ideas’, in S. Bhattacharya (ed.), The Contested Terrain: Perspectives on Education in India. New Delhi: Orient Longman, pp. 357–79. Elphinstone, Mountstuart. 1844. The History of India. London: J. Murray. Gandhi, M.K. 1910. ‘Shortcomings of Western Civilization’, in The Indian Opinion, 22 January. Gandhi, M.K. 1963 [1910]. ‘Hind Swaraj’, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (November 1909–March 1911). New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, vol. 10, pp. 7–65. ———.1939. Educational Reconstruction. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust. ———.1962. The Problem of Education (posthumous collection). Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust. Ghose, A. 2003 [1908]. ‘National University’, in S. Bhattacharya (ed.), Educating the Nation: Documents on the Discourse of National Education in India, 1880–1920. New Delhi: Kanishka, pp. 10–12. Gramsci, A. 1976. Selections from Prison Notebooks. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hunter, W.W. Rulers of India: The Earl of Mayo. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891. Huntington, S.P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Kumar, A. 1998. Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835–1911. New Delhi: Sage. Kumar, D. 1995. Science and the Raj, 1857–1905. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press. Kumar, K. 1991. Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas. New Delhi and Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Lyall, A. 1907. Rise and Expansion of British Dominion in India. London: J. Murray. Mill, J. 1820. History of British India. London: Baldwin, Cradock & Joy.

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Mill, J. 1972 [1844]. History of British India. New Delhi: Associate Publishing House. Naik, J.P. (ed.). 1964. Selections from Educational Records of Government of India. Development of University Education, 1860–1887. New Delhi: National Archives of India. Nandy, A. 1995. ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’, History and Theory, 34(2): 44–66. ——— (ed.). 1988. Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Nehru, J. 1942. ‘Asia and America’, in S. Gopal (ed., 1988 [1979]), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 12. New Delhi: Orient Longman, pp. 612–13. ———. 1945 [1981]. ‘Charges against Communist Members in Congress’, in S. Gopal (ed.), Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. 14. New Delhi: Orient Longman, pp. 528–39. ———. 1948. The Discovery of India. Calcutta: Signet Press. O’Hanlon, R. and D. Washbrook. 1992. ‘After Orientalism: Culture, Criticism, and Politics in the Third World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 34(1): 141–67. Patel, M.S. 1953. Educational Philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. Ahmedabad: Navajivan Trust. Rai, L. 2003 [1920]. ‘Problem of National Education’, in S. Bhattacharya (ed.), Educating the Nation: Documents on the Discourse of National Education in India, 1880– 1920. New Delhi: Kanishka, pp. 27–32. Ramanathan, G. 1962. Education from Dewey to Gandhi. Bombay: Asia Publishing House. Said, E.W. 1978. Orientalism. London: Penguin. ———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Shahidullah, K. 1996. ‘The Purpose and Impact of Government Policies on Pathslala Gurumashays’, in N. Crook (ed.), The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia. New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 119–34. Smith, V. and S.M. Edwardes. 1919. The Oxford History of India: From the Earliest Times to the End of 1911. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stokes, E. (1961). ‘The administrators and historical writing on India’, in C. H. Philips (ed.), Historians of India, Pakistan and Ceylon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 385–403. Tagore, R. 1933. Kalantar. Calcutta: Vis;va-Bhārati. ———. 1937. ‘Convocation Address by Rabindranath Tagore’, Calendar of the University of Calcutta. Calcutta: University of Calcutta. ———. 1996 [1917]. ‘Nationalism’, in S.K. Das (ed.), English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, vol. 2. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, pp. 417–66. ———. 1998 [1902]. ‘Bharatvarsher Itihas’ [History of India], reprinted in R. Tagore, Itihas. Calcutta: Vis;va-Bhārati., pp. 1–15. Tilak, B.G. 2003 [1908]. ‘Writings and Speeches’, in S. Bhattacharya (ed.), Educating the Nation: Documents on the Discourse of National Education in India, 1880–1920. New Delhi: Kanishka, pp. 12–14. Viswanathan, G. 1989. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia University Press.

Chapter 3

Writing Histories of Congolese Colonial and Post-Colonial Education A Historiographical View from Belgium Marc Depaepe

Y The study of historiography is like the study of the weather. Only a theory of chaos can fully account for it! —Vansina, Living with Africa Elaborate celebrations marked the fiftieth anniversary of the independence of the République Démocratique du Congo on 30 June 2010. In Belgium, this jubilee occasioned numerous publications about the former colony, one of which even garnered several awards, including the most prestigious prize for Dutch-language literature (van Reybrouck 2010). The festivities devoted little attention, however, to the history of the education, despite its importance to social development. In this regard, we must continue to make do with the studies launched in the 1990s by the Centre for the History of Education at the University of Leuven (Depaepe and van Rompaey 1995; Briffaerts 2007, in press). These works contain hints of the ‘newer’ colonial historiography that advocates studying cultural traffic in two directions (Viaene, van Reybrouck and Ceuppens 2009), even though most scholars still regard colonial education policy as having developed primarily from the metropolis. La voix du Congolais – ironically also the title of a journal that initially was firmly controlled by Belgians – was not directly heard in the Congolese educational past. The history of education of the Belgian Congo has traditionally centred on the development of colonial educational policy. 41

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Only very recently have scholars taken up a more complex understanding of colonial education, centring their attention on educational practices as experienced by Congolese (Vinck et al. 2006). This chapter reviews the historiography of education in Congo, highlighting the significance of more recent work that contributes to a better understanding of the complex relations of educational transference. Indeed, only two-way traffic between Belgian and Congolese interpretations based on mixed source material and shared experiences can establish a more nuanced cultural-historical view of the overall colonial pedagogical past. The chapter is organized in four sections. First, I discuss the general historiography of Congo. Then I sketch the state of the art in the educational historiography of Congo. Third, I situate the work of the Leuven Centre for the History of Education, which impelled the development of an educational historiography in Belgium within this context. Finally, I offer an example of the way in which the writing of the history of Congolese education should, at least to my mind, be developed in the near future.

GENERAL HISTORIOGRAPHY Unsurprisingly, the trend to map the inverse effects of colonization was a long time coming. The writing of Belgium’s colonial history, which began in the early 1900s (see the historiographical review of Vanthemsche 2006; and the introduction by Vanhee and Castryck [2002] to their special issue on the historiography of Belgium’s colonial past), was part of the country’s imperial project from the very outset. The Congolese enterprise, centred on the monarchy, was intended to reinforce Belgian unity and identity. In this sense, colonialism was focused primarily inwardly (Viaene, van Reybrouck and Ceuppens 2009: 25). Belgian history producers, including the authors of history textbooks (see De Baets 1994), had an important role in that essentially narcissistic project, labouring industriously to fill in the blank epic in which the ‘genius’ late-nineteenth-century king Leopold II carried out a visionary task with his ‘heroic’ supporters: colonists, colonials, soldiers, missionaries, and so on. Therefore, the colonial pantheon was coloured Belgian, not Congolese, and the pride concerned the Belgians and what they had done. What was inscribed in the Belgian story was not a part of African history but rather the history of Belgian colonialism (Verschaffel 2009: 74). In popular presentations, this positive view of the benefactions of the colonial regime was not toppled until long after the Second World War. The general public in Belgium experienced Congolese independence (1960) as a much-too-abrupt termination of a model colony (Ceuppens 2003; Cout-

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tenier 2005; Etambala 2008). Only in the previous decade had a critical perspective of the Belgians’ so-called model colony emerged, spurred by the media (Castryck 2009: 279–80). Attention to the Congo was slow to move beyond the relatively small circle of those directly involved there; meanwhile, only a few dozen Congolese were allowed to reside in Belgium during the 1950s, which helps explain why colonialism was hardly contested in Belgium. Its negative effects on the indigenous were ignored or minimalized in the mother country with the whitewashing argument that they were necessary for progress and civilization – the moral complement and thus, at the same time, the moral justification of colonization (Vansina 2009: 32). At present, such an explanation obviously fails because of, among other things, the globalizing dynamic that the cross-cultural colonial encounter generated in the dominant scholarship (Viaene, van Reybrouck and Ceuppens 2009: 25). A few revisionist voices were to be heard as early as the mid-1980s in the Belgian (primarily the Flemish) historiography (e.g., Vangroenweghe 1985; Delathuy 1986, 1994 [1992]) particularly concerning Leopold II’s controversial role in the exploitation of rubber in the so-called Congo Free State (1885–1908), which ended up as a kind of genocide for the local population. Admittedly, English contemporaries had already denounced the related scandals, but the Belgian supporters had generally brushed them aside as accusations from a rival camp motivated by colonial jealousy. In the 1990s, when a foreign authority – the American Adam Hochschild (1998) – finally confirmed these critical stories of the Belgian colonial past, they gained entry in a broader circle and could no longer be dismissed exclusively as anticolonial libel. In the midst of all this historiographical iconoclasm, which almost exclusively targeted the beginning and the end of the colonization, skirting the everyday reality of the colonial period, Jan Vansina was a notorious exception. This expatriate Fleming, who worked as an Africa specialist out of Madison, Wisconsin, in the United States, has been described as ‘the most brilliant Belgian historian since Pirenne’ (Viaene, van Reybrouck and Ceuppens 2009: 17). This praise was heaped on him because of the anthropological attention he devoted to the position of the indigenous – a position held in the Congo itself by, among others, Isidore Ndaywel è Nziem (1997), who produced an Histoire générale du Congo, and ultimately, more or less, by Valentin Mudimbe (2009), an erudite cultural scientist and famous Congolese author of poems and stories who argues for merging the soberness of the historical researcher with the ethnographic and/or anthropological researcher’s atmospheric sensitivity to radical otherness. In retrospect, such starting points seem readily compatible with what I had in mind, intuitively and implicitly, as the premise of good interdisciplinary and intercultural

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research in the colonial history of education of Africa in general and that of the Congo in particular.

EDUCATIONAL HISTORIOGRAPHY When I started my own research into the colonial educational past in the early 1990s, only a handful of books, some in the United States and some in the Congo itself, treated the Congolese history of education. To the first group belonged a study by Barbara Yates (1967) that emphasized the period of Leopoldian Congo, also the subject of some articles she published later on (Yates 1971, 1976, 1980). Much more important for the colonial period was Marvin D. Markowitz’s (1973) work on the political role of Christian missions in the Congo. Self-evidently, the supply of schools in which to realize the evangelization offensive was one of their preoccupations. Regarding the Belgian educational policy towards the Congo, Markowitz coined the term ‘educational gradualism’, which is still valid for today’s research. The Belgians constantly underestimated the unintended side effects of their ‘gradual’ policy, as attested by the way they were clearly overwhelmed by the sudden acceleration in the Congolese independence process. In addition, there was the hardly substantial, and therefore probably never-to-be-published thesis of the later politician Newt Gingrich (1971), who became the fiftyeighth Speaker of the United States House of Representatives (1995–99) and also unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination to run in the 2012 presidential election. In the Congo itself, there was, first of all, a survey work by the Jesuit Martin Ekwa (1965), who, after independence, became the first Congolese chairman of the Bureau de l’Enseignement Catholique in Kinshasa. This actually reads like the historical foundation of his public policy statement on the future of Catholic education, which had appeared a few years earlier (Ekwa 1963). More critical was the dissertation of Pierre Kita Kyankenge Masandi (1982), which focused on the colonial triad of state, capital and church. He set out to demonstrate, primarily on the basis of official documents, the extent to which education, as a political instrument of colonization, had played a role in the exploitation, subjection and alienation of the indigenous. However, research into the subjective experiences of Congolese who had undergone colonial education was not yet considered. Historiography based on oral testimonies was still marginal in the 1980s, certainly as regards the Congo. Obviously, the Catholic version of the Congolese history of education differed from that of Kita K. Masandi, who did not base his study on Catho-

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lic documents alone. Insofar as Belgian (and primarily Flemish) missionaries actually published their story – which happened in at least one case before the 1990s (van Keerberghen 1985, 1990) – not only did the description rely on primary source material compiled primarily from ecclesiastical archives, but the sparse interpretation also presented less of a threat to the Belgian presence in the Congo. This interpretation through a traditional lens saw education as primarily a component of the civilizing and conversion work of the national mission of Belgium (omitting any account of the efforts of foreign Protestant missions). This is hardly surprising, as Catholic missionaries were mainly trained in the metropolis as agents of the colonial system. Nevertheless, here too at least one well-known exception existed in the person of Honoré Vinck, who studied the intercultural encounter in the colony with a more nuanced perspective, primarily by scrutinizing the textbooks the missionaries published in the Congo (see, e.g., Vinck 1995). Thus, apart from a few sprinklings (e.g., Simon Gasibirege Rugema 1989, 1994), the real body of literature on the history of education in the Congo was quite small. To my knowledge only one book can be mentioned here: Busugutsala Gandayi Gabudisa’s (1986) study of the history of educational policy from the era of Leopold II up to the Mobutu regime. Curiously, it did not refer to the work of Kita (1982), although it tackled analogous official legislative sources (including those for the postcolonial period). Hence it pled for more juridical autonomy for education and greater independence from the existing religious and political dogmas. No wonder the book was published in Paris, not Kinshasa. In what was then Zaïre, coming to terms with the development of other domains in historiography – political, social, economic, demographic, cultural, religious and so on (Ndaywel è Nziem 2006) – presented such difficulty that educational aspects generally were discussed only in passing (e.g., by Mumbanza Mwa Bawele Na Nyabakomi 1976; Feltz 1980, 1981). This was also the case with other researchers, some operating from abroad, who focused on specific aspects of educational history such as the difficult relationship between church and state (Boyle 1995; see also Busugutsala 1987).

LEUVEN RESEARCH RESULTS From this perspective, the book by Depaepe and van Rompaey (1995), even though it was written in Dutch, might be considered a renewal in more than one respect. It intended not only to provide an overview of the primarily missionary educational activity in the Belgian Congo but also to interpret this mission from the viewpoint of the history of education. Without lapsing

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into simplistic terms of an educational plot on the part of the colonial rulers, it showed that Belgian education could not immediately be deemed emancipatory but, on the contrary, contributed intentionally to the paternalism of the Congolese people. In this regard, the title ‘under the sign of paternalism’, to which some missionaries, colonials and/or colonists readily took offense, left little to the imagination: the colonial and missionary educational project indeed stood in the theme of paternalism. Yet this paternalism need not be immediately related to moral categories – ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘evil’, ‘merit’ or ‘guilt’ – that constantly recur in nonhistorical discourse about the colony. What the research in this book ultimately arrived at was the contextualization of that patronizing in the light of the pedagogical theories, mentalities and practices of the time. This leads to a second characteristic of the book that, in the light of the historiographical trends indicated above, may be considered surprisingly current: the educational parallelism between the colony and the mother country. Of course the paternalistic perspective was still, if not exclusively, the dominant pedagogical strategy in Belgium too during the colonial period. Like many other groups in the society, the un-emancipation of children and youth was a legitimate assumption until the 1950s. Partly for this reason, colonial educational history in the Congo allows itself to be read as Belgian history writ small. This characteristic extends also to the pedagogical orientation of the largely Catholic-oriented curricula, which emphasized moralization above knowledge acquisition and preferred native languages for the purpose of evangelization (Seghers 2004; Meeuwis 2011; Depaepe 2012a), and to the political-ideological tensions exported later (coinciding in Belgium with the school conflict of the 1950s; see Boyle 1995; Briffaerts 1999). As I argued in 1994 in an exhibition at the Municipal Education Museum in Ypres, the history of education in the colony cannot be approached separately from the history of the colony in Belgian education. Despite relatively extensive archival research, the study by Depaepe and van Rompaey (1995) has limitations: for one, it is still an introduction that could, at several points, be supplemented, qualified, nuanced or possibly even corrected. And because the book focused primarily on the pedagogical macro level of colonial educational policy and the politics of the educational founders, and the meso level of structures and diversity in the educational supply throughout the colony, little room was left for the study of the educational practices at the micro-level of the classroom (Depaepe 1998). Jan Briffaerts, a doctoral student at the Leuven Centre for the History of Education, undertook this task at the start of the twenty-first century, producing a dissertation that has been published in both Dutch and English (Briffaerts 2007, in press). For his study of concrete, everyday pedagogical

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behaviour, he selected the Tshuapa region in the Lomongo area, situated in the South of the then Équateur province, where the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart were very active. Briffaert’s choice was also influenced by good contacts with the Centre Aequatoria in Bamania, near Mbandaka. This rich, well-preserved, largely microfilmed archive is of interest for cultural history and educational history alike, in part because of the many school inspection reports and the correspondence of Father Gustave Hulstaert (see, e.g., Briffaerts, Depaepe and Kita 2003a), Vinck’s predecessor in Bamania and one of the most remarkable ‘indigenist’ missionaries in the Congo. A personal research interest in the textbook of Honoré Vinck, who recently produced two state-of-the-art articles (Vinck 2007, 2008), also played a decisive role here. As the precipitate of an ‘evaporated’ educational reality, the colonial textbook is obviously a good starting point for the study of that reality, even though this starting point does not directly coincide with it. In this sense, the Leuven Centre, which engaged Vinck after his return from Congo as a voluntary research fellow, cultivated a special interest in the textbook in the Belgian Congo, not only theoretically and methodologically but also in terms of its content (Briffaerts, Depaepe and Kita 2003b). The work of Pierre Kita Kyankenge Masandi, who joined the Leuven Centre in the same period, was particularly helpful in this venture. The author of a study on the education of girls (2004), Kita also provided insights into the history of the school song, which served as a kind of compromised textbook, particularly in primary education, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It functioned, even more in Africa than in Europe, as an economical, multifunctional variant of the textbook that could express all kinds of conceptual content as well as various moral standards and could also be memorized by singing and used partly as recreation, whereby the content also sank in better. That the normative orientation of this pedagogical practice was the same in both the metropolis and the bush goes without saying after the discussion above of the Belgian-Congolese parallelism in education. Kita’s integration into the Leuven research team led to two collective books, one on the use of textbooks and school songs, on which Jan Briffaerts and Honoré Vinck collaborated (Depaepe et al. 2003), and one on the concrete content of the school songs themselves (Kita and Depaepe 2004). Building further on Briffaerts’s study with the aid of oral testimonies, the Leuven research group has also examined the long-term effects of colonial education action in the Congo. It found that histories written from a Eurocentric perspective relied on textbooks, inspection reports and other artefacts of the pedagogical reality in the colony, described on the macro and meso level of educational experience. But more work was needed to

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reveal the experience of the distilled educational reality in the Congo. Using Briffaert’s framework alongside associated anthropological fieldwork, the group set out to interview a sample of the still-living generations of former pupils of the missions. Matonge, the Congolese quarter in Brussels, was the site of three in-depth interviews, and in a collaborative effort, some seven eyewitnesses were interviewed in Kinshasa. These firsthand experiences were then compiled and published integrally (Vinck et al. 2006), precisely because dealing with this kind of a posteriori constructed source material demands a very cautious hermeneutic, text-critical approach. What is still remembered in the present of the educational past is, of course, considerably coloured and distorted by individual memory as well as by the life plans that the informants have devised for themselves and the life trajectories they have travelled. Such ‘documents humains’ have, as far as I know, no equal in Congolese educational historiography. This also applies for the collection of correspondence published at that time about a missionary sister who worked in the Congo throughout the entire colonial period (Depaepe, Lefebvre and Etambala 1992). These sources have also proven a gold mine for the popular media as an introduction to the pedagogical but also stereotypical colonial mentality. For example, Belgian missionizing clearly saw that governmental sites, mission posts and industrial centres were best situated apart from each other to avoid excessive interference associated with the colonial triad of state, church and industry. Primary schools took after medieval abbeys, including their neo-Gothic architecture, aiming to be isolated, enclosed sanctuaries far from the dangers of the city. This approach to the pedagogical space in the geographical sense of the word was, therefore, a good example of paternalistic colonial pedagogy (Briffaerts and Dhondt 2003). Apart from the mainly collective work at the Centre for History of Education in Leuven, the Leuven historian Ruben Mantels has written a monograph (2007) on the history of university education in Lovanium, a Catholic campus created in Kimwenza, near Kinshasa, in 1954. Originally, colonial educational policy was not primarily concerned with the highest level of education. Interest in higher education was aroused only in the early 1950s, when the focus shifted to the problem of university education for the children of colonists and the ministers of the colonial apparatus, as well as to the self-created problem of the évolués (the evaluated), that is, the strongly Europeanized master helpers of the colonial system. The so-called problem of the évolués unfolds the paradox of colonial education and therefore makes a good starting point for its historiography, in view of further international comparative research (see Nóvoa, Depaepe and Johanningmeier 1995; Nóvoa 2009). In a certain sense, problematizing the

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évolués sharpens the ‘educational’ gaze that has too long been neglected in the social and cultural historiography of several colonial (and even postcolonial) situations. To explain this, this section will conclude with a summary of the quintessence of our findings. Having completed my Congo research in the mid-1990s (Depaepe 1998), I encapsulated it in the phrase that a croupier in a casino uses to indicate that one may no longer bet: ‘rien ne va plus’. Despite reluctance to shift the blame for that bankruptcy exclusively to a failed colonial past (Celis 1990), it still looked as though the foundations of the colonial educational system, alongside economic deterioration, continued to contribute to the dysfunction of Congolese education. Even today, the essentially Westernized educational project, inseparably bound to the modernization notion of the Enlightenment, is still producing deracination in a subculture of the nouveau riche, which appears to have seamlessly taken over the mental, social and spatial structures of colonialism. Well into the twentieth century, Belgian missionaries tried, through education, to socialize the indigenous as docile helpers of the colonial system as much as possible (Depaepe 2012a). Inevitably, submission by means of discipline and regimentation – often verging on blind drill (see, e.g., Briffaerts 2007: 205)– was central. The goal was not to expand consciousness. Obviously, pedagogical relations in the classroom pointed not at all to liberation, autonomy, free expression of opinion or other fine concepts produced by the so-called ‘liberating’ pedagogy of the late 1960s as indications of the educational goal. Insofar as critical thinking ultimately resulted, it was little more than an undesired side effect. The objective was to avoid creating an embittered class of semi-intellectuals and half-civilized people that could become a hotbed of dissatisfaction and revolutionary or nationalistic notions. Several racist elements underpinned this pedagogical civilizing paradigm. It was repeated to the point of tedium that indigenes should not take any initiative and thus had to be commanded, that they were incapable of abstraction or intellectual formation, that they were trainable but needed a concrete example, that they admittedly possessed a commercial instinct but preferred to be lazy, that they were locked into magical world views and largely averse to rational starting points, and that the men had women do the hard labour and also had great sexual appetites, as exemplified by polygamous practices. Given this specific psychology of the ‘black’ (see also Depaepe 2009), profound contact with the Western ideas was not considered necessary. The indigene needed only elementary education to function in ‘his’ milieu, so character formation had to prevail over intellectual instruction. In its naiveté, this Eurocentric view of schooling revealed the fundamental paradox confronting most colonial educators. On the one hand, an in-

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troduction to Western thought and value patterns was indispensable for the success of the colonial adventure; on the other hand, too much education could result in alienation and deracination, which was dangerous not least because the destabilization of traditional indigenous life could activate a revolutionary consciousness. The question ‘How far can/must/may we go?’ was therefore never far away, particularly as the expansion of elementary education sparked the desire for more education and even interest in immigration to Belgium. In the pedagogical vision of Belgian educators in the Congo, the indigenous had to be prepared for independence slowly but surely. This was best achieved by keeping them at a kind of near distance. To prevent further deracination, the African identity was strengthened through the ‘indigenist’ approach; some Belgian educators even tried to connect with the modern New Education ideas and set up a genuine African pedagogy. But precisely these initiatives were intended to accentuate the distant nearness. The educators wanted Africans to proceed from their own milieu, thereby highlighting differentiation from Europeans (Depaepe 2009; see also Briffaerts, Depaepe and Kita 2003b). Meanwhile, however, the Western civilization model remained the guide for development and modernization, whereby the Congo – notwithstanding all the well-intentioned New Education (or Reform Pedagogy) – continued to exercise a hierarchy with Belgians at the top. For the future, a harmonious partnership with the whites in the region had to be set up under Belgian leadership to protect the interests of Belgian capital, alongside the state and the church. Such paternalism turned out to be intolerable in the long term. The society, schooled and educationalized after the Western example – as was evident in, among other things, the imitation of European classroom behaviour (Briffaerts 2007) – gradually eroded after independence until the entire structure collapsed like a house of cards. Evolved blacks remained aliens in their own culture (Kita 1982: 202). During the colonial period, the Congolese ‘elite’ had been unable to channel the excrescences of suppressed nationalism into the previously mapped-out bedding of the Belgians’ harmonious collaboration model (see also Ekwa 1965). The carefully cultivated dependence of the Congolese not only erupted in revolt and resistance but also resulted in a dearth of managers trained to bear the suddenly obtained autonomy. In the countryside after independence, elementary education headed for a true catastrophe (Feltz 1980), while the cities, which were literally coming apart at the seams, increasingly suffered the duality of an ever greater loss of schools and the socialization of an elite saddled with an inferiority complex (Feltz 1981).

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But here, too, this overgeneralized picture must obviously be qualified. As Briffaerts (2007: 298) has stated, the interviews with former pupils reveal nostalgia and gratitude, as well as anger and irritation because of restrictions and missed opportunities. The latter most certainly holds for the female elite, for whom the clash between the indigenous culture and the new imperatives of the Catholic expectations of care and monogamous subjection was much more oppressive (Vinck et al. 2006).

FUTURE PERSPECTIVES To create space for more complex interpretations, in the coming years we aim to conduct an in-depth study of this paradox of the cultural hybridity of the évolués (Depaepe 2012b). The postcolonial confrontation with a Western-oriented (and therefore likely also somewhat Westernizing) education system will of course have been much more complex than what the abovementioned stereotyping, in all its simplicity and naïveté, would suggest. Rather than alienation or uprooting, everyday educational practice should probably refer more to appropriation, which in any case leaves scope for adjustments and fleshing-out at the local level. Civilization never appears from a single centre but results from multiple influences and practices, which, regardless of the general trends they harbour, time and again give rise to differentiated results in the short and long term. So, to quote Jürgen Schriewer (2004), there is no internationalization without indigenization, a situation that in Congo naturally does not exclude a certain form of cultural hybridization – quite the reverse, in fact. However, historical analysis of the education policy and legislation alone is insufficient to chart such phenomena. This macro level, which has invariably been a focus of traditional research on the history of education and in comparative education studies, is for this purpose far too far removed from the classroom realities at the micro level. Although in this latter respect historical researchers continually vie with the inescapable fact that these everyday realities have, as it were, evaporated, they can still nonetheless make as close an approximation as possible to the educational practices of yore and their impact on people’s lives in at least two ways, namely, archival research and oral historiography. The foregoing sections’ brief analysis of the scant literature treating the history of Congolese education makes abundantly clear that no one has yet produced a micro study of pedagogic and didactic actions relating to the postcolonial period. However, by no means would the new research project

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intend to fill this lacuna completely. That would be a perilous – indeed, nigh on impossible – undertaking, since adoption of the intercultural approach demands a focus on the specific, often even idiosyncratic context in which the educational actions being examined took shape. As such, the identity of ‘the’ postcolonial education in Congo is not easily conceivable under a single denominator. Such an identification must consider not only the diversity of levels of education and the orientation of the teaching activities as regards content (e.g., general versus vocational education), but likewise also the differentiations between boys’ and girls’ schooling and the historical and ideological backgrounds of the establishments. Besides schools that were Catholic in origin, there were not only the Protestant and old Islamic schools but also Kimbanguistic education, whose enormous expansion under the Mobutu regime was due in part to the local prophetic hue that coloured the message of salvation. For the sake of feasibility, we have therefore resolutely opted for a case study. To be able to penetrate the classroom realities entailed by the intercultural paradox of a Congolese person demanding autonomy in a Westernoriented education system, our study will concentrate only on the most advanced form of general secondary education: boys’ schools of Catholic origin or character in large cities. After all, this is presumably where the confrontation with or integration into Western culture made greatest headway. Furthermore, this choice dovetails with our expertise on the évolués, the showpieces of colonization, whose ascribed ‘psycho-pedagogic’ possibilities were one of the aspects our investigations covered in previous research. Having allotted sufficient consideration to differentiation and historical contextualization, we are designing a study of the internalization and assimilation of educational learning processes whose primary bias was not African to ascertain how they passed off in practice, and what intermediate cultures they led to. We envision a kind of collective biography of the évolué, conceived of as a construction of multiple and fragmented selves, in which general developments can be understood by accessing individual, subjective experiences of the teaching and learning processes these évolués went through (see also Mutamba 1998; Tödt 2012). In this collective biography of the social elite, we consciously pluralize social and intercultural relations (with their neocolonial parataxis) and accept that individual paths are necessarily complex and that individuals belong to different worlds and generations. Moreover, we explore the future of the past by breaking through the coherent birth-to-death time frame to set in train a kind of unmasking process aimed at exposing stereotypes concerning the so-called elite in Congo that have survived to circulate in the present day.

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Given the likelihood that intercultural hybridity is best studied in those places where contact with the metropolitan culture was greatest, we focus exclusively on the education most in keeping with the classic Belgian grammarschool type of secondary education, a schooling that – for boys, at any rate – offered the best prospects in Congo for an intellectual career with a relatively high social standing. The decision to base the study on Catholic-inspired mission schools (which were merged into the nationalized education system between 1971 and 1977) and not on, for example, the former state middle schools that developed mainly in the 1950s, partly in the aftermath of the Congolese school funding controversy, has to do with our prior knowledge of colonial missionary education and the many contacts we have been able to build up in this area, both in Europe and in situ. The two centres that best lend themselves to this are of course Kinshasa, the capital, and Lubumbashi, the most important industrial city, in Katanga. In the first case we will concentrate primarily on the Jesuits’ school archive, and in the second we will turn to that of the Salesians, whose congregations have been most active in this regard in these places. The source material that can tell us about what went on in the classroom at the time includes such items as inspection reports, class journals, lesson plans, notebooks, exams and essays, possibly supplemented by all sorts of other ego-documents belonging to former teachers and pupils. Clearly, with a view to a suitable interpretation, these unpublished sources have to be confronted with and/ or supplemented by various printed materials that directly or indirectly report on what school life used to be like: magazines (educational as well as other periodicals), brochures and stories about short- and long-term effects of people’s education, possibly even incorporated into postcolonial works of fiction. As we have explained at greater length elsewhere, there is no ultimate source for historical research into former educational mentalities and realities. Our task, as we see it, boils down to playing out the complementary nature of the available information as much as possible by observing how the sources clash with each other and integrating the insights generated thereby in layered, ambiguous narratives composed on a multi-perspective basis. At this level, too, as a matter of fact, we can learn much from Michel de Certeau (1990), the spiritual father of the concept of ‘everyday history’, who put the complexity of the interpretation at centre stage in what he has called the historiographical operation. Returning to Congo, we intend on the one hand to provide our storyline with the necessary distinction, and on the other hand to be able to detect a large volume of data that would otherwise be lost in the mists of oblivion. To these ends, we will carry out oral interviews with eyewitnesses in Kinshasa

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and Lubumbashi in hopes of eliciting relevant events from subjective memory. These will admittedly need to be double-checked, as far as is possible, preferably also against written and/or other material sources. Old school photos, educational films and other visual material can be used in the individual interviews both as a prompt and a corrective for the memory, which often fails and/or distorts reality, seeing it in a different light. In both locations, interviewees will be recruited from two categories: former pupils and former teachers. Ideally, for the data collection and processing, we have in mind a kind of matrix of a maximum of three pupils and two teachers to be interviewed per school (one Jesuits’ school in Kinshasa and one Salesians’ school in Lubumbashi) and per generationally determined age group corresponding to school experiences in a particular period: the early 1960s (1960–62), the late 1960s (1967–69), the mid-1970s (1974–76), the early 1980s (1981–83), the late 1980s (1988–90) and the mid-1990s (1995– 97). For the actual field research in the large cities, this gives a total of sixty interviews, although we know that our matrix is an ideal textbook approach that cannot necessarily be followed to the letter in the chaotic conditions of a present-day Congolese metropolis. The teachers will be selected based on the teaching content they were entrusted with. More precisely, only teachers responsible for the ‘history’ and ‘French’ course components will be eligible for selection (for each discipline, one per period and per school), for it is, after all, unfeasible to strive to (re)construct post-colonial educational and schooling behaviour in its totality in our study. This additional limitation to two areas of the curriculum also serves, therefore, as a guideline for the above-mentioned archival research, although here it need not be applied restrictively. Indeed, this limitation is far from being a coincidental choice. Not only is it prompted by our current cooperation with historians and linguists, but it also aligns with the assumption that cultural hybridization manifested itself most sharply in two regards: the way the colonial inheritance was dealt with and related to, and the use of a European language as a national language. Our almost inexhaustible raft of questions about intercultural encounters in the postcolonial period – which we thus must also streamline for use in the guidelines for our interviews – above all concerns how the teaching of the history of the Belgian presence in Congo was presented and experienced, and what effects it had. How exactly was the colonial inheritance viewed? Were lessons on the colonial era deliberately manipulated (e.g., by suppressing or inverting the historical experiences and recollections into politically correct concepts and language)? Did intervention at the teaching level, which may have had a politically ideological slant, promote nostalgia towards, or alternatively horror of, the colonial regime? What was the situ-

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ation as regards the integration and/or assimilation of ‘values’ and ‘standards’ that the Belgians had held up before the Congolese for years? Did Catholic-inspired teaching, for example, create its own heroes on the basis of the colonial history? In this respect, did a kind of ‘reminiscence-based education’ take place at the mission(s)? The second area of ‘intercultural’ questions, which concerns contact with the French language, concentrates primarily on the literary discursive dimensions. To what degree was teaching a vehicle for an endogenous transfer of the Congolese literary repertoire of fables and stories into French? Did the French language instruction feature observable traces (e.g., in the form of used schoolbooks, students’ essays and the like) of rich African metaphorical language, the use of African proverbs and sayings, comparisons with well-known characters from local fables and so forth? In this respect, did translations exist that could be used in a school context? And what did all this mean for the possible existence of a (literary) intermediate culture? This immediately raises the question whether education also went in the other direction to impact the autochthonous population’s everyday use of language by means of educational interventions within the curriculum (e.g., regular lessons and exercises at school) and extracurricular activities (e.g., the compulsory reading of French novels at home). Here again, we are interested not only in the possible influence of metaphorical language, proverbs, literary characters and so on, but also in the possibly compelling discursive influence of French on ways of thinking and acting, to which a civilizing role was probably also ascribed. The historical educational relevance of this question is obvious, given that colonial discourse necessarily described the psychopedagogic possibilities of the indigenous population as limited because the Congolese were not considered capable of thinking in abstract terms. To test our findings on the development of a metropolitan intermediate culture(s) among the neocolonial elite for their generalizability, we see the advantage of bringing in a kind of control group. The above-mentioned Centre Aequatoria offers a superb opportunity to this end. Not only does it possess an extensive education archive, but our historical contacts there can facilitate a replication test of our oral history in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi, with the same matrix in mind (bringing the total number of planned interviews to ninety). Again, both pragmatic grounds and reasons of principle dictate our choice of Mbandaka. Pragmatically speaking, much of the Aequatoria archive is available in Leuven, thanks to extensive documentation by its former director, who in the turbulent times of the Mobutu regime also saw to the making of microfiches that can now be consulted in different places in other countries. As for principle, from a historical viewpoint, the mission in Mbandaka pursued a less metropolitan, more regional education policy,

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advocating the already mentioned indigenistic education of the Congolese rather than assimilationist contact with the Western intellectual inheritance. Therefore we can nicely round off our comparative case study by placing the findings for Kinshasa and Lubumbashi (which may or may not run parallel to one another) against those for the more peripheral Mbandaka. This, as far as interpretation, explanation and follow-up study are concerned, could obviously open up numerous interesting hypotheses about the specificity of our research results. For too long the Congo connection in education has been misunderstood and even suppressed in the Belgian collective memory (see also Stanard 2012). By now it should be clear that investigations like the research project presented here can provide additional insights into the complexity of this problem in a scientifically responsible manner. Intended neither to curry favour with the Flemish or the Congolese community, nor to give in to the urge for simplification, such studies undoubtedly have potential to contribute to contemporary intellectual cooperation. Upon receiving an explicit request for such cooperation from Congo on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of independence, our university lost no time in giving its positive answer.

REFERENCES Boyle, P.M. 1995. ‘School Wars: Church, State, and the Death of the Congo’, The Journal of Modern African Studies 33: 451–68. Briffaerts, J. 1999. ‘De schoolstrijd in Belgisch-Congo (1930–1958)’, in E. Witte, J. De Groof and J. Tyssens (eds), Het schoolpact van 1958. Ontstaan, grondlijnen en toepassing van een Belgisch compromis. Brussels and Leuven: VUBPress and Garant, pp. 331–58. ———. 2007. ‘Als Kongo op de schoolbank wil’. De onderwijspraktijk in het lager onderwijs in Belgisch Congo (1925–1960). Leuven and Voorburg: Acco. ———. In press. When Congo Wants to Go to School: Educational Realities in a Colonial Context. An Investigation into Educational Practices in Primary Education in the Belgian Congo (1905–1960). Amsterdam: Rozenberg. Briffaerts, J., M. Depaepe and P. Kita K.M. 2003a. ‘Beispiel einer Quelle für die Alltagsgeschichte von Erziehung und Unterricht in Belgisch-Kongo’, Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 9: 283–300. ———. 2003b. ‘Das koloniale Schulbuch und die Spannung zwischen pädagogischer Überlieferung und didaktischer Innovation. Meta-Reflexionen über drei Fallstudien zu von Missionaren verfassten Lesebüchern in Belgisch-Kongo, 1910– 1950’, in E. Matthes and C. Heinze (eds), Didaktische Innovationen im Schulbuch. Beiträge zur historischen und systematischen Schulbuchforschung. Bad Heilbrunn: Julius Klinkhardt, pp. 221–32.

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Briffaerts, J. and P. Dhondt. 2003. ‘The Dangers of Urban Development: Missionary Discourse in Education and Urban Growth, Belgian Congo (1920–1960)’, Neue Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft 59: 81–102. Busugutsala, G.G. 1986. Politiques éducatives au Congo-Zaïre. De Léopold II à Mobutu. Paris: L’Harmattan. ———. 1987. ‘Situation récente des rapports Eglise-Etat dans la question scolaire au Zaïre: De la Convention de 1997 au Loi Cadre de 1986’, Studia Canonica 21: 141–74. Castryck, G. 2009. ‘Binnenste-buitenland. De Belgische kolonie en de Vlaamse buitenlandberichtgeving’, in V. Viaene, D. van Reybrouck and B. Ceuppens (eds), Congo in België: Koloniale cultuur in de metropool. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 271–81. Celis, G.R. 1990. La faillite de l’enseignement blanc en Afrique noire. Paris: L’Harmattan. Ceuppens, B. 2003. Congo Made in Flanders? Koloniale visies op ‘blank’ en ‘zwart’ in Belgisch Congo. Ghent: Academia. Couttenier, M. 2005. Congo tentoongesteld. Een geschiedenis van de Belgische antropologie en het museum van Tervuren. Leuven and Voorburg: Acco. De Baets, A. 1994. De figuranten van de geschiedenis. Hoe het verleden van andere culturen wordt verbeeld en in herinnering gebracht. Berchem and Hilversum: EPO. De Certeau, M. 1990. L’invention du quotidien. Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard. Delathuy, A.M. 1986. Jezeuïeten in Kongo met zwaard en kruis. Berchem: EPO. ———. 1994 [1992]). Missie en staat in Oud-Kongo 1880–1914. Berchem: EPO. Depaepe, M. 1998. ‘“Rien ne va plus. . .”: The Collapse of the Colonial Educational Structures in Zaïre (1960–1995)’, Education and Society 16(1): 37–53. ———. 2009. ‘Belgian Images of the Psycho-Pedagogical Potentials of the Congolese during the Colonial Era, 1908–1960’, Paedagogica Historica 45(6): 707–25. ———. 2012a. ‘Sometimes a Little Distance Is Needed to See What Really Happened: The Study of the Belgian Educational Policy in Congo as an Example of the Critical Vigour of Colonial History of Education’, in C. Aubry et al. (eds), Positionierungen. Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft, Pädagogik und Politik. Weinheim and Basel: Beltz Juventa, pp. 219–32. ———. 2012b. ‘How to Research Intercultural Hybridity of the Congolese Elite Through Education During the Postcolonial Era (1960–1997)?’, in M. Depaepe (ed.), Between Educationalization and Appropriation: Selected Writings on the History of Modern Educational Systems. Leuven: University Press, pp. 265–79. Depaepe, M., et al. 2003. Manuels et chansons scolaires au Congo Belge. Leuven: University Press. Depaepe, M., R. Lefebvre and Z.A. Etambala. 1992. ‘Tot Glorie van God en tot Zaligheid der Zielen’. Brieven van Moeder Marie Adonia Depaepe over haar leven en werk als Zuster van Liefde in Belgisch-Kongo (1909–1961). Antwerp: Standaard. Depaepe, M. and L. van Rompaey. 1995. In het teken van de bevoogding. De educatieve actie in Belgisch-Kongo (1908–1960). Leuven and Apeldoorn: Garant. Ekwa, M. 1963. Pour un enseignement national catholique. Léopoldville: Concordia. ———. 1965. Le Congo et l’éducation: réalisation et perspectives dans l’enseignement national catholique. Léopoldville and Kalina: Bureau de l’Enseignement National Catholique.

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Etambala, Z.A. 2008. De teloorgang van een modelkolonie (1958–1960). Leuven: Acco. Feltz, G. 1980. ‘Un échec de l’implantation scolaire au milieu rural: Le cas de la Lulua et du Katanga central de 1920 à 1960’, Revue Canadienne des Etudes Africaines 13: 32–43. ———. 1981. ‘Une introduction à l’histoire de l’enseignement en Afrique centrale (XIXe–XXe siècles): Idéologies, pouvoirs et sociétés’, Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome 51: 441–59. Gasibirege Rugema, S. 1989. Approche du processus d’inadaptation-adaptation de l’enseignement primaire à travers les réformes scolaires au Zaïre (1880–1980). Brussels: Cedaf. ———. 1994. ‘La qualifiquation des instituteurs au Zaïre (1946–1986): Sa structuration par la formation initiale et la gestion des resources humaines’, Ph.D. dissertation. Louvian-la-Neuve: U.C.L. (Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences). Gingrich, N. (1971). ‘Belgian Educational Policy in the Congo, 1945–1960’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. New Orleans: Tulane University. Hochschild, A. 1998. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Kita K.M., P. 1982. Colonisation et enseignement. Cas du Zaïre avant 1960. Bukavu: Ceruki. ———. 2004. ‘L’éducation féminine au Congo belge’, Paedagogica Historica 40(4): 479– 508. Kita K.M., P. and M. Depaepe. 2004. La chanson scolaire au Congo Belge. Anthologie. Paris: L’Harmattan. Mantels, R. 2007. Geleerd in de tropen. Leuven, Congo & de wetenschap, 1885–1960. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven. Markowitz, M.D. 1973. Cross and Sword: The Political Role of Christian Missions in the Belgian Congo, 1908–1960. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Meeuwis, M. 2011. ‘Bilingual Inequality: Linguistic Rights and Disenfranchisement in Late Belgian Colonization’, Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1279–87. Mudimbe, V. 2009. ‘Lex perfecta, praecepta recta. Mediteren over bemiddelen’, in V. Viaene, D. van Reybrouck and B. Ceuppens (eds), Congo in België. Koloniale cultuur in de metropool. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, pp. 315–33. Mumbanza, M.B.N.N. 1976. ‘Les établissements d’enseignement public à l’époque de l’E.I.C. La colonie scolaire de Nouvelle-Anvers (1892–1913)’, Etudes d’Histoire Africaine 7: 87–129. Mutamba, J.M. 1998. Du Congo Belge au Congo Indépendant: 1940–1960. Emergence des ‘évolués’ et genèse du nationalisme. Kinshasa: Ifep. Ndaywel è Nziem, I. 1997. Histoire du Zaïre: de l'héritage ancien à l'âge contemporain. Louvain-la-neuve: Duculot. ———. 2006. ‘L’historiographie congolaise. Un essai de bilan’, Civilisations. Revue internationale d’anthropologie et de sciences humaines 54: 237–54. Retrieved 22 December 2010 from http://civilisations.revues.org/index489.html Nóvoa, A. 2009. ‘Empires Overseas and Empires at Home’, Paedagogica Historica 45: 807–21.

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Nóvoa, A., M. Depaepe and E.V. Johanningmeier (eds). 1995. The Colonial Experience in Education. Historical Issues and Perspectives. Ghent: C.S.H.P. (Paedagogica Historica, Supplementary Series I). Schriewer, J. 2004. ‘Multiple Internationalities: The Emergence of a World-Level Ideology and the Persistence of Idiosyncratic World-Views’, in C. Charle, J. Schriewer and P. Wagner (eds), Transnational Intellectual Networks: Forms of Academic Knowledge and the Search for Cultural Identities. Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, pp. 473–533. Seghers, M. 2004. ‘Phelps-Stokes in Congo: Transferring Educational Policy to Govern Metropole and Colony’, Paedagogica Historica 40: 455–77. Stanard, M.G. 2012. Selling the Congo: A History of European Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Tödt, D. 2012. ‘Les noirs perfectionnés’: Cultural Embourgeoisement in Belgian Congo during the 1940s and 1950s. Berlin: Humboldt University. Vangroenweghe, D. 1985. Rood rubber. Leopold II en zijn Kongo. Brussels: Elsevier. Vanhee, H. and G. Castryck. 2002. ‘Inleiding. Belgische historiografie en verbeelding over het koloniale verleden’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis 32: 305–20. Van Keerberghen, J. 1985. Histoire de l’enseignement catholique au Kasayi, 1891–1947. Kananga: n.p. ———. 1990. Histoire de l’enseignement catholique dans le vicariat de Luluabourg 1948–1960. Kananga: n.p. Van Reybrouck, D. 2010. Congo. Een geschiedenis. Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij. Vansina, J. 1994. Living with Africa. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. ———. 2009. ‘Koloniale geschiedenis en Congo’, in V. Viaene, D. van Reybrouck and B. Ceuppens (eds), Congo in België. Koloniale cultuur in de metropool. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, pp. 29–40. Vanthemsche, G. 2006. ‘The Historiography of Belgian Colonialism in the Congo’, in C. Lévai (ed.), Europe and the World in European Historiography. Pisa: Edizione Plus, pp. 89–119. Retrieved 22 December 2010 from Netbook publication CLIOHRES.net: http://www.cliohres.net/books/6/Vanthemsche.pdf Verschaffel, T. 2009. ‘Congo in de Belgische zelfrepresentatie’, in V. Viaene, D. van Reybrouck and B. Ceuppens (eds), Congo in België. Koloniale cultuur in de metropool. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, pp. 63–79. Viaene, V., D. van Reybrouck and B. Ceuppens. 2009. ‘Koloniale cultuur in de Belgische metropool’, in V. Viaene, D. van Reybrouck and B. Ceuppens (eds), Congo in België. Koloniale cultuur in de metropool. Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, pp. 11–27. Vinck, H. 1995. ‘The Influence of Colonial Ideology on School Books in the Belgian Congo’, Paedagogica Historica 23: 355–406. ———. 2007. ‘Le manuel scolaire au Congo Belge. L’état de la recherche’, History of Education and Children’s Literature 2(1): 117–42. ———. 2008. ‘La pratique de la recherche sur les manuels scolaires au Congo Belge’, Annales Aequatoria 29: 463–83.

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Vinck, H., et al. 2006. ‘Expériences scolaires au Congo Belge. Etude explorative’, Annales Aequatoria 27: 5–101. Yates, B. 1967. ‘The Missions and Educational Development in Belgian Africa, 1876– 1908’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. Ann Arbor: University microfilms. ———. 1971. ‘African Reactions to Education: The Congolese Case’, Comparative Education Review 15: 158–71. ———. 1976. ‘The Triumph and Failure of Mission Vocational Education in Zaïre, 1879–1908’, Comparative Education Review 20: 193–208. ———. 1980. ‘White Views of Black Minds: Schooling in King Leopold’s Congo’, History of Education Quarterly 20: 27–52.

Chapter 4

Range and Limits of the Countryside Schooling Historiography in Latin America (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) Some Reflections Alicia Civera

Y The goal of this chapter is to review the rural school historiography in Mexico and thereby dialogue with rural histories in other Latin American countries in an attempt to understand what Latin American rural schooling has been, who it has benefited or left out, where and how it has developed and for what purpose. Instead of composing a generic vision of rural educational development in Latin America, I aim to go beyond national barriers to generate a debate about the heterogeneity of different local realities and theoretical and methodological perspectives. The overall purpose is to spark a future dialogue between Latin American studies of the history of education and those of the history of Asia and Africa. In this chapter, I review first the Mexican historiography of rural education and then the Latin American work on the topic; finally I discuss some particulars of rural schooling in Latin America and the range of the historiography in this field. I must advise beforehand that it is impossible to mention all the authors and their work, so my review will focus on the 61

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more consistent researchers and the most representative studies. A more complete bibliography list from Latin America can be found in my recent essay (Civera 2011).

HISTORY OF RURAL EDUCATION IN MEXICO: SOME NOTES During the last thirty years, history of education research in Mexico has developed mainly under the influence of social and cultural history perspectives. At the end of the twentieth century, regional studies began to question the effectiveness of the national political perspective. Studies of everyday life diminished the prior understanding of the power of the state in its normative and legal aspects. In particular, social and oral histories highlighted the importance of social rather than economic determinations, and the study of representations and agency capacity began to challenge earlier arguments about the power of state ideologies and reproduction. Research sources changed from laws and other official discourses to bureaucratic documentation, school and municipal files, books, notebooks and oral testimonies. Increasing numbers of scholars studied practices and everyday life matters, as well as subjects like gender, imagination, appropriation, negotiation, resistance and hegemonic forces. Yet rarely did researchers engage in open debate concerning these different interpretations. Mexican historiography of education has tended to have some connections with new North American cultural history and historic anthropology. Studies were commonly about rural education, especially in the post-revolutionary period (1920s–40s). The authors used documentary sources about common educational practices, most of them analysing local and regional experiences, although some also referred to a national perspective (Loyo 1998, 1999; Palacios 1999; Civera 2008). Many scholars used Gramsci’s and Roseberry’s notions of hegemony (Gramsci 1981; Roseberry 1989), Joseph and Nugent’s concept of everyday forms of state formation (1994) and Knight’s notion of post-revolutionary state formation (1990) to understand the relationships between schools and the community in the citizenship processes, and between changes in the political and economic spheres and the school. The symbolic and material components of power struggle are always present in these kinds of studies, which use Chartier’s notion of appropriation (1992), Elias’s ideas of negotiation and configuration (1996, 1998), De Certeau’s concepts of tactics and strategies (1996) and Scott’s notions of moral economy and resistance (2000) to explain how different actors are involved in the process of building a school culture (Julia 1995; Escolano 2000; Viñao 2001). Italian micro history

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(Ginzburg 1983; Levi 1993) has also been used to understand the relationship between the teachers, the school and the communities. Some authors draw upon the pioneering work of Mary Kay Vaughan and Elsie Rockwell, although important differences between these works are worth mentioning. Vaughan (1997, 1999, 2000) examined the comparative study of federal schooling in two different areas of post-revolutionary Mexico, analysing the way in which an educational hegemonic discourse was capable of sustaining a political regime. According to Vaughan, educational discourse appropriated the content and forms of the discourses of several social sectors and was negotiated in such a way that the popular support of popular schools could explain the longevity of the revolutionary government. Vaughan argued that the rural school thus had a very important place in the process of generating an extended political consensus. Elsie Rockwell (2002, 2005, 2007) approaches schools as local constructions subjected to federal revolutionary government intervention. Her initial question was how much the revolution had changed the schools. The answer she found differed from Vaughan’s: the main factor of the revolutionary government’s success, in Rockwell’s analysis, was its ability to use symbolic and physical violence. The state’s strength was not guaranteed but always contested within the different social and political sectors. This debate runs even deeper if we take into account other studies that treat gender and ethnic groups, and the relationship between teachers, schools, communities and parts of communities. In all of this work, two tendencies are discernible. The first, present above all in North American research due to the influence of ‘Cultural studies’, is the tendency to leave the school in order to study other cultural processes such as cinema, radio and television (Vaughan and Lewis 2006). The second tendency analyses the school but broadens the study by examining the differences within communities and turning to the more pedagogical aspects and the cultural material of the schools. This work also engages with the more sociological debate of rethinking the educational system’s structure, centralization and hierarchy, the relationship between economy and education, and the daily work of the schools and female and male teachers (Acevedo 2000, 2005; Civera 2007, 2010; Alfonseca 2005; Arteaga 2005; Gillingham 2006; Martínez and Padilla 2006; Sigüenza 2007). In contrast to past scholarship, recent work pays more attention to different population types, and especially gender. Topics of women’s education, co-education, the feminization of the teaching profession and women’s working conditions have brought researchers from different perspectives and different backgrounds together in a refreshing way. The general tendency is to try to understand, rather than simply criticize, the distance between the

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educational processes experienced by men and women and between different socio-economic levels, and instead to question commonplace assumptions about the organization of school and teaching (López 2001, 2007, 2010; Fowler-Salamini and Vaughan 2003; Civera 2006, 2009; Cortina and San Román 2006; Galván and López 2008). Indigenous education has received similar attention. Whereas in the past, the generic discourse of the revolution’s victory over ‘the peasants’ prevailed in historiography, today the rural population is better distinguished in terms of socio-economic and ethnic factors. Many studies analyse the particularities of the school experience for indigenous groups and examine the differences between education directed at the mestizo and the indigenous populations. For the most part, this work is based on literature that approaches the ethnicity aspect from a relational perspective, rather than as an essentialist culture (Sigüenza 2007; Escalante 2008; Giraudo 2008, 2010; Greaves 2008; López 2010). So it can be affirmed that history of education in Mexico in this century is increasingly a history of cultural practices, despite the increasing distance between scholars who see education as a natural process that reproduces social order and those who try to understand education’s position at the heart of power struggles between social reproduction and change. It is important to note that although older Mexican historiography of education did not escape the nationalist narrative, more recent studies have developed a transnational approach. In the first decade of this century, Mexican scholars’ expanded communication with researchers of other countries and their growing interest in the impact of global processes led to the development of comparative studies involving other countries, transnational regions or specific sectors of the population without exclusively focusing on national boundaries (Roldán and Schupp 2005; Martínez and Roldán 2006; Acevedo and Quintanilla 2009; Roldán 2009; Giraudo 2010; Alfonseca 2011b; Civera 2011).

THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF SCHOOLING IN THE LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRYSIDE Some researchers have focused specifically on the historiography of rural education in Latin America. The work is challenging for a number of reasons. First of all, ‘rural education’ has been associated with twentieth-century experiences of politics that encouraged a special kind of pedagogy for people in the countryside, where schools’ curricula, organization and resources differed greatly from those of city schools. Because use of the term rural educa-

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tion in this sense poses challenges to understanding countryside schooling over the long term, I prefer to speak of ‘countryside schools’. My argument for this distinction is as follows: The particular characteristics of schools developed in the countryside do not result from a specialized curriculum alone. Certain educative homogenizing projects and others were specifically conceived as rural projects; this characterization has consequences in the implementation of particular institutional mechanisms and educative practices. But above all the effects of these politics depend on who promotes and sustains the schools. Second, the specific role that schools play in the countryside depends on the economic and cultural characteristics of the countryside. There are not one but many rural ways of living, distinguishable from one another according to types of landownership, production and commercializing practices in the region, distance from urban centres, types of relationships with the state and national and international markets, and the sociocultural characteristics of the population and their stability or mobility. Third, ‘rurality’ is a category of social distinction and therefore of social discrimination, which in this case has been historically developed. Schools established in the countryside often seem to be embroiled in deep contradictions caused by the cultural and economic distance between the city and the countryside. The problems of countryside schooling have been studied more in some countries than in others, in works drawing upon distinct disciplinary areas including the history of education, rural studies, historical anthropology and sociology. Because the works come from different countries, disciplines and perspectives, they are disseminated in different academic forums and publications; thus it is somewhat difficult to know with certainty the extent of research on education in the countryside across Latin America. In Argentina, the subject has appeared in a significant number of regional papers. As a specific object of study, however, rural schools have been addressed above all in studies focusing on agriculture from a rural sociology and social history perspective. Adrián Ascolani (2007, 2011), among others, has linked rural schooling and agricultural teaching with the political and social activity of the farmers’ associations, economic development and the formation of the state. Lucía Lionetti (2007, 2010) analyses how the civilizing process acquired importance in the Buenos Aires countryside between 1850 and 1875, and how schools became a battleground between different state and local authorities. Along the same lines, Talía Violeta Gutiérrez (2007, 2009, 2011) did an in-depth study of an Argentinean agricultural teaching institution’s social history, emphasizing, among other elements, how the definition of the objectives of rural education and agriculture depended on the relationship between the urban and rural environments and immigrants

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in the formation of the national state. Argentine research focuses mainly on laws, newspapers and journals, although the social history of schools is starting to attract attention. Argentinean educational scholars have recently begun to take an interest in the history of schooling processes and analysis of the preparation of rural teachers (Pineau 1997; Teobaldo and García 2000; Teobaldo et al. 2005; Cragnolino 2007; Rosso 2008). In Brazil, the history of education has shown significant development in the past thirty years, and many regional studies have appeared. There, the most important subject has been the interest that has arisen from Paulo Freire’s ideas on the one hand, and on the other the ‘Los sin tierra’ (Landless) movement, analysed from a Marxist perspective that stresses the relationship between socio-economic factors and development and school curricula by reviewing statistical, legal and curricular documents. This perspective informs Sonia Regina Mendoza’s studies on rural agricultural and cattle ranching education throughout the twentieth century (Mendoza 2009, 2011) and some others on the Educação do Campo (countryside education) (Ribeiro 2009; de Souza 2010). A second important line of study in Brazil draws on social history and institutional history to analyse the roles the church and the state play in schooling in different regions, especially in the south, and the institutionalization of rural teacher preparation. This line of study reviews school documents from the late nineteenth century up to the mid-twentieth century. Especially trailblazing in this regard were Flavia Werle and her disciples (Werle 2005, 2007, 2010; Werle et al. 2007, 2008, 2010; Werle and Carvalho 2009, 2011), but also other researchers such as Wojciech Andrzej Kulesza (2009) and Alceu Ravanello (2002, 2004, 2009; see also Damasceno and Beserra 2004; Luchese 2008; Marins de Oliveira 2008). And recently, a significant number of studies have been based on life stories (Bittencourt 2010). In Chile, an interesting debate has developed between two different perspectives. The social history perspective, concerned with the early-nineteenth-century literacy campaigns and schooling in rural areas, analyses statistical and demographic data. Representative of this work is the research done by Sol Serrano and her research groups (Serrano 1996, 2001; Serrano et al. 2011), who very carefully distinguish among different forms of rural life. The second perspective prevails in regional studies influenced by anthropological literature concerning ‘subalternity’, which track the state’s ability to penetrate rural life, as well as conflicts and cultural imposition processes, using different types of local sources (Egaña 1994, 2000). Within this type of inquiry, the research on the Tarapacá region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is especially noteworthy (González 1996, 2002; Castro 2004; Figueroa and Silva 2006; Figueroa 2007, 2010; Silva 2007, 2008, 2009,

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2010; Castro et al. 2011). As we will see later, this debate extends to other countries, particularly Mexico, Peru and Bolivia. In the Andean area, rural schools as an object of study are included as part of the history of indigenous groups and as such are kept separate from the specific field of the history of education. Many of these studies’ authors question the role of the school in the reproduction and resistance of indigenous groups under state control and favour analysis of the social actors. Accordingly, they develop methodological strategies to try to capture the indigenous point of view without relying simply on the register left by government documents (Fell 1984; Contreras 1996; Ossenbach 1999; Sinardet 1999, 2000; de la Cadena 2000; Martínez 2001; Brienen 2002, 2005, 2011; Brooke 2005; Cavero 2008; Espinoza 2010; Giraudo 2010). As in Mexico, research in the Andes is increasingly interested in understanding the teacher’s work as a social and political intermediary between rural communities and the state, and the links that teachers have with political and armed resistance or guerrilla groups. An article by Carlos Escalante (2005) is a noteworthy first attempt to locate the largely dispersed research on indigenous education in Latin America. In Columbia, some scholars have attempted to discover what policies were followed in regard to the rural population’s schooling in the twentieth century (Alarcón 2009; Triana 2011). The work of the rural education research group assembled by Alba Triana in Columbia includes historical analysis. Interest in this subject matter, however, is incipient and hinges on contemporary concerns about new policies of rural education and teacher preparation under neo-liberalism. We know little of the work that has been done in Central America. In Costa Rica, Iván Molina (2007, 2011) has tried to understand the schooling of the rural population as it relates to the state’s demographic and administrative structure, as well as nineteenth-century economic developments. Juan Alfonseca (2007, 2008, 2011a, 2011b) has researched the schooling processes in Santo Domingo, as well as the application of rural teaching methods, and compares these processes with those that occurred in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Haiti during the U.S. occupation. His pioneering work attempts to make comparative analysis, like that of Laura Giraudo (2010) in her analysis of indigenous education in Mexico and Bolivia. All these studies have in common their character as national narratives. At the same time, within the field of history of education, there have been several efforts to create academic discussion forums with a Latin American or Iberoamerican range, or studies of a general nature about Latin American education, but these efforts have rarely addressed the topic of the history of countryside schooling. Recently, some important initiatives have

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developed in this area (Gonzalbo and Ossenbach 1996; Werle 2007; Civera and Lionetti 2009a, 2009b; González and López 2009; Lionetti and Civera 2010). These efforts show great disciplinary, analytic and thematic diversity, and demonstrate the importance of comparative studies of countryside schools in Latin America. The question is how to further this dialogue of disciplinary, analytic and thematic diversity. Thinking about this initiative, Juan Alfonseca, Carlos Escalante and I have developed a project to address the topic of the history of rural education in Latin America in a way that allows us to establish comparative analysis that transcends national states’ frontiers, even as we emphasize the particularity of national and local realities. We do not pretend to make a specific theorist-methodological proposal; our aim is rather to establish a common discourse that opens the possibility of an exchange of different views of the diversity of schooling in Latin American rural lives (Civera et al. 2011). We have proposed some basic questions about scholarship of the history of rural education in order to invite some researchers from different regions of Latin American countries to respond to key notions: Why was the schooling of the countryside promoted? Who encouraged it? Where and how was schooling promoted? Who benefited from schooling in the countryside? These questions were proposed as a leading theme, whereupon we attempted to match the different social and historical contexts to researchers based in different historiographic traditions, utilizing different information sources and parameters of spatial and temporal delimitation. Debate on these topics in a common project appears to be conducive to comparative studies that are not sustained by great generalizations emitted from megaprocesses, or by a scheme of grading countries’ progress towards modernization. The project also allows us to avoid the simple registration of the diversity of local experiences. The Latin American work of the last ten years raises new questions about the ways of communication behind educative proposals and practices in different contexts, like the itinerant teachers of nineteenth-century Chile and Argentina and early-twentieth-century Mexico; similarities in the organization structure of the Núcleos escolares (clustered schools) in Peru in the 1940s, the Warisata school experience in Bolivia in the 1930s and the regional peasants’ colleges in Mexico in the 1930s; and commonalities in cultural missions in Mexico in the 1920s and in Uruguay in the 1950s. We can ask too, why in many places a rivalry over the direction of agronomic education has arisen between teachers and agronomic engineers, and whether this is connected with transnational processes like the economic model of agro-exportation. Through national studies, we can develop a broader understanding of educational development across cultures and political boundaries. Brazilian

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researchers’ emphasis on the links between schooling and economic development reveal how Mexican education historians’ studies of rural education programs of the revolution of 1910 have ignored that schooling is always related to the local capitalist economy. Similarly, a large part of Mexican research underlines the specific actors and negotiations that intervened in rural schools, questioning nation states’ ability to make school an infallible instrument of control. Demographic analyses of nineteenth-century Chile or Costa Rica, as well as analysis of difficulties the schools in many countries have faced in the changing rural environment of the last thirty years, depict the Latin American countryside as a very heterogeneous place in which it is difficult to argue that the vicissitudes and functions of the school are predetermined solely by economic factors. Some global history proposals emphasize the circulation of ideas, cultural transferences, the spread of institutions and the social net that interweave in schooling. This perspective is unquestionably very important, but to avoid excessive generalizations about the existence of common structural matrixes in Latin America deriving from its colonial past or its development within the capitalist system, local historians can emphasize the dissemination, resistance, appropriation, adaption and transformation of educational ideas and experiences, thus potentially enhancing understanding of not only social reproduction and uniformity under state domination but also the heterogeneity, creativity, initiative and agency of local people (Roldán and Schupp 2005; Fuchs 2007; Caruso 2008; Myers et al. 2008; Pineau 2008).

SCHOOLS AND RURALITIES Some texts about Latin American history (e.g., Newland 1991, 1994; Giraudo 2008) argue that schools expanded into the countryside, promoted by the elites who insisted on civilizing and modernizing the population. By this argument, the expansion of education was more effective at the end of the nineteenth century, when an economy based on exports of primary products allowed regimes to accumulate capital and organize more centralized public administration systems. Inhibiting the expansion of schooling were political instability, lack of resources and means of communication, and the apathy of a population reluctant to attend to school. This broad analysis includes large generalizations that become questionable when schooling is studied from a local view, especially when examine relations between the school and the rurality. For example, the chronology and geography of schooling are not conditioned by economic development alone; in many cases, political interests or racial and cultural prejudices had

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more importance than the agro-exportation impulse, depending on the way the population settled down or moved according to work opportunities. In the region of Tarapacá in Chile, for example, the dispersed population often could not reach schools because local work practices moved according to the demand for salt production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Castro et al. 2011; Serrano et al. 2011). In Costa Rica, the expansion of agricultural production areas provoked population movements from villages in the central valley where schools were concentrated, causing a phenomenon of ‘un-schooling’ (Molina 2011). In Mexico, politicians decide where to establish agricultural schools and rural teacher training colleges depending on political dynamics (Civera 2007, 2008). In contrast, Argentina and Brazil attributed much greater importance to economic interests in the same period (Werle 2007; Ascolani 2011; Gutiérrez 2011; Mendoza 2011). In addition, in different regions of Latin America, local and regional administrations had no positive impact on schooling in poor areas. Central administrations did not guarantee a more equitable development of schools, and in fact some researchers have found that central orders tending to place schools in bigger towns while closing those in smaller ones had an overwhelmingly negative impact on schools that had been opened and sustained by communities and local efforts (Rockwell 2007; Civera 2010; Espinoza 2010; Brienen 2011). Regardless of any unique curriculum, rural schools acquired characteristics of their own through the nature of their rural condition. For example, boys and girls had different attendance problems depending on the sowing and harvest season, land issues or the movement of people to find work. Some schools alternated attendance by gender because communities were not always able to hire a teacher for both boys and girls, or because teachers worked itinerantly, following the population. Each school was shaped by the teacher’s own school experience, which was eclectic in the absence of teachers’ training colleges. And schools that were very distant from capital cities could transmit languages other than the ‘national’ or official ones, and reproduce local cultural traditions and religious practices. Rural schools were similarly conditioned by improvised or adapted school buildings and by the often powerful influence of the school buildings’ owners, because the school was an institution that was undefined between the public, the private and the state. Until the mid-twentieth century, when schooling was accelerated in cities and the countryside, boys and girls could study for only one, two or three years in schools that closed because of weather conditions, epidemics and wars. It was difficult to guarantee their maintenance, since the schools were administered from distant political centres and influenced by different local efforts, individual initiatives or,

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more frequently, a combination of all these forces. Therefore schools’ success could vary not only in the different ruralities where they were built, but even from one community to another within a region. Elites had several motives for promoting rural schooling in the nineteenth century: to consolidate a loyal citizenship and nationality, to increase the state’s presence in faraway lands, to intensify popular support for external or internal political issues, to incentivize modernization amongst an agricultural proletariat, to develop a common language, to avoid exodus to the cities and thereby limit social urban problems. At the beginning of the twentieth century, school had a special place in consolidating new political regimes like that of Vargas in Brazil (Werle and Carvalho 2011) or those in post-revolutionary Mexico, especially the Cárdenas regime (Quintanilla and Vaughan 1997); or the North American occupation of the Antilles to foment self-government and promote agricultural exportation (Alfonseca 2011a). In Santo Domingo’s rural schools, the dictator Trujillo found a way to strengthen his power (Alfonseca 2008). We do not understand yet why some landowners in nineteenth-century Chile and Mexico supported schools and some did not, when education was not needed to do the kind of work done in their lands (Acevedo 2011; Serrano et al. 2011). In Brazil, after the abolition of slavery, the state assigned European migrants the duty to create an educational infrastructure and organize schools in the south. In the northwest, meanwhile, it encouraged the opening of schools to prevent the exodus to cities caused by drought and economic crisis (Mendoza 2011). Fear of the presence of cholos, a pejorative expression used in Bolivia to refer to peasants and indigenous people who moved to cities (Brienen 2011), and savages, a pejorative term for certain ethnic groups but especially nomads and anti-colonialist resisters in the cities of Columbia (Triana 2011), motivated the zoning of schools close to urban centres rather than in distant places that seemed more dangerous. The elites were not the only ones to promote the institution of schooling in the countryside, but the precariousness of the rural schools reflects elites’ ambivalence towards peasants’ own educational initiatives. Indigenous peoples opened schools in Bolivia because of the authorities’ lack of interest (Brienen 2011), as did literate immigrants in Brazil, supported by religious congregations (Werle and Carvalho 2011). In Columbia, the church was the institution that opened schools in the most remote territories (Triana 2011); in Chile and Mexico, the survival of many countryside schools since the nineteenth century came is due to their communities’ efforts (Vaughan 2000; Rockwell 2007; Castro et al. 2011). This evidence questions the once dominant narrative that described schools as a product imposed on a resistant population by reformer elites.

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But we still lack a deeper understanding of why rural communities were interested in schooling. On the one hand, for peasants in Bolivia, Central Mexico and Peru, the school may have implied a double-direction relationship between the state and the community, offering the possibility of modifying ways of regional domination. On the other hand, for peasants the school had its own meaning completely independent of the elite’s interests: it could provide access to the written culture (Rockwell 2007; Espinoza 2010; Brienen 2011). Literacy in some rural regions, though not required to hold a job, could prove useful in political and social struggles associated with the land, and as a means of communication with commercial mediators. And even if agricultural teaching in the first half of twentieth century was not very successful, it was useful for growing the family economy, as in Mexico, or to getting into the government bureaucracy, as in Argentina (Ascolani 2011; Civera 2011). But beyond the utility of the content, activities and teaching provided by the school, or its simple presence, the school was an important means of transmitting knowledge and local cultural values. Outside of the modernizing project in schools in South Brazil, Santo Domingo and other regions, religious congregations dominated educational practices by reproducing a specific way of seeing the world; immigrants likewise sought to reproduce of their own cultures and traditions, including their languages. These local cultural reproduction practices were not approved by the elites, who accordingly developed their homogenizing project to educate a new kind of citizenry (Alfonseca 2011a; Werle and Carvalho 2011). In schools sustained by indigenous groups, a similar process occurred, as we see in some studies of Central Mexico in which the school had a symbolic meaning that lent status to the community (Bazant 1996; Rockwell 2007; Acevedo 2011). These experiences show that schools do not always reproduce the dominant ideology and sometimes even play an important role in subalterns’ struggles and reinforcement of local or ethnic traditions and identity.

CONCLUSION Why and to whom was a community’s school important? It is necessary to answer this question if we want to understand why in Columbia, for example, rates of literacy and schooling were minimal for both men and women at the beginning of twentieth century, whereas in Costa Rica, which had had the highest levels of schooling and alphabetization in Latin America since the early nineteenth century, a great distance separated women’s and men’s level of education (Molina 2011; Triana 2011). Studies of local education

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that emphasize gender and ethnic groups can help to answer this and other questions at both the national and comparative level. These are but some reflections regarding the dialogue promoted by studies of schooling in the Latin American countryside. Recent innovative work allows countryside education to be distinguished from rural education, and also permits expanded periods of time in our studies. But it remains imperative to transcend the acceptance of national narratives as the dominant interpretations by exploring comparative studies at the local and regional levels. We must also consider social network studies (Fuchs 2007), which examine the multiplicity of multidirectional elements intervening in pedagogic transferences, and appropriation processes, that is, the way an a educative project is received, transformed, reformulated and surpassed (Chartier 1992). Extension of our dialogue with researchers from other parts of the world is another step towards building a rich field of studies.

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Martinez, C. and E. Roldán. 2006. ‘Exhibiting the Revolutionary School: México in Sevilla’s Ibero-American Exhibition, 1929’, Bulletin 2006. Innovation and Education in Expos 34: 113–55. Martínez, F. 2001. ‘Le siécle des états éducateurs’, Historie et Sociétés de l’Amérique Latine 12: 3–160. Martínez, L. and A. Padilla. 2006. Miradas a la historia regional de la educación. Mexico City: CONACYT, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos and Miguel Ángel Porrúa. Mendoza, S. 2009. ‘Capitalismo, Estado y enseñanza agrícola en Brasil: Rumbos y redefiniciones (1940–1961)’, in T. González and O. López (eds), Educación rural en Iberoamérica. Experiencia histórica y construcción de sentido. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Anroart Ediciones, pp. 183–214. ———. 2011. ‘Imperialismo, educación rural y dualidad pedagógica en Brasil (1946– 1951)’, in A. Civera et al. (eds), Campesinos y escolares: La construcción de la escuela en el campo Latinoamericano (siglos XIX y XX). Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa and El Colegio Mexiquense, pp. 352–71. Molina, I. 2007. ‘Educación y sociedad en Costa Rica: De 1821 al presente (una historia no autorizada)’, Diálogos: Revista Electrónica de Historia 8(2). Retrieved 15 March 2011 from http://www.historia.fcs.ucr.ac.cr/articulos/2007/vol2/7vol8 n2imolina.pdf ———. 2011. ‘Educación primaria rural en Costa Rica (1812–1885)’, in A. Civera et al. (eds), Campesinos y escolares: La construcción de la escuela en el campo Latinoamericano (siglos XIX y XX). Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa and El Colegio Mexiquense, pp. 78–101. Myers, K., et al. 2008. ‘Education and Globalisation’, History of Education 37(6): 737–41. Newland, C. 1991. ‘La educación elemental en hispanoamérica: Desde la independencia hasta la centralización de los sistemas educativos nacionales’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 71(2): 335–64. ———. 1994. ‘The Estado Docente and Its Expansion: Spanish American Elementary Education, 1900–1950’, Journal of Latin American Studies 26(2): 449–67. Ossenbach, G. 1999. ‘La educación en el Ecuador en el periodo 1944–1983’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 10(1). Retrieved 3 January 2013 from http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id =596&Itemid=293 Palacios, G. 1999. La pluma y el arado: Los intelectuales pedagogos y la construcción sociocultural del problema campesino en México, 1932–1934. Mexico City: El Colegio de México and CIDE. Pineau, P. 1997. La escolarización de la provincia de Buenos Aires (1875–1930). Una versión posible. Buenos Aires: FLACSO and UBA. ———. 2008. ‘Education and Globalization: A Latin American Perspective’, History of Education 37(6): 743–55. Quintanilla, S. and M.K. Vaughan (eds). 1997. Escuela y sociedad en el periodo cardenista. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.

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Ravanello, A. 2002. ‘Analfabetismo e níveis de letramento no Brasil: o que dizem os censos?’, Educação e Sociedade 23(81): 21–47. ———. 2004. ‘Analfabetismo no Brasil: Desconceitos e políticas de exclusão’, Perspectiva 22(1): 111–26. ———. 2009. ‘Brasil: Liberalismo, café, escola e voto (1878–1881)’, in A. Civera and L. Lionetti (eds), Memorias del 53 Congreso Internacional de Americanistas. Mexico City: ICA. Ribeiro, M. 2009. ‘Trabalho agrícola e educação escolar: Uma pedagogia produzida no movimento camponês, no Brasil’, in A. Civera and L. Lionetti (eds), Memorias del 53 Congreso Internacional de Americanistas. Mexico City: ICA. Rockwell, E. 2002. ‘Imaginando lo no-documentado: Del archivo a la cultura escolar’, in A. Civera et al. (eds), Debates y desafíos de la historia de la educación en México. Mexico City: El Colegio Mexiquense and ISCEEM, pp. 207–34. ———. 2005. ‘La apropiación, un proceso entre muchos otros que ocurren en ámbitos escolares’, Memoria, conocimiento y utopía. Anuario de la sociedad Mexicana de historia de la educación (1): 28–38. ———. 2007. Hacer escuela, hacer estado. La educación posrevolucionaria vista desde Tlaxcala. Mexico City: El Colegio de Michoacán, CIESAS and CINVESTAV. Roldán, E. 2009. ‘Los orígenes de la radio educativa en México y Alemania: 1924– 1935’, Revista Mexicana de Investigación Educativa 14(40): 13–41. Roldán, E. and T. Schupp. 2005. ‘Bridges over the Atlantic: A Network Analysis of the Introduction of the Monitorial System of Education in Early-Independent Spanish America’, Comparativ 15(1): 58–93. Roseberry, W. 1989. Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Cultures, History and Political Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Rosso, L. 2008. ‘El inspector de escuelas Raúl Díaz: Entre el proyecto civilizador para la frontera y sus formas de concreción en el territorio nacional del chaco (Argentina 1900–1909)’, Cuadernos Interculturales 6(11): 115–26. Scott, J. 2000. Los dominados y el arte de la resistencia. Mexico City: ERA. Serrano, S. 1996. ‘De escuelas indígenas sin pueblos a pueblos sin escuelas indígenas: La educación en la araucanía en el siglo XIX’, Historia (29): 423–74. ———. 2001. ‘La escuela esquiva. Educación rural en el siglo XIX’, in Vida rural en Chile durante el siglo XIX. Santiago de Chile: Academia Chilena de la Historia. Serrano, S., et al. 2011. ‘La escuela de los Campos. Chile en el siglo XIX’, in A. Civera et al. (eds), Campesinos y escolares: La construcción de la escuela en el campo Latinoamericano (siglos XIX y XX). Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa and El Colegio Mexiquense, pp. 25–49. Sigüenza, S. 2007. Héroes y escuelas. La educación en la Sierra Norte de Oaxaca (1927–1972). Mexico City: INAH and IEEPO. Silva, B. 2007. ‘Los conflictos de un visitador de escuelas: Ramón López Pinto y el contacto con el desierto, 1889–1895 (Tarapacá, Chile)’, Actas VII Congreso Historia de la Educación Iberoamericana. Bueno Aires. ———. 2008. ‘Docentes en la provincia de Tarapacá: Reflexiones sobre el sistema de instrucción pública, Chile 1880–1910’, Acta VIII Jornadas Andina de Literatura Latinoamericana. Santiago de Chile.

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———. 2009. ‘Registros sobre la infancia: Una mirada desde la escuela primaria y sus Actores (Tarapacá, Norte de Chile 1880–1922)’, Revista de Historia Social y de las Mentalidades 13(2). ———. 2010. ‘Voces de maestras en la provincia de Tarapacá: Las silenciadas críticas al sistema de instrucción pública, (Norte de Chile, 1880–1900)’, Cuadernos Interculturales 8(13): 73–86. Sinardet, E. 1999. ‘L’éducation équatorienne et la révolution julienne (juillet 1925– août 1931): Ruptura ou continuité?’, Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Études Andine 28(1): 123–57. ——— . 2000. ‘La difficile constitution du corps enseignant Équatorien: 1895–1946’, Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Études Andines 29(1): 63–107. Teobaldo, M. and A. García (eds). 2000. Sobre maestros y escuelas. Una mirada a la educación desde la historia: Neuquén 1884–1957. Rosario: Arca Sur. Teobaldo, M., et al. 2005. Hoy nos visita el inspector. Historia e historias de la inspección y supervisión escolar en Río Negro y Neuquén, 1884–1992. Neuquén: Universidad Nacional del Comahue. Triana, A. 2011. ‘La escuela rural en Colombia: 1903–1930’, in A. Civera et al. (eds), Campesinos y escolares: La construcción de la escuela en el campo Latinoamericano (siglos XIX y XX). Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa and El Colegio Mexiquense, pp. 131–61. Vaughan, M.K. 1997. ‘Cambio ideológico en la política educativa de la SEP: Programas y libros de texto, 1921–1940’, in S. Quintanilla and M.K. Vaughan (eds), Escuela y sociedad en el periodo cardenista. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, pp. 76–108. ———. 1999. ‘Cultural Approaches to Peasant Politics in the Mexican Revolution’, Hispanic American Historical Review 2(79): 269–305. ———. 2000. Política cultural en la revolución Mexicana: Maestros, campesinos y escuelas en México, 1930–1940. Mexico City: SEP. Vaughan, M.K. and S.E. Lewis (eds). 2006. The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in México, 1920–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Viñao, A. 2001. ‘Historia de la educación e historia cultural: Posibilidades, problemas y cuestiones’, in M.E. Aguirre (ed.), Rostros históricos de la educación. Mexico City: FCE-CESU, pp. 140–64. Werle, F. 2005. ‘Contextualizando a escola rural: Rio Grande do sul final do século XIX e início do século XX’, Série Estudos (20): 97–110. ——— (ed.). 2007. Educaçao rural em perspectiva internacional: Instituiçoes, practicas e formaçao do profesor. Ijuî: Editora Unijui da Universidade Regional de Noroeste do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul. ———. 2010. Educacao rural. Practicas civilizatórias e onstitucionalizacao da formación de professores. Brasília: Ed. Oikos. Werle, F. and A.M. Carvalho. 2009. ‘A educacao para a zona rural no sul do Brasil: Entidos e perspectivas a partir das conferencias Brasileiras de Educação’, in T. González and O. López (eds), Educación rural en Iberoamérica. Experiencia histórica y construcción de sentido. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Anroart Ediciones, pp. 79–108.

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———. 2011. ‘Instituciones y prácticas en las escuelas rurales del sur de Brasil’, in A. Civera et al. (eds), Campesinos y escolares: La construcción de la escuela en el campo Latinoamericano (Siglos XIX y XX). Mexico City: Miguel Ángel Porrúa and El Colegio Mexiquense, pp. 299–325. Werle, F., et al. 2007. ‘Escola normal rural e seu impresso estudantil’, Educação em Revista 45: 81–108. ———. 2008. ‘Um espaço esquecido de formação do professor: A escola normal rural’, in B. Tambara (ed.), Instituições escolares de formação de professores no Rio Grande do sul. Pelotas: Editora da UFPel, pp. 63–102. ———. 2010. ‘Examen de la enseñanza rural en el sur de Brasil: Instrumento de política educacional y de formación’, Naveg@mérica. Revista Electrónica de la Asociación Española de Americanistas 4. Retrieved 16 August 2010 from http://revistas .um.es/navegamerica/article/view/99871/95401

Part II

Travelling Concepts

Chapter 5

A Transcultural Transaction William Carey’s Baptist Mission, the Monitorial Method and the Bengali Renaissance Mary Hilton

Y This chapter explores an aspect of the legacies of colonialism and the intermixing of cultures in the past by examining the educational and religious ideology of William Carey, who together with fellow Baptist missionaries William Ward and Joshua Marshman formed the famous ‘Serampore Trio’. Actually, recent historical work has shown that they were in fact a quartet. Hannah Marshman, Joshua’s wife, was also a leading intellectual and executive figure in the mission at Serampore and eventually spearheaded the move to educate girls (Chatterjee 1987). Through the lens of Carey’s journal and letters, it is possible to look outwards from his roots in eighteenthcentury British Protestant dissenting theology to the wider context of earlynineteenth-century Bengal, seeing both Carey’s evangelical mentality and the complex ways in which the Indian community interacted with and transformed these missionaries’ educational and religious project. To better understand that mentality, the monitorial method of instruction is used as a starting point to connect pedagogy – in this case what C.A. Bayly has called the ‘gradgrind’ teaching of facts1 – with larger cultural imperatives.2 In constructing a vision of the reformist mentality that yielded different outcomes and resistances in both countries, this chapter looks to the roots of English eighteenth-century dissenting theology and to the domination of inductive reasoning in early-nineteenth-century scientific thought. 85

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It argues that, although this was not their intention, the Lancasterian monitorial method that these missionaries employed in their schools, one based on an essential segmentation of texts and facts cut up into words, lists and pictures for transmission by pupil monitors, opened a new intellectual space for their pupils. More importantly, they gave their Indian pupils and readers the tools with which to reconstruct the new knowledges of written vernacular language and Western science in ways that enhanced, rather than replaced, an Indian worldview. The very ways in which these Baptist Dissenters approached the written word, effecting translation through splitting the vernacular into words, maxims and simple dialogues, stimulated and supported Bengali prose development at a crucial historical moment. To understand the early-nineteenth-century reforming mentality that drove change in both Britain and Bengal, we must first sketch those systems of basic education that prevailed in their traditional rural communities before the English industrial revolution and before the development of the fully evangelical, self-righteous and reforming mercantile thrust of English imperialism. In anthropological terms the education of the rural poor tends to be similar in different countries: small in scale, rooted in the customs and habits of village life, interrupted by illness, famine, seasons and festivals, with a curriculum shaped by necessary life skills, taught and administered by a local familiar figure. Within traditional rural society, as the anthropologist Gellner has pointed out, the main work is the production of food, which does not ‘presuppose an initial generic training by an unspecialized centralized education system’ (Gellner 1987: 15). By the eighteenth century, the ubiquitous ‘dame’ schools had served the residents of English rural villages for several centuries. Slightly more learned than their neighbours, the dame or master taught basic literacy and arithmetic so that humble children could read the Bible and carry out the age-old business of life and survival in village and farm. Similarly in Bengal, the rural village pathshalas (small schools) were run and taught by gurus (teachers) from local, more learned families, and were attended by children from all walks of life. The guru post was often hereditary, and classes were generally conducted in the house of the teacher, the portico of a mosque or simply in the shade of a tree. The gurus taught basic literacy, local arithmetic, local accounting and moral codes. The instruction was generally secular in character: reading, writing, arithmetic, letter writing, a little Sanskrit, versified Puranic tales, Zamindari (agricultural accounts) and Mahajani (commercial accounting) were taught in Bengali without printed or manuscript texts (Shahidullah 1987). In Britain, the so-called industrial revolution was rapidly transforming traditional society by the late eighteenth century. As the dispossessed rural poor made their ways to the sprawling cities, they formed a burgeoning ur-

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ban underclass of unprecedented youth, deprivation and poverty. The historically invisible dame schools – now called working-class private schools – continued to serve many of them, and the new Sunday schools, often run by humble artisans, also attempted to teach the basics of literacy and religion (Laqueur 1976; Gardner 1984). Nevertheless, by the beginning of the nineteenth century huge numbers of the children of the industrial poor were beyond the reach of education, philanthropy or religion, and new enterprise was needed. English educators and politicians almost unanimously found the ‘mutual instruction’ or ‘monitorial’ method, an idea derived from South Indian Sanskrit schools by the Anglican Andrew Bell and simultaneously developed by the Dissenter Joseph Lancaster, the answer to the problem of educating vast numbers of poor children. For the next fifty years the urban landscape across England was increasingly dotted with large monitorial schools. Why was the pedagogy of mutual instruction taken up so universally and enthusiastically in England? Firstly, and principally, it was both cheap and, in limited ways, effective in answering the needs of a new set of class relations. One master could control dozens of children by delegating pupil monitors to teach chunks of knowledge. The careful segmentation of reading, arithmetic, study of the natural world, history and geography enabled young pupil monitors to repeat set questions to a small semicircle of pupils, who rehearsed the answers. From 1820 to 1870 and beyond across England and Wales, the underlying method of the schools – question and answer – was the pedagogy of the age, with nearly all teaching manuals and textbooks set out to carve knowledge into small chunks for question-and-answer format. Even physical training in processes such as needlework for girls was likewise chopped into series of graded exercises. Secondly, the machine-like organization of the monitorial school seemed symbolically tuned to both the factory landscape in which it was embedded and the future working lives of its pupils. As Isaac Kramnick has pointed out, a machine metaphor underlay utilitarians’ and bourgeois radicals’ emerging solutions to many social problems (Kramnick 1990: 92–98). Indeed, the monitorial schools were repeatedly likened to machines: ‘The eye was caught by the mechanical order and precision in the school exercises; the children went through their evolutions, according to a signal given by a child, as the different parts of the machinery in a factory are set in motion by a crank’ (Sullivan 1863: 176). Thirdly, published sermons and the proceedings of the National Society3 show that most Anglican clergy considered the set ‘question and answer’ method an effective, secure way of training the minds of poor children in the doctrines of the Established Church. At the heart of their continuing

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rift with the dissenting British and Foreign Schools Society over the possibility of state-funded education was their insistence on the teaching of the Anglican Catechism. For this the monitorial system seemed ideal, with its pedagogy of rote learning through the oral repetition of words, sounds or small chunks of prose. In England, the Tory Anglican party continued to insist well into the Victorian period that only the Bible should be used as reading matter in schools, and that children in the National Schools must be drilled in and catechized on religious knowledge. The British and Foreign School Society, made up of groups of dissenters, liberals and radicals, was more open to change in pedagogy, but their ranks were split by differential support for voluntarism and secularism, a political impasse that led to repeated victories in local elections by the Tory Anglican minority (Fraser 1977).4 As any methodological advance was likely to occur only within the more open-minded, enquiring and scientific majority, the divisions among them straitjacketed elementary education. Only those with scientific or dissenting minds could possibly contemplate a more open pedagogy for the poor, one that might, for example, include forms of rational hypothesis on the part of the pupils or encompass some sense that a child’s mind could develop and mature. Given its Indian origins and its popularity and ubiquity in Britain as of 1800, it is unsurprising that the missionary societies began to recommend use of the monitorial method abroad, where large numbers of ‘native’ children needed education in the wonders of Christianity and Western science (see Jana Tschurenev in this volume5). In 1817, William Carey, a leading Baptist missionary working in Bengal, put together a short book with Joshua Marshman called Hints Relative to Native Schools, which argued that the institution and management of the missionary schools should be based on Lancaster’s monitorial scheme. As Andrew Laird explains: Marshman devised a series of ‘tables’, based on Lancaster’s, including the Bengali alphabet, words, paradigms of verbs, nouns and pronouns, sentences, numbers and arithmetical examples which were printed in large type at the Serampore Mission Press and posted up in the school-room so that all the pupils could use them as examples for reading and writing, under the instruction of monitors. When they had mastered this elementary stage, the monitor dictated sentences from printed textbooks (‘copy-books’) – compiled by John Clark Marshman, Joshua’s eldest son – which were written down by the pupils, read back and learnt by heart. (Laird 1972: 77–78)

The textbooks, each divided into sections, encompassed a wide base of ‘useful knowledge’ presented in graduated form to provide a coherent course composed mainly of short sentences and maxims. By 1818, a cat-

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echism of set questions and answers was appended to each, so that visiting superintendents could test pupils on their progress. Other Baptist missionary teachers, such as Robert May working in and around Chinsura, adapted the Lancasterian system. By 1815, May reported that he had a graded system of lessons on about 140 boards painted with words, facts and arithmetic tables. Soon these home-made materials were overtaken by the sheer mass of printed textbooks issued by the schoolbook societies. The Calcutta School Book Society, established in 1817 to commission and publish cheap books, was soon succeeded by a host of similar societies across India. By the mid-Victorian period, not only were countless presses established in India, producing masses of printed materials in a variety of Indian languages (as well as English), but imports of printed material from Britain had also grown to enormous proportions. This expansion of print culture mirrored the exponential expansion of literacy across the subcontinent. While liberal educators might deplore the learning of gobbets of empirical facts in ‘gradgrindian’ style, it is fairly clear that in this period, scientific method itself was heavily, almost solely, inductive. As John Rudolph has pointed out, the professionalization of science in early-nineteenth-century Britain meant that extended treatments of method, such as John Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic (1843) and William Whewell’s History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), were all based on induction. These books reflected the general view, advanced by Francis Bacon in his Novum Organon, written over 200 years earlier, that natural knowledge could be built only through the inductive method, which entailed the painstaking accumulation of the observable facts of nature as a prelude to extremely cautious generalization (Rudolph 2005: 375). Gradgrind’s obsession with facts was not, as been supposed, a fanciful Dickensian embodiment of individual eccentricity but a central part of the culture of the age – an unquestioned belief that science, like children’s minds, could only proceed through the accumulation of observable, and hence verifiable, data. Encyclopaedias, Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge publications, religious tract societies’ works on the science of the natural world, textbooks and pamphlets all sought to lay out the intricate facts of nature before the enquiring reader (e.g., Fyfe 2004). As Thomas Richards argues, ‘the ideology of mid-Victorian positivism had also led most people into believing that the best and most certain kind of knowledge was the fact’ (Richards 1993: 4). Often driven by religious conviction and metaphor, this necessary segmentation and ordering of facts became part and parcel of Protestant missionary activity across the globe as a means of teaching both the gospel and natural history. Sujit Sivasundaram has pointed out

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that although, ‘for the vast majority of South Pacific missionaries, their primary aim was not the education of their charges, but rather their conversion . . . Natural husbandry was often combined with conversion in religious publications’ (Sivasundaram 2005: 95). Scientific facts and Gospel knowledge were combined to contain and correct potentially unruly native or workingclass populations. As C.A. Bayly notes of the 1820s and 1830s: In Britain, reformers wrote edifying books and ran evening classes with the explicit aim of diverting workers, especially working-class women, from radical politics and impure fancies. A Calcutta branch of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded in 1839; its aim was similar, to cement faith in the superiority of British rule and also to open the way to godly learning by dispelling the ‘erotic fancies’ of Hinduism. (Bayly 1996: 215)

Bayly argues that by 1830 in India, ‘gradgrind’ education and the new print culture had changed the ‘information order’ as older communities of embodied knowledge gave ground before more routinized, abstract information (ibid.: 245–46). In the first half of the century, pathshalas continued to function in the traditional way (except for a few in particular areas) because until 1854 the Bengal colonial government’s concern was with education at the higher levels. Nevertheless, reforming zeal for the primary phase of education was on the horizon. Wood’s Education Despatch of 1854 introduced measures intended to improve the guru by training him in how best to run a school properly and efficiently and how to enlarge the curriculum. A series of model schools was set up in Bengal, as was a system of inspection and payment according to results. Taken together, the reforms and the increased regulation of the pathshalas, including registers of attendance, lesson plans, fixed seating arrangements for different classes and specific punishments for different offences, inevitably – as in the organic dame schools in England – stifled that flexibility of organization that had allowed children to run errands and carry out household chores between classes. These developments alienated the very poorest families, causing many of their children to desert the improved pathshalas. Meanwhile, only a fraction of the traditional gurus submitted to Normal school training, giving rise to a new class of gurus trained to become future teachers (Shahidullah 1987). To better determine what exactly the monitorial school pupils were actually learning, firstly in Britain, and then in Bengal, it is useful to bring educational theory to bear, with its framework of the learning mind that has been honed within educational circles for at least two centuries. Currently termed ‘constructivism’, the basic idea is that the human mind learns – can only learn – actively, by constructing meaning from elemental data within a

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reactive environment. This notion not only destabilizes the sense of a foreseeable collective response to instruction, but more fundamentally it deconstructs and destabilizes the very nature of the knowledge that is intended to be conveyed. If the mind learns actively, then the context, key elements and prior and present experience of the learner dictate the saliency, significance and retention of all learned material (von Glaserfeld 1999; Fosnot 2005). This instability is highly relevant to current debates over the classroom teaching of ‘higher-order’ skills of reading comprehension, such as inference and deduction, in today’s classrooms (Urquhart 2002). It can also provide a lens through which to examine unexpected outcomes of past educational ventures.6 By the 1840s, it was clear that pupils in the National and the British and Foreign elementary schools were learning very little besides the most basic literacy, if that, and that the monitorial method was responsible for this shortcoming. Rote learning of words, facts and maxims consistently denied children any opportunity to think for themselves, or to relate what they were supposed to be learning to their own experience, a vital aspect of a constructivist notion of effectiveness. By this time, as government grants were being made and schools inspected, it was noted time and again that neither the monitorial method nor the new ‘simultaneous’ method (where all the children chanted answers together) allowed the children themselves to form rational hypotheses.7 A debased form of the Pestalozzian object lesson was instituted widely in a desperate attempt to educe thought and conversation, but hierarchy and catechistical instruction were too embedded in British educational culture for this to be effective, and anyway Pestalozzi’s theories were internally inconsistent (Hilton 2007: 202–9). Yet at the same time, the indigenous dame schools – the working-class private schools where local and child knowledge could possibly become the basis of a more interactive pedagogy, schools that provided basic literacy in familiar ways capable of exciting legitimate curiosity and rational hypothesis – were under perpetual attack from reformers. As Philip Gardner has shown, the difficulty in judging their effectiveness is that primary evidence, such as journals, Parliamentary Papers and local archives, all comes from middle-class sources that were almost entirely hostile (Gardner 1984: 9). In their new drive for scientific rationalization, middle-class reformers abhorred these poor, haphazard, culturally situated schools, just as they did the Indian pathshalas. By the 1880s, such schools were becoming few and far between in Britain. By 1913, Joseph Thornton could confidently assert that ‘in all elementary education, in comparison with the public school, the argument for the private school amounts to very little, and the tendency of modern educational evolution is all against it’ (quoted in ibid.: 188).

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Thornton wrote several decades after Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) had finally valorized evolutionary ideology, in turn undermining the inductive method and replacing the assumption of a static universe with a dynamic and potentially progressive system. In the early nineteenth century, however, there had been no such consensual understanding. During that earlier period, inductive reasoning had become so deeply entrenched in British scientific method that leading scientists had consigned open speculation, hypothesis and deduction – those elements of scientific thought that would later signal progressive change within the natural world – to the realm of atheists, imposters, showmen and ‘chattering’ females. Nonetheless, in the metropolis the corrosive power of evolutionary ideology was beginning to shift the tectonic plates of scientific and social thinking. Adrian Desmond’s work on the early radical politics of evolution and James Secord’s work on the reception of Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) show how deeply the intellectual world of early Victorian Britain was disturbed by the idea that the world unfolded in a series of long-term processes removed from direct intervention of the Almighty (Desmond 1989; Secord 2000). Extraordinarily popular yet condemned from many conservative quarters, including the Cambridge scientific establishment in the figure of Adam Sedgwick, Vestiges had caused a seismic jolt within the scientific community twenty years before Darwin’s Origin of the Species. As Desmond explains, dons and divines attacked the idea of evolution as an act of terrorism, the old conservative Anglicanism being deeply hostile to the progressive, natural, competitive, mobile view of life taught in more radical medical and scientific classrooms.8 Hence, seeds of change lay underneath the heavy blanket of empirical fact-gathering and exposition in tract and treatise and the concentration on inductive reasoning in early-nineteenth-century metropolitan culture. Within educational circles there had for some time existed a tradition opposed to the teaching of inductive reasoning through the painful accumulation of facts – a radical, dissenting education tradition that was also progressive and democratic. Influenced by romanticism, millenarianism and radicalism, it placed high value on child knowledge, experimentation and hypothesis, or in other words, deductive reasoning. Several leading educators in earlynineteenth-century Britain felt that that Pestalozzi’s pedagogy was far more likely to develop the innate reasoning powers of the child. Like Pestalozzi, they held that the child’s mind could ‘unfold’ in a series of developmental stages that should be nurtured through the processes of education (Hilton 2007: 202–9). This notion of unfolding resonated with new theories of evolutionary change that saw the natural world itself as still unfolding, yielding an inherent progressive and dynamic dimension to scientific and educational

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theory alike. Progressive circles of metropolitan intellectuals began to argue that the various species could evolve in different ways dictated by their environments, far from direct intervention of the Almighty. Returning to Serampore, here again, monitorial pedagogy was mechanical, inductive, fragmented and hierarchical. But in contrast to the British experience, it played into a very different, transcultural dynamic. Clearly all missionaries in Bengal, working outside the East India Company’s agenda and in face-to-face with the Indian people, had to modify the more mechanistic disciplines associated with the method and embrace the essential compromises and more imaginative acts of teaching that difficult conditions elicit. Murdoch advised new missionaries: ‘The problem is, how can the mind be so aroused during the short school period that its continued exercise afterwards may be secured? Nature herself by her phenomena excites the opening faculties of the child. Too often a contracted education directs his attention to mere words, and the universe becomes to him a blank’ (Murdoch 1862: 243). Despite the fixities of the universe that the missionaries believed in, here in Serampore as in Britain the more culturally situated approaches to science and elementary education came from dissent, and specifically the Baptist variety. Although Anglican evangelical imperialists such as Charles Grant stressed the need to introduce Western science as part of Christian culture, the question of whether this should be done in the vernacular or in English soon divided the Serampore missionaries from the Calcutta Anglicans. Baptist ideology, in common with nearly all forms of dissent, insisted that all people must read both the Holy Scriptures and the ‘book of Nature’ for themselves, in their own mother tongue. In fact, and rather more than has been acknowledged in the colonial context, Baptists held tenets of religion fundamentally different from those of the Established Church. They had always adhered to the doctrine of grace as taught in scripture, attributing to God alone the glory of their salvation. Their four lasting principles were the separation of church and state, the universal priesthood of all believers, the biblical discipline of the local church and the church’s regenerate membership of baptized believers only (Hoad 1986). This simple insistence on autonomy led them to reject all authority, whether civil or ecclesiastical, and importantly it led to vigorous support of girls’ education, Hannah Marshman becoming one the first women Protestant missionaries dedicated to educating poorer Indian girls. With this long-standing Baptist purpose, the Serampore missionaries set out to translate the Bible into the different local languages. They also purposed to write textbooks and translate them into Bengali. These works included useful local knowledge such as systems of accountancy; for exam-

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ple, the Serampore arithmetic tables included all the weights and measures and modes of reckoning in use among Indians, from the cowrie to the rupee. Furthermore, their histories and geographies did not relate stories of cultural supremacy but centred on India. Thus their geography textbook described Bengal first, then Asia, and finally other parts of the world (Laird 1972: 87–88). Driven by their particular beliefs, these Baptist missionaries displayed prodigious scientific and technical industry. In 1800 they founded the Serampore Mission Press, which together with the Baptist Mission Press in Calcutta, came to dominate printing in Bengal (Shaw 1981: x). As Chittabrata Palit explains in full, William Carey, assisted by Indian scholars, eventually got the Bible translated into thirty-two regional languages. At Serampore he set up a botanical garden on five acres of land with 427 plants arranged in the Linnaean system. He edited Roxburgh’s catalogue of 3,500 trees together with Flora Indica, as well as Wallich’s Asiatic Plants. He founded the Agri-horticultural Society of Eastern India with an agenda of improving Indian agriculture according to Western scientific methods, answering questions sent in by cultivators and supplying seeds. He started a plantation committee to ensure forestation for the production of timber. At Serampore College, established in 1818, Carey taught botany, zoology and agriculture, and supported the teaching of physics, meteorology, chemistry, geology and biology – all in Bengali. From 1820, John Mack also taught chemistry. Carey, helped by Panchanan and Manohar Karmakar, constructed a wooden press and set up a paper mill that closed in 1845, by which time paper and printing technology had been firmly established. The Serampore Trio continually published small scientific works and, in collaboration with the Calcutta School Book Society, many larger works, including Felix Carey’s Physiology, and Marshman’s and Mack’s respective treatises on astronomy and chemistry. Their newspapers and magazines, such as Samachar Darpan and Digdarshan, regularly carried scientific articles (Palit 2006: 41–53). By the early 1820s they had also set up a school for native girls, supervised by the indefatigable Hannah Marshman. To understand the mentality of these Serampore missionaries, it is helpful to see them as children of dissent in the late eighteenth century, a time when the ‘book of Nature’ had spoken as powerfully as the book of Revealed Scripture. In the early decades of the new century, far from the hotbed of radical and evolutionary social and scientific controversies circulating in the metropolis, they retained an essential belief in the power of the Word combined with human reason to effect the immediate conversion of an individual (Porter 2004: 204) – like acid cutting into metal.9 All three came from the artisan class that Catherine Hall has demarcated as the occupational

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source of Baptist and other forms of dissent (Hall 2002: 88), and all had an exceptional technical curiosity evocative of the age of the enlightenment. Carey’s brother Eustace wrote of him as a boy: He never walked out, I think, when quite a boy, without observation on the hedges as he passed; and when he took up a plant of any kind, he always observed it with care. Though I was but a child, I well remember his pursuits. He always seemed earnest in his recreations, as well as in school. Like the industrious bee, he was always gathering something useful. It seemed as if nature was fitting him for something great – from a child forming him for future usefulness. (E. Carey 1836: 25)

Resonating with this life of scientific observation was the centrality of Bible knowledge and its interpretation by the Baptist ‘universal priesthood of believers’, all necessarily committed to Christ’s evangelizing mission to save sinners. Preaching to both the heathen and themselves took up a large portion of each Serampore missionary’s day, and they persevered despite continual rebuffs from all sectors of the Indian population – the poor, the wealthy, the pandits, munshis and gurus, be they ‘Mosselmen’ or Hindus – at the cost of angry theological exchanges with learned Brahmins in front of listening crowds in the bazaars. Yet all this preaching energy and commitment in all seasons and at all times of day rarely came to fruition in conversions to Christianity. Grappling over many years with an alien, ancient and embedded religious culture, Carey himself came to believe that ‘idolatry’ was so deeply written into Indian thought and language that it could not be written out: So extremely, also, have poetry and the popular idolatry combined to poison the current of human thought, that no religious conception is ever formed apart from the fictitious and the monstrous; and so effectually have they abused and perverted the use of language, that scarcely a single word can be safely used without periphrasis. Neither God, nor holiness, nor heaven, nor hell, nor sin, nor any other word within the compass of religious phraseology, can convey any just impression to the mind of a Hindu, without explanation; his idolatry having invested every possible term with something fabulous and alien from truth. (W. Carey quoted in E. Carey 1836: 223)

The point to stress is that, for all their insistence on communicating in the Indians’ own languages, these Baptists were utterly hostile to other religions and cultures. Despite the ‘Orientalism’ of certain leading English scholars in Bengal and the fusionist ideals of Bengali scholars such as Rammohan Roy, all of whom they regarded as theological apologists equally inimical to Christianity, they themselves never deviated from the conviction

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that Hinduism was the most ‘puerile, impure, and bloody of any system of idolatry that was ever established here on earth’ (Ward 1822: clxx).10 Islam was no better. In 1831, Carey wrote in apocalyptic tones from Serampore to his sisters: ‘I wish to see Idolatory, Mohammedanism, and all political establishments of religion in the world swept from the face of the earth and also see slavery and war abolished, and infidelity cease. I account Socinianism and Arianism as nothing but modifications to Mahommedanism; or if you will Mahommedanism only a modification of what they choose to call Unitarianism’ (Carey in Carter 2000: 252). Regardless of their zeal, and however well organized their schools, the religious project of these missionaries – direct conversion to Christianity through elementary education – was uphill work. Firstly, both the dissenting missionaries and the Anglican evangelicals in Bengal found that presenting elements of Christian texts as gobbets of rote learning in the monitorial manner enabled their Indian pupils simply to reject or else transform any religious messages, whether presented in their own language or in English. The missionaries’ careful segmentation of text and ideas formed a set of discrete building blocks that allowed ‘creative’ construction of meaning by learners. For Indian pupils, the cultural holism of Hinduism, with its texts, its system of social organization, its priests and its rituals of daily life, was a powerful, coherent and familiar integrative framework to help comprehend new knowledge. In fact, recruitment of Indian children to the missionary schools largely depended on parents who instructed their children to ignore the religious messages and focus instead on the language and knowledge elements of the curriculum. Indian pupils steadily transformed the Protestant missionaries’ religious project into the learning of science, literacy and literature, first in their own languages, and later, as colonial bureaucracy expanded, in English. Several historians have explored the complicated question of Christian conversion in nineteenth-century India. It is now fairly clear that Indians in the north-west provinces who did convert were motivated by a wish to rid themselves of inferior caste or the outcast status held by widows, orphans or the destitute (Porter 2004: 64).11 Generally speaking, the pathshalas continued to recruit children from all castes, including the higher ones, whereas the missionary schools filled up with children of the very poorest members of Indian society. A further complicating factor was that the missionaries running elementary schools were reliant on the goodwill of different Indian religious groups and often employed Brahmin teachers – pandit supervisors – when they could find them, so that gospel teaching became something of an extra and was subject to local interpretation. Catherine Hall has explored the ways in which the indigenous religious beliefs of the native assistants in

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Jamaica continuously disrupted or inflected the transmission of true gospel understanding (Hall 2002: 170–73); likewise, Sujit Sivasundaram found the same phenomenon in the Pacific Islands (Sivasundaram 2005). In these circumstances, it gradually dawned on Carey that the Indians were capable of taking up Western science without embracing the Christian religion: The principles of science may be accurately announced and freely received, and a sound literature and a high degree of mental culture may obtain without an adequate and saving religious change taking effect; yea, it may be, without any change being perceivable, beyond the renunciation of preposterous errors, and an abstinence from former revolting usages. Men have a radically vitiated nature to be regenerated, as well as a system of destructive errors to abjure, and a circle of external abominations to retrench and forego. (W. Carey in E. Carey 1836: 409)

But what did he mean by ‘the principles of science’? As a technical artisan bred in the eighteenth-century age of enlightenment, Carey embraced the inductive science of botanical taxonomy, collecting specimens and growing his own. His exhaustive observations of living plants were an outcome of his own inner conviction that God’s hand lay in the organization of the natural world, and that only by collecting and organizing these smaller units would the larger principles of that design be revealed. In Carey’s mind, the intense literalism of Baptist theology, focused on the scriptures, ran in parallel to the details of the natural world. Just as individuals could read the scriptures for themselves, so could they walk outside and read the details of God’s ‘book of Nature’, which had to be recorded and interpreted through the same small, dissected ways. Far removed from the controversies over science, induction and deduction that were seeping into metropolitan culture around the early theories of evolution, in India the empirical learning of gobbets of factual knowledge, which was soon to evacuate the Pestalozzian object lesson of its evolutionary potential and adapt it to the same fact-gathering purpose, actually played into this taxonomic and inductive mindset (Sengupta 2003: 96–121). Thus, despite their narrow selfrighteousness in the face of religious and cultural difference, these Baptist missionaries handed out large segments of literal and scientific knowledge to the Indian community. Meanwhile, like other scientifically minded colonizers, Carey saw Britain as the essential Christian centre of the final inductive interpretation of all natural knowledge. There, in museums, collections and botanical gardens, the whole map of nature would be revealed. Carey sent innumerable plants and specimens, as well as figures of Hindu gods and religious artefacts, back

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to Britain (mainly to the Bristol Museum). Carey clearly experienced what Thomas Richards has called the ‘leap of faith’ that these facts and artefacts would ‘one day add up to any palpable sum of knowledge’ – the faith that would soon inform what Richards describes as the ‘fantasy of an imperial archive in which the control of Empire hinges on a British monopoly over knowledge’ (1993: 6). Ironically, as Baptist schools became more numerous in Bengal their Indian pupils were served by a system of mutual instruction that, in constructivist terms, meant they could take what they wanted from gobbets of vernacular literacy, systems of accounting, English language lessons and Bengali textbooks. In shaping their own new prose literature, they left much of the inductive science and all of the Christianity to one side. As Chandrika Ayyar has pointed out, it was mainly the literary and linguistic aspects of the imperialists’ empiricist education that helped to give birth to the bhadralok, a new educated middle class, largely Hindu by religion, who felt acquisition of such an education was necessary to secure justice from their new rulers and conduct business with English merchants. By the time Rammohan Roy settled in Calcutta in 1815, and long before Macaulay’s notorious 1834 ‘Minute on Education’, the desire for Englishlanguage education had taken root. Hindu College was founded in 1817; its students later established more schools and colleges. Influenced by the rich cross-currents of ideas from their own society and from the West, and now with ever expanding access to print culture in English and Bengali, the educated bhadralok began to express their own thoughts in books, pamphlets and newspapers, resulting in phenomenal growth in Bengali prose literature (Ayyar 1987: 308–10). As the old indigenous higher education had been almost entirely literary and religious in character, it was those aspects of the new empirical texts that the bhadralok appropriated, building an intellectual, integrative foundation for education as a passport to the professions and higher appointments in government service (Bellenoit 2007). Western science for Indians, although a central plank in many Indian intellectuals’ progressive project towards modernity, had only feeble support from colonial governments. Without sufficient technical colleges, and denied the enterprise culture of indigenous industrialization, science education in Bengal was taught and absorbed as an abstract systems of ideas and therefore remained inert within the high culture of the nineteenth-century Bengali renaissance (Pannikar 1995).12 There is not space here to detail the political and literary effects of the Serampore Press on the educated Hindu population of Bengal. In a colonial world where imperial ideology meant, as Sabyasachi Bhattachararya argues in this volume, the attribution of cognitive authority to the English metropolis, the Serampore print output must stand as a fascinatingly equivocal sym-

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bol in the history of colonialism. The mechanistic outlook of these Baptist artisans impelled their production of a stream of textbooks that revitalized Bengali as a written language, a prose that had hitherto been subordinate to Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic. Bengali, as the language and literature of the ordinary people, had ‘led a second-hand existence on themes and modes almost all derived from Sanskrit’ (Ghosh 1948: 117–18).13 By 1801, Carey had produced and printed a booklet of simple dialogues in an effort to ‘include the most common conversations of the country people’ (W. Carey 1801: v). With constant stimulation through such plain, primitive Serampore productions, the first quarter of the century became a period of experiment whose products consisted almost entirely of textbooks for schools or books of information and facts. But after Serampore College was founded in 1818, William’s son Felix translated Pilgrim’s Progress and John Clark Marshman, son of Joshua, wrote a history of India translated into Bengali. Indian initiative and talent at first supplemented and soon came to dominate the publishing scene. Members of the Calcutta School Book Society included, alongside William Carey, Indian scholars such as Tarincharan Mitra, Ramkamal Sen and Raja Radhankanta Dev. Sen, for example, produced both a translation of Aesop’s Fables and the annals of ancient Bengal (Vangadeser Puravritta), also compiling an English-Bengali dictionary and a medical book based on the British pharmacopoeia. By 1825 the initiative for vernacular writing had passed almost entirely to Indian writers, although the weekly newspaper Samachar Darpan, edited and published by John Clark Marshman formally but by Jaygopal Tarkalankar in fact, continued until 1851, its controversies and opinion practically founding Bengali journalism. Prose literature soon sprang up in the figure of Rammohan Roy, who – in addition to his immense scholarship, fusionist ideals and social and religious reforms – pioneered the literature of thought in Bengali, famously falling out with Carey in the published ‘Serampore controversy’ (Bose 1960). Paradoxically, and clearly figuring as an outstanding example of a transcultural transaction, the missionaries’ educational method, requiring an output of Biblical and scientific texts, formed the seeds of the flowering of Indian literature, that is, of stories and fables inhabiting the highly imaginative literary dimension that they wholly despised. Even in relation to English prose, Carey loathed and castigated the fictional and the fabulous as being, to his intensely puritan literal mind, aspects of ‘irreligion’. He fumed: There is indeed, no language in the world which idolatry has not profaned. English is scarcely purged from it to this day, though many generations have passed since heathenism was professedly renounced. Hence the frequent use of the words ‘fortune, fate, muse, nature’, and many others; not merely by poets, but by other writers; and, in common conversation, not shunned by some who

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would think it hard not to be deemed Christians. (W. Carey quoted in E. Carey 1836: 223)

Hence Carey fought in vain against the tidal undercurrent of embedded religious and imaginative culture in Bengal, using weapons that he perceived to be rational, biblical and scientific. Yet those were the very weapons that would provide the raw materials of a new, powerful Indian culture of the literate arts, and eventually of patriotic nationalism ( Joshi 2002).14 Hayden Bellenoit argues that by the 1870s, partly as a consequence of the Indian Uprising of 1857, Protestant missionary ideology had become more liberal, pragmatic and far more respectful of other religions. ‘Fulfilment theory’ slowly became the theological norm as Christian missionaries accepted that other religions were important evolutionary stages in the development of Christianity (Bellenoit 2007: 29).15 Evolutionary progressivism also underlay a new form of education for young children that would challenge the whole basis of the elementary system in England and Bengal – the Froebelian kindergarten. Increasingly popular across Europe, Froebel’s system drew on progressive evolutionary ideology, completely abandoned facts, induction, rote learning and repetition, in fact all forms of instruction, and instead focused on play, child creativity and self-expression. By the 1890s, the principles of the kindergarten were accepted in both England and Bengal as the basis for the reform of their elementary systems – but that is another story, far removed from the unexpectedly transformative legacy of pedagogic principles, inductive facts and elementary Bengali prose that literal, narrowly righteous, scientific Serampore bequeathed the indigenous population of Bengal.

REFERENCES Ayyar, C. 1987. Education and Intellectual Pursuits (with Special Reference to Bengal 1817– 57). Kanpur: Prajna Prakashan. Bayly, C.A. 1996. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bellenoit, H.J.A. 2007. Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India 1860– 1920. London: Pickering and Chatto. Bose, N.S. 1960. The Indian Awakening and Bengal. Calcutta: Firma K. Mukhopadhyay. Carey, E. 1836. Memoir of William Carey D.D. Late Missionary to Bengal. London: Jackson and Walford. Carey, W. 1801. Dialogues Intended to Facilitate the Acquiring of the Bengalee Language. Serampore: Serampore Mission Press.

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Carter, T.G. (ed.). 2000. The Journal and Selected Letters of William Carey. Macon, GA: Smyth and Helwys. Chatterjee, S.K. 1987. Hannah Marshman: The First Woman Missionary in India. Sheoraphuli and Hoogly: Sri Sunil Chatterjee. Desmond, A. 1989. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fosnot, C.T. 2005. Constructivism: Theory, Perspectives, and Practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Fraser, D. 1977. ‘Education and Urban Politics c. 1832–1885’, in D.A. Reeder (ed.), Urban Education in the Nineteenth Century. London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 11–25. Fyfe, A. 2004. Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Gardner, P. 1984. The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England. London: Croom Helm. Gellner, E. 1987. Culture, Identity, and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghosh, J.C. 1948. Bengali Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glaserfeld, E. von. 1999. Radical Constructivism: A Way of Learning. London: Routledge. Great Britain Committee on Education. 1852. Extracts from the Reports of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans. Hall, C. 2002. Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830– 1867. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hilton, M. 2007. Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Hoad, J. 1986. The Baptist: An Historical and Theological Study of Baptist Identity. London: Grace. Joshi, P. 2002. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Kramnick, I. 1990. Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. Kumar, N. 2000. Lessons from Schools: The History of Education in Banaras. New Delhi: Sage. Laird, M.A. 1972. Missionaries and Education in Bengal 1793–1837. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Laqueur, T.W. 1976. Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-Class Culture 1780–1850. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Murdoch, J. 1862. Indian Year-Book for 1861. A Review of Social, Intellectual, and Religious Progress in India and Ceylon. London: J. Nisbet. Palit, C. 2006. Scientific Bengal: Science, Technology, Medicine and Environment under the Raj. Delhi: Kalpaz. Pannikar, K.N. 1995. Culture, Ideology, Hegemony: Intellectuals and Social Consciousness in Colonial India. New Delhi: Tulika Press.

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Porter, A. 2004. Religion versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion 1700–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Richards, T. 1993. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London and New York: Verso. Rudolph, J.L. 2005. ‘Epistemology for the Masses: The Origins of “The Scientific Method” in American Schools’, History of Education Quarterly 45(3): 341–76. Secord, J.A. 2000. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Sengupta, P. 2003. ‘An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedagogy’, Journal of the Society for Comparative Study of Science and History 45(1): 96–121. Shahidullah, K. 1987. Pathshalas into Schools: The Development of Indigenous Elementary Education in Bengal 1854–1905. Calcutta: Firma KLM. Shaw, G. 1981. Printing in Calcutta to 1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sivasundaram, S. 2005. Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific 1795–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, R. 1863. Sullivan’s Popular Education: Papers on Popular Education and School Keeping. Dublin: Marcus and John Sullivan. Tschurenev, J. 2008. ‘Diffusing Useful Knowledge: The Monitorial System of Education in Madras, London and Bengal, 1789–1840’, Paedagogica Historica 44(3): 245–64. Urquhart, I. 2002. ‘Beyond the Literal: Inferential or Deferential Reading?’, English in Education 36(2): 18–39. Ward, W. 1822. A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos, 3rd ed. Serampore: Serampore Mission Press. Young, B. 2000. ‘Christianity, History and India, 1790–1820’, in S. Collinin, R. Whatmore and B. Young (eds), History Religion and Culture: British Intellectual History 1750–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 91–111.

NOTES 1. Based on the educator Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s satirical novel Hard Times (1854), the expression is used by a variety of historians to symbolize the teaching of facts and disconnected gobbets of information; e.g., Bayly (1996), who wrote: ‘Given the extent of colonial patronage it was gradgrinding British empiricism that usually won out’ (p. 235). 2. Tschurenev 2008: 245–64. I am particularly grateful to Jana for also sharing with me her unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Imperial Experiments in Education: Monitorial Schooling in India, 1789–1835’. 3. The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor on the Principles of the Established Church throughout England and Wales. 4. In his study of the local politics of four great provincial capitals of Victorian England – Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool – in 1832–85, Derek

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7.

8.

9.

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Fraser demonstrates that educational ideology was a major force in local politics. Through the complex picture he paints, the dissenting/liberal position that espoused voluntarism lost out to Tory churchmen for most of these years as national education was repeatedly aligned with Anglican domination. Tschurenev’s chapter 6 explores how the monitorial method was developed in India and returned there. Nita Kumar discusses this lack of understanding of educational technology in relation to the failure of the modernization project of colonial Benares schools. See Kumar 2000: 201–5. Clear manifestations of the inadequacy in the English elementary system were apparent in, for example, the inspection reports Joseph Fletcher composed in 1848–49. He wrote: ‘The greatest defect in the gallery lessons, as now given, appears to me the absence of any express methods of exciting legitimate curiosity or rational hypothesis, to animate the whole of the exercise, and give it the true character of investigation’ (Great Britain Committee on Education 1852: 164). Despite the valorization of the inductive method, claims about knowledge were highly contested in this period. As Aileen Fyfe points out, popular science writers and Biblical literalists alike often refuted the claims of the gentlemen who ran the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Fyfe 2004: 67). Andrew Porter explains: ‘In the early years of the century in their emphasis on the over-riding importance of teaching, literacy and the diffusion of the scriptures they were also drawing on the rationalist features of eighteenth-century thought in matters other than theology to support their continuing belief that Christianity could be introduced by universally applicable means. Missionaries did not understand preaching, schooling and the circulation of the Gospels in translation to be tied inevitably to particular forms of social and economic change’ (Porter 2004: 104). As Brian Young points out, in Ward’s view ‘sensuality was held to be the predictably besetting sin of Hindu worship, its peculiarly pervasive variety of Brahminical priestcraft calculated to delude from the very outset of maturity’ (Young 2000: 92). Andrew Porter notes: ‘Those possessing only a limited stake in local societies – which might include the ill or destitute, orphaned, enslaved, insane, vagrant and the criminal – were either frequently attracted to mission stations or became the object of missionary attention . . . it was estimated in 1862 that with the exception of Meeruth, nearly three fourths of the whole number of Christians in the North West Province and the Punjab . . . are orphans or the children of orphans’ (Porter 2004: 64). Chittabrata Palit argues that to the contrary, Bengal was in fact the cradle of the first flush of scientific pursuits in the colonial era, prefiguring the golden age of swadeshi technical education in Bengal in the twentieth century. Yet in the nineteenth century, the few leading Bengali scientists and technical institutions took some time to become established (Palit 2006).

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13. According to J.C. Ghosh, ‘The literature was dominated by the spirit of Bhakti (devotion), and did not possess a single work inspired by pure human interest or pure joy of living. . . . Being a literature of escape Bengali had little interest in or contact with, the actualities of life. The bulk of it was monotonous, platitudinous, convention-ridden, and devoid of substance, variety and virility’ (Ghosh 1948: 117–18). 14. Priya Joshi’s work on the reading figures of Indian libraries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows that many Indian readers tended to prefer texts that played into their own indigenous sense of melodrama and epic (Joshi 2002). 15. H.J.A. Bellenoit explains: ‘Fulfilment accepted the glimmer of truth in other faiths but ultimately insisted that they needed to be corrected. It was undoubtedly influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its model that religions partially evolved, and because they originated from one original source, they all contained some degree of inherent truth. . . . In a sense they (Protestant missionaries) constructed a universal history based not upon the progress of European science, reason and culture, but upon the gradual unfolding of a divine empire of truth, faith and morality’ (Bellenoit 2007: 29).

Chapter 6

A Colonial Experiment in Education Madras, 1789–1796 Jana Tschurenev

Y England’s debt to India in pedagogics has been fitly acknowledged in the tablet in Westminster Abbey, which describes Andrew Bell as ‘the eminent founder of the Madras System of Education, which has been adopted within the British empire, as the national system of education for the children of the poor’. — Sarkar, The Futurism of Young Asia and Other Essays

INTRODUCTION: COLONIAL ORIGINS OF A GLOBAL MODEL This chapter explores part of the history of the so-called monitorial system of education, which was one of the first global currents in the field of elementary schooling (Schriewer and Caruso 2005). Based on the ‘distinguishing characteristic’ (Bell 1808b: 3) of students mutually instructing each other, the monitorial system included a number of innovations. Teaching was based on a sequence of short, standardized successive lessons. Students were grouped in classes according to their progress and constantly re-ranked within classes according to their performance. Monitorial schools introduced a strict disciplinary regime, which ideally substituted corporal punishment by ‘emulation’ on the part of the students and panoptic surveillance on the part of the master. To educational reformers in Europe, the Americas, and colonial contexts (Caruso and Roldán 2005; Tschurenev 2008; Caruso 2010; Ressler 2010), the model appeared a cheap, rational and effective ‘machine’ 105

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for the diffusion of useful knowledge (Hogan 1989; Foucault 1995: 220–50; Miller 1998: 143–82). From the perspective of an entangled history of the modern world, one of the most interesting features of the monitorial system of education is that it did not ‘originate’ solely in ‘the West’. An abandoned military fort in the vicinity of Madras was the scene of an educational experiment that inspired the making of the globally circulating model. Egmore Redoubt, as this place was called, held an asylum for orphaned boys fathered by European officers and soldiers. Starting in 1789, the Scottish adventurer, science lecturer and ordained Anglican pastor Andrew Bell (1753–1832), appointed to superintend the education of these children, remodelled the asylum school to change it from an old-fashioned charity into a modern disciplinary institution. This place of origin – the colonial city of Madras – has attracted the attention of colonial policymakers, anti-colonial nationalists and scholars alike. In 1814, the Court of Directors of the East India Company (EIC) opined that Bell’s new mode of education was, basically, the ‘mode of instruction that from time immemorial has been practised’ under Indian village schoolmasters, concluding that it must, therefore, be well adapted to spread modern knowledge throughout the country (Howell 1872: 6). The issue resurfaced a century later in the context of the Indian nationalist movement. Sociologist Benoy Kumar Sarkar, struggling with the Eurocentric historiography of his time, highlighted ‘England’s debt to India’ for the ‘so-called Bell-Lancasterian pedagogics’, emphasizing ‘the fact that even the ancient and medieval civilization of the Hindus has been one of the feeders of this modern [Western] civilization’. Sarkar’s ‘[l]eitmotif’ was to wage ‘war against colonialism in politics’ as much as ‘against “orientalisme” in science’ (Sarkar 1922: 144–45, iv; emphasis original). Also, the authors of a standard history of education in India that was first published two years before independence ‘point[ed] out with pride that the indigenous schools of India contributed the idea of the monitorial system to England’ (Nurullah and Naik 1955: 25; emphasis original). In their reading, Andrew Bell had acted as a mediator who ‘advocated the adoption’ of the ‘Indian system of teaching with the help of monitors’ in England. The object of this emphasis is similar to Sarkar’s, namely, a politically anti-colonial and academically anti-Eurocentric rewriting of history, including an alternative interpretation of the location of causal powers. As Sarkar puts it, ‘[h]istorians talk only of England’s contribution to Indian Education and they generally ignore the great contribution which was made by India to the spread of education among the poorer classes of England herself’ (Sarkar 1922: 144–45, iv). Finally, the Indian context of Bell’s experiment reappears in postcolonial studies. In this field, works drawing on literary theory, history and

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cultural studies not only look at the problematic ‘impact’ of European rule on the former colonies, but also analyse the repercussions of colonial encounters on metropolitan societies. The changes that immigration of people from former colonies produced in the political and cultural constellations of postcolonial metropolitan countries – the emergence of the ‘multicultural question’ (Hall 2001) and ‘imaginary homelands’ (Rushdie 1992) – are thereby treated as only the most visible repercussions. Even under direct colonial rule, subjected populations were not mere respondents to ready-made sets of institutions and forms of governance but acted as ‘coproducers’ of global modernity (Conrad and Randeria 2002: 26). A common notion for grasping the co-constitution of metropoles and colonies under asymmetric power relations is the metaphor of colonies as ‘laboratories of modernity’. Thus the monitorial system appears as one of the ‘key strategies for managing populations’ – in Foucauldian terms, disciplinary techniques and bio-politics – that ‘were developed and refined in the colonies’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (O’Quinn 1998). This laboratory metaphor is the starting point for this chapter. To reassess it in the light of the prehistory of the monitorial system of education in Madras, I will follow Bell’s (1797) and his friend and biographer Southey’s (1844) accounts of how he came to remodel the asylum school, examining the cultural, political and institutional frame in which Bell’s innovation occurred and describe the interactions through which it took shape. My aim is to show how pedagogical practices from Southern India became connected to ideas from the Scottish enlightenment, and how this colonial encounter led to educational developments that would reshape elementary schooling in Britain, India and beyond.

ENCOUNTERING A ‘MALABAR SCHOOL’ According to Bell’s own account, the innovation started with his ‘happening on one of his morning rides to pass by a Malabar school’. There he observed ‘the children seated on the ground, and writing with their fingers in sand, which had for that purpose been strewn before them’. This picture made such an impression on Bell, that ‘he hastened home, repeating to himself as he went Eureka, “I have discovered”; and gave immediate orders to the usher of the lowest classes to teach the alphabet in the same manner, with this difference only from the Malabar mode, that the sand was strewn upon a board’ (Southey 1844, vol. I: 173). A brief outline of the prevalent educational landscape and the sources available in it will assist understanding of what kind of school it was that Bell

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possibly encountered. Modern reports on ‘the state of education’ in India – as different from, for instance, normative reflections on education in the philosophical, religious and legal Sanskrit literature – start with the Protestant missionaries, who began working in India in the early eighteenth century. In 1713, German missionaries stationed in Tranquebar/Tarangambadi informed their readers that ‘one can find, in all towns, places and villages, schools in which the youth is informed in reading and writing’ (‘Hallesche Berichte’ 1713: 127, my translation). These missionaries left vivid accounts of the schooling and pedagogy in eighteenth-century Tamil Nadu (Liebau 1998). New actors entered the field of educational provision and regulation in India in the early nineteenth century. In 1817, British missionaries and educationalists started the Calcutta School Book Society, a voluntary association dedicated to the expansion and reform of popular schooling in Bengal (Basak 1959). This association, which was run in cooperation with reformers from the new middle class, served as a model for the formation of other such ‘Europeo-native institutions’ in Bombay and the Madras, which all began their activities with an inquiry into the state of indigenous or ‘native’ education. Such inquiries were often meant to show the inadequacy of existing schools and prove the need to reform them (e.g., Row 1873). In the 1820s, British tax collectors started to compile records about educational facilities on their own initiative (e.g., Campbell 1834). This finally inspired the governments of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay – which, also in the 1820s, installed agencies to invest in and control education – to undertake systematic research and produce the first statistics on the state of education. The data for all three British Presidences in India show clearly that the British were hardly faced with a tabula rasa when they started to provide education. Besides common forms of family-based education, there were two streams of a formal education outside the household. (I will refrain from using the terms private and public education to refer to the period before establishment of the ‘separate spheres’ and introduction of the categories of ‘private’ versus ‘public’ life in India.) Higher learning was usually given in Sanskrit, in the case of Brahminical knowledge, or for Muslim intellectuals, in Arabic and Persian. Sanskrit and Arabic education was crucial for the future pandits and munshis who served as law specialists. Alongside these rather exclusive or high-caste institutions, vernacular schools catered to merchants, artisans and landowning castes (Frykenberg 1986; Shahidullah 1987; Pannikar 1995: 34–53; Bara 1998). Vernacular schools provided basic literacy in one of the popular languages, which in Madras meant Tamil, Telugu, Marathi or, sometimes, Canada (Row 1873: 72). Such a school was called either a pathshala, which literally means ‘recitation hall’ (Scharfe 2002: 77–78), tinnai school in Tamil (Babu 2007) or pyal-school, ‘pyal’ referring to

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a small platform erected in front of the schoolmaster’s house for use in instructing the students (Lawson 1905). The village schoolmaster’s general task was to see that the ‘children of the peasantry . . . were equipped with enough competence . . . for carrying on their occupational obligations’ (Jha 1998: 218–28). In towns, pathshalas and pyal-schools catered to the demands of the ‘commercial’ and ‘manufacturing classes’ (Campbell 1834: 355). The core of the curriculum was instruction on keeping accounts, carrying out calculations with weights and measures, and official correspondence. It was to the ‘operation’ of these schools that the British ascribed ‘the general intelligence of the people as scribes and accountants’ (Howell 1872: 6). Overall, the educational situation was quite fragmented. Higher learning and common vernacular instruction were parallel streams catering to different groups of people. Control over education rested with patrons or local communities. ‘All the varieties of schools that existed before colonial education’, Nita Kumar (2007: 36) observes, ‘varied in language, standard, design, and purpose. They were not thought of as one “system” . . . until the British labelled them as “indigenous”.’ What Bell encountered was not a general ‘pedagogy of the Hindus’ (Sarkar 1922: 145) or even an ‘Indian system of education’ (Nurullah and Naik 1955: 25), but a particular regional variation of a common vernacular school. The ‘Malabar school’ being identified, what do the sources reveal about the pedagogy in South Indian vernacular schools, that is, the ‘Malabar mode of teaching’? Tax collector Campbell observed that ‘[t]he first business of a child on entering school is to obtain a knowledge of the letters which he learns by writing them with his finger on the ground in sand, and not by pronouncing the alphabet, as among European nations’ (Campbell 1834: 351; cf. Cordiner 1820: 88; Row 1873: 66; Tschurenev 2011a). As Campbell realized, the crucial difference from Western European pedagogy was that basic literacy was connected to writing, not to reading. In Western Europe, confessionalization and the rapid spread of printed books had led to a ‘reading revolution’. Thus, whereas writing was not considered necessary for the mass of the population, reading – individual reading for improving one’s mind – became the heart of education (Maynes 1985; Stollberg-Rilinger 2000: 138–39). Basic education in eighteenth-century South Asia concentrated on the arts of writing and mathematics. According to the Tranquebar missionaries, writing in sand was an important technique for memorizing tables of weights and numbers (Liebau 1998: 134–40) and exactly the element that Bell ‘at the first sight . . . adopted’ from the Malabar school (Bell 1797: 11). Andrew Bell found it necessary to ‘particularly [notice] that thus much, and thus much only, was taken from the Malabar school’ and that it was –

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certainly – ‘not otherwise connected with the main discovery than as having been . . . the first link, of the chain of fortuitous occurrences which led to it’ (Bell 1814: 31). This ‘main discovery’, as Bell saw it, was mutual instruction. Employing students as helpers has been common in various pedagogical settings, including medieval Europe (Ackstaller 1934) as well as seventeenthcentury India (Dharmpal 1983). The interesting point is how exactly it was organized. Several sources indicate that the mornings and evenings of a school day in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South India were regularly spent in memorization of lessons among the students (Row 1873: 67). Arithmetic tables, for example, were memorized as follows: one boy wrote and at the same time rhythmically recited a number, and the others repeated it, the pupils taking turns acting as the precentor (Liebau 1998: 128–34). Nineteenth-century accounts even report the use of ‘monitors’ in the teaching process beyond repetition: ‘the scholars . . . are divided into several classes, the lower ones of which are partly under the care of monitors, whilst the highest ones are more immediately under the superintendence of the master’ (Campbell 1834: 351). Remarkably, these accounts were given only after the ‘monitorial system’ had become popular among education societies in both India and England. Nineteenth-century observers, supposing that the monitorial system had been ‘taken’ from India in the first place, used the new term monitor to describe what they saw as the indigenous mode, though most probably it was already a hybrid combination of precolonial and newer ‘monitorial’ types of teaching. It seems clear that mutual instruction had its place in a particular part of education, namely in the repetition of lessons. Meanwhile, there is no definite evidence that monitors were used to teach classes in South Indian vernacular schools. Finally, there is the issue of organizing classes. Sources for the South as well as for Bengal identify three to four classes defined according to the students’ proficiency in writing and therefore the materials they wrote upon: having begun by tracing letters in sand with their fingers, the children proceeded to writing with iron styles on palm leaves and finally learned to write in ink on plantain leaves (then still a common material in the production of manuscripts) or paper (Ward 1822: 160; Campbell 1834: 351–52; Row 1873: 67; Liebau 1998: 134–40). This is noteworthy because monitorial schools in England for some time used an analogous sequence of writing materials (sand board to wooden board to paper). In South India, the categories in which students were organized concerned not age but individual merit: ‘a scholar rises from one [class] to the other according to his capacity and progress’ (Campbell 1834: 351). This mode of classification was definitely an important feature of the monitorial system, one that allows for interpreting the monitorial system as an intermediary step between the early modern

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individual mode of tuition and the later ‘classroom system’ in several parts of Europe (Caruso 2010).

ROOTS IN SCOTLAND The inspiration Bell gained from South Indian vernacular schools was the starting point of his innovation, but not its only source. If ‘India was the birthplace of the monitorial method,’ according to McCann (1988: 30), ‘its roots must be sought in Scotland’. I want to reformulate this as a matter of Bell’s life and educational background. In 1769, he entered the College of St. Andrews, where he successfully studied mathematics as well as natural philosophy. Thomas Wilkie – poet, political economist, classical scholar and friend of Ferguson, Hume and Smith – held the chair of natural philosophy. Thus the student Bell had access to knowledge in natural and moral philosophy that was nearly unrivalled in other parts of Europe. In short, ‘although Bell, in his later life, became a conventional pillar of the Anglican Church, his early manhood was passed in the intellectual ferment of the Scottish enlightenment’ (McCann 1988: 30; see Lawson 1905: 206; Larwood 1961: 84–85). Southey’s biography – which, much encouraged by the fame-hungry Bell, was based on his voluminous personal correspondence – depicts young Andrew as an ambitious adventurer who at the age of twenty-one went to Virginia in search of employment. Having spent five years as a private tutor there, he opened a mathematical class at St Andrews and, ‘more out of the desire for a regular income than from any strong religious convictions,’ finally took orders of the Church of Scotland in 1784 (McCann 1988: 30). In London, inspired by the incredible wealth displayed by the nabobs (and by the famous play of Samuel Foote), he decided to make his fortune in India. Now holding a doctorate from St Andrews, he obtained permission to enter India from the EIC and left London in 1787. He took with him the scientific apparatus he needed for what he planned to achieve in India: to become a distinguished lecturer on experimental natural philosophy. Scientific lecturing, accompanied by experimental demonstrations of ice-making, chemical reactions, the functioning of air-pumps, and so on had been a well-known pursuit in Britain since the early eighteenth century. Towards the end of the century, attending lectures also became a popular aspect of the ‘beauty and fashion’ (Lawson 1905: 207–9) of the colonial cities (Southey 1844, vol. I: 104–19, 222–26; cf. Larwood 1961: 87). However, Bell happened to land in Madras in the midst of preparations for opening the boys’ asylum mentioned above. The governing body of this institution, glad to meet a churchman distinguished by a doctoral degree and years of pedagogical experience, asked

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him to become superintendent of the asylum school. Encouraged by the offer of a number of chaplaincies as sinecures, Bell took charge of the school in September 1789 (Southey 1844, vol. I: 351–54; Larwood 1961: 88). How did Bell’s ‘roots in Scotland’ influence his educational innovation? When he published his experiences back in London, he called his book An Experiment in Education (1797). In his account of how he came to remodel his school, he used the language of scientific discovery (‘Eureka’). Bell (1808a: 134) claimed to have followed the example of ‘a Newton, a Franklin, a Lavoisier’. Looking back at his Madras experiment, he stated that his innovation was not the outcome of theoretical studies; rather, it was the experimental method that led him to ‘hit upon’ the ‘discovery’ of some ‘vital and directive laws’ for usefully governing a school (ibid.; cf. Salmon 1915: 170). Bell’s writings also display a remarkable preoccupation with the notion of system, which together with the experimental method forms an important feature of the Newtonian world view. The ‘rhetoric and practices of systematization’, that is, of establishing series of discrete but interrelated processes, were crucial to the organization of industrial production, but they also diffused to other social domains and entered Bell’s educational thinking (Hamilton 1989: 77–78). To produce fruitful effects, the classroom and the teaching process had to be ‘systematically’ arranged. Later, Bell promoted a ‘system of education’ designed to apply the principles of systematization to the educational landscape as a whole. Meanwhile, Bell was drawing on the emerging social sciences. Scottish enlightenment moral philosophers were concerned with establishing the general rules governing the social and psychological domains (ibid.: 92). On the one hand, they focused on the ‘laws’ of historical development, understood as a sequence of stages in which humanity passed from ‘savagery’ to ‘civil society’ (Meek 1976). On the other hand, they were concerned with the ‘laws’ that govern what sociologists would later term social cohesion and social change (Hamilton 1989: 83–84). This perspective ‘systematically’ perceived both human history and human society as regulated by the movement of societies’ component parts. Such a perception of society was an important condition for any form of interventionist social policies, and for education to work as a tool for bringing about social improvement. Moreover, education had to accord with the ‘laws’ of the human psyche, or the ‘nature and disposition of youth’ (Bell 1797: v). The skilful pedagogue employed students’ passions rather than suppressing them. Bell envisioned competition, based on constant assessment of individual merit, as providing incentive important to learning. Thus, the internal ‘moral economy’ of Bell’s classroom was shaped by liberal notions of competition of equals and enhancement according to

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merit (Hogan 1989). By contrast, his view of the world outside the classroom – the world he was to supply with an ‘annual crop of good and useful subjects’ (Bell 1797: 7) – ‘hinged on a vision of an ordered, static, agricultural society’ that was hierarchically differentiated in ‘ranks’ defining the respective ‘station’ of an individual in society (Hamilton 1989: 83–84). Finally, the standards of ‘rationality’ set by Enlightenment philosophy, together with the consolidation of a marked-based economy, brought about new standards of efficiency. Saving money was not a strong motive for Bell, but he strongly emphasized the need to ‘prevent the waste of time’ and to produce visible outcomes. For Bell, rationality, efficiency, ‘constant employment’ and the ‘prevention of idleness’ became as much part of the curriculum as the transmission of information.

THE ‘EURASIAN PROBLEM’ Having shown how ‘Indian’ and ‘European’ sources of knowledge inspired a new educational method, I will move on to discuss the colonial situation’s impact on Bell’s innovation. Bell undertook his experiment during the initial phase of colonial state-building and development of colonial modes of governance. The orphan asylum where it was conducted was one of the institutions that ushered in the EIC’s consciously interventionist social policy (Ahuja 1999; Mann 2004). Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the European public of the colonial cities, EIC officials, clergymen, missionaries, and their female family members became concerned with what was called the Eurasian problem. The extended warfare accompanying the EIC’s accompanying territorial expansion had led to an increasing number of lower-class British men entering its territories as soldiers and petty officers of Indian troops, on salaries that would by no means be sufficient to bring a family to India. Just as numerous European ‘gentlemen’ did, these soldiers formed unions with local women. Although the EIC chaplains tried to promote church weddings, many mixed couples lived in common-law marriages. The British husband’s Indian family were left unsupported, facing material distress, when he died in battle or from disease, or was removed to Europe, where he was not allowed to bring his Indian family. What concerned the European public even more were the large numbers of ‘illegitimate’ ‘mixedrace’ children who, as adults, formed a ‘low and licentious’ urban underclass of European descent (Fischer-Tiné 2009). The public display of an unruly population connected to the British elites according to religious as well as racial categories appeared particularly threatening because it blurred the boundary between colonizer and colonized (Stoler and Cooper 1997).

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The ‘Eurasians’, therefore, became the first target group of social regulation in the colonial centres. A variety of welfare-cum-disciplinary institutions were set up, starting with asylums for orphaned children of European soldiers (Arnold 1979). On the one hand, it was a matter of Christian charity ‘to smooth the bed of death of many a valuable veteran’ (Madras Military and Secret Proceedings 1787, quoted in McCann 1988: 32) by assuring him that his children would be kept and educated. This, it was hoped, would enhance the troops’ morale. On the other hand, the purpose of these institutions was to ‘fit’ the Eurasian children ‘for “useful” but emphatically subordinate, roles in colonial society commensurate with their race and their class and to rescue them from . . . “corrupting” influences’ (Arnold 1979: 109–10). This implied taking them from their homes, even against the mother’s wishes. Since the ‘degradation and depravity of that class to which the mothers mostly belong’ was held responsible for corrupting the children, the ‘moral effects of their education would have been counteracted just in proportion to the intercourse which they were permitted to hold with their maternal relations; and the restriction, therefore, in their case was not more severe than necessary’ (Southey 1844, vol. I: 170). Who was responsible for maintaining this kind of institution? In England, charity was one of the classical tasks of the vestry, which in this form did not exist in India (Ahuja 1999: 297). In the case of the Military Male Orphan Asylum of Madras the initiative appears to have come from the Governor, but the preparations involved church ministers, a committee of military officers and missionaries. The asylum was run on public subscriptions, supplemented by a government grant. The charity thus used a novel form of cooperation between state and non-state actors that became quite widespread in the early-nineteenth-century provision of elementary education (Tschurenev 2008). However, in terms of pedagogy, the new superintendent Andrew Bell most ‘probably expected the Asylum to be run more or less as an eighteenth century charity school’ (McCann 1988: 32; see Southey 1844, I: 171).

AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION Now ‘it remains to trace the growth of that system of education which originated there’ (Southey 1844, vol. I: 167). Bell’s superintendency would not necessarily have included pedagogical activity, since he had three (untrained) teachers to do this job. But Bell ‘looked upon perfect instruction as the main duty’ of his office. This brought him into conflict with the teachers, who were considerably ‘displeased . . . that instead of holding the office of

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the superintendent as a sinecure’, he interfered with their work. Bell, in turn, complained about their ‘incapacity’ and ‘obstinacy’. It was in this situation that he ‘happened’ to encounter the said ‘Malabar school’. Therefore, Bell’s ‘orders to . . . teach the alphabet in the same manner’ as in the common vernacular schools of the region were ‘either disregarded, or . . . carelessly executed’. Giving up any further attempt to ‘depend on the will and ability of those over whose minds he had no command’, he ‘bethought himself of employing a boy, on whose obedience, disposition, and cleverness he could rely, and giving him charge of the alphabet class’. This time, he was not disappointed: ‘What the usher had pronounced to be impossible, this lad succeeded in effecting without any difficulty.’ Encouraged by this experience, Bell extended the ‘experiment which . . . had been tried at first with one class systematically . . . to all the others in progression’ (ibid.: 171–73). Bell first mentioned the new model in a letter to his friend Dr Adamson of St Andrews in May 1792. ‘The conduct of this school’, he explained, ‘is peculiar. Every boy is either a master or a scholar, or generally both. He teaches one boy, while another teaches him’ (ibid.: 177). Bell’s initial model of mutual instruction had a double aspect. Similar to the practice in the vernacular schools, peer-to-peer exercises were conducted within the same class. For some time, however, more advanced students appeared as the appointed teachers of a less advanced class. This element, according to Hogan (1989), marks the beginning of the ‘classroom system’. In the asylum school, ‘the master and ushers were now virtually superseded’. Their reduced function was to ‘maintain the observance of the rules’, which, however, they were unable to do to Bell’s satisfaction. The ‘mismanagement’ that Bell kept lamenting included general ‘neglect’, ‘ill usage of the little boys’ such as ‘pinching the ears’ and even a teacher’s frequenting an arrack shop with some older students (Southey 1844, vol. I: 176, 184). Notwithstanding these obstacles, the school became increasingly popular. The student body grew from twenty in 1789 to thirty in 1792 and had to be limited to 100 in the mid-1790s. The curriculum was extended from the ‘three Rs’ to, first, bookkeeping, geometry and navigation (according to the career choices of writer, mechanic or sailor), and later even to mensuration, surveying and trigonometry. Bell even began to use his scientific apparatus for demonstrations (ibid.: 177–78, 181). The core of Bell’s mission, however, was nothing less than an ‘attempt’ to ‘alter the character of a race of men’ (ibid.: 171–72). His system was ‘calculated to render’ the ‘stubborn’, ‘perverse’, ‘obstinate’, ‘lying’ boys ‘valuable to this settlement and subservient to the general good’. The final goal of education was to ‘meliorate the rising generation’ and thereby ‘improve the state of society’ (Bell 1797: 9, 33, 36). Bell’s trust in the possibility of fun-

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damentally reforming his students was rooted in an assumption that their character was the outcome of their upbringing, not of any natural incapacity. There were basically, as he saw it, two ‘means of correcting the miserable maxims and habits in which most of them had hitherto been bred up’ (Southey 1844, vol. I: 171–72): ‘inculcating upon them on all occasions a sense of their moral duties’, that is, instilling the right ‘maxims’ or ‘principles’; and ‘produc[ing] habits . . . favourable to virtue, religion, and good government’. These habits would most fruitfully result from ‘the practise of early youth, and systematic arrangements’ (Bell 1787: 32–33). His pedagogy aimed at enhancing and stimulating the natural capacities, forming them and leading them into the ‘proper’ direction. The learning conditions were to be rendered ‘pleasant’ to the students, whose attention was to be led ‘to proper pursuits’; this entailed establishment of a sequence of short and easy lessons as well as a broad and interesting curriculum. Bell also firmly emphasized a new kind of discipline: it had to be ‘mild’ and ‘gentle’ but more ‘inflexible’; instead of the punishment common in charity schools, he recommended a ‘preventive discipline’ (Southey 1844, vol. I: 171, 175). Part of this was the constant examination that allowed for measurement of individual progress in a standardized sequence of lessons as well as comparison of classmates’ achievements. Meantime the students’ ‘conduct’ was constantly supervised through peer observation and surveillance by the always present ‘eye of the master’ (ibid.: 179). Taken together, these elements – ‘systematic arrangements’ that were supposed to produce favourable ‘habits’; constant examination of the students as developing individuals and as bearers of a certain rank in a group; mutual observation and ‘panoptical’ surveillance by ‘the eye of the master’ – form the core of the functioning of the ‘disciplines’ as analysed by Foucault (1995: 135–230).

CONCLUSION In using the metaphor of the colonies’ functioning as laboratories for modern techniques of social regulation, a few limitations should be kept in mind (Stoler and Cooper 1997: 5). First, the ‘colonial ground’ was no tabula rasa waiting to be inscribed with the knowledge of the colonizers, even if imperial minds expressed such fantasies; as it has been shown, a complex educational landscape existed in eighteenth century South India. Some of the pedagogical techniques they employed – certainly the teaching of the alphabet via writing exercises and most probably the technique of mutual instruction – became inspiration for Bell’s experiment in education. When missionaries, school societies and colonial governments started to expand a new model of public schooling based on the monitorial system in the

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nineteenth century (Tschurenev 2008, 2011a, 2011b), they did not introduce elementary education but rather transformed it, partially substituting and partially integrating the prevalent facilities. Second, since people are not passive respondents of social engineering programmes but conscious agents ‘capable of circumventing and undermining’ disciplinary techniques, ‘controlled conditions’ for social experiments do not exist (Stoler and Cooper 1997: 5). It is remarkable that Bell turned to children to be the operators of his system exactly to gain the kind of unlimited control sometimes attributed to European social engineers in the colonies: his school, he said, was run ‘by means of agents as are always at command’ (Southey 1844, vol. I: 178). Nineteenth-century educational reformers may have appreciated this idea as much as the idea of saving the salary of an adult teacher. Bell indeed had strong control over his charges, since their mothers and relatives were not allowed ‘to remove children whenever they pleased’ and even the children’s contact to the outside world was restricted (ibid.: 169). But he also won his students’ cooperation by offering a broad curriculum that opened prospects for employment beyond the subordinate ranks of army and navy. One of the most advanced students, William Smith, was even invited to deliver scientific lectures at the court of Tippoo Sultan (Larwood 1961: 88). Finally, Bell had not previously intended to test new pedagogical methods to determine their suitability for building national education in Britain. His innovation was the contingent product of his happening to enter a specific political situation (i.e., the emergence of social policies towards the Eurasian population in the context of consolidating British rule), his experimentalist processing of locally observed pedagogical methods and his interaction with teachers and students in a particular institutional setting. When he published his Experiment back in England, he still did not know if his innovation would be applicable in his home country: ‘Whether a similar attempt would be attended with equal success in every charity or free school . . . I do not say’. He published it simply ‘to give it the chance of that diffusion which may produce a fair trial in other situations’ (Bell 1797: 36). Thus the ‘disciplinary machine’ par excellence in the field of pedagogy came into existence not because of a governmental plan but as the individual project of a Scottish adventurer responding to a particular situation. After his ideas were partially taken up in the young dissenter Joseph Lancaster’s (1803) proposals for reforming the education of the poor in England, the Church felt the need to come up with a counterproposal for a ‘national system’ under its own control and thus turned to Bell as its saviour. Only then did he conclude that the ‘system’ developed for the Eurasian students in Madras was perfectly ‘adapted to the condition of the lower order of youth in this country [England]’ (Bell 1808a: 209), even hoping that, ‘if you or I live a thou-

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sand years, we shall see this system spread over the world ’ (ibid.: 138; emphasis original).

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Dharmpal (ed.). 1983. The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. New Delhi: Biblia Impex. Fischer-Tiné, H. 2009. Low and Licentious Europeans: Race, Class, and ‘White Subalternity’ in Colonial India. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Foucault, M. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Frykenberg, R.E. 1986. ‘Modern Education in South India, 1784–1854: Its Roots and Its Role as a Vehicle of Integration under Company Raj’, American Historical Review 91(1): 37–65. Hall, S. 2001. ‘The Multi-Cultural Question’, in B. Hesse (ed.), Un/settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions. London: Zed Books, pp. 209–41. ‘Hallesche Berichte’ (= Der königlich-dänischen Missionarien aus Ost-Indien eingesandte ausführliche Berichte). 1713. 1(3). Halle: Francke’sche Stiftungen. Hamilton, D. 1989. Towards a Theory of Schooling. London: Falmer Press. Hogan, D. 1989. ‘The Market Revolution and Disciplinary Power: Joseph Lancaster and the Psychology of the Early Classroom System’, History of Education Quarterly 29(3): 381–417. Howell, A. 1872. Education in British India, Prior to 1854, and in 1870–71. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing. Jha, H. 1998. ‘Decline of Vernacular Education in Bihar in the Nineteenth Century’, in S. Bhattacharya (ed.), The Contested Terrain: Perspectives on Education in India. New Delhi: Orient Longman, pp. 218–28. Kumar, N. 2007. The Politics of Gender, Community, and Modernity: Essays on Education in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Lancaster, J. 1803. Improvements in Education, as It Respects the Industrious Classes of the Community: Containing, a Short Account of its Present State, Hints Towards its Improvement, and a Detail of Some Practical Experiments Conducive to that End. London: Darton and Harvey, J. Mathews, W. Hatchard. Larwood, H.J.C. 1961. ‘Science and Education in India before the Mutiny’, Annals of Science 17(2): 81–96. Lawson, C. 1905. Memories of Madras. London: Swan Sonnenschein. Liebau, K. (ed.). 1998. Die Malabarische Korrespondenz. Tamilische Briefe an deutsche Missionare. Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke. Mann, M. 2004. ‘“Torchbearers Upon the Path of Progress”: Britain’s Ideology of “Moral and Material Progress” in India’, in H. Fischer-Tiné and M. Mann (eds), Colonialism as Civilising Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India. London: Anthem Press, pp. 1–28. Maynes, M.J. 1985. Schooling in Western Europe: A Social History. Albany: State University of New York Press. McCann, P. 1988. ‘The Indian Origins of Bell’s Monitorial System’, in P. Cunningham and C. Brock (eds), International Currents in Education. Leicester: History of Education Society, pp. 29–40. Meek, R. 1976. Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Miller, P. 1998. Transformations of Patriarchy in the West, 1500–1900. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Nurullah, S. and J.P. Naik. 1955. A Students’ History of Education in India, 1800–1947. Bombay: Macmillan. O’Quinn, D. 1998. ‘Review: Hofkosh S. and A. Richardson (eds), “Romanticism, Race and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834”’, Romanticism On the Net 11. Retrieved 1 May 2007 from http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1998/v/n11/005815ar.html Pannikar, K.N. 1995. Culture, Ideology, Hegemony: Intellectuals and Social Consciousness in Colonial India. London: Anthem Press. Ressler, P. 2010. Nonprofit-Marketing im Schulbereich: Britische Schulgesellschaften und der Erfolg des Bell-Lancaster-Systems der Unterrichtsorganisation im 19. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Row, V.V.G. (ed.). 1873. The Life of Vennelacunty Soob Row, (Native of Ongole). Madras: C. Foster. Rushdie, S. 1992. Imaginary Homelands. London: Penguin. Salmon, D. 1915. ‘Bell’s Writings’, Educational Record with the Proceedings of the British and Foreign School Society 19: 154–176. Sarkar, B.K. 1922. The Futurism of Young Asia and Other Essays on the Relations between the East and the West. Leipzig: Markert & Petters. Scharfe, H. 2002. Education in Ancient India. Leiden: Brill. Schriewer, J. and M. Caruso (eds). 2005. Nationalerziehung und Universalmethode – frühe Formen schulorganisatorischer Globalisierung. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag. Shahidullah, K. 1987. Patshalas Into Schools: The Development of Indigenous Elementary Education in Bengal, 1854–1905. Calcutta: Firma KLM. Southey, R. 1844. Life of the Reverend Andrew Bell: Comprising the History of the Rise and Progress of the System of Mutual Tuition, 3rd ed. 3 Vols. London: J. Murray. Stoler, A. and F. Cooper. 1997. ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in A. Stoler and F. Cooper (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–56. Stollberg-Rilinger, B. 2000. Europa im Jahrhundert der Aufklärung. Stuttgart: Reclam. Tschurenev, J. 2008. ‘Imperial Experiments in Education: Monitorial Schooling in India, 1789–1835’, Ph.D. dissertation. Berlin: Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. ———. 2011a. ‘“Patshalas into Schools”. Das “monitorial system of education” in Bengalen (ca. 1815–35)’, Jahrbuch für Historische Bildungsforschung 16: 11–38. ———. 2011b. ‘Incorporation and Differentiation: Popular Education and the Imperial Civilizing Mission in the Early Nineteenth Century India’, in C. Watt and M. Mann (eds), Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia: From Improvement to Development. London: Anthem Press, pp. 93–124. Ward, W. 1822. A View of the History, Literature, and Mythology of the Hindoos: Including a Minute Description of their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Principal Works. London: Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen.

Part III

Indigenous Education and Resistance

Chapter 7

A New Education for ‘Young India’ Exploring Nai Talim from the Perspective of a Connected History Simone Holzwarth

Y INTRODUCTION The introduction of such practical productive work in education to be participated in by all children of the nation will tend to break down the existing barriers of prejudice between manual and intellectual workers, harmful alike for both. It will also cultivate in the only possible way a true sense of the dignity of labour and of human solidarity – an ethical and moral gain of incalculable significance. (Hindustani Talimi Sangh 1939: 9–10)

Zakir Husain, an economist with a keen interest in education who later became the third president of independent India, wrote these lines in a report on the Wardha1 Conference of 1937, an important event in the debates on education within the Indian independence movement. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869–1948), by that time undoubtedly an icon of the independence movement, presented his ideas on education at this conference. Its participants affirmed them, and they became known as the Wardha Scheme. Gandhi himself called his education concept ‘rural national education through village handicrafts’ or Nai Talim.2 As he wrote in 1938: A more correct though much less attractive description would be Rural National Education through village handicrafts. ‘Rural’ excludes the so-called higher or English education. ‘National’ at present connotes truth and non-violence. And ‘through village handicrafts’ means that the framers of the scheme expect the 123

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teachers to educate village children in their villages so as to draw out all their faculties through some selected village handicrafts in an atmosphere free from superimposed restrictions and interference. (Gandhi 2000, vol. 73: 202)

Gandhi’s education ideas were closely interwoven with his vision of a new social order for independent India based on self-sufficient village republics. He was convinced that education was the key to this transformation. As the above passages from Husain and Gandhi show, the Wardha Scheme aimed to radically break with the dominant colonial education practices based on rote learning and textbooks and place practical work at the core of the education process instead. The idea was that education would thus be more accessible to the rural population and at the same time create a ‘sense of the dignity of labour and of human solidarity’, as Husain wrote. Krishna Kumar therefore sees Gandhi’s ideas as a ‘radical proposal’ in the ‘quest for self-identity in education’ in the Indian independence movement: ‘Both in terms of world-view and functional skills, the curriculum of a “basic” school favoured the child belonging to the lowest stratum of society. From this point of view, Gandhi’s proposal intended to make the education system stand on its head’ (Kumar 1991: 171). The purpose of this chapter is twofold. The first part outlines the emergence of Nai Talim as the central programme of national education in the decades around independence and provides new insights based on documentary materials from Nai Talim institutions. Most of the existing academic literature about Nai Talim discusses its pedagogical ideas, whereas only very limited research analyses Nai Talim as an implemented model. I therefore use primary sources such as the writings of key actors, (government) reports, syllabuses, pictures and advertising materials to help fill this research gap. In the chapter’s second part, I explore Nai Talim from the perspective of ‘connected history’, a concept that strives to overcome a Eurocentric perspective in historical research by emphasizing shared spaces, connections and entanglements (see, e.g., Conrad and Randeria 2002). I use an actor-centred approach focusing on four actors who were involved in the conceptualization and implementation processes of Nai Talim. This approach sheds light on the interesting personal connections and entanglements in Indians’ and Europeans’ education discourses in the first half of the twentieth century. The stories of Rabindranath Tagore and Zakir Husain, important figures in the conceptualization of Nai Talim, show the importance of researching Gandhi’s ideas on education against a backdrop of inter- and transnational networks of progressive thought on education. Meanwhile, the Danish missionary Anne Marie Petersen and the English teacher Marjorie Sykes – two European women who, inspired by the ideas

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of Nai Talim, worked to spread the concept across India – exemplify a connected history that opens up the perspective beyond a Eurocentric writing of education history.

NAI TALIM: A NEW EDUCATION FOR A NEW SOCIAL ORDER Gandhi’s ideas on Nai Talim have to be seen in the context of the Indian independence movement and the discussion it provoked over the future of India. Education was a highly ‘contested terrain’3 in the debates about how to overcome colonial domination and create a new social order for a postcolonial India. Within the independence movement, colonial education was often criticized as focusing overmuch on books and neglecting practical skills and leading to dependence on foreign-produced goods and British experts. One example is the Swadeshi4 movement of 1903–8 against the partition of Bengal and British colonization as such, which employed protest strategies that later also inspired Gandhi, such as boycotting British products, reviving domestic products and production techniques to achieve economic independence, and establishing education institutions (Trivedi 2007: 6) to support import-substituting industrial development. Technical education and the introduction of science and technology into curricula thus were crucial to the movement’s success.5 Gandhi entered the political stage of the Indian independence movement after coming back from South Africa in 1915. As the example of the Swadeshi movement shows, his critique of India’s colonial dependence and the need to overcome it through, among other things, a new approach to education was not new. He argued in the same direction as earlier debates, favouring an expansion of mass education based on practical skills as part of the curriculum. His ideas on the future of India and the role of education were, however, quite unique in that he aimed at a totally new social order focused on village life. Inspired by a mixture of anti-modernist and Indian reformist trends (Markovits 2004: 129), Gandhi blamed India’s ‘underdevelopment’ on the ills of ‘Western modernization’ (Gandhi 1922). His aim was to achieve poorna swaraj6 (total self-rule), and he stressed that this transformation of society and economy should not copy ‘the West’ to overcome the consequences of colonial domination. Gandhi’s development rhetoric centred on the village and the betterment of the living conditions of the rural, low-caste, poor population. He envisioned villages as cooperative self-sufficient entities at the core of a decentralized political and economic system and was convinced that the revival of village industries, especially cotton spinning and weaving, would

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play an important role in overcoming seasonal unemployment. He also argued against exclusionary practices targeted at ‘untouchable’ groups regarded as the lowest of society,7 though generally he was unopposed to the caste system.8 Gandhi saw education as an essential tool for the realization of the new social order he envisioned, as this quote from 1920 shows: ‘The spirit of independence will be fostered not only through Religion, Politics and History but through vocational training also, which alone can give the youths of the country economic independence and a backbone that comes out of a sense of self-respect’ (Gandhi 1953: 86). He criticized colonial education as too theoretical, serving only the Indian elite. His concern with education had emerged during his time in South Africa (1893–1915), where the idea of the dignity of manual labour, derived from the writings of John Ruskin9 among others, inspired him to conduct his first experiments in education in the cooperative colonies Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm. Gandhi envisioned an ‘education for life’ consisting of five stages: ‘pre-basic’ education (under age 7), ‘basic’ education (ages 7–14), ‘post-basic’ education (ages 15–18), rural universities and ‘social’ (adult) education (Hindustani Talimi Sangh 1950). The main features of Nai Talim were the orientation of education towards the rural masses, education in the vernacular languages and the centrality of village crafts in the educational process. The aim was for children to internalize the dignity of manual work and contribute to financing their education through the production of crafts. The learning process therefore was to be based on a ‘productive trade’ (a craft such as spinning, gardening, weaving, etc.). Gandhi suggested that education should be self-supporting, so that children would be able to pay the salaries of their teachers through the production of village crafts: ‘I would therefore begin education by teaching a child a useful handicraft and enabling such production from the moment training is begun. Thus every school can be made self-supporting, the condition being that the State takes over the manufactures of these schools’ (Gandhi 2000, vol. 72: 79). The pedagogical concept behind the idea that education should be self-supporting was called ‘correlation’. Children should, for example, spin or weave while the teacher explained subjects such as arithmetic or social studies as they related to the topic of spinning or weaving (Solanki 1958). Gandhi emphasized the importance of teaching ‘head, heart, and hands’, an idea also found in many writings by contemporary progressive educators. The ideas of Nai Talim had their breakthrough at the Wardha Conference in 1937, which took place in a situation in which the new constitution of 1935 had increased Indian self-government, including in the field of education. The conference was initiated by the circle of educationists around Jam-

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nalal Bajaj, a prosperous supporter of Gandhi who himself had founded an education organization. Among the conference participants were provincial education ministers, reputed nationalist education thinkers and teachers. Gandhi presented his ideas about basic education (ages 7–14) and initiated a debate on their feasibility. In the end, the conference passed a resolution for national education based on Gandhi’s line of thought. Zakir Husain, then president of Jamia Millia Islamia, a ‘national university’ founded in the context of the Non-Cooperation Movement of the 1920s, was interested but also critical of the concept,10 and Gandhi asked him to summarize the discussions in a report including a syllabus.11 In 1938, the Indian National Congress accepted the Wardha Scheme, as it was called after the conference, as its national education policy. It recommended that the scheme should first be implemented in rural areas and provided for the creation of an All-India Education Board called the Hindustani Talimi Sangh (HTS) to supervise and evaluate the experiments as well as provide teacher training. Accordingly, the provincial governments of Central Provinces, Bihar, Bombay, Madras, Orissa, United Provinces and Kashmir initiated the implementation of the Wardha Scheme on an experimental basis. Sevagram,12 a village close to Wardha, was an important centre for the conceptualization and implementation of Nai Talim. Here the HTS was institutionalized under the mandate of the 1938 Haripura Session of the Congress (Hindustani Talimi Sangh 1945), with the aim of supervising and evaluating experiments with the Wardha Scheme in different parts of India. Zakir Husain became its chairman, and its founding secretary was E.W. Aryanayakam, a teacher from Sri Lanka who had worked in Tagore’s Shantiniketan, a model school set up by Rabindranath Tagore in 1901, and earlier as headmaster in Wardha. He and his wife, Asha Devi, became the leading figures of the HTS in the following years. The HTS organized conferences to bring together the politicians and educationists working on the experiments, and exhibitions to demonstrate the workings of Nai Talim. HTS also published books and materials like syllabuses, advertising material and teachers’ manuals. The first educational institutions in Sevagram were a teacher training institute and two elementary schools. The institute, called the Wardha Training School, was key to the Nai Talim experiments and to dissemination of knowledge about the new education concept to other parts of India. Opened in April 1938 under the leadership of the Aryanayakams (Sykes 1988: 31), it was the only Nai Talim teacher training institution in India during the first year of the experiments. The Congress governments that launched the implementation of the scheme sent personnel and teacher trainees to Seva-

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gram to undergo training there. The two elementary schools set up to practise the new education ideas were the Segaon village school and a school in Wardha. The available documentation shows that these schools followed the strict routine suggested in the report compiled by Zakir Husain. The school day, which started at 5.15 A.M. with community work and sports, lasted five hours and thirty minutes, of which a total of three hours and twenty minutes was dedicated to craft work (Sykes 1988). At first, Nai Talim institutions expanded rapidly. By October 1939 there were 247 schools (also called Basic Schools) and fourteen training schools in the provinces Kashmir, United Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, Central Provinces, Bombay Presidency and Madras Presidency, and the State of Mysore (Aryanayakam 1950: 3). After 1940, however, the experiments suffered a major setback when mass protests against India’s participation in the Second World War led to massive imprisonment of supporters of the Gandhian movement and the closure of institutions inspired by his programme. After his release from prison in 1944, Gandhi initiated a second phase of developing and expanding Nai Talim with the idea of extending it beyond the stage of basic education to also include early childhood, adolescent and adult education. By 1947, the first group of students in Bihar and Sevagram had completed their basic education course, creating a need to implement further education opportunities along the lines of Nai Talim (ibid.: 11). Thus adolescent or ‘post-basic’ education was introduced and institutionalized in Sevagram. At this school, post-basic education for students aged 14–15 and up, consisted of a three- to four-year course. The rhetoric on this stage of Nai Talim was no less revolutionary than the materials on basic education: ‘Post-basic education has as its goal a new social order based on justice, in which there is no cleavage between rich and poor, in which everyone has the right to freedom and a chance to earn his living’ (Sykes 1954: 27). This type of education offered training in the following vocations: agriculture, fruit and vegetable gardening, dairying, oil pressing, wood and metal work, rural engineering and building, weaving, tailoring, domestic science and training of teachers and village workers, including workers in adult education. The educational process was divided into three parts: vocation, community work, and arts and sports. In correlation with the vocation, four subject areas were taught: languages (mother tongue and Hindustani, working knowledge of English, acquaintance with one other Indian language), science and mathematics, sociology and economics, and other social studies such as history, geography and civics (Sykes 1954). Experiments in early childhood (pre-basic) and adult education were also carried out in Sevagram. Following independence in 1947, the spread of Nai Talim institutions continued with the support of different government schemes, but they never

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transformed the education system as intended, for implementation always remained only parallel to the traditional (colonial) education system. Thus the net addition of traditional elementary schools outnumbered the new and converted basic schools (Sinclair and Lillis 1980: 54). Gandhi’s ideas slowly lost their potency after his death in 1948, and the schools therefore lost their popular and government support. In sum, the Wardha Scheme never attained more than experimental status and totally disappeared from official education policy documents after 1964, in part because the development model followed by the post-independence government of Jawaharlal Nehru was based on socialist ideas of central planning and rapid industrialization that tended to clash with Gandhi’s ideas of self-sufficient village life.

NAI TALIM AND ITS HISTORY OF PERSONAL CONNECTIONS Connections to Progressive Education Networks: Rabindranath Tagore and Zakir Husain Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the Bengali poet and first Asian recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was an important source of inspiration for Gandhi’s educational thinking. In 1901 he founded a school north of Calcutta in a place he called Shantiniketan.13 Disappointed with his own experiences in school, he wanted to create a new model of education based on ideas such as creating an educational setting close to nature rather than in classrooms, teaching arts and crafts, and combining urban life, science and technology with rural life, traditional knowledge and skills. His concern was to revive Indian self-respect and Indian traditions that had been lost through colonial domination (Kumar 1991: 161–66). Tagore’s educational institution and his experiments with ‘rural reconstruction’14 gained fame throughout India. Tagore was very well connected with international networks of progressive education thinkers. Progressive education was the outcome of several reform movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that involved such popular figures as Maria Montessori, John Dewey and Leo Tolstoy. Critical of traditional education based on rote learning and discipline as not supportive of children’s development, these educators instead proclaimed more active, natural, child-centred methods of education (Reese 2001). Gandhi’s ideas of education through manual work in a rural community resonated with certain ideas of the progressive education movement, such as the teaching of ‘head, heart, and hands’. Unfortunately, the activities

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of the networks of progressive educators in India have been little researched. In this part of the chapter I will present some insights into the extent of personal connections between the movement for the implementation of Nai Talim and progressive education networks. One interesting point showing his connection to these networks is Tagore’s invitation of a conference delegation of the New Education Fellowship to Shantiniketan in 1936 (Tagore 1996: 814–16). The New Education Fellowship, an international network of progressive educators founded in France in 1921, had its origins in the Theosophical Education Trust. It became a very influential network of educationists aiming to spread the ideas of progressive education all over the world (Lawson 1981). Tagore and Gandhi were close friends. When Gandhi came back from South Africa, he visited Shantiniketan (das Gupta 1998). Later on, teachers from Shantiniketan came to teach in the experimental Nai Talim institutions in Gandhi’s ashram in Sevagram. It therefore seems quite clear that Gandhi was in touch with progressive educators and the activities of the New Education Fellowship through Tagore. There is, however, no evidence of Gandhi’s direct connection to these networks. A second example of the connections with progressive education thinking concerns Zakir Husain (1897–1969), an active member of the independence movement and a central figure in the founding of the ‘national university’ Jamia Millia Islamia in 1920, among other endeavours in the context of the Non-Cooperation Movement and its boycott of colonial education institutions. In 1937 Husain became the chairman of the committee assigned to report on the Wardha Conference (Hindustani Talimi Sangh 1938). He was actively involved in the process to develop Nai Talim into a programme for national education and worked on its implementation for ten years (Ali 1991: 329). As a student pursuing a Ph.D. in economics in Berlin from 1922 to 1926, Husain had been highly interested in developments in education in Germany. He took courses on German education philosophy at Berlin University, met progressive educationists and visited schools. Abid Husain, a friend who studied education under Eduard Spranger, was an important contact in this regard, as was Gerda Philipsborn, a Jewish intellectual from Berlin who later came to work at Jamia Millia Islamia. The literature about Zakir Husain depicts him as especially interested in the educational ideas of Georg Kerschensteiner (1852–1932), the founding father of the German system of vocational training, and his concept of the Arbeitsschule (literally, work school) (Mujeeb 1972; Ali 1991; Oesterheld 2001). Kerschensteiner was supervisor of public schools in Munich and from 1895 onwards professor of education (Röhrs 1993; Kerschensteiner and Gonon 2002). His

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central idea was the combination of education and manual work: ‘For all our concentration on book-learning in school, 90 per cent of all boys and girls far prefer any kind of practical activity to quiet, abstract thought and reflection. . . . They are always ready to work in workshop and kitchen, garden and field, stable and fishing boat. This is their richest learning field’15 (Kerschensteiner 1912: 3). It is possible that Kerschensteiner and Husain met in person, but unfortunately there is no evidence of such an encounter (Oesterheld 2001: 111). However, it is interesting to see how Gandhi’s thoughts resonated with those of Kerschenstiner: ‘. . . it is a crime to make education merely literary, and to unfit boys and girls for manual work in afterlife. Indeed I hold that as the larger part of our time is devoted to labour for earning our bread, our children must from their infancy be taught the dignity of such labour’ (Gandhi 2000, vol. 24: 156). Soon after the Wardha Conference, Zakir Husain opened a Nai Talim experimental school in Delhi. It is not clear to what extent he was connected to international networks of progressive education thinking such as the New Education Fellowship.

Two Europeans Inspired by Nai Talim: Anne Marie Petersen and Marjorie Sykes Anne Marie Petersen, a Danish missionary, and Marjorie Sykes, a teacher from England, are interesting examples of the connected history of Nai Talim that so far have not been discussed in research literature. Their biographies reveal a wide array of ideas and experiences in education and different kinds of involvement in the implementation of Nai Talim. They met Gandhi at very different stages of the development of the education concept: Petersen in 1917 at Sabermati Ashram, and Sykes in 1938 in Sevagram soon after the experiments had started there. Both women were inspired by Gandhi’s ideas and actively implemented them, Petersen in a girls’ school that she ran herself and Sykes as the headmistress of the Nai Talim institutions in Sevagram. The teacher and missionary Anne Marie Petersen (1878–1951) was one of several Danish admirers of Gandhi who corresponded with him by mail and came to visit him (Reddy and Terp 2006).16 Denmark also appeared quite often as a reference model for life in rural self-sufficient communities in the debates about the new Gandhian social order. Several times throughout his writings, Gandhi referred to Denmark as a model of cooperative dairy farming (see, e.g., Gandhi 2000, vol. 38: 350). Zakir Husain, who was also interested in these models, visited Denmark and Sweden personally in 1924 (Faruqui 1999: 76).

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Petersen came to India in 1909 at the age of thirty-one through the Danish Missionary Society (DMS) to work at a DMS school in South India. She identified herself with the ideas of Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783–1872), a Danish theologian and education thinker, and had studied in a school following these ideas. Grundtvig, who had developed his ideas on education and Christianity in the context of Danish nationalism, was opposed to education in a foreign language. He became famous for his concept of folk high schools (folkehoeskoler) and his emphasis on the importance of creating ‘schools for life’, that is, adult education of the peasant population in residential institutions and in their mother tongue as an alternative to elite higher education at universities. By combining general education with manual work and sports, these schools aimed to enhance the peasants’ education and personal development. The first folk high school based on Grundtvig’s ideas was founded in 1844 (Lawson 1993). Grundtvig’s ideas also circulated throughout Scandinavia and became, for example, a source of inspiration for the founding of girls’ schools in the mid-nineteenth century (Linné 2010: 138). Anne Marie Petersen soon developed the idea of establishing a girls’ school outside the institutional framework of the DMS along the lines of Grundtvig’s ideas (Reddy and Terp 2006: 228). In 1916 she obtained DMS authorization to visit several schools throughout India and work out a plan for her school. Esther Faering, a missionary colleague, accompanied her. On their study tour they also stayed in Gandhi’s Sabermati Ashram in Ahmedabad in 1917 to observe its small school (ibid.: 228). Petersen found Gandhi’s views on education to be in harmony with those of Grundtvig and from then onwards corresponded with him. They developed a friendship, and in 1920 Gandhi even wrote in a letter to Esther Faering that ‘Anne Marie . . . [and] I have fallen in love with each other’ (Gandhi 2000, vol. 21: 229). This probably points more to a friendship than a love relationship, but the letters between Petersen and Gandhi nonetheless show her deep admiration for him: she sent him self-spun cotton and worried about his health. Only later does a conflict seem to have developed about the Kasturba Memorial Trust’s funding of Petersen’s school; in that context Gandhi called her ‘foolish’ (Reddy and Terp 2006: 258). In a 1917 report to the DMS, Petersen wrote that she preferred schools that taught in the mother tongue and emphasized the history and culture of India to schools that taught in English, which in her opinion alienated children. Her idea, inspired by the thought of Grundtvig and Gandhi, was to open a Christian girls’ school combining academic and practical subjects. During a trip to Denmark in 1919, she found financial support to realize her plan. Then in 1920 she resigned from the DMS, unable to accept that

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the missionary society rejected a proposal for equality between Danish and Indian missionaries. She experienced further political pressure when asked to sign a pledge of loyalty to the colonial government: she refused, declaring that ‘as a Christian she would collaborate with everything good and promote loyalty to God and not to kingdoms of the world’ (ibid.: 230). As a consequence she was subjected to restrictions under the Foreigners’ Registration Act. Petersen identified strongly with the Indian struggle for independence and, inspired by the Non-Cooperation Movement, started to spin, wore selfspun clothes and used products made in India, following the ideas of economic independence and Swadeshi. After listening to a speech by Gandhi in Vellore in 1920, she wrote to him: ‘I have thrown myself at the feet of India’ (ibid.: 236). In the same letter she also wrote of her views on the future of education in India: India and we who love her have come to the conclusion that the education the foreign Government has given you is not healthy for India and can certainly never make for her real growth. . . . Only by indigenous education can India be truly uplifted. Why this appeals so much to me is perhaps because I belong to the part of the Danish people who just started their own independent, indigenous national schools. The Danish Free Schools and Folk-High Schools, of which you may have heard, were started against the opposition and persecution of the State. The organisers won and thus have regenerated the nation. (ibid.: 239)

Here Petersen directly links the development of folk high schools as ‘indigenous national schools’ in Denmark and the situation in India. Gandhi published her letter, which he titled ‘A Missionary on Non-Cooperation’, in his journal Young India in 1920, showing thereby that the Non-Cooperation Movement ‘is neither anti-Christian nor anti-English nor anti-European’ (ibid.: 236). In 1921, Petersen founded the Seva Mandir17 and the National Christian Girls’ School at Porto Novo, south of Madras, financed by donations from Denmark. She adopted the Wardha Scheme curriculum in 1937 and implemented spinning as part of the school’s programme. She supported the Gandhian movement, and during the civil disobedience movement of 1930 she gave refuge to families of imprisoned volunteers. After independence her school was recognized by the state and she obtained the right of residence in India (ibid.: 239). The other European woman inspired by Nai Talim was Marjorie Sykes (1905–93), an English teacher from Yorkshire, who came to India at the age of twenty-three through a volunteer programme to teach at the Bentick School for Girls, run by the London Missionary Society in Madras in 1928.

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She lived in India for most of her life, teaching first in Shantiniketan and later in Sevagram. She documented her work on implementing Nai Talim in several writings (Sykes 1950, 1954, 1988; Narulkar and Sykes 1951). Information about her experiences in India also appears in her biography (Dart 1993) and in interviews (A. Gandhi 1969; Rühe 1991). After her arrival in Madras in 1928, Sykes became interested in the Indian independence movement and the education ideas of Gandhi and Tagore, and met Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, a key figure in the Gandhian movement in South India. She also joined the Quaker community in Madras (Dart 1993: 27). After the implementation of the communal electoral system in 1935, suspicion arose that religious institutions were striving for conversions to increase their voting strength, Sykes became more and more unhappy with the atmosphere at the Bentick School (Rühe 1991). She started to look for new places to work, and upon being told by H.G. Wood, an English Quaker who had recently visited Tagore, that a ‘representative of English culture’ was sought in Shantiniketan, she accepted the invitation. En route in 1938, she visited Gandhi’s ashram in Sevagram for three days to see the experimental school that had just started there. In Shantiniketan, Sykes taught at the school and university level and became increasingly interested in village teacher training. In contrast to Anne Marie Petersen, Sykes did not develop a close personal relationship with Gandhi. She did, however, keep track of developments around Nai Talim through her personal networks and her work in Shantiniketan. In interviews and writings she reported on the close connections between Sevagram and Shantiniketan, especially regarding the exchange of teachers. For example, Deviprasad, a student from the arts faculty in Shantiniketan, was appointed as a staff member for artwork in Sevagram. Together with Sykes, he later edited the journal Nayee Talim, published by the HTS (Gandhi 2000, vol. 85: 448). Sykes also undertook several visits to Sevagram. Sykes was a strong supporter of Gandhi’s ideas about Nai Talim from the moment she first encountered them in 1937. She was convinced that education was a tool for teaching children how to live in rural self-sufficiency. Between 1949 and 1959 she worked at the Nai Talim institutions in Sevagram, which by 1949 had been running for about ten years. Gandhi died shortly before her arrival, so they never worked together, but this did not restrict her full engagement in the further development of Nai Talim. She directed the teacher training section, supported experiments in adult education, organized conferences and advised experimental schools throughout India. In a letter to friends, she described the pedagogical approach of Nai Talim and what the teachers would say to their students:

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Grow your food, pick your cotton, spin yarn and weave your clothes, cook your meals, plan and care for your own sanitary system, keep your surroundings clean and hygienic and your buildings in repair. Tackle each of these jobs as intelligently and scientifically as you can; find out what sort of knowledge and skill you need to do it efficiently, and find out how you can get it. When you have re-educated yourself in real knowledge by these means, you will be ready to do your bit in the education of the nation. (Cited in Dart 1993: 54)

This quote shows Sykes’ strong belief in the ideas of Nai Talim. She even called the described approach to education ‘real education’. She characterized teachers as helpers and students as active agents expected to take the lead in finding out how to solve problems in the education process. In the same letter she wrote that through this kind of education, students ‘do learn perhaps to measure worth and knowledge by a new, realistic standard’ (ibid.: 55). Sykes described their work in Sevagram establishing self-sufficient educational institutions as very hard and always requiring more people to help. She did, however, retain a firm belief in Gandhi’s ideas: ‘If you believe, as I do, that Gandhiji was fundamentally right in what he declared to be necessary for human welfare, it is absorbingly interesting and worth-while’ (ibid.: 55). She even saw Nai Talim as a first step towards creating a new, peaceful world order: ‘the fundamentals of a peaceful world can only be reached by living in accordance with true human values and basing society on cooperative and creative work instead of on artificial money values – i.e. by something of which “Nai Talim” in India is one form of expression’ (ibid.: 57).

FINAL COMMENTS If the history of Nai Talim is to be fully understood, several research gaps need attention. As the first part of this chapter shows, the further analysis of primary sources is required to analyse not only the level of education ideas but the implementation process and its outcomes. Furthermore, the perspective of connected histories reveals interesting international connections between Nai Talim actors, who included influential thinkers and policymakers, as well as teachers and practitioners. As the examples of Rabindranath Tagore and Zakir Husain show, the developments around Nai Talim are fruitfully viewed in the context of progressive education discourses. The examples presented in this chapter are only a starting point. The stories of Anne Marie Petersen and Marjorie Sykes point to an area that has not been researched so far: the involvement of European education practitio-

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ners in the implementation processes of Nai Talim, exemplified by these two women’s adoption of Gandhi’s ideas for an independent India and active participation in the movement. These interesting traces point to the importance of opening the perspective beyond Gandhi as the central figure in the conceptualization and implementation of Nai Talim and seeing the education concept as part of a connected history.

REFERENCES Ali, B.S. 1991. Zakir Husain: Life and Time. New Delhi: Vikas. Aryanayakam, E.W. 1950. The Story of Twelve Years. Sevagram and Wardha: Hindustani Talimi Sangh. Bhattacharya, S. 1998. The Contested Terrain: Perspectives on Education in India. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Conrad, S. and S. Randeria (eds). 2002. Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Dart, M. 1993. Marjorie Sykes, Quaker Gandhian. York: Sessions Book Trust in association with Woodbroke College. Das Gupta, U. 1998. ‘Tagore’s Educational Experiments at Santiniketan and Sriniketan 1901–1941’, in S. Bhattacharya (ed.), The Contested Terrain: Perspectives on Education in India. New Delhi: Orient Longman, pp. 265–74. ———. 2008. ‘Tagore’s Ideas of Social Action and the Sriniketan Experiment of Rural Reconstruction, 1922–41’, University of Toronto Quarterly 77(4): 992–1004. Faruqui, Z.H. 1999. Dr. Zakir Hussain: Quest for Truth. New Delhi: APH. Gandhi, A. 1969. ‘Interview: Mrs M. Sykes’. Retrieved 23 February 2011 from http:// karachi.s-asian.cam.ac.uk/archive/audio/sykes.html Gandhi, M.K. 1922. Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Madras: G.A. Natesan. ———. 1953. Towards New Education. Ahmedabad: Navajivan. ———. 1962. Varnashramadharma. Ahmedabad: Navajivan. ———. 2000. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. 98 vols. New Delhi: The Publication Division Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Gov. of India. Retrieved 30 September 2013 from http://www.gandhiserve.org/e/cwmg/cwmg.htm Hindustani Talimi Sangh. 1938. ‘Basic National Education: Syllabus for a Complete Basic School Grades I to VIII’. Sevagram and Wardha. ———. 1939. ‘Basic National Education: Report of the Zakir Husain Committee and Detailed Syllabus with a Foreword by Mahatma Gandhi’. Segaon and Wardha. ———. 1945. ‘Constitution’. Sevagram and Wardha. ———. 1950. ‘Basic National Education: Revised Syllabus for the Training of Teachers for Grades I–V’. Sevagram and Wardha. Kerschensteiner, G. 1912. Begriff der Arbeitsschule. Leipzig: Teubner. Kerschensteiner, G. and P. Gonon 2002. Begriff der Arbeitsschule. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

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Kumar, K. 1991. Political Agenda of Education: A Study of Colonialist and Nationalist Ideas. New Delhi: Sage. Lal, P.C. 1932. Reconstruction and Education in Rural India. London: Allen & Unwin. Lawson, M.D. 1981. ‘The New Education Fellowship: The Formative Years’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 13(2): 24–28. ———. 1993. ‘N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872)’, PROSPECTS: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Educational Theory 23(2/3): 613–23. Linné, A. 2010. ‘Lutheranism and Democracy: Scandinavia’, in J.C. Albisetti, J. Goodman and R. Rogers (eds), Girls’ Secondary Education in the Western World: From the 18th to the 20th Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 133–49. Markovits, C. 2004. The Un-Gandhian Gandhi: The Life and Afterlife of the Mahatma. London: Anthem Press. Mujeeb, M. 1972. Dr. Zakir Husain: A Biography. New Delhi: National Book Trust. Mukherjee, H. and U. Mukherjee 2000. The Origins of the National Education Movement. Calcutta: National Council of Education. Narulkar, S. and M. Sykes 1951. A Picture and Programme of Adult Education. Sevagram, Wardha: Hindustani Talimi Sangh. Oesterheld, J. 2001. ‘Zakir Husain. Begegnungen und Erfahrungen bei der Suche nach moderner Bildung für ein freies Indien’, in P. Heidrich and H. Liebau (eds), Akteure des Wandels. Lebensläufe und Gruppenbilder an Schnittstellen von Kulturen. Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, pp. 105–30. Omvedt, G. 1991. Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial India. New Delhi: Sage. Reddy, E.S. and H. Terp (eds). 2006. Friends of Gandhi: Correspondence of Mahatma Gandhi with Esther Færing (Menon), Anne Marie Petersen and Ellen Hørup. New Delhi, Berlin and Copenhagen: National Gandhi Museum, Gandhi-InformationsZentrum and the Danish Peace Academy. Reese, W.J. 2001. ‘The Origins of Progressive Education’, History of Education Quarterly 41(1): 2–24. Röhrs, H. 1993. ‘Georg Kerschensteiner’, PROSPECTS: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Educational Theory 23(3/4): 807–22. Rühe, P. 1991. ‘Marjorie Sykes: On My Life I & II, Talk with Peter Rühe, Sutton Courtney, Oxfordshire/UK’. Retrieved 10 February 2011 from GandhiServe Foundation. Mahatma Gandhi Research and Media Service: http://gandhiserve .org/e/streams/audio_library.htm Sinclair, M.E. and K. Lillis. 1980. School and Community in the Third World. London: Croom Helm in association with the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex. Solanki, A.B. 1958. The Technique of Correlation in Basic Education. Ahmedabad: Navajivan. Sykes, M. 1950. Basic Education: Its Principles and Practice. Madras: Department of Public Instruction. ———. 1954. A Picture and Programme of Post Basic Education (Adolescent Education in Nai Talim). Sevagram and Wardha: Hindustani Talimi Sangh.

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———. 1988. The Story of Nai Talim: Fifty Years of Education at Sevagram (1937–1987). Sevagram and Wardha: Nai Talim Samiti. Tagore, R. 1996. The English Writings of Rabindranath Tagore. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Trivedi, L. 2007. Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Varkey, C.J. 1939. Wardha Scheme of Education. London: Oxford University Press.

NOTES This chapter is based on the author’s research on the connected history of Nai Talim in the context of the research project ‘Constructing Social Meanings from the Vantage Point of National Self-Determination: Occupation and Education in Peronist Argentina and the Indian Independence Movement’ located at Humboldt University Berlin (SFB 640). This chapter presents first findings from the analysis of primary sources on Nai Talim. The archival research in India was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. I am particularly grateful for the help of Joseph Bara of Jawaharlal Nehru University during my research in India. Special thanks to my colleagues at Humboldt University and Jana Tschurenev for their helpful comments. 1. Wardha is a city located in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. 2. ‘Nai talim’ means ‘new education’ in Hindi. In debates about the implementation of the scheme, the term Basic Education was often used to refer to the education of children aged 7–14 as envisioned in the resolution from the 1937 Wardha Conference. 3. See the title of the book by Bhattacharya (1998). 4. Swadeshi means ‘of one’s own country’ in Hindi. 5. For example, the Bengal Technical Institute was founded in Calcutta in 1906 by the Society for the Promotion of Technical Education. See also H. Mukherjee and U. Mukherjee 2000: 47–68. 6. Swa can be translated from Hindi as own, raj as rule and poorna as total. 7. Gandhi called them ‘harijans’, Hindi for ‘children of God’. Today these communities prefer the word ‘Dalit’ as a more emancipatory term meaning ‘downtrodden, oppressed’ (see, e.g., Omvedt 1991). Dalit communities today still face discrimination based on the idea of untouchability. 8. In his writing Varnashramadharma for example, Gandhi (1962) clearly states that he is not opposed to the caste system. 9. Gandhi translated Ruskin’s essay ‘Unto this Last’ to Gujarati and called it ‘Sarvodaya’, a term Gandhi created for his envisioned new social order. 10. Husain was not alone in critiquing the ideas of Nai Talim; see Varkey 1939: 88–119. 11. The syllabus lists three ‘basic crafts’ that should be taught in basic schools: (1) agriculture, (2) spinning and weaving and (3) cardboard, wood and metal

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13. 14. 15.

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work. The following subjects should be taught in ‘correlation’ to these crafts: mother tongue and Hindustani, mathematics, social studies, general science and drawing. Jamnalal Bajaj had offered land to Gandhi in Segaon, a village close to Wardha. Gandhi renamed it Sevagram, ‘village of service’. He opened an ashram there in 1934 and lived there until his assassination in 1948. In Hindi shanti means peace and niketan, abode. For further information see Lal 1932 and das Gupta 2008. Original text in German: ‘90 Prozent aller Knaben und Mädchen ziehen trotz unserer Bucherziehung jede praktische Beschäftigung bei Weitem dem stillen abstrakten Denken und Reflektieren vor . . . In Werkstatt und Küche, im Garten und auf dem Felde, im Stall und am Fischerboote sind sie stets zur Arbeit bereit. Hier ist ihr ausgiebigstes Lernfeld.’ Gandhi was invited to visit Denmark several times but was always too busy to accept the invitations (Reddy and Terp 2006). In Hindi seva means service and mandir temple.

Chapter 8

Colonial Education and Saami Resistance in Early Modern Sweden Daniel Lindmark

Y ‘Why do people find it so difficult to accept Sweden’s colonial past?’ Rolf Sjöström (1999: 53) asks in an article about the Swedish slave trade in the Caribbean. His own answer suggests that such a process would force the mental preconditions for slavery up to the surface. In any case, it is safe to assume that we Swedes do not like to be reminded of the grading of peoples and cultures that is indeed part of our heritage. Such a colonial world view would be an all-too-blunt challenge to our image of Sweden as a stronghold of freedom, justice and humanity. Maintaining this self-image has required relegating inconvenient elements to the junkyard of history, a whitewashing of the past that includes the perception that Sweden never acted like a colonial power. The foreign colonies Sweden possessed have probably been considered far too marginal or atypical for Sweden to be assigned to the same category as ‘actual’ colonial powers like Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and so on.1 These assumptions have even influenced the formulation of academic concepts. In Swedish history writing, the term colonisation2 is used to signify cultivation of land located in Sápmi.3 This pioneering activity resulted from a conscious government policy initiated by the Lapland Bill of 1673. The purpose of ‘colonization’ was twofold: to mine the natural riches of Sápmi and to populate an area to which several different nations still laid claim (the Norwegian border was not permanently established until 1751). However, the pioneering activities were of no particular consequence until the end of the eighteenth century. With the support of the Lapland Regulations of 140

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1749, growing numbers of colonies were established after the Saami failed to convince Swedish authorities that their livelihoods would be endangered (Sörlin 1988; Lundmark 1998). Since kolonisation was specifically defined as cultivation and settlement, the colonial power relationships have been pushed to the background. Instead of discussing the development of Sápmi in terms of Swedish colonialism, Swedish scholars have preferred terms like internal colonisation.4 Apart from sounding uncontroversial – and indeed, on the contrary quite far-sighted – the expression also implicitly perceives Sápmi as a purely Swedish region. But choosing to define Sápmi as a part of the Swedish realm also ignores the possibility of placing Swedish policy in Sápmi in a colonial context, thereby making the development in the Swedish Laplands essentially different from the colonialism practiced by European powers on other continents. On the other hand, apprehending the Swedish presence in Sápmi as an expression of colonialism implies an admission that the relationship between Swedes and Saami has always been asymmetrical. From its dominant position of power, the Swedish government has dictated conditions to the Saami who lived in the region of Sápmi that lay under Swedish jurisdiction. It was in the Swedish government’s interests to control the area, which motivated the expansion of the Church of Sweden in Sápmi and gave education there the purpose of domesticating the Saami. Although few questions have been so thoroughly analysed as educational efforts in Sápmi, previous research has never placed the colonial power relationship at the centre of its analysis (Haller 1896; Nordberg1955; Widén 1964, 1965; Öberg 1983; Anderzén 1992; Henrysson et al. 1993).

COLONIAL AND SAAMI EDUCATION The history of colonialism iterates the importance education had in the hands of the colonizing power, which offered a restricted curriculum to inculcate knowledge, values and attitudes deemed necessary to controlling the colonized.5 Commonly, lessons were limited to elementary skills like reading, writing and arithmetic, sometimes complemented with basic vocational training. Thus the colonized were prepared to enter the labour market equipped with the norms and values essential to a loyal, diligent, conscientious working class. This ethical perspective was transmitted both openly, in textbooks and curricula (moral curricula), and informally, in the very organization of the lessons themselves (hidden curricula). By instilling virtues like order, precision, punctuality and obedience, schoolwork groomed students

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to fulfil the demands of colonial society. Because these norms were usually buttressed with Christianity lessons (religious or evangelical curricula), colonial education and religious education were more or less identical. Even when the content and organization of education resembled that offered in the European metropolises from whence it came, the colonial context lent it its distinctive character. By advancing the colonial power’s demands for obedience and efficiency, education helped lay the groundwork for political dominance and economic exploitation. The roots of colonial education of the Saami stretch as far back as the seventeenth century, though the only abiding effort came in the form of the Skyttean School founded in Lycksele in 1632. Only after another hundred years did the Swedish parliament enact a law on an educational programme for Sápmi. The government was appalled at reports that Saami were still conducting shamanistic rites, which it saw as a threat to national stability. According to the orthodox, Lutheran theory of governance, unity in religion was a necessary prerequisite to a functional social order. Pietists also insisted on the need to convert the Saami to Christianity, even though their prime missionary motive was the salvation of the individual soul. Thus in 1723, a parliamentary decree established a boarding school that enrolled six Saami boys in each parish of Lapland. After some delay, classes began in Åsele and Jokkmokk in 1732, and by mid-century schools had opened their doors in all seven parishes. Finances were regulated by government decree in 1729, and in 1735 a curriculum was fixed, the so-called ‘School Instruction’ (Instruction 1987 [1735]; Haller 1896: 148–55). Analysis of the School Instruction quickly reveals similarities to Pietist pedagogy and the system employed by the boarding schools established by August Hermann Francke in Halle. These include the principles of isolation and surveillance; the significance of the teacher as role model; an emphasis on diligence, obedience and compliance as fundamental virtues; a drive towards individual conversion and internalization of desirable norms; the use of persuasion rather than corporal punishment to modify bad behaviour; the fostering of a diligent prayer and devotional life; and the ultimate goal of turning out teachers and missionaries. The School Instruction can also be understood from a colonial perspective. Postcolonial theorist Valentin Yves Mudimbe (1994) studied Catholic seminaries in the Belgian Congo. His observations jibe with educational practice in eighteenth-century Saami schools. The most obvious parallel is the use of isolation as a fundamental strategy. Both the Congolese seminary and the Saami schools comprised their own, separate worlds cut off from undesirable outside influences. These school systems thereby created conditions conducive to indoctrination and acculturation. Authority figures

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enforcing the rules of their isolated environment kept students under constant supervision to effect a radical transformation of the life of the student, merging thought and action with the religious ideology of the school. The principle of placing the students in a position ‘in-between’ the colonizers and the colonized, so that their education and status would elevate the students above the general native population, is also characteristic of the Saami context.

THE VOICE OF THE COLONIZED: SAAMI IDENTITY Although colonized peoples were silenced, the historian can find evidence of articulated resistance. Missionary reports have proven an obliging source in the search for the voice of the colonized. Though often compromised by triumphalist attitudes about the Christian faith and Western civilization, the reports also contain objections expressed by the individuals who were being proselytized. These also appear occasionally in stories about missionary efforts among the Saami. Theophilus Gran served as assistant vicar and schoolmaster in Jokkmokk (1757–68) and later, while serving as vicar in the coastal parish of Piteå, authored a manuscript titled ‘Some Collected Signs and Proof of the Growth of Christianity in Luleå Lapland and the Parish of Jokkmokk’. In 1773, the manuscript was sent to the recently founded Pro Fide et Christianismo, Sweden’s first missionary and tract society. Except for one chapter on the deathbed watch over Elsa Larsdotter, the manuscript remained unpublished until 1999.6 In a chapter on the ‘conversion of a Saami youngster’, Gran recounts his efforts to convert the teenaged Saami Anders during his years as a pupil at the Jokkmokk Saami school in the 1760s, recording a snatch of dialogue between the schoolmaster and his student in which Anders utters his objection to the missionaries: ‘Why shouldn’t we live the way we choose? If there is a life after this, then we’ll find out when we get there’ (Gran 1999: 85). When schoolmaster Gran asked, ‘Do you not think that you are happier than your forefathers, who lived in ignorance and wandered in the darkness?’ Anders replied: ‘Not everyone who can read is happy’ (ibid.: 86). In the end, Anders’s resistance was in vain. While battling a drawn-out illness, he had a frightening vision in which the Devil, clad in traditional Saami garb, came to claim his soul. Anders tried to protect himself by praying to the Christian God and asked the intruder to take his book in his stead, but the offer was dismissed: ‘I can read more than you can.’ Vowing to return, the intruder disappeared head first through the floorboards. According to Gran, when Anders became well again he turned into a pious,

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studious pupil who recognized the divine hand in what had transpired. Despite Anders’s eventual capitulation to the cultural pressure exerted on him at school, his resistance to missionary zeal is duly documented in Gran’s report. Another perspective on Saami resistance to colonization differs uniquely in that the Saami themselves formulated the story in writing, in the form of a petition filed by Olof Sjulsson and the Vapsten Saami to His Royal Majesty the King, asking permission to use their traditional sacred drum as a compass when travelling in the mountains. Little is known about Olof Sjulsson. He hailed from the Saami community of Vapsten in Umeå Lapland and was a pupil at the Skyttean School in Lycksele until 1676, after which he attended classes for a year in Umeå and several more in Härnösand. Though he never took church vows, he reached a prominent position in the local community and had been promoted to county sheriff by the time he wrote to the king. In 1671, the fifteen-year-old Sjulsson experienced a vision that is documented in Nicolaus Lundius’s Descriptio Lapponiæ (1905).7 During the schoolmaster’s absence, according to fellow pupil and eyewitness Lundius, Sjulsson began to ‘rage both day and night as if the Devil spoke to him’. When Lundius asked him what the Devil looked like, Sjulsson replied that ‘he was like a priest [and] had a long overcoat’. In his account, Lundius noted that ‘the Devil urged him to burn up books’ and witnessed how Sjulsson threw his book under the bench when he came upon the name ‘Jesus’ in his reading. Olof Sjulsson’s visionary experiences (which also included apparitions of elves and a dog) can be interpreted in various ways. They can be seen as expressions of a violent identity crisis in the conflict between traditional, oral Saami culture and the Western, Christian book culture he encountered at school. Lundius mentions nothing about Sjulsson’s eventual conversion to the Christian faith, but later events prove that as an adult, he rose to the defence of Saami culture. Space here does not permit detailed comparison of Sjulsson’s vision in Lycksele with the one Anders had in Jokkmokk almost a hundred years later, but they do exhibit similarities.8 Both occured in a teaching environment and palpably embodied the crisis of Saami youth caught between the same two identities. Both feature a book charged with meaning, a symbol of Western culture and Christian faith. The Devil appears in both visions as well, dressed in traditional Saami clothing in Anders’s vision, leading him to embrace Christianity, but wearing a priest’s collar in Sjulsson’s vision, an indication of the true source of evil for the latter. To this day, identity is still a painful, conflict-ridden subject for Saami youth. Ethnologist Christina Åhrén defended her thesis Är jag en riktig same?

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(‘Am I a Real Saami?’) in 2008. Aided by interviews and observation, Åhrén examined the identity work of young Saami from various backgrounds. She presented her material in the form of life stories that clearly demonstrate how difficult it is for Saami youth to find their own identity among so many different kinds of ‘Saaminess’ and ‘Swedishness’. The borderlines often proved sharply drawn, and the obstacles were sometimes impossible to overcome. Thus the experiences of Olof Sjulsson at the Skyttean School back in 1671 can be seen as an early and illustrative example of an existential condition that is still in effect.

PETITION TO BE TRANSFERRED TO ÅSELE LAPLAND The backstory to Sjulsson’s drum petition was the so-called witchcraft trials that took place in the Västerbotten Laplands. After repeated reports of putative idolatry, which included mention of the use of the traditional Saami drum, Bishop Matthias Steuchius of Härnösand Diocese and Hans Abraham Kruse, county governor of Västerbotten County, decided to personally visit the regional Saami parishes.9 The trip was undertaken in early 1688, its itinerary restricted to Umeå and Luleå Laplands due to illness and poor snow conditions. Inhabitants of Umeå Lapland were called to assemble before the commission at the district court of Lycksele, and the Saami of Vapsten were interrogated on 9 February. The minutes refer to them as ‘utterly obstinate’.10 Finally, having managed to persuade several of them to identify who used the drum, the commission was able to coax them to confess and do penitence. The subsequent test of catechetical knowledge served as proof that of all the Saami in Umeå Lapland, the Saami of Vapsten possessed the feeblest knowledge of the tenets of Christianity. Only County Sheriff Olof Sjulsson could read, but he made himself scarce since he had been ‘found with Drum’ (ENA 43: 191). To remedy the situation, the youngest members of the Vapsten community were ordered to attend school. But whereas the commission may have managed to quell the protests of the parents, it could not stop presumptive pupils from fleeing to Norway in the dark of night. Olof Sjulsson had written directly to the king on 26 March 1687, proposing several changes in Vapsten. The letter has been lost, but its main arguments are known via a number of other writs concerning the matter. One item proposed administrative gerrymandering so that Vapsten would no longer belong to Lycksele congregation but rather Åsele in Anundsjö parish, on the pretext that the Saami of Vapsten lived closer to the latter church. In response, the king entrusted County Governor Kruse and Bishop

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Steuchius with the task of ensuring that the Saami of Vapsten ‘may attend the church which lies closest to them’ and not have to travel all the way to Lycksele (ibid.: 237–38). Before the county governor answered the royal letter, he sought the counsel of experts in the matter. Bailiff Aegidius Otto reported that Sjulsson had manufactured ‘a great untruth’ (ibid.: 241). In Otto’s estimation, the Vapsten Saami were nearly twice as far from Åsele as they were from Lycksele. Vicar of Lycksele Olaus Stephani Graan and District Court Judge Lars Grubb also affirmed that Olof Sjulsson’s community of Northern Vapsten was in fact located much closer to Lycksele than to Åsele (ibid.: 243, 247). Grubb suspected that Sjulsson’s desire for a change of venue had nothing to do with distance but rather indicated his wish to avoid the witchcraft trials taking place in Västerbotten. As no such process had been undertaken in the province of Västernorrland,11 to which Åsele belonged,12 Grubb suspected that Sjulsson and the Saami of Vapsten were fleeing the possibility of indictment in Åsele for their ‘increasingly savage perpetuation of idolatry and superstition’ (ibid.: 243–44). Bishop Steuchius concurred with Grubb in his reply to the king. Sjulsson’s request was nothing more than an attempt to ‘avoid inquisition into his well-known sinful ways’ (ibid.: 253). Since attempting to escape justice flew in the face of the king’s intentions, Steuchius had no choice but to deny the request. When the king finally reaffirmed the prevailing order of things in a letter of 23 May 1688 to the country governor and the bishop, his reason was not just that the transfer to Åsele lacked merit but that its objective was un-Christian (ibid.: 254–55).

OLOF SJULSSON’S REQUEST TO BE APPOINTED TEACHER FOR THE SAAMI OF VAPSTEN None of the remaining items in Sjulsson’s petition were addressed, though two of them came to be intimately associated with the suspected underlying purpose of his request to join the Åsele congregation. The authorities saw both Sjulsson’s desire to be put in charge of the educational system in Vapsten and his request to be allowed to use his drum as a compass as attempts to evade Christian influence. The authorities never questioned Sjulsson’s formal teaching qualifications, which in fact were confirmed in testimonies about his extensive education, sent under the same cover as Kruse’s letter. Instead, Vicar Graan zeroed in on his suitability for the job. Sjulsson had asked to conduct services for the Saami of Vapsten and give them lessons in Christianity, so that the children would no longer need to attend school in Lycksele. He had

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also expressed interest in sparing the children ‘the unusual fare’ served in the Skyttean school (ibid.: 243). Graan admitted that the desire to spread the Word of God was a ‘divine act’ completely in sync with the Skyttean school’s aim of inducing former students to serve as teachers in their respective communities (ibid.: 247). However, up to now Sjulsson had never shown the slightest interest. To the contrary, Graan stated, Sjulsson had not even proven himself capable of running his own household properly: ‘When I asked him three years ago why he had not made more of an effort to teach his own wife, I was met with derision and indecent gestures’ (ibid.: 247). This and similar experiences made Graan fear that the Saami of Vapsten, who as it stood rarely attended church services, would abandon the church and its teachings entirely if Sjulsson became their schoolmaster. District Court Judge Grubb too expressed his doubts, concerned that Olof Sjulsson would ‘instruct innocent children in how to play the drum and other idolatrous superstitions, rather than teach them their Christian verses’ (ibid.: 243). Bailiff Otto shared the opinion of Grubb and Graan on the consequences of appointing Sjulsson to the job: ‘[S]hould that devil be made schoolmaster, few will come to church’ (ibid.: 241).

OLOF SJULSSON’S REQUEST TO USE HIS DRUM AS A COMPASS Local and regional authorities saw Olof Sjulsson’s request to be allowed to continue using his drum as an instrument of orientation in the high mountain ranges as the height of audacity. Bailiff Otto stated that in his forty-four years in Lapland, he had never heard the Saami refer to their drums as guides or compasses, and that they used them exclusively to predict their hunting and fishing luck. Vicar Graan developed an even sharper scepticism towards the drum’s supposed ability to show the way back to camp. According to him, this was nothing less than a ‘shocking and idolatrous request’ that the well-educated Sjulsson should have had enough sense to forgo, setting a good example for the Vapsten Saami instead (ibid.: 246). Graan rejected the idea that the drum could function as a compass, noting that it lacked magnetization and only moved when ‘the sorcerer and its superstitious worshippers, through the machinations of satan and idolatrous superstition, make it show him either good or evil’ (ibid.: 246). Had the drum not been a tool of idolatry but a truly functioning instrument of navigation, then ships at sea would have begun using it long ago. Aided by this fantastic instrument, sailors would always know their exact position and dock safely in their harbours, day or night. Graan concluded his sarcastic effusions by stating that ‘such tools of

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Satan’ were of no service to Christians, ‘but only to sorcerers and idolators who have learned this art from one another’ (ibid.: 246). District Court Judge Grubb also used strong language to condemn the continued use of the drum. The petition was shameful, an expression of ‘madness and false belief’ (ibid.: 243). In his estimation, the Saami wanted to ‘continue in their heathen blindness and superstition’, which in itself qualified as high treason (ibid.: 242). Grubb stated that Sjulsson, who had attended school for so many years at the pleasure of the Crown, ought to have set a good example for his less educated brethren by his teachings and living. Since the obdurate Sjulsson should have known better, he ‘should be punished as a warning to the others’ (ibid.: 242). Only then would the Saami who had gone astray be freed from the shackles of the Devil. In similar terms, Vicar Graan urged that ‘this satanic art be abolished’ (ibid.: 249). Only then could the clergy liberate and rehabilitate the misguided members of the flock.

THE AUTHORITIES’ REACTION TO OLOF SJULSSON’S PETITION The supplementary testimony described above, enclosed in County Governor Kruse’s reply to the king, cast aspersions on Olof Sjulsson’s character and intent in no uncertain words. According to Otto, ‘Olof Sjulsson is a grand mythmaker, [who] makes the Laplanders obstinate. . . . He is a crook and ought not escape punishment’ (ibid.: 241). Similar indignant statements feature in all of the included testimonies. In his report to the king, Kruse declared Sjulsson ‘the most angry’ of all the Saami in Vapsten, who in turn were the worst in all of Lapland (ibid.: 239). Apparently both the spiritual and the worldly authorities had a hard time coming to grips with ‘this barbaric people . . . for no one can imagine how wicked they are’ (ibid.: 240). This coordinated attack on the character of Olof Sjulsson was apparently motivated by the opinion that his petition to the king was a barefaced provocation. The impudence of applying for something contrary to the wishes the king had expressed in countless resolutions implied that Sjulsson had committed high treason. There were no mitigating circumstances; he had spent many a year studying at the expense of the king himself in Lycksele, Umeå and Härnösand. Having acted despite knowing better, he was therefore considered callous and hardened. He had taken advantage of the trust represented by long-term financial support and failed to use his acquired knowledge responsibly. Instead, he had led his unlearned brethren astray and undermined both the spiritual and worldly power of the authorities. The petition’s presentation in the midst of a trial involving both eccle-

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siastical and civil authorities also likely contributed to the violent reactions, as did the alarming fact that the king had initially accepted Sjulsson’s disingenuous arguments about the distance the Saami were forced to travel to church. Sjulsson was perceived as a threat to the extermination of what the authorities regarded as idolatrous witchcraft at large in Sápmi. The authorities’ indignation was certainly also founded in the Saami’s counterattack, which defended their religion and culture with weapons that until then only the Swedes had mastered. With the aid of the written word, Sjulsson could appeal directly to the Royal Court, whose knowledge of the actual state of affairs was strictly limited. The fact that County Governor Kruse’s reply relied so heavily on supplementary testimony from expert regional authorities reveals the fundamental gravity of the offense. Kruse backed up the local authorities’ expertise by stating categorically that ‘no one can imagine how wicked they [the Saami] are without having been among them and dealt with them’ (ibid.: 240). The Swedish authorities directly responsible for Sápmi apparently saw quick, effective closure of the channel that had opened between the Saami and the king as a matter of the utmost importance. The Saami lacked all credibility in this and all other instances; only the Swedish parties concerned possessed reliable information. This was the message the county governor sent to the authorities in Stockholm, and the final verdict of the king was proof that his message had hit home.

THE VOICE OF THE COLONIZED AND THE LEGACY OF COLONIAL EDUCATION Olof Sjulsson’s attempt to defend his cultural heritage was a unique event in seventeenth-century Saami history. Even when the perspective is broadened to include the entirety of European colonial history, examples of verbal resistance on behalf of the colonized are few, especially ones formulated on paper by the latter themselves. The stories of Olof Sjulsson in Lycksele and Anders the ‘Saami youngster’ in Jokkmokk highlight the role of education as a tool serving the church and the government’s cultural influence on the Saami. Isolated from their native culture and under constant supervision, Saami children were exposed to intensive acculturation during their years at boarding school. At the same time, the school offered skills that at least occasionally were used to defend Saami culture. By learning to write, Saami youth acquired the ability to formulate their thoughts and make their opinions known. Nearly all the pioneers of the Saami political movement that arose in the first decades of

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the twentieth century had been pupils at the schools of the Swedish Missionary Society. Similarly, the first generation of political leaders to decolonize Africa had been educated at Western missionary facilities.13 Though Sjulsson’s defense of Saami culture was unique in its time, he stands at the head of a long line of political activists who became able to formulate their standpoints in writing thanks to the government’s educational programme. In Sjulsson’s day, no one wanted to hear his request to use his drum as a compass. Today, the Saami still have a hard time making their claims to land and water heard. The basic characteristics of the Saami school system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries left a lasting imprint on Swedish educational practices in Sápmi with regard to both the limited scope of the lessons themselves and their religious coloration. In the terminology of international curricula, the historical Swedish Saami education can be characterized as having a curriculum that was both restricted and evangelical. Consequently, Swedish Saami education exhibits the same traits usually associated with the colonial curriculum. Meanwhile, the very fact that education in Sápmi so thoroughly reflected Swedish actors’ official and individual views as to what comprised an appropriate Saami education is sufficient evidence of the powerful influence of the colonial legacy. The ideologies motivating educational initiatives in Sápmi have changed over time. The Pietist missionary ideology of the eighteenth century was followed in the next century by the Swedish Missionary Society, which founded numerous missionary schools in Sápmi. The teaching in these schools was restricted to reading and Christianity, eventually expanding to include writing and arithmetic in order to reach what was considered the minimum level of public schooling. For the Saami, the introduction of the public school system brought lessons that were more or less equivalent to the minimum course of an ordinary Swedish elementary school. Thus the practice of restricted education that had been initiated in the Early Modern Period was now complete. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the view of the Saami came under the sway of theories of cultural levels and racial hygiene. The nomad school reform introduced in 1913 was clearly influenced by ideas of the inferiority of the race and culture of the Saami (Eriksson 1992; Henrysson 1993; Pusch 1998; Karlsson 2000). Only by being held at its proper level of evolution could Saami culture ever have a chance to survive. This goal could only be achieved if the Saami were segregated from the civilized lifestyle of society at large. The school system therefore accommodated the reindeer-herding Mountain Saami’s nomadic lifestyle as far as possible, and the schools took

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the form of both mobile and permanent Saami cots. Since the purpose of the nomad schools was to preserve the Saami at their cultural level, the contents of the lessons were both restricted and tailored to what was considered the particular needs of the Saami. Not until after the Second World War were the nomad schools replaced by new forms of education. The concentration on the living conditions of the Mountain Saami was in line with the government’s comprehensive Saami policy at the outset of the twentieth century. With the nomadic life of the Mountain Saami taken as the only model, there emerged a constructed image of the ‘correct’ and legitimate kind of Saami, to which legislation on the minority rights of reindeer pasturing was bound (Mörkenstam 1999; Amft 2000). All other Saami were to be assimilated into the Swedish majority population. The modern state demanded clear, unambiguous categories, and Saami culture had to be redefined to fit that need. Whether aimed at acculturation or segregation, Swedish educational policy in Sápmi has been dictated by Sweden’s interest in domesticating a colonized populace. This is the colonial legacy in the history of Saami education. The Swedish state’s self-assigned right to define what the Saami are and ought to be is a feature that fuses educational policy with Saami policy in general. At the same time, this power to define ‘Saaminess’ and transform Saami identity continues a fundamentally colonial relationship with roots in the previous centuries’ missionary and educational efforts in Sápmi.

REFERENCES Åhrén, C. 2008. Är jag en riktig same? En etnologisk studie av unga samers identitetsarbete. Umeå: Umeå University. Amft, A. 2000. Sápmi i förändringens tid: En studie av svenska samers levnadsvillkor under 1900-talet ur ett genus- och etnicitetsperspektiv. Umeå: Umeå University. Anderzén, S. 1992. ‘Begrepp om salighetens grund, ordning och medel’: Undervisningen i en Lappmarksförsamling: Jukkasjärvi församling 1744–1820. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Arell, N. 1977. Rennomadismen i Torne lappmark – markanvändning under kolonisationsepoken i fr.a. Enontekis socken. Umeå: Kungl. Skyttenska Samfundet. Calvert, P. 2001. ‘Internal Colonisation, Development and Environment’, Third World Quarterly 22(1): 51–63. Elenius, L. 2010. ‘Memory Politics and the Use of History: Finnish-Speaking Minorities at the North Calotte’, in M. Pakier and B. Stråth (eds), A European Memory? Contested Histories and Politics of Remembrance. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 294–307.

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Eriksson, N. 1992. Sameskolor inom Åsele lappmark. Umeå: Research Archives. Forsgren, T. 2000. ‘Language and Colonialism: Two Aspects’, in D. Lindmark (ed.), Education and Colonialism: Swedish Schooling Projects in Colonial Areas, 1638–1878. Umeå: Umeå University, pp. 87–121. Fur, G. 1999a. ‘Svar på tal: Indianer bemöter europeisk kolonisation’, in C. Angelfors et al. (eds), Universitet 2000. Växjö: Växjö University, pp. 20–28. ———. 1999b. ‘Ädla vildar, grymma barbarer och postmoderna historier’, Historisk tidskrift 119(4): 637–53. ———. 2000. ‘Monument, minnen och maskerader – eller vem tillhör historien?’, in P. Aronsson (ed.), Makten över minnet: Historiekultur i förändring. Lund: Studentlitteratur, pp. 34–49. ———. 2006. Colonialism in the Margins: Cultural Encounters in New Sweden and Lapland. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2009. A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters among the Delaware Indians. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gran, T. 1999. ‘Några samlade teckn och bewis på Christendomens tilwäxt uti Luleå Lappmarck och Jockmocks Församling’, in D. Lindmark (ed.), Berättelser från Jokkmokk: En kommenterad utgåva av två 1700-talsmanuskript till belysning av lappmarkens kristianisering och Pro Fides äldsta historia. Stockholm: Pro Fide et Christianismo, pp. 39–114. Haller, E. 1896. Svenska kyrkans mission i Lappmarken under frihetstiden. Stockholm: Nya Tryckeri-Aktiebolaget. Hechter, M. 1999. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in National Development. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Henrysson, S. 1993. Darwin, ras och nomadskola: Motiv till kåtaskolreformen. Umeå: Research Archives. Henrysson, S. et al. 1993. Samer, präster och skolmästare: Ett kulturellt perspektiv på samernas och Övre Norrlands historia. Umeå: Umeå University. Hodacs, H. 2003. Converging World Views: The European Expansion and Early-nineteenthcentury Anglo-Swedish Contacts. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Instruction 1735. ‘Instruction för Inspectorer och Schol-Mästarena i Lappmarken samt Scholæ-Piltarne dersammastädes.’ In D. Lindmark (ed.). 1987. 1812 års uppfostringskommittés enkät: Svaren från lappmarksförsamlingarna. Umeå: Research Archives, pp. 8–14. Karlsson, C. 2000. Vetenskap som politik: K.B. Wiklund, staten och samerna under 1900talets första hälft. Umeå: Research Archives. Lindmark, D. (ed.) 1987. 1812 års uppfostringskommittés enkät: Svaren från lappmarksförsamlingarna. Umeå University: Research Archives. ———. 2000. Education and Colonialism: Swedish Schooling Projects in Colonial Areas, 1638– 1878. Umeå: Umeå University. ———. 2006a. En lappdrängs omvändelse: Svenskar i möte med samer och deras religion på 1600- och 1700-talen. Umeå: Umeå University. ———. 2006b. ‘Pietism and Colonialism: Swedish Schooling in 18th-Century Sápmi’, Acta Borealia: A Nordic Journal of Circumpolar Society 23(2): 116–29.

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———. 2010. ‘När samerna ville använda trumman som kompass: Om samiskt motstånd mot kolonisationen’, Saga och Sed: Kungl. Gustav Adolf Akademiens Årsbok 2010: 95–104. ———. (ed.). 1999. Berättelser från Jokkmokk: En kommenterad utgåva av två 1700-talsmanuskript till belysning av lappmarkens kristianisering och Pro Fides äldsta historia. Stockholm: Pro Fide et Christianismo. Lönneborg, O. 1999. Mwalimu och Ujamaa: Julius Karambage Nyerere och nationsbildningen i Tanzania. Umeå: Umeå University. Lundius, N. 1905. Nicolai Lundii Lappi Descriptio Lapponiæ. Uppsala. Lundmark, L. 1998. Så länge vi har marker: Samerna och staten under sexhundra år. Stockholm: Rabén Prisma. Mörkenstam, U. 1999. Om ‘Lapparnes privilegier’: Föreställningar om samiskhet i svensk samepolitik 1883–1997. Stockholm: Stockholm University. Mudimbe, V.Y. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nordberg, E. 1955. Arjeplogs lappskola. Stockholm: Föreningen för svensk undervisningshistoria. Öberg, I. 1983. Mission och evangelisation i Gellivare-bygden ca 1740–1770. Turku: Åbo Akademi University. Pusch, S. 1998. ‘Nationalismen och kåtaskolan: Remissvaren till O. Bergqvists Förslag till kåtaskolreformen 1909–1912’, in P. Sköld and K. Kram (eds), Kulturkonfrontation i Lappmarken: Sex essäer om mötet mellan samer och svenskar. Umeå: Umeå University, pp. 95–136. Sebro, L. 2010. Mellem afrikaner og kreol: Etnisk identitet og social navigation i Dansk Vestindien 1730–1770. Lund: Lund University. Sjöström, R. 1999. ‘“En nödvändig omständighet”: Om svensk slavhandel i Karibien’, in R. Granqvist (ed.), Svenska överord: En bok om gränslöshet och begränsningar. Stockholm: Brutus Östlings, pp. 41–57. ———. 2000. ‘The Swedish Model? Education in Saint-Barthélemy during the Nineteenth Century’, in D. Lindmark (ed.), Education and Colonialism: Swedish Schooling Projects in Colonial Areas, 1638–1878. Umeå: Umeå University, pp. 123–67. Sörlin, S. 1988. Framtidslandet: Debatten om Norrland och naturresurserna under det industriella genombrottet. Umeå: Kungl. Skytteanska Samfundet. Trenter, C. 2000. ‘“And Now – Imagine She’s White” – postkolonial historieskrivning’, in P. Aronsson (ed.), Makten över minnet: Historiekultur i förändring. Lund: Studentlitteratur, pp. 50–62. Widén, B. 1964. Kristendomsundervisning och nomadliv: Studier i den kyrkliga verksamheten i Lappmarkerna 1740–1809. Turku: Åbo Akademi University. ———. 1965. Kateketinstitutionen i Sveriges och Finlands lappmarker 1744–1820. Turku: Åbo Akademi University.

NOTES A shorter, Swedish version of this chapter can be found in Lindmark (2010).

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1. Gunlög Fur (1999b) has discussed the lack of a colonial perspective in Swedish historiography. One of several indications of this is the way Saami and Native Americans are excluded from accounts produced within the discipline of history. For examples of postcolonial theory in Swedish historical research, see Fur 1999a; 1999b; 2000; 2006; 2009; Trenter 2000; Hodacs 2003; Sebro 2010. 2. On the Swedish term kolonisation see, e.g., Arell 1977 and Forsgren 2000. 3. In this chapter, the Saami term Sápmi refers to the entire Saami area in northern Fennoscandia, some of which was administered by the state of Sweden. In the Early Modern period, the part of Sápmi under Swedish sovereignty was referred to as Lapland (Sw. Lappland) or the Laplands (Sw. lappmarkerna). To refer to Saami districts and communities in the Early Modern Period, this chapter uses contemporary terminology, such as Umeå Lapland and Luleå Lapland (Sw. Ume lappmark, Lule lappmark), i.e., the part of Sápmi belonging to the medieval parishes of Umeå and Luleå, respectively, both of which held large areas ranging from the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia up to the mountains. In 1673, when the Saami area belonging to Umeå parish separated to become the independent parish of Lycksele, the old term Umeå Lapland continued to be used. Several Saami communities lived in Umeå Lapland, including the Vapsten community. The parish of Jokkmokk in Luleå Lapland separated from Luleå Parish in 1694. 4. On the origins of this term in the Swedish context, see Sörlin (1988: 198–200). Various meanings of the English counterpart are discussed in Calvert (2001), including Michael Hechter’s dependency theory. However, referring to Hechter (1999), Lars Elenius (2010: 296–97) has applied the term internal colonialism to dealings with the national minorities of Scandinavia, thereby acknowledging the colonial power relationship between the state of Sweden and the Saami and Finnish minorities of Northern Sweden. 5. This section summarizes the main results of Lindmark (2006b). On Swedish colonial education, see Lindmark (2000); on colonial education from a curriculum perspective, see esp. Sjöström (2000), where the colonial curriculum is discussed in relation to hidden and evangelical curricula. 6. An annotated edition of the entire manuscript as well as a comprehensive account of its origin can be found in Lindmark (1999). 7. On the dating of the episode, see Lindmark (2006a: 212–14), which argues that the student Olaus is probably the same person as the later County Sheriff Olof Sjulsson. 8. Anders’s and Olaus’s visions have been analysed together with two other Saami visions in Lindmark (2006a: 209–45). 9. The background of the visitation is related in some detail in Lindmark (2006a: 44–60). Formally, Steuchius held the title of superintendent. In 1772 the head of the northernmost diocese received the title biskop (bishop). 10. Erik Nordberg Archives, vol. 43, p. 191 (hereafter cited as ENA 43: 191, etc.), in the Research Archives, Umeå University, Sweden.

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11. Västernorrland County was created in 1654 by merging Härnösand County (encompassing the provinces of Jämtland, Medelpad and Ångermanland) and Hudiksvall County (consisting of the provinces of Hälsingland, Gästrikland and Härjedalen), two counties that had been established ten years earlier. In 1762 the new county was divided into Västernorrland County and Gävleborg County. 12. In 1648, Åsele Lapland (the present-day Dorotea, Vilhelmina and Åsele municipalities) were separated from Ångermanna Lapland to become an independent parish with its own chapel. Originally belonging to Västernorrland County, in 1694 Åsele Lapland was transferred to Västerbotten County. 13. On Julius Nyerere’s way to becoming a ‘black European’, see Lönneborg (1999: 43–65).

Chapter 9

Constructive Orientalism Debates on Languages and Educational Policies in Colonial India, 1830–1880 Hakim Ikhlef

Y In British India, philological scholarship held a central position among the different types of knowledge the colonial state utilized to maintain its power. In fact, Bernard S. Cohn (1996) convincingly argued that knowledge of language was essential for the British, as it allowed them to gain access to, and process information about, Indian society and cultures. Looking at the same issue from a different perspective, Michael S. Dodson argued that ‘the work of translation into English can be seen to operate in colonial contexts to construct European authority, whether that authority be of an eminently practical kind for the extension of the structures of rule, or as a cultural authority for the effective representation of the colonized as somehow “other”’ (Dodson 2007: 1). Historiography of ‘Orientalism’ in India focused almost exclusively on European translations of Indian texts. This was so until scholars such as Christopher A. Bayly began to pay attention to ‘strategies of translation developed principally from European ideas about the status of language within the imperial project of imposing “civilizational advancement” upon the non-West through education’ (Dodson 2005: 810). Since then, increasing numbers of scholars have no longer focused mainly on the translation of Indian texts into European languages but have also studied how and why European works were translated into the languages of India. Education was at the core of the self-assigned civilizing mission of the British in India (Marx 1979: 125). This ‘notion of the civilizing project of the 156

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colonial state grew in popularity’ (Fischer-Tiné 2004: 229) in the first decades of the nineteenth century, when evangelical sects in Britain became very influential in colonial affairs. Under their sway there emerged the opinion, both at home and in India, that the East India Company was responsible for the material and moral improvement of the Indian people. Thus, upon the expiration of the East India Company’s charter in 1813 and its subsequent renewal, a regulation compelled the Court of Directors to set apart one lakh of rupees per year for the ‘revival and improvement of literature’, ‘the encouragement of the learned natives’, and the ‘introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences’. Generally speaking, most colonial officials agreed that the British civilizing mission in India should be carried out through education and ad hoc educational policies. The main point of contention concerned the nature and modalities of educational policies. Orientalist scholars, for instance, held that the better way to educate and instruct Indians was through their own native languages, whereas Anglicists thought that education should be imparted in English, one of the European languages of modern science. An English-medium education, in the Anglicist view, represented the most suitable and viable way to promote modernization among Indians. Given that the two factions could not find common ground, the ‘Anglicist-Orientalist Controversy’ broke out in 1835. The final outcome was a compromise between an all-English and an all-Indian-languages education. English therefore retained a privileged position within the educational system as a tool for imparting Western-style scientific knowledge, but at the same time many scientific works produced in Europe were being translated into Indian languages.

CONSTRUCTIVE ORIENTALISM: AN EDUCATIONAL PROJECT In the wake of the compromise, Oriental scholars in colonial India became involved in a ‘Constructive Orientalist Project’. The expression ‘constructive orientalism’ was initially coined by Christopher A. Bayly (1996: 224) to refer to British scholars’ and officials’ attempts to graft the technical vocabulary of European sciences onto Indian languages. More precisely, the Constructive Orientalist Project was a massive translation of scientific technicalities from European languages (mainly English) into Indian classic languages and ‘vernaculars’. Constructive orientalism thus was arguably a by-product of the more well-known Orientalism studied extensively by Raymond Schwab (1950) and critically by Edward W. Said (1978). Dodson (2007) convincingly

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argued that the Constructive Orientalist Project very deeply influenced the construction of an Indian national culture by eloquently demonstrating the Sanskrit pandits’ centrality to the project. In fact, British scholars relied extensively on pandits’ expertise to carry out a series of tasks that would have been difficult if not impossible to perform without their assistance. Borrowing the Gramscian definition of intellectuals and their relation to culture, one can argue that in this specific context, Sanskrit pandits and other Indian Sanskrit scholars became ‘organizers of culture’, that is, agents able to shape the modalities of culture production, its contents and its purposes. As such, they were a major motor of transformation within Indian society, helping to promote the dissemination and assimilation of European culture. At the same time, as Dodson insightfully pointed out, Sanskrit scholars used their role as cultural mediators in the framework of the Constructive Orientalist Project to promote certain ideas about Sanskrit and Hindi as a national language intimately bound to an Indian cultural identity, which mirrored a clear, albeit not totally organic, vision of Indian-ness. Moreover, in most cases Indian scholars acted as agents of an anti-colonial national resistance – especially when they collaborated with colonial officials. Although this argument can be accepted in general terms, broadening and deepening the scope of analysis foregrounds a set of issues hitherto neglected or not exhaustively dealt with. One of those overlooked issues is the link between language and education in relation to inter-communal relationships in India. This essay aims to show how the entangled issues of education and language gradually became a contentious terrain between different religious communities. The Constructive Orientalist Project therefore became a space of intense debate between Indian elites on the one hand and British ‘Oriental’ scholars and other colonial officials on the other. By engaging in debates centred around the role of language and education in the framework of the Constructive Orientalist Project, Hindu and Muslim elites attempted to forward their own views about India and favour their own specific interests at the expense of other communities. The interconnection of language and education in the colonial environment of nineteenthcentury India was a highly contentious issue even at the inter-Indian level because of its strong association with the ideas and practices of national improvement through education and scientific instruction. The regulations enclosed in the East India Company’s charter of 1813, ‘encouraged’ India’s ‘learned natives’ to play an active role in the field of education. As a result, Hindu scholars who belonged to the urban indigenous elite of Calcutta undertook many initiatives related to educational programmes designed for Indians. They founded a college for the instruction of the sons of respectable Hindu families, known as the Hindu College, and

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started a society devoted to the translation of schoolbooks into Bengali. One of the main aims of the Hindus who backed new initiatives in the field of native people’s education was to counterbalance the missionaries, as many Indians regarded their growing importance in the Indian educational system as a threat. To avoid the possible conversion of Hindu youth to Christianity, Hindu elites began to foster educational programmes that avoided any reference to Christianity. The systematically undertaken translation of English schoolbooks and textbooks into Indian languages must be placed within the context of competition between Indian elites who aimed at retaining an education in modern Western science without disfavouring Indian culture, and missionaries who imparted an education linked to Christian values and ideas. While embroiled in these numerous intense debates about education, Hindu scholars also began to translate scientific works from English into the Indian languages, thus contributing in their own way to the active fostering of cultural improvement and modernization among Indians. It was precisely in this context that Hindu scholars debated with British officials and scholars about the best strategies for disseminating European knowledge, particularly science. They discussed opportunities to translate European knowledge or vernaculars into classical languages of India, such as Sanskrit. Translations into Indian languages were carried out exclusively by Indian scholars, which highlights their role as active agents of the ‘constructive orientalism’: the Constructive Orientalist Project was not, in fact, carried out solely by British scholars engaged in the study of Indian civilization. Indians performed a significant function whose outcome is rarely fully grasped, as the close links they developed with British scholars make it difficult to discern who influenced whom. Despite a certain degree of disagreement on some specific issues, the very close collaboration between Indians and British resulted in a mutual influence. Therefore, it is important to bear in mind that the systematic work of translation that characterized the Constructive Orientalist Project hinged on the capacity of British and Indian scholars to work side by side, for the translation of European works of sciences into Indian languages was not a simple task to accomplish. Constructive Orientalist translations took two distinct forms involving different types of native expertise. These forms also coincide with two chronological phases. Initially, from the 1820s onwards, translators mainly produced works in the ‘classical’ languages of India. The languages that scholars considered classical were Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian. After 1835, however, British scholars adopted a different strategy, becoming interested in producing translations from English into ‘vernacular’ languages – mainly Hindustani and Bengali, in the British view. For Indian scholars, however,

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this definition was not very clear. Translating a complex, precise scientific vocabulary from English into Indian classical languages seemed to present few problems that were easily resolved. In fact, scholars had to draw on the respective lexicons of the ‘Classical languages of the East’ to construct new compound and derivative words. The latter were intended to convey the meaning of European words as precisely as possible without altering the very nature of the Indian languages. James Ballantyne referred to this as a process of ‘engraftment’: a naturalization of words that makes them compatible with the essence of Indian languages. These ideas were in line with nineteenth-century theories based on philological knowledge, whose adherents believed that languages were the mirror of their speakers’ minds. For example, Rajendralal Mitra, one of the most eminent Indian Orientalists, considered a language to be the ‘intellectual atmosphere of a nation’ (Dodson 2005: 810). In this sense, then, the transplantation of European science could fully succeed only if the fundamental concepts to be conveyed to the Indian audience were properly ‘acclimatized’. Only in this way would Indians be able to understand their meaning without constantly needing to refer to the English original. This might have seemed a softer way to introduce new, modern scientific concepts borrowed from Western science into Indian languages, and therefore cultures. Nevertheless, closer inspection of projects of this sort reveals that they were marked by Orientalist views and perceptions of India and its culture. In fact, what Rajendralal Mitra proposed was to orientalize Indian languages through a process highly influenced by certain ideas about India, which fossilized them into unnatural, immobile systems. Although it was easier to translate English into Indian classical languages than into the vernaculars, British scholars soon acknowledged the impossibility of wiping out knowledge systems elaborated over centuries and replacing them with Western conceptual frameworks. Words reflected complex and ancient traditions and practices of knowledge that had taken form in specific cultural environments and penetrated the social fabric, thus becoming important cultural markers. In the Indian context, British translators sensed and faced the presence of other knowledge systems that could not be deconstructed or changed overnight. A telling example of the impossibility of completely altering Indian knowledge systems is the attempt by the Bengal Medical Service’s John Tytler to ‘embody European medicine in the imperishable language of Arabia’ during the 1820s. Translating a work of medicine entitled Anatomist’s Vade Mecum (Hooper 1830), Tytler had no viable choice but to rely on the nomenclatures outlined by ‘mediaeval’ Arabian and Muslim physicians. This case clearly shows how the Constructive Orientalist Project, far from

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being based on an imposition of European knowledge on Indian natives, was rather the outcome of dialogue and negotiations between indigenous and Western knowledge-systems. However, John Tytler also felt confident enough in Arabic to take the initiative of creating new words in this language when its classics of medicine did not provide adequate terms to render notions of modern anatomy. Indeed, coining new words in Indian languages was a widespread habit among European scholars in India. Michael S. Dodson has effectively highlighted this aspect in his recent work on the Benares Sanskrit College, exploring James Ballantyne’s translations of scientific works into Sanskrit. Dodson argues that British Orientalists imposed a form of power on Indian languages even as they took possession of them. However, this was possible only in collaboration with Indian scholars, who often provided the necessary theoretical and practical instruments to conduct this sort of ‘experiment’. Through the Constructive Orientalist Project, British scholars experimented with Indian languages, modifying them to serve a host of purposes linked to the conceptual apparatus that backed colonialism and its forms of conquest. Arguably, colonization did not simply imply the takeover of territories and domination of people. It also was a more complex process that penetrated the intimate sphere of native culture. Colonization actually extended to many aspects of Indian life, including languages, which became a fundamental space of debate and contention.1 However, British Orientalists could not carry out this operation without relying on Indian experts, pandits and munshis, making the collaboration of Indian agents an absolute necessity. In Bengal, for instance, the Constructive Orientalist Project aligned itself with the initiative of a Hindu elite that sought to foster its own educational agendas. Thus the Constructive Orientalist Project became one of the ‘cultural terrains in which colonizers and colonized coexisted and battled each other through projections as well as rival geographies, narratives, and histories’ (Said 1993: xxii–xxiii).

RENDERING EUROPEAN SCIENCE IN THE LANGUAGES OF INDIA: CLASSICS OR VERNACULARS? Soon after 1835, the controversy that opposed Orientalists to Anglicists, Indian to British ‘Oriental’ scholars, began to debate whether translations into Indian ‘vernaculars’ were more useful than those into classical languages. One of these debates took place at the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta in the summer of 1836. It must be pointed out that this institution was the stronghold of the Orientalist faction in the metropolis of British

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India. The Asiatic Society gathered officials and scholars who regarded forced English education as counterproductive to the British civilizing mission. Believing that Indians should be educated in their own languages, they debated whether Arabic, Persian and Sanskrit were more suitable vehicles of knowledge than the vernaculars. These discussions soon resulted in a schism within the Orientalist faction between those who favoured education in Indian classical languages, and those who considered the vernaculars more useful as tools of education. Debates among scholars in the Asiatic Society intensified when the subject was the translation of Hooper’s Anatomist’s Vade Mecum. This debate centred on the question of which Indian classical language Hooper’s work was to be translated into Sanskrit and Arabic both appeared appropriate as recipient languages. The Vade Mecum, which had been translated into Sanskrit by Madhusudan Gupta, was entitled Sarira Vidya. The Asiatic Society bought the translation in 1836. Sir John Muir had donated one thousand rupees to the Asiatic Society for the publication of a Sanskrit translation of a work on medicine. It was decided that the donation would cover the expense for the publication of Gupta’s Sarira Vidya. However, the secretary of the society, James Prinsep, advised the society’s president, Sir Edward Ryan, ‘that 2000 Rupees more might still be required to complete’ the printing (‘Proceedings of the Asiatic Society for July’ 1838: 663), ‘including the plates and additions it was proposed to supply’ (ibid.). Hence, under ‘these circumstances the aspect of the question was materially changed; and he [Sir E. Ryan] would put it to the meeting whether it would be justifiable for the Society to expend s much upon Sanskrit translation which but a limited class could read, when the money might be better employed in imparting the same or other knowledge to the great body of the people in their own vernacular tongue’ (ibid.). Thence, a ‘fresh reference’ was made ‘to the special Committee begging for their opinion if it was expedient for the Society to spend any portion of its funds for publishing a Sanskrit translation of the Vade Mecum, rather than investing the same amount of money in the education of the mass of the people in the Hindustani language, even though in doing so it forfeits the advantage of Mr. Muir’s bonus and of the translation already made’ (ibid.). The committee set up for that reason comprised mostly physicians of the Calcutta Medical College under the direction of William Brooke O’Shaughnessy. In the course of its very first debates, the issue of the vernacular came to the fore, so the society also appointed its native secretary, Ram Comul Sen, to the committee to contribute to its reflections from the standpoint of a Sanskrit scholar who, as a vaidya, was also familiar with medical knowledge.

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Sen argued in favour of the Sanskrit translation in a long minute published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (‘Proceedings of the Asiatic Society for August’ 1838: ‘Minute by Dewan Ram Comul Sen’, 742–43) after having brought ‘two questions before the Committee’. The first question at stake was ‘whether the Hooper’s Anatomist’s Vade Mecum should be printed in the Sanskrit or the Vernacular Language’ (ibid.: 742). Second, the society, and the committee in particular, had to consider whether ‘publication of similar works would be more useful and would contribute more to the instruction of the people in a vernacular tongue than in a Sanskrit’ (ibid.). Since ‘the work has already been translated into Sanskrit, and prepared for press, paid by the Education Committee, and thirty-two pages have already been printed’ (ibid.), Sen recommended continuation of the Sanskrit publication for which the Asiatic Society had earned its reputation: the Vade Mecum was ‘one of the works transferred to the Asiatic Society, which has engaged to complete it’ (ibid.). Furthermore, Ram Comul Sen insisted, ‘when the Asiatic Society applied for aid from Government to finish the work, it never had it in contemplation to publish it in the vernacular language’ (ibid.). Besides the issue of the Asiatic Society’s reputation, Sen argued that Hindu physicians all over India would use the Sanskrit version of the Vade Mecum. He emphasized that ‘Sanskrit is read in several parts of India, where there are many thousands Vaydyas practising in medicine, a considerable portion of whom are versed in Sanskrit, and who will find the work useful and read it to help themselves becoming acquainted with the European system of anatomy’ (ibid.). Though he argued in favour of the Sanskrit translation, it must be underlined that Ram Comul Sen, having authored a critically acclaimed English-Bengali dictionary, had no evident personal dispraise for the vernaculars. The problem was that the concept of vernacular as such was not clear to him: As for the vernacular language, I do not understand what is meant by it. If it is meant to be Bengali, it is understood by the people inhabiting the country which comprehends Rajmeha, Orissa, Chittagong, Assam and Mitihila. But a considerable portion of the language is intermixed with Sanskrit, and when a work written in that language is of a scientific character, it must require a pandit to explain its meaning. If it is meant to be Hindi, a term by which languages spoken in Behar, Lucknow, and Agra is called; it must come under the head of Urdu, Hindì or Hindvì. (ibid.: 143)

Furthermore, Ram Comul Sen opined that ‘the Hindi which is a degeneration of words derived principally from the vernacular language is very poor

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and incapable of interpreting any difficult or scientific subject, without borrowing a considerable portion of words from Urdu, two thirds of which consist of Arabic and Persian words’ (ibid.). This perception was widely shared among Hindu scholars in the years from 1820 to 1840. By and large, they considered vernaculars unfit to convey scientific instruction for two reasons: either they were not yet ready to serve that purpose, in the case of Bengali; or, in the case of Hindi, they simply were degenerated jargons. However, this attitude changed radically in the subsequent fifty years, as nationalist sentiments and ideas made their way into elite circles.

‘RENDERING EUROPEAN SCIENCE INTO THE VERNACULARS OF INDIA’ Rajendralal Mitra (1823–91), one of India’s most famous Sanskrit scholars and historians, was also a founder of the Indian National Congress. In his lifetime, he devoted much time and commitment to disseminating of knowledge by means of the Bengali and Hindi languages. Given his outstanding reputation as a scholar, the Indian colonial government often sought his advice, especially in the field education and languages. In 1870, for instance, he wrote an extensive minute on the question of how to properly render European scientific terms in the vernaculars of (Northern) India. This minute was eventually republished in 1877 as Mitra’s A Scheme for the Rendering of European Scientific Terms into the Vernaculars of India. In this scheme, Rajendralal Mitra outlines possible rules for translating European concepts into Indian vernaculars, rules that would have helped vernaculars more suitably convey European technical and scientific terms. To this end, Mitra implicitly proposed to rely on the rules outlined by Indian grammarians since antiquity. More precisely, he used the infinite capacity of the Sanskrit language to create new compounds and derivatives that could be grafted onto the vernaculars. Considering Bengali and Hindi to be modern Prakrits, Rajendralal Mitra treated them as if they were ‘both the same and different at once’ (Trautmann 2006: 57) vis-à-vis Sanskrit. Mitra justified his reliance on Sanskrit grammar theory by pointing to the need to face two main issues affecting the process of translation: an etymological problem on the one hand, and the ‘universal laws of phonetics, on the other’ (Mitra 1956 [1877]: 8). Considering that ‘all substantives as well as verbs derive from verbal roots’ (Trautmann 2006: 57), he started from the premise that ‘the classes of substantives so derived that must be specified as the objects of particular transformational rules of grammar’ (ibid.) able to produce ‘an uncountable and unlimited of possible words making up their content’ (ibid.).

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Given, however, that Rajendralal Mitra did not write during the classical period of Indian civilization, his scheme seemed to suggest that philologists must look to the past of Indian languages to find ways to incorporate and convey Western science, even though this past clearly remains subject to scholars’ interpretation. Therefore, it must be stressed that Mitra developed this scheme at a time when Indian scholars were intensely debating the respective status of Hindi and Urdu. It thus is necessary to analyse the ideological factors that affected Mitra’s work in the context of the HindiUrdu controversy that broke out between the 1860s and 1880s.

COMPETING LANGUAGES AND ‘NATIVE EDUCATION’ The Hindi-Urdu controversy carried a heavy load of inter-communal disputes about Indian identity as shaped in the framework of colonial domination. The controversy emerged in 1837 in response to the replacement of Persian with Urdu and other regional languages as the language(s) of administration (King 1999: 8). According to C.R. King, it was born of the contradictoriness of the language policies set in motion by the British government (ibid.; King 1992: 123–24). The British administration had used Persian script to write Hindustani instead of employing the Nagari script, as most officials were better acquainted with Arabo-Persian than with Nagari characters. Replacing Persian with Urdu and regional languages for administrative purposes was a sign that the British colonial regime was trying to find middle ground between English-medium education and education in Indian classical languages. It was a sort of compromise between the views proposed by the Anglicists and the Orientalists, though it seemed more in line with the latter’s ideas. Christopher R. King convincingly argues that the Hindi movement of the second half of the nineteenth century ‘provides an interesting and extremely complex example of the relationship between language, religion and nationalism’ (King 1999: 1). In the context of colonial India, contention between the status of Hindi and Urdu and the identitary meanings they carried became ‘the central symbols of competing nationalism’ (ibid.). Though it is relevant to connect the Hindi-Urdu controversy to the emergence of competing nationalism within the Indian political space, it should be noted that this link could not have been established without the benefit of hindsight. Early on, the controversy was determined by competition between Hindu and Muslim elites striving to gain access to the same positions in the colonial administration. Only during the 1870s did linguistic issues overlap with the emergence of different identities based on religion and language,

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whereupon Hindi and Urdu came to express distinct and clashing forms of conceiving and elaborating identity in the Indian colonial context. Language as a mirror of identity was a potent ideological symbol that could be deployed to foster different and conflicting nationalist ideologies. The political and ideological use of languages is discernible in, for example, the process of Sanskritization or Persianization suffered by the Indo-Aryan language once denominated Khari-Boli, which both Muslim and Hindu court poets used in versification. In what follows, this denomination (Khari-Boli) will be used for neutrality’s sake. Hindu scholars such as Rajendralal Mitra contributed very actively to Sanskritization of the Khari-Boli speech. Mitra explicitly saw Hindi and Bengali as casting off their allegedly Semitic elements, or more precisely the terms that were usually associated with Muslim domination. Even Persian, which is not a Semitic language but belongs to the Indo-European family, was deemed alien, foreign and exogenous to the Indian language (Mitra 1956 [1877]: 7). The ‘Moslem rulers of India’ (ibid.), Mitra argued, had forced these Semitic elements into Bengali and Hindi (it is worth noting that Mitra used the term Hindi almost exclusively). Hindi had existed before Muslims came to rule India, he noted, also pointing out that Arabic and Persian words were introduced into Hindi by force. This process of forcible introduction of words from Muslim, alien languages caused Hindi to degenerate into Hindustani, which Mitra considered a ‘jargon’ (Apabhransá). Even as Muslim scholars sought to preserve Urdu as a persianized language, therefore preserving its ‘Muslim identity’, Mitra’s provocative scheme met with some very comprehensive responses. For example, Syed Husain Bilgrami Imad-Ul-Mulk (Bahadur), responded to Mitra’s proposal in an unexpected way that surprised Mitra himself. Syed Husain published his reply in the Times of Lucknow, of which he was the chief editor, in 1870. Responded to an initial version of Mitra’s scheme that had appeared as a minute on the rendering of European scientific terms, Husain recalled that Mitra’s proposal to exclusively rely on Sanskrit had ‘formed sometimes ago, the subject of a warm public discussion’ (ibid.). Being deeply interested in educational issues, Husain sought to ponder the advantages and inconveniences of using Sanskrit instead of Arabic and Persian to improve the Khari-Boli language (ibid.). Much like Ram Comul Sen in 1838, he assumed it ‘cannot be denied that both these classics possess inexhaustible literary resources, and for precision and elegance of expression and power of rigid, philosophical analysis, are without a parallel in the world, if we make an exception in favour of Greek’ (ibid.: 7–8). He consequently argued that all three languages were moreover ‘both excellently suited for giving expression and fixity to exact thinking, each in its own way’ (ibid.).

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Nevertheless, Syed Husain felt compelled to acknowledge that ‘in the capability of furnishing compound and derivative vocables to an unlimited extent, and submitting words to all shades of modification of meaning by a host of prefixes and suffixes, Sanskrit is immeasurably superior to Arabic’ (ibid.). Therefore, and despite the fact that ‘it hurts our Vanity as Urdu speaking people to make the confession’ (ibid.: 8), he continued, ‘it nevertheless must be admitted that the Arabic language is very meagre in this respect’ (ibid.), since Arabic ‘has only one prefix, the article AL, and only one suffix, the vowel YA. Its capacity for the formation of compounds is very limited, there being only four classes of compounds and two of them almost utterly useless for our purposes’ (ibid.). Thus, ‘owing to some grammatical and philological peculiarities, [Arabic] cannot afford as such material help in the formation of compounds and derivatives, as can be expected from Sanskrit’ (ibid.). However, as Arabic was entitled to the status of scientific language, he felt ‘in all fairness bound to state the other side’ (ibid.) by highlighting the historical merits of Arabic as a scientific language. Thence began a long dithyrambic expressing nostalgia for a golden age when ‘the Arabs of Spain and Syria, were the fathers of the European revival of learning’ (ibid.). Setting his Muslim pride aside, Husain desired Urdu to be less influenced by Arabic language and culture and thus strongly favoured the Sanskrit as the main source of improvement of the Urdu language. This can be explained by his personal admiration for the Bengal Renaissance (Husain 1925a: 22, 1925b: 10) and Rajendralal Mitra (Husain 1925a: 22): Syed Husain Al-Bilgrami regarded Bengal and Bengali intellectualism as a successful model whose reproduction could improve the Muslim condition in British India through education and knowledge dissemination. He was convinced that the successes of the Hindus of Bengal would vitalize Muslim Indians’ resilience, enabling Muslims to assimilate and re-elaborate features of the modernity the British had brought to India while also improving their own culture. He also envisioned this process as one in which Muslim Indians, by learning Sanskrit and grafting it into their vernaculars, could become more intimately bound to their Hindu fellows, so as to form one single national community. Indeed, the integration of Muslim Indians was a central concern of Syed Husain’s article. This issue was intimately linked to that of education, a crucial factor in the construction of national identity. However, his will to reconcile the intellects, if not the affections, of Muslims and Hindus led him to accept Mitra’s idea that Muslims were foreigners – that they were not indigenous to India. Husain asserted that Muslim Indians were partly responsible for their being viewed as alien to India. At a linguistic or philological

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level, he observed that ‘Urdu will hardly tolerate such intruders’ (Husain 1925b: 10) as compounds derived from Sanskrit ‘unless a radical change takes place in its present constitution, and the Urdu speaking people not only gravitate more towards Hindi, but adopt the Nagari alphabet instead of the Arabic’ (ibid.). Ideally, he avowed, he would be ‘glad to see this change effected’ (ibid.), and he had the ‘profound conviction that Urdu would be enriched and made more fruitful in direct proportion to its alliance with an approximation to Hindi, and the adoption of the excellent Hindi, instead of the defective Urdu alphabet, would tend more than anything else to a uniformity of language and sentiment among the peoples of India’ (ibid.). Nevertheless, he was ‘afraid that it will be long, very long, before this most desirable consummation is a fait-accompli’ (ibid.); although he expected ‘its ultimate triumph’ (ibid.) without ‘the slightest doubt’ (ibid.). ‘[T]he Semitic element will still continue dominant’ in Urdu, he predicted, ‘so long as the Mahomedans of India did not come to have a juster, and less personal and exclusive idea of their position in the country of their adoption’ (ibid.). In the long run, this would happen ‘when they have learnt to feel more Hindu and less Saracen . . . when they have come to look upon themselves more as Monads in the aggregate mass of Indian nationality, and less as an alien element hindering its thorough combination, when their affinities shall have elected for brotherhood India and the Hindus, not Arabia and the Arabs, then truly will the dream of a uniform language and nationality begin to be realised’ (ibid.).

CONCLUSION British educational policies, as a key part of Britain’s alleged civilizing mission in India, represented a crucial issue to be tackled. However, the colonial State was hard put to address the multifaceted aspects of education in India without facing the fact that languages, as a tool of education, were a complex issue in India. The great variety of Indian idioms, which reflected a wide range of social, religious and regional diversities, was a major roadblock to implementing a homogeneous educational system. On the other hand, the British soon understood that it was impossible to force Indians to accept English-medium education as the only way to acquire knowledge in the colony. Mediation was obviously necessary. British-sponsored projects in the field of education required, among other things, that European scientific works be translated into Indian languages, a process that could be carried out only with the active cooperation of Indian scholars. Collaboration with native experts implied, in turn, that Indian traditions of knowledge were not

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completely discarded but blended with the Western-style knowledge introduced via the translations of European scientific works. Meanwhile, colonial educational projects faced an additional dilemma: scholars translating European works of science for an Indian audience had to choose between classical languages (Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian) and vernaculars. As discussed above, British and Indian scholars debated this issue, but it was also at the core of discussions in which many Indian intellectuals engaged, especially when the Hindi-Urdu controversy broke out in the mid-1860s. The documents analysed in this essay provide evidence of the nineteenthcentury changes in Indians’ perceptions of languages denominated vernaculars. Whereas the status of Hindi/Urdu was still unclear to Ram Comul Sen in 1836, by the 1870s Hindi and Urdu had been recognized as national languages by intellectuals such as Rajendralal Mitra and Syed Husain Bilgrami Imad-Ul-Mulk. But the national status of Hindi and Urdu was still a matter of contention between Hindu and Muslim scholars. Although Mitra’s Scheme for the Rendering of European Scientific Terms in the Vernaculars of India (1877) represents an attempt to essentialize India as a Hindu country, Syed Husain’s response indicates that there were Muslims eager to find compromises between the Sanskritization and Persianization of vernaculars. Therefore, a nuanced idea of ‘competing nationalisms’ emerges when inter-communal relations are examined through the lens of debates on educational issues between Indian intellectuals of different religious backgrounds. In a nutshell, the history of ideas and practices in colonial India’s education policies can lend fresh perspectives to narratives of the relationship between education and nationalisms in India. Moreover, this history may also open new research perspectives for historiographies of other colonial contexts. The concept of constructive Orientalism could extend, for example, to Egypt during the period of modernization under Muhammad Ali Pasha (Burrow 1975). Interestingly enough, the constructive Orientalist works of the Asiatic Society of Bengal reached Egypt during the very year of the debates over Hooper’s Vade Mecum (‘Proceedings of the Asiatic Society for September’ 1838: ‘Letter from Gaetani Bey to W. Macnaghten, secretary to government, dated 11 May 1838’, 832–33). Meanwhile, Mitra’s scheme is comparable to those elaborated by the Senegalese intellectual Sheikh Anta Diop (1979 [1954]: 405–95) in his work on the possible methods for enabling African languages to convey scientific ideas such as general relativity. In short, one may hope that the concept of constructive Orientalism will lead to new and fruitful directions of research that may, in turn, further understanding of the complexities of educational issues in colonial contexts, and the imprint they left on the postcolonial world.

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REFERENCES Bayly, C.A. 1996. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burrow, G.N. 1975. ‘Clot-Bey: Founder of Western Medical Practice in Egypt’, Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 48(3): 251–57. Cohn, B.S. 1996. ‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command’, reprinted in B.S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 16–56. Diop, C.A. 1979 [1954]. Nations nègres et culture, 3rd ed. Paris: Présence Africaine. Dodson, M.S. 2005. ‘Translating Science, Translating Empire: The Power of Language in Colonial North-India’, Comparative Studies in Societies and History 47(4): 809–35. ———. 2007. Orientalism, Empire and National Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fischer-Tiné, H. 2004. ‘National Education, Pulp Fiction and the Contradictions of Colonialism: Perceptions of an Educational Experiment in Early-Twentieth Century India’, in H. Fischer-Tiné and M. Mann (eds), Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology and British India. London: Wibledon, pp. 229–47. Hooper, R. 1830. Anis Ul Musharrahin or Anatomist’s Vade Mecum, trans. J. Tytler. Calcutta: Education Press (Committee of Public Instruction). Husain, S. 1925a. ‘Moral and Religious-Education’, in S. Husain, Addresses, Poems and Other Writings. Hyderabad-Deccan: Government Central Press, pp. 21–24. ———. 1925b. ‘Scientific Nomenclature for the Vernaculars’, in S. Husain, Addresses, Poems and Other Writings. Hyderabad-Deccan: Government Central Press, pp. 1–20. King, C.R. 1992. ‘Images of Virtue and Vice: The Hindi-Urdu Controversy in Two Nineteenth-Century Hindi Plays’, in K.W. Jones (ed.), Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages. New York: Sunny Press, pp. 123–48. ———. 1999. One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century NorthIndia. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Marx, K. 1979. ‘The British Rule in India, New-York Daily Tribune, June 25, 1853’, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx & Engels Collected Works, vol. 12. Moscow: Progress, pp. 125–126. Mitra, R. 1956 [1877]. A Scheme for the Rendering of European Scientific Terms into the Vernaculars of India. New Delhi: Manager of Publications. Nandy, A. 1983. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ‘Proceedings of the Asiatic Society for August’. 1838. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 7(80): 742–49. ‘Proceedings of the Asiatic Society for July’. 1838. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 7(79): 663–69. ‘Proceedings of the Asiatic Society for September’. 1838. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 7(81): 829–37. Said, E.W. 1978. Orientalism. New York and London: Vintage Books.

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———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Schwab, R. 1950. La renaissance Orientale. Paris: Payot. Trautmann, T.R. 2006. Languages and Nations:The Dravidian Proof in Colonial Madras. New Delhi; Yoda.

NOTES 1. This is, indeed, an aspect that fits well in the ‘colonization of the minds’ idea that Ashis Nandy elaborated in his seminal study (1983).

Part IV

Women’s Education

Chapter 10

Raden Ajeng Kartini and Cultural Nationalism in Java Joost Coté

Y In 1911, a collection of selected, carefully edited letters written by a largely self-educated Javanese woman was published in the Netherlands in memory of her untimely death seven years previously. The letters, written in Dutch over a period of five years to five Dutch women and six Dutch men, describe, on one level, her efforts to gain further Western education. This personal goal was wrapped up in a larger vision: that her educated self would contribute to the ‘advancement’ of her society. On both a personal and a social level, these goals involved a broader vision of social and cultural change that can be termed ‘modernity’. What kind of society such changes might produce she could not yet define at this juncture in Javanese history, but her letters were insistent about the ideals that would underpin it. The articulation of such ideas in Java at the time they were written was not entirely new. Indeed, references to similar sentiments and ideas appear in an emerging public discourse among Javanese and other indigenous inhabitants of the archipelago who wrote in the latter decades of the nineteenth century and, more dramatically, the first decade of the twentieth.1 But insofar as it had manifested itself, such public expression of new perspectives and sentiments was exclusively articulated by men and consisted largely of ‘the incorporation of certain European ways of thinking within the larger world of Javanese thought’ (Behrend quoted in Ricklefs 2007: 140).2 Indonesian history provides no other comparable, woman-authored set of documents from this early period to convey a gen-

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dered perspective on what has been defined in other contexts as the emergence of cultural nationalism.3 Although this historical figure, Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879–1904), has been widely discussed in terms of her feminist credentials, less attention has been paid to Kartini’s correspondence as a historical source for the discourse of Javanese modernity whose early articulation it uniquely documents. Yet in the course of the decade after Kartini wrote these letters, the central precepts of her emotionally charged private writing (presaged in several pieces that had already found their way into the public domain) increasingly informed the public speeches, pamphlets and vernacular language newspapers of colonial subjects. The apparent reliance of her ‘gedachten’ (ideas) on Western (colonial) concepts, as well as Kartini’s evident links to feudal Javanese and elite colonial society, have – perhaps understandably – separated her history from the later narrative of a more revolutionary Indonesian anticolonial struggle. Kartini, it is argued here, can however be considered as an early exponent of a distinct ‘Javanese nationalism’ the emergence of which few historians have examined in any detail, to date. Preoccupied with ‘political nationalism’, Indonesian historiography has tended to disregard, or subsume evidence of, the expression of regional and ethnic cultural nationalisms not specifically fitting that central national political narrative.4 Newer historiographical perspectives on global interactions and sub-national histories, however, have increasingly focused attention on the detail of the more intricate intercultural webs that have contributed to the postcolonial and global conditions of the present. Cultural historians have become alert to the complexities of ‘modernity’ as central to the problematic of nationalism, increasingly recognizing a need for ‘multiple modernities’.5 Conversely, ‘Third World nationalists’ have been urged to recognize that the ‘achievement of political modernity . . . could only take place through a contradictory relationship to European social and political thought’ (Chakrabarty 2000: 9). This chapter seeks to contribute to an exploration of the historical process of transcultural interaction that was an inevitable by-product of colonialism. It argues that the body of published writing by Kartini represents some of the earliest extant ‘national’ articulation of a Javanese modernity. It briefly identifies the ideas and assumptions referenced or implicit in this body of private Javanese writing that drew on a broader discourse of modernity then circulating in metropolitan Europe and, less explicitly, in colonial society. It then highlights the complexity of the historical trajectory of nationalism in Indonesia by distinguishing the moment of Kartini’s ‘act of writing’ between 1899 and 1904, and the moment a decade later – 1911 – when the correspondence was first published in the Netherlands as an

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edited ‘collection of thoughts’. By 1911, the debate on colonial policy had developed considerably in ‘greater Netherlands’ and become more clearly etched in a variety of ‘politicized polarities’ (Ricklefs 2007). Kartini’s earlier private act of writing came to be appropriated by ‘progressive’ colonial political discourses and employed to compete against other emerging colonial and Indonesian voices. In charting the course of an Indian (Bengali) nationalism, Partha Chatterjee has defined women’s writing as representing the ‘original site in which the hegemonic project of nationalism was launched’ (Chatterjee 1993: 148).6 More broadly in the colonial context, Hutchinson has argued that such voices, whether they have grass-roots origins or are formulated in terms of specific ‘discourses of gender, region, religion and communalism’, need to be recognized as expressions of a ‘proto nationalism’ aimed ultimately at resisting the incursions of the colonial state. Even if initially unconnected and decentralized, the aim of its exponents can be characterized as ‘seek[ing] to recreate a patriotic and self-aware stratum within each national sphere . . . and [aiming] to overthrow foreign hegemony in the dominant institutions of the community’ (Hutchinson 1999: 400). Ostensibly cultural in terms of their content, such discourses need to be recognized for their political significance because in such (colonial) circumstances, ‘culture is viewed as inextricably aligned to an activist political sense’ (ibid.: 400). This perspective on ‘cultural nationalism’ provides a useful position from which to view Kartini’s original act of writing – as distinct from its later ‘colonization’ by editorialization – as a political act. Recognizing the significance of the collected correspondence as a political document, then, requires recognizing the correspondence as constituting an act of ‘speaking’ (Berman 1998).7 This recognition also hinges on clarifying the historical process of Kartini’s own appropriation of European progressive discourse and her conscious exploitation of the Dutch language, the colonial mode of letter writing and the postal service as the enabling technologies that allowed her to ‘speak’ to her colonial interlocutors. Together, the actions of this individual woman arguably constitute a ‘grass-roots’ political act, as identified above, through which Kartini specifically attempted to challenge the colonial state.

KARTINI: A LIFE The narrative of events in Kartini’s life covered by the five years of correspondence has been widely rehearsed in international literature over the century since its publication. Space here does not permit more than the

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briefest outline of that history, which must suffice to focus on the nature of her interaction with Western discourses and their exponents. Raden Ajeng Kartini (1879–1904) spent most of her short life ostensibly embedded in a feudal Javanese world in Jepara, far from the colonial capital of Batavia. Once the centre of a prominent independent north coast Islamic state that more recently had been a colonial residency or administrative province, the town of Jepara was in decline by the end of the nineteenth century, reduced to a minor administrative post on the fringes of a booming colonial sugar industry.8 In her writing, then, she locates herself in the ‘Oosthoek’, a region in Java analogous to an eponymous region in metropolitan Netherlands similarly removed from the centre of power and society. Personally she presents herself as imprisoned in a ‘gilded cage’, a reference to the aristocratic tradition of pingit.9 Physically she was indeed largely isolated from the increasing momentum of a rapidly modernizing material world, but this perception belied the reality in important ways. The correspondence cites regular steam tram excursions to the urban centre of Semarang and regular visits to photographic studios, as well as frequent contact with a stream of ‘metropolitan’ visitors. More significantly, she was in ‘virtual contact’ with the tumultuous intellectual changes occurring in Europe – and with their belated, secondhand appearance in the colonial capital. In this sense, she and her European colonial contemporaries were situated in approximately similar positions in relation to ‘modernity’.10 Indeed, the letters exchanged with the select group of Europeans represented by the extant correspondence explicitly identify her as linked to a very small but distinctly recognizable group of contemporary supporters of ‘colonial reform’. Moreover, as will be demonstrated below, the recipients of her letters – the women and men she was speaking to – were all linked to the various streams of progressive discourse and movements in the Netherlands whose ideas were echoed in the ‘colonial reform’ platform. The elaborate and lengthy letters Kartini wrote to these individuals can be seen as amounting to an explicit act of claiming (as a representative Javanese) the right to be part of that small circle – to share the ideology of that cultural movement and indeed, to educate it. In setting out an aspiration to a Javanese modernity, Kartini’s correspondence demanded of her interlocutors recognition of Java as (at least potentially) the equal of contemporary Netherlands, and herself as an equal to European women. One of eleven children, Kartini was the second-eldest daughter of a Javanese regent (bupati), the regional indigenous authority harnessed to the colonial administration. She was the fourth child and eldest daughter of his selir, or ‘secondary’ wife, a circumstance in her own biography that anchored some of her later thinking on the condition of Javanese women. Her father,

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Regent of Jepara Raden Mas Adipati Ario Sosroningrat, was known within the colonial bureaucracy as a scion of a pro-colonial dynasty of honourable lineage extending back to the ancient Javanese Majahpahit Empire that now boasted a network of family members in positions of authority throughout this part of Java. Himself a beneficiary (like all his siblings, including his sisters) of a Western (Dutch) education, Sosroningrat ensured comparable access to Western education for his own children. For Kartini, this meant several years of European elementary school education until the end of the 1891–92 school year when she turned twelve (her younger sisters completed elementary school). Meanwhile, her brothers were amongst the few Javanese men of the day to undertake a European grammar, one going on to a Dutch university.11 Sosroningrat and his children spoke fluent Dutch, and the kabupaten, the official residence of the regent – and specifically Kartini’s room – had a well-stocked Dutch-language library. This was supplemented by subscriptions to several leading Dutch-language newspapers and literary and cultural journals, and to the colonial community’s lees trommel, the mobile revolving subscription ‘library’ of Dutch reading material.12 All these resources were available for Kartini’s self-education after she left primary school. From 1892 on, Kartini was in the constant physical company of a local colonial official’s wife, Marie Ovink-Soer (1904, 1925).13 The extant correspondence begins after this family’s departure from Jepara in 1899 and gradually widens to encompass the eleven recipients selected for the 1911 publication, titled Door Duisternis tot Licht. More specifically, Kartini was motivated to begin what became an extensive body of writing after she contributed exhibits of Javanese women’s work to the Dutch Nationale Tentoonstelling voor Vrouwenarbeid, the national exhibition of women’s work held in The Hague (Coté 2000).14 From then till her wedding in November 1903, and thereafter as wife of the regent of Rembang until her death in September 1904, she gradually became known to a growing circle of people interested colonial affairs in the Netherlands, as well as to increasing numbers of Javanese and colonial critics of her presumptuous behaviour. In fact, she became a minor celebrity presence in the colonial and metropolitan media, as much for the curiosity value of being a female Javanese writer in Dutch as for what she wrote about. Kartini’s involvement in the seminal project of the nineteenth-century Dutch women’s movement represented her first attempt to articulate and publicize her claim to equality in terms of the feminist discourse of the day. Thereafter, defying the hesitancy, obfuscation and outright opposition of both Javanese and colonial actors in her immediate environment, her letters held increasingly passionate expressions of her personal aspirations and those she projected for ‘her people’. The narrative of her efforts to gain an

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education peaks in the course of 1901 and 1902, when it seemed likely that official support would make her the first Dutch-government-funded Indonesian woman to study in the Netherlands. The subsequent correspondence relates a series of what could be construed as strategic compromises in which she was obliged to recalibrate her goals in the face of growing opposition.15

KARTINI AND THE DISCOURSE OF MODERNITY Although the letters in the 1911 publication represent a conscious post factum selection, they nevertheless constitute an important record of Kartini’s links with specific community figures whom historians have been wont to describe as proponents of an ‘ethical policy’ (Ricklefs 2001: 193). They comprise a small circle of eleven like-minded Europeans (including two sets of married couples), although references in the letters indicate that the actual extent of her network of correspondents included many more individuals, European and Javanese, of a similar orientation. Of course, only access to the other side of the extant correspondence would allow an accurate assessment of how these correspondents may have influenced Kartini’s discourse. However, the general cultural and political orientation these individuals specifically represented can readily be determined, either through direct reference to their own publications or indirectly by reference to their known affiliations and activities. These channels show that each of the eleven correspondents was directly linked to cultural, social and political movements then contemporaneously emerging in the metropolitan Netherlands. Most notable were the socialist and feminist movements whose influence came to the fore in the late nineteenth century, but no less significant was the political influence of a populist Christian revivalist movement emerging partly in opposition to the rising tide of secular liberal and socialist reformism and partly in response to the wider social and economic changes the Netherlands was experiencing.16 These ideological streams competed for political influence over a gradually democratizing Dutch civil society, forming distinct sociocultural political groupings in terms of which Dutch colonial policy was defined (Stuurman 1983). In this context it is clear that the individuals with whom Kartini corresponded were personally or intellectually linked to the contemporary ‘progressive movements’ in the Netherlands. They were socialists, liberal and moderate feminists, and exponents of Christian socialism and philanthropic views that were then challenging traditional attitudes in Dutch society and, by extension, traditional colonial policy (ibid.; de Regt 1984). All Kartini’s female correspondents considered themselves feminists. Most illustri-

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ous among them were the Netherlands-based Petronella Porreij (Nellie van Kol), a prominent voice in late-nineteenth-century socialist feminism,17 and Stella Zeehandelaar, a ‘rank and file’ socialist, feminist, urban social worker, vegetarian and temperance advocate (Bouman 1954: 26).18 Her key male correspondents, Henri van Kol,19 Jacques Abendanon20 and Dr Nicolaus Adriani,21 respectively represented (and were active exponents of) socialist, liberal and Christian streams of progressive Dutch colonial discourse. Two other male correspondents, Professor G.K. Anton22 and G.L. Gonggrijp (1944 [1913]),23 as well as several individuals mentioned but not included were also active voices in colonial discourse.24 Equally important to understanding Kartini’s intellectual context is an itemization of her library. An analysis of titles mentioned in her letters reveals she had read the core literary output of the late nineteenth century. The arts had reflected the upheavals in the material world in parallel with the political and social changes in Dutch society. In particular, proponents of the cultural movement known as De Beweging van Tachtig (the Eighties Movement) strove to break down institutionalized cultural and social barriers and focus on exploring the inner life and consciousness of the modern individual (Knuvelder 1962: 575–84; Bel 1993). The literary world gave expression to the sentiments of late-nineteenth-century feminism and socialism in some of the most influential popular novels of the time, which realistically portrayed the emotional suffering, idealistic excitement and sensuality of the modern individual, offering new insights into the nature and experience of once hidden corners of human existence. Kartini was very proud of her library, which was notable for the prevalence of almost contemporaneously published Dutch socialist and feminist writing as well as its selection of the most influential, if now largely forgotten, English and European titles in translation. The latter included such bestsellers as Henry Fielding’s account of Buddhism and Buddhist society, The Soul of the People (1899), Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmer (1888) and Marcella (1894), Rudyard Kipling’s The Light that Failed (1890), Beatrice Harraden’s Ships that Pass in the Night (1893), Maurice Maeterlinck’s Wisdom and Destiny (1898) and Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899), as well as older classics like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Robert Hammerling’s Aspasia (1876), Tennyson’s Idylls of the King (1860), Samuel Smiles’s Essays (1881) and Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880). She owned a representative collection of key Tachtiger texts, including works by Vosmaer, van Eeden, Limburg Brouwer, and naturally, Multatuli, pseudonym of E. Douwes Dekker, author of Max Havelaar and one of the most influential nineteenth-century Dutch writers on colonial reform (see Dolk 1993). Most notably, Kartini owned and explicitly discussed the contemporary sensational feminist novels Hilda van Suylen-

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burg (1898) and Barthold Meryam (1896), Bertha Suttner’s influential pacifist novel, Lay Down Your Arms (1889) and contemporary literary accounts of Java by Louis Couperus (De Stille Kracht, 1900), Bas Veth (Het Leven in Nederlandsch Indië, 1900), Augusta de Wit (Orpheus of the Desa and The Goddess who Waits, 1903) as well as several titles by Henry Borel, known for his writings on China and Buddhism.25

COLONIAL RESPONSE TO KARTINI’S MESSAGE The broad suite of progressive cultural and social ideas embodied by these individuals and embedded in the literature available to Kartini inevitably came to shape her perception of the world and her own aspirations, and featured explicitly in her presentation of herself and her ideas and aspirations in writing. However, her correspondents – notwithstanding their ideological commitment to and sometimes direct involvement in social change in the metropole and some aspects of political reform in the colony – including the prominent socialist-feminist van Kol couple, were all disinclined to support the kind of radical change in the colony that Kartini’s writing implied.26 This is perhaps unsurprising, since all the male correspondents – Henry van Kol, Jacques Abendanon, Gonggrijp, Adriani, Anton – were somehow linked to the colonial regime. Before entering parliament, van Kol had anonymously published an account of Java (which Kartini admired) that explicitly rejected radical proposals for Dutch withdrawal as not being in the interests of the Javanese (Rienzi 1896). Abendanon, Adriani and Gonggrijp wanted only to liberalize colonial policy to ‘educate’ the colonial subject, and Anton explicitly stated he had come to Java to study the colonial system, which he greatly admired. Three of the women were spouses of influential ‘colonial’ men, and only Nellie van Kol could be said to have held a public position – she had edited an influential women’s journal for many years – from which she could have exerted an influence.27 Privately (in a letter dated 28 December 1900), Hilda de Booij, the young Anglo-Dutch wife of the governor general’s adjutant, confided to her mother that she could well understand how the Europeans in the colony, frustrated by existing policies and practice, might wish to lead a revolution against the undemocratic nature of colonial government (Archief Familie de Booij n.d.), but that empathy did not extend to its colonial subjects. Collectively, these progressives hoped to see a more ‘civilized’ colonial society through the gradual restructuring of its institutional and cultural frameworks. This was in line with the ‘deugdzaam liberalisme’ that dominated reformist thinking in the contemporary Netherlands.28 Entrenched

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colonial and feudal Javanese interests strenuously opposed even this, however, as threatening the colonial modus vivendi that had evolved in Java in the course of the nineteenth century. This dominant political framework formed the major obstacle to what was effectively the key goal defined in her correspondence: the emancipation of Java from colonialism. Kartini’s aspirations were thwarted not only by the head of the colonial administration of the province, the Resident of Semarang, Piet Sijthoff, but also by her uncle, RMA Hadinigrat, reputedly one of the foremost ‘modern’ regents of Java. Respectively representative of colonial and aristocratic Javanese tradition, and together representative of the colonial status quo, both these figures worked to maintain the very social and cultural structures Kartini was attempting to transform. In her private correspondence, however, she was able to thoroughly demolish them with withering sarcasm of the former and scathing criticism of the latter, thus giving the lie to the description of her prose as being overly flowery. Regardless of her friends’ intentions and the logic of the progressive discourse they subscribed to, the seductive rationale of colonialism clearly proved impossible for them to dislodge. Jacques Abendanon was specially appointed to introduce a measure of reform in the colonial education system, but his plan to promote the ‘education of native girls’ was resoundingly rejected in 1900. His argument that ‘it is an undeniable fact that . . . Native society cannot march forcefully ahead’29 in the absence of educated women was vehemently opposed by colonial and Javanese officials alike (van der Wal 1963: 9–14). The majority of the latter, in response to a questionnaire on the issue, were opposed on the grounds that it was against tradition, while the former argued that The number of young people educated in the Western manner is still extremely limited; the girls who will partake of European education will expect to marry young men similarly educated; this will not always be possible and deep disappointment will be the consequence. Furthermore, such native girls will have developed needs which a Native official of a lower rank – not all girls can marry regents, patihs or wedonos – cannot provide form his limited income. Unhappy marriages will result. (van der Wal 1963: 12)30

This superficially plausible argument by the colonial bureaucracy, ostensibly expressing its sensitivity to Javanese tradition and awareness of conceptions of ‘modern marriages’, was in essence predicated on a critique of ‘the new woman’ – the ‘demivierge’ – the target of fin-de-siècle anti-modernists such as Max Nordau and Otto Weininger (Karl 1988: 86–90). Transferred to the context of the colony, conservatives saw the ‘new woman’ as taking the form of the ‘native woman with modern Western appetites’. Kartini herself was the object of such criticism, and it created the image within which

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her critics succeeded in entrapping her.31 Kartini herself was well aware of the nuances within the contemporary (European) debate on gender. Her correspondence contains critical references to the spokeswoman of the conservative wing of the Dutch women’s movement;32 sympathetic comments regarding the editor of a popular liberal women’s journal to which she subscribed;33 mockery of the conservative views of Resident Sijthoff who wanted to see her married; and enthusiastic discussion of two recent bestseller feminist novels. In the end, even Kartini’s colonial supporters subscribed to the image created by her detractors when it became clear that Kartini might, against all odds, secure support for her further studies in the Netherlands. Each of her correspondents for whom direct evidence exists – Abendanon, Nellie van Kol, Adriani and Stella Zeehandelaar – agreed or acquiesced to an outcome that eventually led to her polygamous marriage and denied her the chance to become, as they saw it, that ‘new woman’. Their shared concern was perhaps most clearly expressed by Nicolaus Adriani in a letter to Nellie van Kol, who herself hesitated to support the arrangements her husband had made for Kartini and her sister Roekmini to study abroad: Arriving in Holland she might, because of a change in climate, diet and lifestyle, also have physical problems. Her state of mind, which is rather unsettled, as well as her mental faculties and studies could be tested to the limit. The possibility of mental indigestion is not far fetched. Furthermore, the girls are not strong . . . I really worry about these dear girls. Their parents are not able to give them sufficient moral support. They themselves are ready for anything but in fact are not capable of everything, even though undoubtedly they are very talented. If they do not come under very experienced and loving care, someone who knows how to ensure they do not become caught up in fashion, will not be invited out to all kinds of parties which would only wear out their nerves, who would prevent them from trying to take on everything at once and ensure they don’t study too hard, that they take great care in their clothing, diet and lifestyle, and that they practice self-control, then I foresee a lot of misery and that would pain me greatly. (Cited in Bouman 1954: 55–56)34

TOWARDS AN ALTERNATIVE MODERNITY ‘Colonial reformers’ such as those with whom Kartini corresponded were ultimately unwilling to uphold the implications of their principles when it came to colonialism and readily resorted to more paternalistic models of gradual reform. But wholesale acceptance of a reformist Western discourse was equally problematic for ‘cultural nationalists’. Ultimately, Kartini’s deci-

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sion to decline the offer to study in the Netherlands – and eventually also a scholarship to train as a teacher in Batavia – appears to accord with Kartini’s own gradual reassessment of her initial, Western-feminist-inspired goals. Despite two convincing memoranda she had written in the first months of 1903 on the need to expand Western education, her deferral, albeit reluctantly and initially under some duress, to Javanese convention in accepting a polygamous marriage suggests a growing appreciation of what a Javanese modernity might constitute. A close reading of the Kartini correspondence reveals four contemporary colonial ‘models’ of a ‘modern Javanese woman’: the good, traditional Javanese ‘feudal’ woman, such as her older sister, stepmother and her sister’s mother-in-law; the Europeanized Javanese woman that Kartini’s Javanese critics faulted her for aspiring to become; the ‘new Javanese woman’ – more specifically the ‘new Sundanese woman’, whom Kartini critiqued – who had received a European education providing European accomplishments but remained essentially ‘morally deficient’; and the ‘modern Javanese woman’, who was both educated and morally transformed. Kartini regarded herself as having become the latter, a model she perceived as essential to the transformation of Javanese society. European versions of each of these models were readily available and discussed in detail in contemporary Dutch (European) feminist and conservative discourse, on which Kartini drew in formulating her ideals – and she rehearsed much of this herself in her letters. But Kartini was not writing simply in response to her reading of European feminist literature, but also in response to visible changes in colonial society that were widely reported in the colonial press. This evidence of the emerging transformation of her Javanese world inspired her own goals for personal development. Conscious of the obligations that inhered in her elite Javanese background, Kartini increasingly bundled her personal hopes into a broader aim to channel the newly emerging modernizing tendencies and opportunities. Kartini’s elaboration of how Javanese girls should be educated and how she herself could best deploy the fruits of Western education was not simply an issue of applying European formulae. The appropriation of ‘education’, indeed, presented cultural nationalists with a fundamental dilemma that became increasingly apparent to Kartini as her options rapidly narrowed. The broader context of her correspondence makes clear that Kartini struggled to resolve the questions of how ‘Javanese-ness’ was to be retained and defined in modernity, and how the Javanese woman was to become a better Javanese. Kartini’s model school would not be like a ‘school’ as she had experienced it, but more like a family35 in which intellectual learning was integrated with ‘domestic learning’ and various ages and abilities could intermingle.

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Her emphasis on ‘domestic economy’ in both of her 1903 memoranda on the need for education reveals that Kartini had found an equivalent model – that is, a Western educational concept that went beyond the existing colonial idea of education– that would allow the education of Javanese women as Javanese.36 Although partly necessitated by circumstances, these same terms ultimately dictated Kartini’s redrawing of the ambitious plans she had defined in the course of 1901 and 1902 to gain a broad liberal education in the Netherlands as she herself came to realize the logic of her cultural argument (see Coté 2008).37 The discourse of modernity – of new ideas about culture and society – resisted by conservative and traditionally privileged ‘colonized’ interests, was therefore equally problematic for ‘cultural nationalists’, though in a different way; in any case, neither group could directly appropriate the full implications of Western modernity. In this sense, the full text of Kartini’s extant correspondence from May 1899 to September 1904 represents, beyond a biographical narrative, an example of the complex and tortuous process cultural nationalists experienced in constructing an alternative discourse of modernity. The ‘modernity’ the letters evinced could be readily appropriated by a contemporary ‘progressive’ readership and ultimately celebrated by the wider international feminist movement because of its reference to a recognizable Western feminist discourse. Kartini’s thoughts were all the more accessible to a Western readership throughout the century because they were expressed via the modern medium of the individualized, personalized private letter. Fortuitously, this medium was the very means of political action to which Kartini was largely restricted. Viewing the correspondence, in all its emotional and intellectual, argumentative and seductive qualities, as ‘action’ – that is, an act of political intent – at once also recognizes the limited options available to this young, unmarried, rural, priyayi woman. It also points to the way she, and the first generation of ‘cultural nationalists’, hoped to achieve their objectives: via ‘association’.38 The ‘action’, then, primarily took the form of educating susceptible colonial representatives – in Kartini’s case, her small group of influential Dutch (and Dutch colonial) correspondents – to entice supporters to the quest to attain equal status for Javanese in a modern international world. Her brother, Raden Sosrokartono, had adopted the same strategy in a speech of 1899 that gained fame as the first direct appeal to the Dutch nation by a colonial subject in Europe (Poeze 1986: 29–32). Other Western-educated male Indonesian voices emerging in the course of the first decade of the century expressed similar views. They too presented themselves as spokesmen to the colonizer – and more spe-

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cifically to an increasingly politicized and ‘aware’ metropolitan European public – representing the aspirations of those who could not speak. For this educated and elite group, the language of modernity shaped the intellectual formulation of a future emancipation, which therefore demanded to be expressed in the same modern terminology. Even so, it was not long before such ideas were being expressed in the languages of the archipelago.39 These modernizers were also involved in a parallel process of making contact with an emerging kaum muda – the new generation of nationally oriented colonized subjects who together aspired to national autonomy. Kartini’s involvement in this early attempt to give voice to a national consciousness is partially obscured in the 1911 publication of her letters, but remains clearly discernible as constituting her key preoccupation. It involved, above all, communication with her brother Kartono in the Netherlands. Struggling to establish himself at Leiden University, he became a major influence on the founders of Oost en West Vereeniging, the first private Dutch lobbying group for promoting knowledge about and support for colonial reform. Through Kartono, Kartini became aware of the thinking of the small group of privileged Indonesians studying in the Netherlands who were beginning to write about an Indonesian future.40 Four years after Kartini’s death, they established the first informal Indonesian organization dedicated to discussing the future of their Indies; in Java, meanwhile, Kartini’s sisters worked to establish a similar organization in her memory, which they merged into their support of the first specifically nationalist organization in colonial Indonesia, Budi Utomo, established in the same year.41 Of more immediate significance are references indicating that Kartini maintained correspondence with young men enrolled in the colony’s three vocational institutions for training an expanding cadre of indigenous doctors and civil servants, respectively the STOVIA and OSVIA.42 Through them, Kartini gained an awareness of wider developments amongst the new generation of Javanese and other Indonesian leaders in the capital, Batavia.43 One direct reference to this appears in an undated letter fragment included in a memoir by Kartini’s Dutch mentor, Marie Ovink-Soer. In it, Kartini writes: We have won so many to our cause, the young generation is completely at one with us. Oh, you should read the letters from our idealistic little soldiers, young people who will one day be working amongst the people. They celebrate with us. They call me ‘Sister’. Their older sister to whom they can always turn when they need support and encouragement. New members are continually seeking to join our group. The top student of all the three HBS schools this year is once again an Inlander, a Sumatran from Riouw. He is in complete affinity with my ideas, his aim is also to work for his people. Oh, it is wonderful to have such an

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important goal in our sights and to see it gradually coming closer. (Ovink-Soer 1925: 24)44

CONCLUSION Many writers have highlighted the ultimate tragedy of the Kartini narrative, if not in terms of Kartini’s consignment to a polygamous marriage, then of her untimely death following the birth of her child. However, the trajectory that led to this end – although of course not the end (her death) itself – arguably represented a transitional resolution of the conundrum the colonized subject faced, which at the time neither Kartini nor even her male contemporaries in subsequent decades were able to adequately resolve: how to reconcile modernity, projected as the exclusive legacy of Western civilization, with Javanese identity. This suggests also that the standard account of the ‘Kartini tragedy’ – her ultimate ‘capitulation’ in assenting to a polygamous marriage – as a failed attempt in the construction of modernity represents a peculiarly Western interpretation.45 Viewed more broadly in terms of a ‘national history’, Kartini’s construction of a strategic network through her correspondence suggests her story may be more accurately described as an initial ‘first step’ to articulate and manifest an alternative modernity.46 Examined against this broader background and reading between the lines, as it were, the correspondence gains increased significance. The corpus of letters can be read as a process of ‘trying out’ her ideas and ways to effectively communicate them – that is, of differing strategies for ‘political lobbying’. Assuming a trajectory into adulthood (though it was not to be), the correspondence can also be seen as a means of ‘trying out’ in private what would later be set out in public. In this sense it is important to recognize the correspondence not just as narrating a series of setbacks to Kartini’s personal hopes for further education but as part of a broader national process of negotiation in the construction of a modern national identity. The historical moment of Kartini’s writing, then, can be situated in a longer historical process involving an attempt by a growing circle of writers and activists to resolve the problem of integrating a Javanese cultural identity into the dominant contemporary world view defined by Western ideals. In her own narrative, truncated by her death, the path of this evolution is uncertain, although her final published correspondence as a married woman appears to point towards a resolution. Certainly the subsequent history described in her sisters’ correspondence reveals how the trajectory they had shared with her developed towards a more clearly defined and

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confident Javanese modernity (Coté 2008). However, history also tells us that this particular modernizing trajectory ultimately clashed with, and was increasingly sidelined by, a more aggressive political rhetoric that was less accommodating of Western influence and broader in its geographical and ethnic scope. By the 1930s, Kartini’s sibling Soematri, married to a leading conservative Javanese politician, found the new Indonesian world of young nationalist activists unintelligible, worrying and indeed unacceptable (ibid.).47 In any event, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested, no attempt to find a way of integrating the two worlds, and thus appeasing the demands of both cultural nationalism and Western modernity, was likely to have been adequately resolved (Chakrabarty 1999). The modern colonized subject, he suggests, struggled constantly to express his or her identity in a way that was ‘amenable to global-European constructions of modernity so that the quintessentially nationalist claim of being “different yet modern” [could] appear valid’ (ibid.: 1).. Such a colonial subject was eternally trapped in a ‘difference-deferral’ binary. The need to escape that conundrum arguably made it inevitable that a cultural nationalism movement be superseded by a ‘revolutionary’ political one. By analogy, here we also arrive at recognition of the dilemma Kartini faced. Inspired as she was by the radical version of a European discourse on women’s emancipation, she came to appreciate that a modern Javanese discourse could not directly appropriate it. Ultimately, despite all the apparent paraphrasing of current European discourse, the reader of her correspondence is forced to recognize Kartini’s insistence on ‘difference’. As Chakrabarty argues with reference to nineteenth-century Bengali modernity in general, escaping the tutelage of colonialism to ‘participate in what was seen as a world-community of peoples and nations’ (ibid.: 4) hinged on reconstructing traditional conceptions of public and private domains as modern in a way that nevertheless allowed them to retain their distinctive identity as Bengali. It was this cultural consciousness that would ultimately become the foundation of political nationalism. But the final definition of what this difference was to constitute, Chakrabarty declares, had always to be deferred, as its proponents remained caught between the desire for modernity and equal recognition in a world system on the one hand, and the imperative of culture on the other. Charting this ambiguity is a significant challenge for the historian, Chakrabarty warns, that can only be savoured through extended, sensitive access to the ‘artifacts that narrate “the private” in “public” eg., novels, autobiographies, diaries, letters etc.’ (ibid.: 3). Here, he argues, beyond the public world dominated by colonialism (and men),

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the ‘modern non-citizen’ could attempt to start construction of a new civil society. Yet even in this domestic sphere there was no autonomy, as Kartini was all too aware: it too was being penetrated by Western modernity as new models of the modern spouse, the mother and the housekeeper were increasingly employed as templates for assessing ‘civilization’, defining the criteria for what should constitute modernity. The publication of a selection of edited Kartini correspondence was intended to define a trajectory by which Javanese women could become ‘modern’ in the manner modelled in Dutch households, manuals and fictional accounts in Dutch literature, as autochthonous models did not yet exist at the beginning of the twentieth century and, indeed, were only gradually defined publicly in later decades (Hatley and Blackburn 2000). It was not simply the institutional obstacles of colonialism and feudalism that prevented Kartini from realizing such aspirations at the outset of the twentieth century: she herself was beginning to question this Eurocentric trajectory. Most immediately, her self-questioning is evident in her constant expression of concern about how to retain the respect of her father, reunite with her estranged stepmother and, more generally, retain acceptance in ‘Javanese society’ and yet be modern. This problem, running throughout the correspondence, can be seen as a metaphor for the wider challenge of how the new ideas were to be integrated with a Javanese identity. The 1911 publication’s framing of Kartini’s ‘Gedachten’ obscures the fact that her well-intentioned European friends persuaded Kartini not to go to Europe and to accept marriage – in other words, to retreat from this claim to ‘modernity’. It equally obscures the evolution of her own thinking towards a sense of an alternative Javanese modern-ness, although in this she was herself complicit. This extant collection of letters, then, provides a glimpse of two moments in competing Dutch and Javanese processes of cultural reconstruction within the context of colonialism. Kartini’s retreat from the persona she had initially been so keen (and so successfully able) to create,48 to one that began to model a modernity more integral to Javanese society, a process prematurely ended by her death, can too easily be interpreted, in line with Kartini’s colonial friends’ views, as an inevitable ‘failure’. The original publication of part of her correspondence as Door Duisternis tot Licht (From Darkness to Light) intentionally leaves the reader with the impression that obscurant forces within colonial and Javanese society defeated a defenceless Kartini. This tragic story was a powerful weapon for a colonial reform lobby determined to ‘educate the native’, but it is only partly true. The real story suggests a valiant attempt to develop a vocabulary for, and a trajectory towards, a national autonomy predicated on the need to develop autonomous individuals.

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REFERENCES Adam, A. 1995. The Vernacular Press and the Emergence of Modern Indonesian Consciousness (1855–1913). Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Adriani, A.E. and H. Kaemer. 1935. I: Dr. N. Adriani: Schets van leven en arbeid. II: Dr. N. Adriani zooals wij hem zien uit zijn brieven. Amsterdam: H.J. Paris. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ‘Archief Familie de Booij’. Retrieved 15 September 2013 from http://www.egoproject .nl/archief-debooijfamilie/H.G%20de%20Booij-Boissevain.htm Bel, J. 1993. Nederlandse literatuur in het fin de siècle. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Berman, L. 1998. Speaking through the Silence: Narratives, Social Conventions and Power in Java. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloembergen, M. and R. Raben (eds). 2009. Het koloniale beschavingsoffensief: wegen naar het nieuwe Indië. Leiden: KITLV Press. Bouman, H. 1954. Meer licht over Kartini. Paris and Amsterdam: HJ Paris. Chakrabarty, D. 1999. ‘The Difference-Deferral of (A) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’, History Workshop 36: 1–34. ———. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chatterjee, P. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Coté, J. 2000. ‘Celebrating Women’s Labour: Raden Ajeng Kartini and the Dutch Women’s Exhbition, 1898’, in M. Grever and F. Dieteren (eds), Een vaderland voor vrouwen: A Fatherland for Women: The 1898 ‘Nationale Tentoonstelling van Vrouwenarbeid’ in Retrospect. Amsterdam: IISG/IIVA, pp. 119–35. ———. 2005. On Feminism and Nationalism: Kartini’s Letters to Stella Zeehandelaar. Clayton: Monash Asia Institute. ———. 2008. Realizing the Dream of R.A. Kartini: Her Sisters’ Letters from Colonial Java. Athens: Ohio University Press. De Regt, A. 1984. Arbeidsgezinnen en beschavingsarbeid: Ontwikkelingen in Nederland 1870–1940: Een historische-sociologische studie. Amsterdam: Boom Meppel. Dolk, L. 1993. Twee zielen, twee gedachten: Tijdschriften en intellectuelen op Java, 1900– 1957. Leiden: KITLV. Dudink, S. 1997. Deugdzaam liberalisme: Sociaal-liberalisme in Nederland 1870–1901. Amsterdam: IISG. Gonggrijp, G.L. 1944 [1913]. Brieven van Opheffer: Aan de redactie van het Bataviaasche Handelsblad. Maastricht: NV Leiter-Nypels. Grever, M. and F. Dieteren (eds). 2000. Een vaderland voor vrouwen: A Fatherland for Women: The 1898 ‘Nationale Tentoonstelling van Vrouwenarbeid’ in Retrospect. Amsterdam: IISG/IIVA. Hatley, B. and S. Blackburn. 2000. ‘Representations of Women’s Roles in Household and Society in Indonesian Women’s Writing of the 1930s’, in J. Koning,

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et al. (eds), Women and Households in Indonesia: Cultural Notions and Social Practices. Richmond, UK: Curzon Press. Hutchinson, J. 1999. ‘Re-Interpreting Cultural Nationalism’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 45(3): 392–407. Karl, F. 1988. Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist (1855–1925). New York: Atheneum. Kartini, R.A. 1903. ‘Van een vergeten uithoekje’, Eigen Haard (January): 12–15. ———. 1976. Door Duisternis tot Licht: Gedachten over en voor het Javaanse volk, ed. E. Allard and J.H. Abendanon. Amsterdam: Gé Nabrink & Zn. Knuvelder, G. 1962. Beknopt handboek tot de geschiedenis der Nederlandse letterkunde. Hertogenbosch: LCG Malmberg. Mohamad, G. 2004. ‘Kartini Sebuah Persona’, in V.I. Yulianto (ed.), Aku mau: feminisme dan nasionalisme: surat-surat Kartini kepada Stella Zeehandelaar. Yogyakarta: IPR/Kompas Media, pp. 7–19. Nagazumi, A. 1972. The Dawn of Indonesian Nationalism: The Early Years of the Budi Utomo, 1908–1918. Tokyo: Institute of Developing Economies. Ovink-Soer, M. 1904. ‘Raden Ajoe Djojo Adiningrat: In Memoriam’, De Hollandsche Lelie 18(10): 339–44. ———. 1925. ‘Persoonlijke herinnering aan Raden-Ajeng Kartini’, Vrije Arbeid (May): 3–36 (Leiden: KITLV Archive, H 897:20). Poeze, H. 1986. In het land van de overheerser: Indonesiërs in Nederland 1600–1950. Dordrecht: Foris. Ricklefs, M.C. 2001. A Modern History of Indonesia since c. 1200. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ———. 2007. Polarising Javanese Society: Islamic and Other Visions (c.1830–1930). Singapore: NUS Press. Rienzi, M.R. 1896. Land en volk van Java. Maastricht: Pieters. Röling, H.Q. and B. Reinalda. 2008 [2001]. ‘Porreij, Jacoba Maria Petronella (Nellie)’, Biografische Woordenboek van het Socialisme en de Arbeidersbeweging in Nederland. Retrieved 20 January 2011 from http://www.iisg.nl/bwsa/bios/porreij.html Scherer, S.P. 1975. Harmony and Dissonance: Early Nationalist Thought in Java. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Steringa, P. 2010. ‘Woude, Johanna van’, Stichting Dodenakkers. Retrieved 20 January 2011 from http://www.dodenakkers.nl/beroemd/letteren/216-woude.html Stuurman, S. 1983. Verzuiling, kapitalisme en patriachaat: Aspecten van de ontwikkleing van de moderne staat in Nederland. Nijmegen: SUN Uitgeverij. ———. 1992. ‘Wacht op ons daden’: Het liberalisme en de vernieuwing van de Nederlandse staat. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker. Toer, P.A. 1985. Sang Pemula. Jakarta: Hasta Pemula. Van der Wal, S.L. (ed.). 1963. Het onderwijsbeleid in Nederlands-Indië 1900–40. Groningen: J.B. Wolters. Van Miert, H. 1991. Bevlogenheid en onvermogen: Mr J.H. Abendanon en de ethische richting in het Nederlandse kolonialisme. Leiden: KITLV Press. ———. 1995. Een koel hoofd en een warm hart: Nationalisme, Javanisme en jeugdbeweging in Nederlands-Indië. Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw.

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NOTES 1. Adam (1995: Appendix E) identifies eighty-eight vernacular-language newspapers and periodicals established between 1900 and 1913. See also Ricklefs (2007: 126–73) for a summary of ‘new horizons’ for the period 1870–1925. 2. Adam (1995) identifies the emergence of a discourse of ‘kemajuan’ (progress) in late-nineteenth-century publications. 3. Toer (1985) emphasizes pioneer Indonesian (Javanese) journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo’s concern for women’s issues after 1905. 4. Two notable extended studies of ‘Javanese nationalism’ are Scherer (1975), van Miert (1995). More recently the question has been addressed in Ricklefs (2007). 5. Appadurai’s examination (1996) of the contemporary globalization of culture and of ‘cultural flows’ provides a relevant framework for historians of colonialism. 6. Chatterjee points to the complexities of women’s writing, which framed a new nationalism even as it had to resist ‘new forms of patriarchy’. 7. Berman (1998), exploring the politics of women ‘speaking’ in contemporary Javanese contexts, has relevance to an examination of the ‘Javanese-ness’ of Kartini’s Dutch-language writings that cannot be pursued here. 8. A queen of Jepara, Ratu Kalinyamat, is reputed to have sent a naval fleet to support an attack against the Portuguese conquerors of Malacca. Kartini makes mention of the days when Jepara was known for its horse racing. 9. This becomes the central conceit of Kartini’s (1903) published short story, Van een vergeten uithoekje (From a Forgotten Corner). 10. In an early letter (to Stella, 25 May 1899) she proudly notes she is ‘in advance’ of Dutch (Eurasian) women in the colony. 11. Two older siblings, her oldest brother and oldest sister, appear not to have undertaken much Western education. 12. This included De Locomotief, the leading colonial progressive daily; De Gids, the leading Dutch progressive social and cultural journal; Wetenschapplelijke Bladen, a journal of popular science; De Hollandsche Lelie, a Dutch women’s journal; Belang en Recht, a new journal discussing feminist legal issues, and Nederlandsch Taal, a new colonial journal established to promote the Dutch language. 13. Marie Ovink-Soer, a minor Dutch writer and contributor to women’s journals, was later best known as author of children’s books. She published two memoirs of her association with Kartini. 14. See Grever and Dieteren (2000) for a detailed account of the women’s exhibition. 15. After rejecting Ovink-Soer’s suggestion to consider work in a mission hospital, Kartini asserts her desire to study in Europe against the Abendanons’ suggestion that she become a teacher. Later, having accepted the idea of being a teacher, she insists on proper training. She attempts to delay her marriage to complete teacher training in Batavia. Eventually Kartini rationalizes her position as a married woman in terms of a future as an educator of the region’s elite

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18.

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20.

21.

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families, an objective her sister Kardinah also achieves. See Coté (2000) for a detailed discussion of these disputes. Beyond the specifically religious revival, a broader ‘moral reform’ affected political, social and cultural movements. See for instance Dudink (1997). Long the editor of the feminist journal De Vrouw, Nellie van Kol had led the women’s protest movement against the Aceh War. At the time of Kartini’s writings to her, she had moved significantly towards the Christian evangelical movement; she later joined the Salvation Army, continuing her involvement in children’s education (Röling and Reinalda 2008 [2001]). Approximately the same age as Kartini, Hilda de Booy-Boissevain, wife of the adjutant to the governor general, whose mother was English, was representative of the contemporary modern European middle class. She later helped publicize Kartini’s ‘thoughts’ amongst Dutch ladies to obtain financial support for the ‘Kartini schools’ (see Archief familie de Booij). Van Kol, leader of the parliamentary wing of the moderate socialist party (SDAP), had written the party’s colonial policy platform and was the parliament’s most outspoken advocate of colonial reform. Jacques Abendanon, a leading legal bureaucrat and member of the prominent Batviaasche Genootschap, the colony’s leading cultural and scientific forum, had been specifically appointed to the education department to introduce reform (see van Miert 1991). Adriani, an academic linguist attached to the Protestant mission in Central Sulawesi, was associated with Abendanon via the Batavaasche Genootschap and later cooperated with him on a series of colonial education conferences. Though involved in the ‘modernization’ policies of the mission, he was critical of conventional colonial policy (Adriani and Kaemer 1935). G.K. Anton, professor of politics at Jena University, Germany, visited Java as part of an inspection tour of Dutch colonial practice in which he praised newer developments. He published a treatise recommending German-Dutch unity, Ein Zolbündnis mit den Nederlanden’, in 1902 and one on modern German colonial policy in 1908. Although not directly represented, G.L. Gonggrijp, assistant resident of Jepara and later resident of Rembang, is mentioned as a correspondent and as being in regular contact with Kartini in both Jepara and Rembang. He became famous for a series of anonymous ‘letters’ initially published in a colonial newspaper critical of colonial policy and later as Brieven van Opheffer (1913). While not a correspondent, references suggest that Marie Ovink-Soer’s husband, like Gonggrijp, was representative of the ‘new colonialism’ that inspired Kartini to believe in the possibility of change. A further group of Dutch correspondents (not included) expressing interest in Javanese arts and crafts included the president of Oost en West Vereeniging, Nellie van Zuylen-Tromp, with whom Kartini’s brother was also associated. For an overview of fin de siècle Dutch and Dutch-colonial literature and literary criticism see Bel (1993).

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26. ‘Reform’ in any event was official policy of the Protestant Anti-revolutionnaire Partij government and had been included in its platform since the 1880s. 27. Stella was active within the Dutch Socialist Democratic Workers party and Marie Ovink-Soer became known as a minor writer. It may be that Rosa Abendanon-Mandri was the influence behind the throne in relation to her husband’s attempt to reform colonial education policy. 28. Dudink argues that ‘social liberalism was deeply embedded in a set of moral assumptions [that] postulated the importance of individual morality for achieving social harmony and coherence’ (Dudink 1997: 299). 29. Director of Education, Religion and Industry to Governor General (Roosenboom), 31 October 1901. 30. The negative response to Abendanon’s proposal noted specifically: ‘The position of the girl and the woman in [Native] society indeed means that at the moment there exists no need for her to receive a European education and development. . . . First one would need to work towards the further education of the man for should one not do this and should one follow the direction you advise, then an imbalance would be created in native society which would result in the most tragic situations in social and married life’ (Memorandum, First Government Secretary, 19 December 1901, in van der Wal 1963: 12). 31. Kartini’s correspondence refers to gossip suggesting she is out to catch a European husband. 32. This was represented by Baroness Catherine Anna de Savornin Lohman (1868–1930), a ‘Christian feminist’, criticized ‘radical feminism’ in several publications between 1896 and 1903. 33. This related to Johanna de Woulde. Accused of attempting to murder her estranged husband, Woude became the target of much critical gossip (Steringa 2010). 34. Abendanon persuaded Kartini to decline the offer of the government scholarship van Kol had convinced the Dutch parliament to grant her. Stella also accepted that it was better for Kartini to stay in Java (Bouman 1954: 59), although she assumed this meant an education in Batavia, not the marriage subsequently contracted (Coté 2005: 14–15). Marie Ovink-Soer had never supported the idea; nor, it seems, had Rosa Abendanon-Mandri, both of whom appear to have attempted to dissuade her. 35. Kartini’s image of her ideal school oscillates between a family image (‘we will have a school where our children will not only call us “mother” out of politeness, but because they see and feel us to be mothers’, Letter to Mev. Abendanon-Mandri, 2 September 1902) and a more strategic ‘policy-directed’ image (‘to establish a school for daughters of the native aristocracy’, Letter to Adriani, 24 September 1902). Dutch initiators of the ‘Kartini school’ referred to the latter model. 36. Chakrabarty emphasizes the ubiquity of a discourse of ‘domestic science’, cleanliness and hygiene in the Bengali literature he cites. Though an ideal of contemporary European feminists, in retrospect this discourse has been judged critically as merely confirming an updated version of ‘women’s role’.

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37. Significantly, Kartini’s sister Kardinah established a girls’ school in Tegal on a model that more closely followed Katini’s ideas and was initially critical of Dutch plans for the Semarang Kartini school, which focused on ‘accomplishments’ (Coté 2008). 38. Modernization through ‘association’ was a concept that evolved on both sides of the colonial relationship in the course of the first decade of the century. As ‘colonial policy’, it was most clearly articulated by Snouk Hurgronje, whose views on the status of Javanese women Kartini strongly criticized. For colonial cultural policy, see a recent discussion in Bloembergen and Raben (2009). 39. As Adam and Toer, show, the two pioneering professional Indonesian journalists Abdul Ravai and Tirto Adhi Soerjo defined an indigenous ‘progressive’ class, a ‘kaum muda’, equivalent to that in the Netherlands and adapted a ‘new language’ (Malay) to articulate their aspirations. 40. Besides several Javanese ‘princes’, such as RMA Koesoema Joedha, this group also included Abdul Ravai, the Tehupeiory brothers and Mas Abdullah, son of the nominal founder of Budi Utomo. These pioneers were all involved in early Netherlands-based Dutch and Malay language publications, such as ‘Soerat Tjerita’, Bandera Wolanda and Bintang Hindia (Poeze 1986: 23–51), and largely aspired to ‘associate’ with Dutch progressives on colonial reform. 41. The Indische Vereeniging, established in 1908 and often described as a ‘social club’, provided a venue for discussion of modern solutions to the colonial situation. Like the celebrated Budi Utomo founded in the same year in Java, it attracted a generation of progressive, Western-educated modernizers. Seen in retrospect as conservative, these two groups represented the first organizational and intellectual formulations of cultural nationalism. Kartini’s sisters were amongst Budi Utomo’s first female members; their brother Kartono was a member of the Indische Vereeniging. 42. STOVIA, School tot Opleiding van Inlandsche Artsen (School for the Training of Native Doctors) and OSVIA, Opleidingsschool voor Inlandsche Ambtenaren (Training School for Native Civil Servants) were the highest-level Dutchlanguage educational institutions in the colony. 43. See Nagazumi (1972) for an account of STOVIA students. For an account of Kartini’s sisters’ contact with its founders, see Coté (2008: 136–44). 44. Undated letter extract included in Ovink-Soer (1925: 24) and Kartini (1976: 426). Kartini also refers to Agus Salim and nominates him as the person to whom her scholarship should be transferred (Kartini to Mevrouw AbendanonMandri, 24 July 1903). 45. Kartini also depicted her impending marriage in these terms – as representing her failure to be a modern woman – declaring that it made her ‘no better than all the rest’, that is, that she would now become just an ordinary Javanese again (Kartini to Rosa Abendanon-Mandri, 14 July 1903). This can be explained as Kartini maintaining the tenor of the feminist discourse she had established with Rose since 1900. Subsequent letters, however, show Kartini expressing a new sense of her Javanese-ness.

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46. Ricklefs (2001) uses this term to cover the period up to 1927. A more detailed account would indicate a series of progressive steps towards a more radical nationalism. 47. Kartini’s second-youngest sister, Kartinah, disappears from the ‘modernist narrative’ of Dutch-language correspondence soon after her marriage, suggesting she chose a different path, intentionally or otherwise (see Coté 2008). 48. Goenawan Mohamad develops the idea of Kartini’s ‘persona’ in his foreword to Vissia Yulianto’s Aku Mau (Mohamad 2004).

Chapter 11

Women’s Education through Women’s Eyes Literary Articulations in Colonial Western India Meera Kosambi

Y In the late nineteenth century, women’s education was an embattled though relatively less invasive social reform issue in the region of Maharashtra in western India.1 The other social reform issues were marriage-related and thus more deeply entrenched and resistant to change. A significant marker of this reform discourse was its transnational and transcultural impulse, received in various ways from the British colonial rule (1818–1947), especially through the dissemination of Western, secular education imbued with a Western value system and designed to inculcate a self-critical outlook among Indians. Strangely enough, the social reform discourse in Maharashtra – as elsewhere in India – was constructed as a male project, although intended for the benefit of women. In the process, women were constructed as ‘passive’ and ‘helpless’ beneficiaries of reforms and therefore occluded as subjects or agents and reduced to the status of objects.2 But although denied a space within the discourse, women were neither unaware of nor insensitive to the reform process and articulated their thoughts in other ways, mainly through creative literature in the regional language, Marathi. In this chapter I argue that these articulations can serve as the basis for constructing a parallel women’s discourse on education, which I seek to do through four iconic women writers and their landmark texts in different genres: the novel, drama and short story. The idea of a women’s parallel discourse on gender issues through their fiction is explored more fully in the 198

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introduction in Kosambi (2012). These texts span the social transition during the decades from the 1880s to the 1930s, reflecting women’s increasingly greater freedom of thought and articulation. What they also reveal is the divergence between men’s and women’s objectives for women’s education and the fact that education and its intended benefits for women did not follow a linear progression but involved unexpected twists and turns. Especially interesting is the contrast between men’s desire to accommodate women’s education within the prevailing patriarchal family structure and women’s expectation of education as a stepping stone to ultimate gender equality.

WOMEN’S EDUCATION THROUGH MEN’S EYES The issue of women’s education was finally settled in favour of male reformers – but only as a necessary evil and subject to strict surveillance. The reasons were many. One was the British promise to grant Indians greater political rights contingent upon social reform. Another was the self-critical perspective that Western education instilled in students. The colonial state and Western culture thus became the significant Other in the reform discourse. Additionally, the colonial state and state-backed Christian missionary societies facilitated and encouraged women’s education by opening girls’ schools. Lastly, newly educated young men demanded educated, or at least literate, wives to achieve companionship within marriage.3 Under these pressures, then, the strongly patriarchal Indian family structure accommodated women’s education rather uneasily. But both liberal and conservative social leaders took care to emphasize that education was intended for a better functioning of women vis-à-vis their families – not for women’s own benefit as individuals. Upon this point there was a patriarchal convergence across the ideological divide between liberals and conservatives. Thus it was argued that education would make women more efficient housewives – for example, by allowing them to keep household accounts – and more competent mothers, as well as suitably companionate wives. At the same time, education was not to benefit women outside these familial roles. The male discourse on women’s education was resolved by deciding that Indian women were to be given an ‘essential’ education that would serve as merely another female accomplishment without disturbing the old familial power equation. This education was to be imparted at home, avoiding the need to send girls to school and thus protecting them from exposure to the potentially dangerous company of more liberated girls and the hazards lurking in public spaces. The public harassment schoolgoing girls faced has been documented in both women’s autobiographical narratives and men’s

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literary works.4 Care was to be taken to ensure that education would not develop women’s personalities or encourage them to think independently. But it was easier to control outward behaviour than thoughts. The dilemma remained, and women’s education involved a difficult balancing act: exposure to new ideas without the freedom to think new thoughts. Generally the tension resulted in two tropes of ‘the educated woman’. The positive trope was illustrated by the contemporary icons of womanhood: educated women who were conspicuously conventional, obedient, devoted wives. An excellent example was Ramabai Ranade, wife of the reformer Justice M.G. Ranade, who was valorized for having happily ‘devoted herself to the service of her husband’ despite ‘the New Education’ she had received (Gokhale 1953 [1910]: vii–viii). Any deviation from this conventional image would relegate the educated woman to the negative trope. This negative trope had a complex transcultural dimension. The example of educated British women and their companionate marriages seemed attractive to young reformers but aroused anxiety among conservatives and the older generation. These women were held out as a deterrent example, and the Indian women who emulated them were portrayed as spoilt, callous, willing to break the marriage bond with ease and generally loose in their behaviour. This trope was food for entertainment. The author of a popular play entitled Taruni-shikshana-natika (A Short Play about Women’s Education, 1886) makes in his preface a cogent – albeit breathlessly long – statement of this conservative conflation of women’s education, undesirable Western influence and immoral, irreligious behaviour: Society can be said to be thoroughly ruined when [women] start wearing glasses for short sight caused by studies, when their cheekbones become visible, when they become weak and their progeny short-lived, when their religious restrictions are loosened, when they deride the Hindu religion and harbour a wish to accept an alien religion or become atheists, when their pure and simple Maharashtrian speech becomes adulterated with a mixture of English words, when they get access to vulgar books like Reynold and Boccacio which turn their naturally tender minds wayward, when they develop contempt for Hindu customs and caste practices and feel like imitating the foreigners’ customs and manners in their entirety, when they drink alcohol to their hearts’ content along with men and develop a taste for forbidden foods, when they desire to indulge in English ballroom dancing, when they start to insult their parents-in-law, husbands and other kith and kin at every step, when they begin to like love marriages, when they enter courts of law to break their marriage bonds because their husbands are stupid, ignorant, illiterate, poor and therefore unlovable, when they abandon their homes to act on the stage, when they begin to believe that love is blind and the path to elopement sweet! (Kanitkar 1890 [1886]: xiv–xv, my translation)5

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Women writers’ valorization of education had to combat this trope and the social and familial insecurities of men that it exposed. The articulations of four authors in a few landmark texts might appear an insufficient basis for reconstructing a definitive women’s discourse on education, but they undoubtedly identify certain trends that accompanied a remarkable social change worked by the spread of formal education during the decades under consideration. Girls’ schooling and even college education had become the norm in urban middle-class families, although general female literacy remained rather low. In the area currently under Maharashtra State, the literacy rate for women rose from a mere 2 per cent in 1931 to 7 per cent in 1941 (and for men from 12 per cent to 25 per cent). But in cities like Mumbai and Pune (formerly Bombay and Poona) – centres of literary and other cultural activity – literacy rates were significantly higher.6 Another aspect of social change was the postponement of girls’ marriages. In the 1880s, mandatory pre-pubertal marriages for girls set the upper age limit at eight or nine years; by the 1930s, an educated working woman could, in rare cases, stay single into her thirties. In parallel legal developments, the Age of Consent Act, passed in 1891 after much controversy, stipulated a minimum age limit of twelve years for girls regarding cohabitation within or outside marriage.7 In 1929, the Child Marriage Restraint Act laid down twelve years as the minimum age limit for a girl’s marriage.

WOMEN’S VOICES Four iconic women writers’ voices are amplified and analysed here to reconstruct the contours of the parallel, incipient ‘female discourse’ on women’s education mentioned earlier. Under consideration are two novels by the first major woman writer in Marathi, Kashibai Kanitkar (1861–1948), who begins by adhering to the male paradigm of the reformist novel but then soars imaginatively into a gender-egalitarian utopia built on equal education and employment.8 Sharing the same ethos, a play by Girijabai Kelkar (1886– 1980), the first major woman dramatist in Marathi, skilfully privileges both traditional sacred learning and modern professional – especially medical – education for women and underscores their benefits for society as a whole. In a clear paradigm shift, Indira Sahasrabuddhe (1894–1959) agitates in her novel for women’s education, freedom in spouse selection and the right to attain selfhood. Also within this emphatically feminist paradigm are two short stories by the far better known Vibhavari Shirurkar (1905–2001) who, moreover, identifies educated women’s employment as a possible source of exploitation by their lower-middle-class parents. This belies both the con-

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servative dismissal of women’s formal education (as aimed at the unrealistic possibility of their Western-style employment) and the utopian equation of education/employment with gender equality. Thus, what comes across in an overview of women’s writing from the 1880s to the 1930s is precisely this process of women learning to free themselves from male paradigms of thinking and to articulate their own independently formed opinions based on their experiential world – and also freeing educated women from male tropes and installing them as flesh-and-blood characters. We see this progression in three stages: first an echoing of the male argument for women’s education as a necessary social reform initiative, secondly the radical idea that education can and should lead to gender equality, albeit – paradoxically – within the existing family and social structure, and finally the revolutionary idea that the man-woman equation itself needed to be changed. Another parallel process at work here runs counter to the above. During this period, at least one woman writer’s concern shifted from rescuing women through education to rescuing educated women from exploitation. In other words, education was no longer solely the means of achieving women’s emancipation but had in some cases become an obstacle to it.

KASHIBAI KANITKAR’S NOVELS (1903 AND 1928) Kashibai’s prolific literary career spanned the decades from the 1880s to the 1920s and included two novels that put women’s education centre stage (Kosambi 2007c, 2008). The obvious reason is found in Kashibai’s own life. She was married at the age of nine to a bright and handsome student with a literary flair and romantic ideas derived from Keats and Shelley. Being neither pretty nor educated, she suffered outright emotional rejection from him and tried to salvage the situation by educating herself, braving stiff opposition from the older and conventional women in her extended family. Her eventual progress was astounding as she blossomed into a writer able to handle various literary genres from the novel and short story to biography and essay. Her husband even cherished the ambition of making her the Jane Austen or George Eliot of Marathi. Kashibai herself deployed her access to the written word to promote social reform. Her debut novel Rangarao (1931 [1903]) started being serialized in 1886, was interrupted and eventually appeared in book form eighteen years later. It traces the life and career of the protagonist Rangarao (fondly modelled on her own soldier-brother) from childhood to his twenties, when he has distinguished himself as an officer in the Indian Army in military ac-

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tion in the Middle East and studied in England. Rangarao holds liberal and progressive notions, especially about marriage and spouse selection, predictably shaped by the highly popular Jane Austen. He says in a letter: ‘In my opinion, the best type of marriage is that of Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I do not at all approve of the marriages prevailing in our society . . . [T]hey [Elizabeth and Darcy] had come to know each other well before they married . . . What a well-matched couple!’ (Kosambi 2008: 140–41). The novel’s dominant subtext is women’s education. Rangarao’s friend Prabhakar has educated his two younger sisters at home and refused to arrange the customary child marriages for them. As a result, the family faces tremendous public harassment and social censure. Prabhakar engages Rangarao’s younger brother Vyankatrao and also – in a move quite revolutionary in the days of gender segregation, even within the home – Rangarao’s two older, married sisters in a discussion about the need to educate girls before marriage. Prabhakar maintains that ‘An education means not merely the ability to read and write, but also an improved mind, the ability to discriminate between right and wrong, and conduct that reflects this ability’ (ibid.: 152). With reformist enthusiasm, Vyankatrao supports this and exhorts his sister: You seem to think that an educated wife can’t live in a poor family and is used to living in style. How do you know that? If education has improved her mind, she’ll give her poor husband more happiness than an illiterate wife would. And if poverty leads him on the wrong path, she would be able to advise him and prevent him from wrongdoing. She would raise her children well and put them on the right path. (ibid.: 152)

Unfortunately, Kashibai was hampered by her lack of maturity as an author. She successfully conveyed the desirability of women’s education – but only through such discussions, not by creating educated women characters possessed of confidence and independent thinking. Prabhakar’s two sisters neither value education nor derive any benefit from it. They only pine for marriage and social acceptability until they are rescued by Rangarao and Vyankatrao, who agree to marry them. Throughout the novel the colonial state is a significant Other but in rather conflicted ways. This posed a dilemma for many women thinkers, because the British colonial presence was at once exploitative and oppressive towards the nation, but liberating for women through the social reform it tried to encourage.9 Kashibai’s second novel, The Palanquin Tassel (1928), was serialized since 1913, interrupted and finally published as a book fifteen years later. The novel valorizes women’s education as a means for creating a better society and even a better political system. It is the story of a girl whose ambitious

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parents marry her to the young ruler of a princely state – only to discover too late that he is mentally challenged. Eventually the young princess receives an education from her older brother and introduces far-reaching reforms in her state. Her core agenda is to educate and employ women on an equal footing with men and thus create a utopian, gender-egalitarian society. Education thus benefits not only its female recipient herself, but also all other women and indeed society as a whole. Incidentally, this was the first utopian novel in Marathi, although not a full-fledged one. Elsewhere I have compared it with two other famous, woman-authored utopian works, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1979 [1915]) and Rokeya Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream (1993 [1905]), and concluded that Kashibai’s partial utopia lacks the vitality and sophistication of the other two works, but ‘all three converge at the point of culturally specific articulations of universally experienced feminist desires’ (Kosambi 2007c: 193).

GIRIJABAI KELKAR’S PLAY (1913) As a first and only major woman playwright, Girijabai achieved enough prominence to be elected president of the Marathi Dramatists’ Annual Meeting in 1927. By then she had also made her mark as a writer of short stories and novels, although she self-effacingly refers to these only in passing in her autobiography (Kelkar 1959). Girijabai (née Draupadi Barve) grew up at a time when girls’ schooling was becoming common in the middle class. Her education was interrupted when at fifteen she was married to a widower twice her age, but the atmosphere in her marital family was conducive to literary pursuits, and she was encouraged to eventually enter the field of creative writing. Girijabai travelled widely in western India, thanks to her husband’s transferable job, and opened women’s clubs and libraries in some of the small towns she stayed in. At a fairly young age Girijabai published her first book, a collection of essays. This was the fulfilment of her childhood ambition to write books, an ambition whetted by the fact that all the books she read were authored by men: As a child I asked everyone why there was never a woman’s name [as an author] on a book. People said, women did not write books. My next question was ready: why didn’t they? Because they weren’t able to. Why weren’t they able to? My interlocutor would answer irritably, ‘Well, you can write one yourself.’ I thought to myself that I should really write a book when I grow up and put a woman’s name on it. (ibid.: 42–43, my translation)

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The Marathi theatre was already a robust vehicle for shaping public opinion, and Girijabai utilized it effectively. ‘Once I developed a taste for reading and writing, I pondered about the state of our society and felt that we should have social plays that exert some [positive] influence upon society, because the theatre is our prime means of entertainment’ (Kelkar 1913: 1, my translation). Girijabai’s first play, Men’s Rebellion (1913), was a rejoinder to the then popular play Women’s Rebellion by the renowned playwright K.P. Khadilkar (1962 [1907]), first performed in 1907. The latter is based upon an episode in the epic, the Mahabharata, depicting the defeat and dismantling of an allfemale kingdom and thus the restoration of male dominance and subjugation of the independent spirit of women. In contrast, Girijabai’s play envisions the attempted creation of an all-male kingdom by the king of an imaginary state, in deference to the wrongheaded exhortation of a misogynist holy man or swami. Ultimately the king realizes his mistake when his only son meets with an accident and is nursed back to health by the nearby women’s hospital. The prince proposes marriage to the capable, warm-hearted, pretty young director of the hospital and vows to redress all injustice to women. Significantly, the play ends not in female dominance but in gender equality inspired by educated women. Women’s education is the play’s central theme. In her Prologue, Girijabai faults men for blaming women’s ignorance as an obstacle to social and political advancement instead of rectifying this ignorance. She therefore sets out to outline the duties of men and women, and – without using strong language or offending her ‘brothers’ – induce men to treat women with proper respect. In the play, women’s education works on two distinct but complementary levels. In the modern sphere, medical training for women is valorized as a crucial instrument in women’s health care. In another transnational connection, the woman doctor at the women’s hospital in the play is trained in the United States – a character obviously modelled on Dr. Anandibai Joshee, India’s first woman doctor (and also a Maharashtrian), who took her medical degree from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1886. Anandibai was an inspiration to women writers and students aspiring to a professional career.10 At the same time, in the traditional sphere the play shows a ‘holy woman’ learned enough to defeat the swami in a religious debate. The point emphasized repeatedly is that educated women do more for other women and for society as a whole than do men – and they do so within the parameters of filial obedience and family duties. Again, women quell the men’s rebellion, but by creating gender equality (though seemingly

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without revolutionizing the existing social structure), not by asserting their own dominance. The complementarity of the sexes is reiterated at the conclusion of the play. This attitude assumes significance when seen against the backdrop of Girijabai’s own role as a devoted wife and her evident veneration of her husband, which pervades her autobiography.

INDIRABAI SAHASRABUDDHE’S NOVEL (1931) Indirabai Sahasrabuddhe’s generation saw many women graduating from college as a matter of course, some of whom were able to think outside the patriarchal paradigm. She herself worked as a schoolteacher and headmistress in Mumbai for many years and engaged in social activism along with her husband. She contributed several essays to magazines (Ganorkar et al. 2004: 713). Her first two novels were adaptations of English works dealing with women’s problems. Her third novel, Balutai, Dhada Ghe (Balutai, Heed this Lesson, 1931), was an independent creation presenting the quite radical idea that the objective of women’s education was the cultivation of independent thinking and ultimate realization of their selfhood. The novel is a retrospective, first-person account by Sonu, a young, educated, aware woman who is facing premature death because of mental and physical oppression. It is ostensibly a long letter addressed to her little daughter Balutai, as a warning not to repeat her own mistakes. The novel begins when Sonu has just finished her schooling – a privilege granted by her seemingly ‘reformist’ father (Baba), who allows her freedom of action and equality with her two brothers. This suddenly changes when Sonu falls in love with Bhaskar, a bright but poor neighbourhood boy who shares her progressive ideas. She considers herself to be betrothed to him, and when her brother informs Baba that the two are seen holding hands and even embracing, she is shocked at her wealthy father’s opposition. Enraged at her ‘misuse’ of her education, Baba at once arranges her marriage to a ‘suitable’ groom, an older but wealthy widower. Baba views education as only an additional accomplishment for girls, not a means for opening their minds and certainly not as an instrument of resistance to deeply entrenched social customs underpinned by conventional morality. Sonu retorts that ‘thinking independently is not a misuse of education’; ‘Education is to be used precisely for thinking independently and improving the world’ (Sahasrabuddhe 1931: 169). Sonu cannot forget Bhaskar and finds it difficult to submit physically to her husband, whom she regards as a stranger: a sexual relationship with him in the absence of love would be a form of prostitution. Finally he does

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exercise his marital rights and, when she continues to rebel, conveys her back to her father’s house. She then engages in raising awareness among women who are, according to her, generally enslaved by ignorance and coercive social customs. Her volunteer work in an institution that helps women obtain education, vocational training and economic self-reliance evolves her thinking further: The more I considered the issue, the more I pitied the disadvantaged condition of women. Gradually I was convinced that nothing would be achieved unless women themselves made a strong effort to free themselves from their slavery. . . . Then I . . . started writing articles and delivering lectures on topics such as women’s education, emancipation and rights; the need for women to marry in adulthood and choose their own partners; the need for reform in the marriage system and the availability of divorce when necessary. (ibid.: 201–2)

Soon Sonu gives birth to Balutai, but her father continues to incarcerate and penalize her. Later her husband claims his daughter, thus forcing Sonu to accompany her. Sonu’s health has already been undermined by Baba’s harsh treatment, and she ultimately pines away for Bhaskar and dies in her prime. Throughout the novel, Sonu’s interlocutor is the patriarchal family structure that her father, older brother and husband uphold. Her struggle is that of an educated woman who, having already acquired freedom of thought, wants to claim freedom of action as well. Significantly, Bhaskar shares her ideas of women’s rights and wants to support her struggle, but he lacks a legitimate position from which to do so. Indirabai does not posit a manwoman binary but hints at an optimistic scenario of enlightened men and women together striving towards a better future for women, and thus for society as a whole.

VIBHAVARI SHIRURKAR’S SHORT STORIES (1933) Soon afterwards, the comet-like appearance of Vibhavari Shirurkar (née Balutai Khare) on the literary scene took Maharashtra by storm.11 A small-town girl, she came to Pune for middle school and college education and in 1928 gained a master’s degree from the Women’s University, established by the famous social reformer D.K. Karve. From 1923 to 1933 she taught in a girls’ school in Pune, and later she worked in a women’s institution in Mumbai, as well as in institutions for ‘backwards’ classes and ‘criminal tribes’. In 1938, at the age of thirty-three, she married Vishram Bedekar, who gained renown as a writer and film director. Her literary career, spanning the sixty years

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from 1933 to 1993 as well as diverse genres, was informed by sociological observation (Ganorkar et al. 2004: 682–83). Vibhavari’s first collection of short stories, Kalyanche Nishwas (The Sighs of Buds, 1933), was potentially explosive enough to warrant the use of a pseudonym. A public backlash did indeed follow these candid expressions of budding feminine responses to topics ranging from educated women’s employment to their friendship with young men and the conflict between their ideal of platonic love and sexual urges. In her preface to the second edition of the book, Vibhavari talks about the hypocritical society of the early 1930s, which proclaimed a strict moral code but condoned its frequent flouting (Shirurkar 1991 [1933]). She also indicates the unexpected problems created by women’s education. Widows working as schoolteachers and nurses found themselves saddled with the financial responsibility of the natal or marital families that alone offered them protection: ‘Society did not accept the idea of women’s independent existence’ (ibid.: xv). At the same time, young, unmarried working women were sometimes similarly exploited in lower-middle-class families. Vibhavari applied a creative sensibility to an incipient problem in the 1930s that later became acute upon women’s large-scale entry into the job market during the Second World War. Two of Vibhavari’s short stories of 1933 deal with this issue. In ‘Babancha Sansar Maza Kasa Honar?’ (How Can Baba’s Family Responsibilities Be Mine?), now a classic of Marathi literature, a woman (unnamed) who has just turned thirty ponders her future (ibid.: 82–89). Her impoverished parents have educated her and encouraged her gainful employment – ostensibly to ensure her economically self-reliant future, but actually to supplement her father’s (Baba’s) meagre income, insufficient for a family with six children. Feeling simultaneously guilty about and resentful of his oldest daughter’s sacrifice, Baba tries to justify himself by arguing that whereas men have strong sexual needs and must therefore marry (and produce children), women lack such needs and can remain single. When he accuses her of being selfish in occasionally thinking of herself, his hypocrisy is apparent to his narrator-daughter: I felt disgusted with such talk. Perhaps Baba’s words were appropriate from his point of view. It’s not that I don’t understand his state of mind. But like him, I too have a mind and human emotions. How can I help it? No matter what my mother and father are like, and no matter if they are prompted by poverty to say what they should not, there is love behind it all – I cannot forget that. Under the cruel blows of poverty, even affection hides in a remote recess of the heart and dons a hard armour to face poverty. I feel momentary anger when my parents say harsh things. But then again I feel that

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they are after all my parents . . . [who] have raised me since childhood with affection and love. ... But even after thinking with a cool head, I cannot unravel the puzzle – how can Baba’s family responsibilities be mine? How to overcome the feeling of self and others? My family life is not with these children – it is what I would live in someone else’s home. The children’s joys and sorrows are for them, mine are for myself. (ibid.: 85)

In another story, ‘Tyaag’ (Self-sacrifice), the young female narrator-protagonist is in a situation identical to that in the story just described, but she reconciles herself to the inevitability of her sacrifice (ibid.: 5–11): After thinking to myself, I realized that I should do nothing that would cause the least trouble to my aged parents – parents who have raised me at a great cost to themselves and made me capable of independent thinking. Now I began to feel that it would be sheer selfishness on my part to think of marrying and seeking my own happiness. And that is why my decision not to marry gave me great satisfaction. O God, this satisfaction of self-sacrifice will endure, won’t it? (ibid.: 11)

The poignant ambivalence about choosing in favour of self-sacrifice is a telling comment on the unanticipated but significant result of women’s education (and employment): in certain cases, instead of emancipating them it entraps and handicaps them. A man can marry and bring home his wife, but should an earning woman marry, she must take her income to her husband’s home. Only her continued self-sacrifice can guarantee the survival of her parents and younger siblings.

CONCLUSION The remarkable social transition from the 1880s to the 1930s was clearly reflected in women’s swiftly changing perspective on education, as seen in their creative literature. Kashibai’s initial enthusiasm for women’s education as an ordinary social reform issue is transmuted into a desire for gender equality. For Girijabai, educated women’s direct contribution to multi-pronged social change entitles them to equal status with men. Indirabai stresses the personal freedom and dignity of selfhood that should ideally accompany education. Vibhavari’s concern is for the occasional personal cost of education to lower-middle-class women. A parallel change is evident in women’s attitudes to and expectations of marriage. For Kashibai and Girijabai, education makes a woman a better wife and inspires her to uplift her oppressed sisters. Meanwhile, educa-

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tion coupled with employment leads to gender equality – seemingly within the existing patriarchal social structure, notwithstanding Kashibai’s vaguely formulated utopian dream. Indirabai sees education as making a woman confident, aware of her rights, able to question the existing institution of marriage and functionally equal to men in a new egalitarian social order that she seeks to initiate. For Vibhavari, however, a woman’s education and earning capacity can hamper her marriage prospects. Ironically, Kashibai’s 1928 utopian vision of equal education and employment as a source of gender equality gave way only five years later, in 1933, to Vibhavari’s reality that these ‘facilities’ can worsen women’s exploitation instead. Gender equality still remains a utopian vision.

REFERENCES Apte, H.N. 1928 [1916]. Mi (I), 3rd ed. Pune: A.V. Patwardhan. Ganorkar, P., et al. (eds). 2004. Sankshipta Marathi vangmaya-kosh, 1920–2003 (A Concise Encyclopedia of Marathi Literature, 1920–2003). Mumbai: G.R. Bhatkal Foundation. Gilman, C.P. 1979 [1915]. Herland. New York: Pantheon Books. Gokhale, G.K. 1953 [1910]. ‘Prastavana’ (Foreword), in R. Ranade (ed.), Amachya Ayushyatil Kahi Athavani (Reminiscences of Our Life), 7th ed. Pune: K.G. Sharangapani, pp. v–viii. Hossain, R.S. 1993 [1905]. ‘Sultana’s Dream’, in S. Tharu and K. Lalita (eds), Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, vol. 1. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 342–52. Kanitkar, K. 1928. Palkhicha gonda (The Palanquin Tassel). Pune: Ganesh Mahadev ani Kampani. ———. 1931 [1903]. Rangarao, 2nd ed. Pune: A.V. Patwardhan. Kanitkar, N.B. 1890 [1886]. Taruni-shikshana-natika (A Short Play about Young Women’s Education), 2nd ed. Pune: N.B. Kanitkar. Kelkar, G. 1913. Purushanche banda (Men’s Rebellion). Jalgaon: Girijabai Kelkar. ———. 1959. Draupadichi thali (Draupadi’s Plate). Pune: M.M. Kelkar. Khadilkar, K.P. 1962 [1907]. Sangit bayakanche banda (Women’s Rebellion: A Musical Play), 2nd ed. Mumbai: Y.K. Khadilkar. Kosambi, M. 2007a. Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. ———. 2007b. ‘“A Window in the Prison House”: Women’s Education’, in M. Kosambi, Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, pp. 151–71. ———. 2007c. ‘Feminist Utopian Visions: Kashibai Kanitkar’s Creative Writing’, in M. Kosambi, Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, pp. 172–203.

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———. ed. and tr. 2008. Feminist Visions or ‘Treason against Men’? Kashibai Kanitkar and the Engendering of Marathi Literature. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. ———. ed. and tr. 2012. Women Writing Gender: Women’s Fiction before Independence. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. ———. forthcoming. A Profile of Women in Twentieth-Century Maharashtra. Mani, L. 1998. Contentious Traditions. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Sahasrabuddhe, I. 1931. Balutai, dhada ghe (Balutai, Learn This Lesson). Mumbai: Vasant Balwant Marathe. Shirurkar, V. 1991 [1933]. Kalyanche nishwas (The Sighs of Buds), 2nd ed. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan.

NOTES 1. Maharashtra, the Marathi-speaking region of Western India and a separate state in the Indian Union since 1960, was then administratively divided into three entities, including the Bombay Presidency. 2. In this context, Lata Mani has famously argued that women were so marginal to the reform discourse on sati in Bengal as to be denied even the status of object: they were only a ‘site for the contestation of tradition’ (Mani 1998: 2). 3. For a general discussion on the social reform movement in Maharashtra, see Kosambi (2007a). 4. For accounts of such harassment in women’s memoirs, see Kosambi (2007b: 160). An excellent, contemporary (male) literary account is to be found in a famous novel (Apte 1928: 177–89). 5. The quote is also cited in Kosambi (2007a: 24–25). The conservative author, N.B. Kanitkar, was the uncle by marriage of Kashibai Kanitkar, discussed in this article. The tension between the conservative older generation and the progressive younger generation surfaced in many extended families of the time. 6. These figures have been recalculated from the old decennial censuses in Kosambi (forthcoming) using the current state and district boundaries. This recalculation shows that in 1931, the Greater Mumbai District had 15 per cent literate women (and 29 per cent literate men) and Pune District had 4 per cent literate women (and 16 per cent literate men). Ten years later, in 1941 the comparable figures were 31 per cent for women in the Greater Mumbai District (and 47 per cent for men) and 11 per cent for women in Pune District (and 31 per cent for men). 7. For a discussion of the Age of Consent controversy, see the chapter ‘Child Brides and Child Mothers: The Age of Consent Bill (1891) Controversy’ in Kosambi (2007a: 274–310). 8. The honorific suffixes used for women in Maharashtra are ‘bai’ (broadly, lady) and ‘tai’ (sister, specifically older sister). Both of Kashibai’s novels (in abridged form) and some of her essays are available in translation in Kosambi (2008).

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9. This point has been discussed in the chapter ‘Gender and Nationalism’ in Kosambi (2007a: 204–33). 10. Unfortunately, Anandibai Joshee’s life proved sadly short (1865–87). Her biography by Kashibai Kanitkar (1889) was the first woman-authored Marathi biography. For more information about Anandibai’s life and biographies, see the chapter ‘A Prismatic Presence: Anandibai Joshee through Iconized Readings’ in Kosambi (2007a: 67–95). 11. Balutai Khare published under this maiden name, under the pseudonym ‘Vibhavari’ (night) ‘Shirurkar’ (resident of Shirur), and later her married name, Malatibai Bedekar.

Chapter 12

Connecting Literature and History of Education Analysing the Educative Fiction of Jean Webster and Lila Majumdar Transculturally and Connotatively Barnita Bagchi

Y In this chapter, I examine the work of two women writers who wrote primarily for children and young adults on two different continents in two different parts of the twentieth century. They are the American writer Jean Webster (1876–1916) and the Indian, Bengali writer Lila Majumdar (1908– 2007). My focus on their fiction will analytically connect literature, history and education using a connotative, transcultural, comparative approach. By connotative, I refer to a fuzzy, multi-resonanced approach to knowledge. By transcultural, I mean an approach to knowledge that is interested in tracing connections, resonances and relationships across cultures. I argue that these two writers show affinities in the liberal, reformist context and spirit in which they wrote, as well as in their spiritedly humorous writing. Both were born into liberal, reform-minded families. Both chose life partners in a spirit of independence and defiance of social or familial norms. Irreverence, a spirit of independence and articulacy mark out the literary territory of both. Women’s welfarist and associational work figure strongly in both writers’ works. Both write marginalized groups such as tribals or orphans into their stories. What binds them most strongly is humour, a notion and practice in crying need of analytical attention in literary history and the 213

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history of education. I argue that such humour is crucial to their success as entertainer-educators, and that humour is also an important category in our analysis of educative literature, including educative fictions. I further argue that examining contemporary journalistic writing (on women’s and children’s reading and well-loved books) by South Asian women such as Priya Ramani and Kushalrani Gulab reveals a rich, varied, transcultural world of South Asian reading that blends love and analysis of writers from the past (such as Webster and Majumdar) with appreciation of fiction from the present. Such reader responses blend appreciation of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism and Indian national and diasporic fiction with white European and North American writing. Fiction by Webster or Majumdar, I argue, functions across cultures and in nuanced, connotative ways, purveying informal education and liberal values through entertainment. The quote below from the work of Priya Ramani (a contemporary Indian journalist and editor of a weekend supplement to the business newspaper Mint) discusses the subject at the heart of this chapter: a transcultural, connotative approach to women-authored writings for young adults and children, situating such writings at the interstice of literature and history of education. I recently figured the reason I haven’t yet written a book is because my dream book is too scary to even attempt to replicate. In 2012 it will be 100 years since it was published! In other words, it was written the same year the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank – clearly, both stories have survived the test of time. It’s been adapted multiple times to film and stage including the 1955 hit musical starring Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron. I wonder if you’ve read it? A spot office survey showed only three members of my team had. I guess it would classify as a girlie book, it’s told from the perspective of a 17year-old orphan. It’s also a book you can easily finish on a flight from Delhi to Mumbai, as I did again, earlier this week. It recently featured on the list of books the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) said would improve reading habits among Indian schoolchildren. The list, which was released at the end of last year, recommended Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs – the book I’m talking about – for students of classes IX and X along with books by more ‘popular’ authors such as Agatha Christie, Ruskin Bond, Oscar Wilde and P.G. Wodehouse. Scholastic India, which regularly publishes classics, chanced upon CBSE’s list and took the opportunity to publish the book in India in June with the blurb: Recommended by CBSE. (Ramani 2010)

Ramani mentions the American writer Jean Webster. My analysis of Webster and Majumdar emerges partly from the perspective of reception,

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partly from the reading experiences of cosmopolitan South Asian readers such as Ramani or myself. Both Webster and Majumdar were popular in India when I was growing up, and they continue to enjoy this popularity. As Ramani notes, Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs continues to be republished under Indian imprints such as Scholastic, and contemporary Indian journalists and writers write about her in newspapers and on the Internet: clearly, Webster’s work enjoys transcultural success and is read with fresh, reinvented pleasure across periods and cultures. Lila Majumdar is now being vigorously translated and republished in English in India, so audiences besides the Indian (or diasporic Indian) ones are starting to read her books. Majumdar’s work crafts a literary space where her own wide range of reading in British and American literature, her acute awareness of India as a hybrid space where cultures mingle, and her evocation of the British Raj, Anglo-Indian populations and missionary schooling all combine to produce a creatively transcultural space. Equally, my analysis emerges from my own reading as a cosmopolitan, transcultural academic, brought up and educated in India, educated further in Great Britain, and now situated as an academic in the Netherlands. Kushalrani Gulab writes: How shall I organise my books? Despite my inner librarian, I refuse to do it alphabetically (my inner librarian often has to compete with my inner bohemian). So shall I arrange them by author? But then what happens to the lone books, the ones that are the sole representatives of their authors? It’s very sad to see a lone book squashed between large, thug-like gangs of books. It could severely disturb the lone book’s personality. Not nice. So, by genre? But sometimes it’s very difficult to classify books into categories. One of my favourites, 84 Charing Cross Road, a story about a love affair between an American woman and a secondhand bookshop which is told in letters, could be clubbed with other books about books. . . . But it could just as easily be clubbed with Daddy-Long-Legs, which is also a book in letters, but is what would be called today a Young Adults romance. And Daddy-Long-Legs could be clubbed with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which is also a story told in letters and also a romance (or rather, a feel-good book), but this is for grownups. . . (Gulab 2010)

Here we have more transcultural literary analysis, questioning easy generic classification and comparing Daddy-Long-Legs with other epistolary novels, including those for adults, such as The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Anne Shaffer and Annie Burrows (2008) and 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff (1990 [1970]). Below is an insight into a transcultural literary world enjoyed, analysed and celebrated by an Indian journalist and writer:

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I grew up with a lot of good books, but so much of the children’s fiction I love was discovered when I was long past my teens . . . I’d never have lost myself in Susan Cooper’s wonderful The Dark Is Rising series that I can re-read any time. I wouldn’t have been able to fling myself with all my heart and soul into the happy multicultural world of Amber, Geena and Jazz in Narinder Dhami’s Bindi Babes series, books that never fail to cheer me up when I’m sunk in gloom. I stumbled upon Anne of Green Gables when I was 22, Cornelia Funke’s Dragon Rider when I was 34 and have recently lost myself in the worlds of Satyajit Ray’s Feluda and Professor Shonku, now available in English translations. If I didn’t ‘still’ read children’s books, I’d never have got into a fascinating and completely unexpected – because it seemed such an unlikely thing to happen – discussion on the joy of reading with a sales assistant at a gift shop . . . And I’m bleeped if I’ll ever stop reading Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. I first read it when I was about eight and I have read it consistently year after year since then. (Gulab 2009)

Gulab, in her account of transcultural reading experiences, further questions generic categories as she celebrates an adult reader reading books for children and young adults, including the Bindi Babes series, which tells the story of immigrant South Asian children in school in the United Kingdom (the books are popular in the United States too); she also mentions Daddy-Long-Legs and other classics of European and Anglo-American literature. She speaks further of classics of Bengali literature written by Lila Majumdar’s cousin and close associate Satyajit Ray, whose fictional sleuth Feluda (2004a) stars in a series of highly popular detective books (now translated into English, the language in which Gulab read them), while Professor Shonku is the hero of Ray’s science fiction (2004b). Ray and Majumdar were two of the three editors of a Bengali magazine for children, Sandesh, which means both ‘sweetmeat’ and ‘news’. Gulab’s piece shows what a rich, varied, world of reading South Asian readers such as her or myself inhabit, one that by no means lives only in the past but rather blends the fiction of the past with that of the present, and multiculturalism and Indian national and diasporic fiction with white European and North American writing. That is the varied, vivid, reading world this chapter situates itself in. In this world, books like Webster’s purvey both education and entertainment. That is why, as Ramani mentions, the Central Board of Secondary Education in India (CBSE), recommends Webster’s books for boys and girls aged 14–16, in classes nine and ten. Such recommendations strengthen my argument that the fiction of Webster and Majumdar needs to be situated at the interstice of literary studies and the history of education. Both writ-

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ers were popular, respected entertainer-educators whose work expands our notion of history of education to encompass the important educative work performed by fiction for children and young adults. I analyse a crucial element in their success as entertainer-educators that is also the strongest element linking them as writers: humour, a notion and practice that is analysed lamentably little in literary history and the history of education. I argue further that in understanding the history of both education in general and women’s education in particular, literary works by women writers such as Webster and Majumdar are important objects of analysis. Through humorous writing and writing that was simultaneously supportive of the education and development of women and other socially marginal groupings, such women writers purveyed defamiliarizing, entertaining processes of informal education to their readers. Far more than just sugar-coated pills, the educational work of these women’s fiction challenged facile didacticism and showed that through creative, humorous literary craftsmanship, one could offer connotative lessons for life. ‘Connotative’ therefore functions at two levels in this article. I am arguing that the kind of broad-based, multipronged, fictional education offered by Webster and Majumdar is connotative. I am also arguing that analysing their works in all their richness, polyphony and humour requires a connotative approach, picking up on associations, connections, multiple meanings and affiliations to enable gains in flexibility and richness of analysis, and avoids a reductive, didactic analysis of fiction by women, which is a real danger in situating humorous fiction by women in the history of education. In my enterprise, my status as literary scholar is vital to my connotative, transcultural approach: I read these writers as authors of creative literary texts and argue that if we are to situate Webster or Majumdar analytically in history of education, we need to see them as literary creators. The two writers’ works differ in their main thrust. Whereas Webster wrote her most well-known fiction primarily about girlhood and young adulthood, Majumdar’s main corpus for children is not primarily for and about girls or women growing up, though she did write autobiographical works about her own childhood, girlhood and mature years. She also wrote some relatively little known fiction about girls’ and women’s growth and development. Both writers display an eclectic, adventurous, questing spirit that is interested in different cultures, including Europe. Both are sturdily rooted in the local; this includes a tremendous empathy for tribal societies in India in the case of Majumdar and for orphans in the case of Webster. Both wrote works that acted as entertaining media of education, and have, since their publication, been recommended as funny yet liberal and inclusive literature for children and young adults.

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Alice Jane Chandler Webster, Jean Webster’s real name, and Lila Majumdar, née Raychaudhuri, were both born into liberal, reformist milieus. Webster, born in Fredonia, New York, grew up in an activist, matriarchal setting. Her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother all lived under the same roof. Her great-grandmother worked on temperance issues and her grandmother on racial equality and women’s suffrage. Webster’s mother was Mark Twain’s niece, and her father was Twain’s business manager and subsequently publisher of many of his books. However, the publishing company ran into difficulties. In 1888, her father had a breakdown, and in 1891 he committed suicide. Alice graduated in 1894 from the Fredonia Normal School. From 1894 to 1896 she was a boarder at the Lady Jane Grey School, which institution taught academics, music, art, letter-writing, diction and manners to about twenty girls and inspired many of the details of the school in Webster’s novel Just Patty (1911). It was at this school that Alice became known as Jean. Webster attended Vassar College from 1897 to1901. Majoring in English and economics, she took a course in welfare and penal reform and became interested in social issues, including institutions for orphans and delinquent children. She involved herself in the College Settlement House that served poorer communities in New York, an interest she would maintain throughout her life. Her experiences at Vassar provided material for her books When Patty Went to College (1903) and Daddy-Long-Legs. With her close college friend Adelaide Crapsey, Webster participated in many extracurricular activities, including writing, drama and politics. Webster and Crapsey supported the socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs during the 1900 presidential election, although as women they were not allowed to vote. She contributed stories to the Vassar Miscellany. Webster’s spelling was imperfect, and when asked her authority for a spelling error, she replied ‘Webster’, a play on the name of the famous dictionary with which she shared her surname. Webster spent part of her junior year travelling in Europe with two other students, with Italy as her main destination. There, Webster researched her senior economics thesis on pauperism in Italy. She was literary editor for her class yearbook and graduated in June 1901. Once out of college, Webster began writing When Patty Went to College, which was published in 1903, followed by Daddy-Long-Legs in 1912 and Dear Enemy in 1915 as well as other books. Webster became involved with Glenn Ford McKinney, who was unhappily married; he and Webster eventually married in 1915 after McKinney’s divorce. She died in childbirth in June 1916. Lila Majumdar (1908–2007) too belonged natally to a culturally and socially reformist, innovative milieu (Chattopadhyay 2010). Illustrious mem-

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bers of her family, the Ray/Raychaudhuri family, included her uncle, the children’s writer and publisher Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri; his son, the publisher and writer of fantasy and nonsense literature Sukumar Ray; and Sukumar’s son, the filmmaker and children’s writer, Satyajit Ray. Majumdar and Ray spearheaded writing for children in Bengal through their own work and their co-editorship of the children’s magazine Sandesh. Majumdar’s family belonged to the reformist, monotheist Brahmo Samaj founded by Rammohun Roy in the nineteenth century, among whose ranks were some of the most fearless and active campaigners for women’s education in India. Majumdar relates anecdotes about the husband and wife Dwarakanath (1844– 98) and Kadambini Ganguly (1861–1923), close relatives on her mother’s side (Majumdar 2001 [1986]: 101–3). She describes Kadambini, who had a highly successful practice, as one of India’s earliest women doctors. She also recounts with relish an anecdote about Dwarakanath, who, incensed by derogatory remarks about Kadambini Ganguly and other educated women published in the periodical Bangabasi in 1891, went to the office of the publication and forced its editor to swallow the piece of paper in question – that is, he made the editor literally ‘eat his own words’ (ibid.: 103). Majumdar’s role as a powerful woman writer embedded in this milieu has just begun to be analysed (Bagchi 2009). Sandesh, founded in 1913 by Upendrakishore, played a major role in creating a Bengali literary public sphere for children that promoted humour, non-sectarian ethics, adventurousness and creativity. Majumdar also produced pieces for All India Radio. She wrote bestselling cookbooks that taught generations of Bengali women how to cook efficiently without fuss (Majumdar and Chatterjee 1979). As a writer for children and young adults in Bengal from the 1920s onwards, Majumdar was a wise, funny imparter of humane values, all the more effective because she did not write pompously or sententiously. Her role as public educator was thus both influential and multidimensional. Majumdar wrote autobiographical pieces, collected into three major book-length works, Ar Konokhane (Somewhere Else, 1989 [1967]) Kheror Khata (Miscellany, 2009 [1982]) and Pakdandi (Winding, Hilly Road, 2001 [1986]), which recount the processes of education that she went through as a girl and young woman in the hills of North-east India and in Kolkata. These narratives are suitable for a very large age range, from teenager to adult. The Ray family comprised entrepreneurial, original master entertainers who simultaneously brought civilizing, humanist educative values into the public sphere of the arts. How did the leading woman writer from this milieu present her own development, as a girl and human being in this environment, to her readers? She did so in complex ways that reveal the gendering and ungendering of the self of a most subversive gentlewoman.

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Majumdar was a highly successful achiever in formal education from school through the completion of her M.A. degree in English Literature from Calcutta University. Her autobiography describes her career as teacher, first in Maharani Girls’ School, a pioneering girls’ school in Darjeeling, a hill station in Bengal; then in Patha Bhavana, the school founded and run by Rabindranath Tagore in the innovative educational and social community Shantiniketan in rural Bengal; and then in Asutosh College, a college for girls in Kolkata. Tagore’s own ideals of education rejected rigid, formal institutional education in favour of an education that prized creativity and the experimental. Classes in Shantiniketan were frequently held in the open air under trees. Creative writing, painting, batik, dancing, singing and other such crafts and creativity-based activities were encouraged. Majumdar chose to leave teaching in Shantiniketan because even this was too routine and constricting for her, but she later had a house there and remained a loyal part-time resident of Tagore’s ‘abode of peace’. Dissatisfied with institutional education, Majumdar was nonetheless shaped by her own higher education, knew what it was to teach in schools and colleges, and chose as her vocation creative writing, which cut cross the formal narrowness of institutional education to entertain while also imparting education through fiction. Her work was recommended highly and taught in high schools in Bengal when I was growing up. Majumdar’s autobiographical writing describes the schools she went to in Shillong and Kolkata, and her experiences as a teacher in Darjeeling and Kolkata. She interweaves this with representations of informal educational processes, whether conducted by women of the North-east Indian hill tribes that Majumdar interacted with in childhood, or her remarkable family members, including Sukumar Ray. In the vignettes/scraps/sketches in Kheror Khata (Miscellany), Majumdar offers a sketch about a tribal Santhal boy who ate jalebis and samosas (respectively sweet and savoury, very popular snacks originating in North India) on the prize distribution day in a school started by boys from Visva-Bharati, the university at the core of Shantiniketan. On being asked how he liked this fare, he gave a big smile, and replied, ‘Great. But field mice taste even better’ (Majumdar 2009 [1982]: 37). Majumdar’s most well-known works centre on boys, although girls and women also feature somewhat peripherally. Ghost stories, short stories in the vein of nonsense and fantasy, detective and adventure stories, science fiction: these were some of her most favoured genres, and in all of them Majumdar praises mischief, waywardness and quirkiness. Such praise is also interwoven into her ostensibly more feminized writing, such as her autobiographies and her female-centred suspense and romance novels. In all her oeuvre, we find imaginative scepticism about rote-learning and institutional

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education. This is the case even in her conduct-book Manimala (originally a series broadcast in 1947–48 on All India Radio), which consists of letters of advice from a grandmother to her ‘very ordinary’ granddaughter, tracing the granddaughter’s path from age twelve through to her falling in love and marrying against her father’s wishes, much as Majumdar had done (Majumdar 1956). This is the case also in novellas such as Halde Pakhir Palak (The Yellow Bird’s Feather), translated recently as The Yellow Bird (Majumdar 2010b [1957]), where she offers an imaginative, empathetic representation of the poverty-stricken and the indigenous tribes of India. Majumdar’s writing arguably creates adventurous new notions of decorum while refusing any straitjacketing into limited notions of what a woman writer catering for children and young adults should write. She expanded the middle-class child’s world to take in the poor of India, the indigenous people of India and even the thieves of India in superb humorous vignettes and stories about encounters with clever thieves (e.g., Majumdar 2009 [1982]: 44–47). Majumdar both participated in and represented multiple layers and complexities in education. She crafted roles for herself that were both overtly gendered (wife, mother, writer of cookbooks and conduct books for girls) and not overtly gendered (writer not primarily of girls’ stories but of zany, humorous, fantastic adventures and science fiction). Majumdar herself translated writers such as Jonathan Swift (1975–76) and Hans Christian Andersen (1983). Her husband was a Harvard-trained dentist, and the couple lived in a household that bridged Westernized mores with Hindu and Brahmo values in the shadow of the fact that Majumdar, in choosing to marry outside the Brahmo Samaj, had created a permanent rupture with her father. All of Majumdar’s writing shows many loyalties: loyalty to her Brahmo roots and personality, to the Hindu values and cultural richness she encountered after marriage and to a thoroughly cosmopolitan, transcultural sensibility, whether revealed by her love for Dickens novels and Gothic-style romance novellas, by the constant presence of sahibs, mulattoes and Anglo-Indians in her stories, or by her tremendous love for the geography and highly hybrid society of the Indian hills (based no doubt on her childhood upbringing in the hill station of Shillong in North-east India). Jean Webster, like Lila Majumdar, was a spirited, reformist writer. She wrote most memorably about Judy Abbot, never to be called Jerusha as she was primly christened at the charity orphanage where she grew up, for Judy sounded freer. Orphanage reform, girls’ and women’s education, women’s suffrage and the development and encouragement of female authorship are important issues in Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy. Daddy-Long-Legs, a book about female education and female vocations, writing and romance, good causes and riches, has recently received atten-

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tion from critics who bring a gendered perspective to bear on Webster’s writing (Lehnert 1992; Alkalay-Gut 1993). It is a fairy-story in which the orphan Judy ends up living happily ever after with her hitherto anonymous benefactor, who happens to be a rich, eccentric, generous socialist. After struggling with her muse, she also emerges as an author. Daddy-Long-Legs is also one of the most vivid representations ever of life in a residential college. From making lemon jelly to failing Latin or Mathematics, from burning one’s first literary manuscript to learning to subdivide essays into clear arguments, from first encountering Emily Dickinson in some bewilderment to constantly battling snobbery, Daddy-Long-Legs offers humorous snapshot after snapshot of the experience of being a young woman in college in turn-of-the-century America. In Dear Enemy, the sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs, Judy’s rich socialite friend Sallie Macbride takes charge of the John Grier Home for children, where Judy grew up. Sallie starts out as a reluctant amateur but then becomes passionate about the children and about improving the orphanage. She abandons her engagement to an ambitious politician and forms a comradely friendship, which turns into a romantic attachment, with the Scottish doctor who looks after the orphanage children. He, mirroring a man in Webster’s own life, turns out to have a mentally unstable wife in an asylum. All ends happily with the convenient death of the wife, clearing the way to a companionate marriage for Sallie and Sandy McRae. Scholars have shown that Webster argued for a certain kind of eugenics in her programme of social reform (Keely 2004). Majumdar also fictionally depicts young women who are in college, or have graduated from college and work at jobs, in her relatively neglected novellas for young adult women, some of which are collected in the anthology Ami Nari (I Am a Woman, Majumdar 1999). These fine works are perhaps some of the very few works in the female Gothic mode in Bengali, carrying the combination of bildung (education and development of the self) and suspense that one finds in the works of skilled, elegant, neglected writers such as Anne Radcliffe in the late eighteenth century and Mary Stewart in the twentieth century. Usually stories of romantic suspense, they are also tales of ‘female difficulties’ resolved. Majumdar says in Pakdandi that these novellas give happy endings to their heroines, all of whom are orphans or homeless, have undergone trials and difficulties and are overwhelmingly working women. These are precisely the sorts of stories that young girls in Bengal would read from their teens onwards, although it is worth noting that by their late teens, many of these ‘young girls’ were already married and reading as young wives. The reader of these tales is somewhere in between the kishori

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(female adolescent) and the nari (woman). Like Majumdar’s children’s tales, these novellas are far from heavy reading; rather, they rely on frisson-filled plotline of exquisite fear and/or suspense and the continuous presence of romantic threads to create stylized and predictable structures. Yet they are unusual novels. The eponymous narrator of Kestadasi, the first novella in the anthology Ami Nari, is a poor lower-caste woman employed as a social worker. It is Kestadasi/Krisnamani’s diary that forms the novel, presenting her struggles between a wide variety of subject positions, from her current gentrified status to memories of abject poverty and rough living that shaped her early life. Rescued from a state of penniless destitution by a gentlewoman named Mani, ‘Kesta’, through Mani’s support, comes to teach weaving to other women in a women’s welfare project. She earns a monthly salary, lives with Mani and becomes known to the bhadramahilas or gentlewomen who run the ladies’ welfare society Mahila Sangha as Krisnamani Devi, a marker of her upward mobility. She is not classifiable as a domestic servant, since she does not take a salary for doing Mani’s work and is thought to be Mani’s relative. This fascinating relationship posited between the women is at once socially unequal, inwardly equal, friendly and affective. Inside herself, Krisnamani still thinks of herself as Kestadasi and feels torn about the abjectly poor, traumatized life in the slum of Hogalkunre she has left behind. Right at the beginning of her diary she tells of her teacher in school asking her father’s name; she replies cavalierly that she had no trace of a father. When, as instructed, she asks her mother, the mother in turn replies, ‘There never was a father, and he never had a name. Tell your teacher that. All this nonsense’ (Majumdar 1999: 3; my translation). Majumdar makes Kestadasi display this kind of unsentimental, brisk attitude in at least one part of herself. But another part of Kesta is unashamedly, overwhelmingly sentimental. Both these parts are activated when the Mahila Sangha takes up a welfare project in Hogalkunre just as a film star appears in the locality with his little son Rahul, and a mysterious relationship unravels between him and Mani. This part of Majumdar’s oeuvre features fascinating accounts of a whole era of do-gooding Bengali women running ladies’ committees in primary schools and creating ladies’ societies – Mahila Sanghas – whose cosy malice and competence is wonderfully captured in the members’ conversations in Kestadasi. Majumdar’s work and life offer records of, and links to, a distinguished strand of modernizing Brahmo female welfarist activism, which foretokened our current canonization of civil society. Majumdar’s belonging to a Brahmo milieu, and her often-expressed admiration for crusading welfarist working women, at least partly shaped such narratives as Kestadasi. She herself worked, with some seriousness and great enjoyment, with such

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civil society organizations such as Anandamela (Joyful Gathering), a strong thread of unity with Webster and her love of welfarist, activist, reformist women. In her autobiography Pakdandi, Majumdar expresses particular fondness for her much acclaimed fantasy Halde Pakhir Palak, mentioned above. Elusive notes of sorrow, eeriness and the uncanny sound throughout the work as a brother and sister encounter a strange world of loss, fantasy, the supernatural and sadness through their interaction with the aged servant Jhagru, from the poverty-stricken area of Dumka in Eastern India. The children lose their beloved dog and believe that being brushed by the feather of an injured bird has turned him into a little boy, as Jhagru’s Dumka lore would have it. Tale after tale, the wizened, white-haired, wise Jhagru inducts them into a world where magic and sadness couple to produce eerie empathy with humanity. Multi-semantic, entertaining, educative and funny, both Majumdar and Webster chart women’s and men’s quest for unusual, feisty, independent patterns of education, growth and development. At once entertainer-educators and reform-minded fiction writers promoting causes such as Fabian socialism, orphanage reform, women’s suffrage, tribal communities, solar power and women’s education and right to work, Webster and Majumdar were far more successful educators than most formal educators. Both voiced strong views on a whole range of issues, such as women’s education, welfare and care for the underprivileged, and both chose to write in a style that foregrounds humour. Their humour marked out their writing and played a crucial role in their success as educators in fiction, for it was precisely their defamiliarizing irreverence that drew the loyalty of generations of readers and let them transmit their messages in a non-didactic style. How do we analyse their humour? Two words I have just used are essential to understanding their humour: irreverence and defamiliarization. Pomposity, earnestness and powers-that-be are all treated with laughter and lack of respect. And a fresh eye is cast on a world where eating field mice is both funny and natural (Majumdar 2009 [1982]: 36), where snobbery in aristocratic ancestry is joked about (Webster 1912: passim) and where a hero can be both attractive and ridiculous (ibid.), as in the case of Jervis Pendleton, the man Judy falls in love with, who turns out to be her unknown benefactor. A certain code of humour-in-propriety characterizes both women’s writing. But these proper gentlewomen nonetheless extended the boundaries of propriety, especially considering their shared belief that women should choose life partners independently and affectively. Both drew on the strength of critical, reformist, male relatives. And their humour transformed the edu-

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cative pills they purveyed – speaking up for marginalized people such as tribals, advocating for girls’ and women’s education, discussing the care of orphans and dependent children – into tasty, satisfying dishes. Fairy-story and romance elements arguably also contribute to the success of Dear Enemy and Daddy-Long-Legs and to Majumdar’s female-centred novellas. Ramani’s and Gulab’s acute sense of a transcultural world of books for children and young adults that transcend their age-group-limited target audience and cut across geographical boundaries offers clues to how potent a Webster or a Majumdar can be. Taught in schools, recommended for schools and entertaining outside the limits of school prescriptions, Majumdar’s and Webster’s writings are important constituent elements of the worlds we analyse in both history of education and literary studies.

REFERENCES Alkalay-Gut, K. 1993. ‘“If Mark Twain Had a Sister”: Gender-Specific Values and Structure in Jean Webster’s Daddy Long-Legs’, Journal of American Culture 16(4): 91–99. Andersen, H.C. 1983. Rachanavali, trans. L. Majumdar. Kolkata: Asia Publishing. Bagchi, B. 2009. ‘Cheery Children, Growing Girls, and Developing Young Adults: On Reading, Growing, and Hopscotching across Categories’, in R.B. Chatterjee and N. Gupta (eds), Reading Children: Essays on Children’s Literature. Delhi: Orient Blackswan, pp. 162–81. Chattopadhyay, D. 2010. ‘Nonsense Club and Monday Club: The Cultural Utopias of Sukumar Ray’, in M. Corporaal and E. van Leeuwen (eds), The Literary Utopias of Cultural Communities, 1790–1810. New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 243–52. Cooper, S. 1993. The Dark Is Rising Sequence: Silver on the Tree; The Grey King; Greenwitch; The Dark Is Rising; Over Sea, Under Stone. New York: Simon and Schuster. Dhami, N. 2005. Bindi Babes. New York: Yearling. Funke, C. 2005. Dragon Rider. London: Chicken House. Gulab, K. 2009. ‘Labels and Tags: Expletives Deleted’, Hindustan Times blog, 20 August. Retrieved 15 September 2013 from http://web.archive.org/web/20090917002406/ http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/expletive-deleted/2009/08/20/labels-and-tags/ ———. 2010. ‘On the Shelf: Expletive Deleted’, Hindustan Times blog, 9 December 2010. Retrieved 15 September 2013 from http://web.archive.org/web/20101211014932/ http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/expletive-deleted/2010/12/09/on-the-shelf/ Hanff, H. 1990 [1970]. 84, Charing Cross Road. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Keely, K.A. 2004. ‘Teaching Eugenics to Children: Heredity and Reform in Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy’, The Lion and the Unicorn 28(3): 363–89. Lehnert, G. 1992. ‘The Training of the Shrew: The Socialization and Education of Young Women in Children’s Literature’, Poetics Today 13(1): 109–22.

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Majumdar, L. 1956. Manimala. Kolkata: Asia Publishing. ——— . 1989 [1967]. Ar Konokhane. Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh. ——— . 1999. Ami Nari. Kolkata: Mitra and Ghosh. ——— . 2000 [1982]. Sab Bhuture. Kolkata: Ananda. ——— . 2001 [1986]. Pakdandi. Kolkata: Ananda. ——— . 2009 [1982]. Kheror Khata. Kolkata: Ananda. ——— . 2010a. The Burmese Box: Two Novellas, trans. S. Banerjee. New Delhi: Puffin. ——— . 2010b [1957]. The Yellow Bird, trans. K. Chatterjee. New Delhi: Puffin. Majumdar, L. and K. Chatterjee. 1979. Rannar Boi. Kolkata: Ananda. Montgomery, L.M. 1908. Anne of Green Gables. Retrieved 15 February 2011 from Literature Network database: http://www.online-literature.com/lucy_montgomery/ anne_green_gables/ Ramani, P. 2010. ‘The Book That Lives On and On: Every Time I Think of Writing a Book I Think of Daddy-Long-Legs’, Mint, 30 July 2010. Retrieved 16 February 2011 from http://www.livemint.com/2010/07/30205248/The-bookthat-lives-on-and-on.html Ray, S. 2004a. The Complete Adventures of Feluda, trans. G. Mazumdar. 3 vols. New Delhi: Penguin. ———. 2004b. The Exploits of Professor Shonku: Diary of a Space Traveller, trans. G. Mazumdar. New Delhi: Penguin. Shaffer, M.A. and A. Burrows. 2008. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. New York: Random House. Swift, J. 1975–76. Gulliverer Bhramanbrittanta, trans. L. Majumdar. Delhi: Sahitya Akademi. Webster, J. 1903. When Patty Went to College. New York: Grosset & Dunlap. Retrieved 15 February 2011 from The Celebration of Women Writers database: http://dig ital.library.upenn.edu/women/webster/college/college.html ———. 1911. Just Patty. New York: The Century Company. Retrieved 15 February 2011 from Project Gutenberg database: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21048 ———. 1912. Daddy-Long-Legs. New York: The Century Company. Retrieved 15 February 2011 from Project Gutenberg database: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/157

Chapter 13

Transcending the Centre-Periphery Paradigm Loreto Teaching in India, 1842–2010 Tim Allender

Y Loreto is a Catholic teaching order for girls. This chapter explores its educational work in India in the past 160 years. Though Loreto operates throughout most of India today, the focus here is on Calcutta as the place where it first engaged with the subcontinent in 1842 before spreading west and eventually south. The chapter explores the complexity of this educational site to consider theorization about knowledge transfer that goes beyond simpler centre-periphery binaries. It also contextualizes and positions Loreto’s work in pre- and post-independence India to explain why it has been able to transcend Partition despite its Western and Christian predication, and why it continues to flourish today. I argue here that Loreto women religious were not simply tools of empire, but rather that they carved out unique relationships with rulers during and after colonization. The chapter outlines the reasons for this by illustrating how Loreto’s long history in the field of female education in India was not always coterminous with empire. Finally, it looks at one key branch located in Sealdah, Calcutta, where impressive outreach programmes build on Loreto’s distinctive heritage in India.

WHAT IS LORETO? Loreto is an order that was founded by Mary Ward in 1609 in England. Its educational precepts were simple yet revolutionary for the time. Ward be227

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lieved girls should be educated as boys were, and that this education should involve acts of charity to surrounding communities and regular student contributions to the education of others. Rather than anticipating modern educational narratives, her work is best viewed as reflecting the Catholic religiosity of her day, especially the contours that framed both her accommodative and resistive praxis as it related to the Catholic Church. For example, Ward saw her order as open, not cloistered, and wished it not to be controlled by men, specifically the bishops. Working within the Church, Loreto came to be most closely allied to the Jesuits, who were acutely interested in the education of males. This active dynamic led the Vatican to suppress Loreto in 1639, and the order eventually relocated a century later to Ireland. It was rehabilitated in 1877, finding new footing throughout many parts of the world – often in the footprints of a Protestant pax Britannica – and also reconfiguring Ward’s early-seventeenth-century education philosophy. Emerging Western imperatives to educate females gave Loreto new focus, even though these imperatives were driven in part by feminist thought that would have been unrecognizable to Ward herself, and that her order scarcely acknowledged even in the late nineteenth century.

THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS OF LORETO’S WORK IN INDIA To adequately locate Loreto in India, this chapter draws on papers in public and private collections located in Dublin, Ireland; London and Birmingham, England; Australia and India. These archives are critical, as the official paper trail relating to female education in India dries up in government archives after the Indianization of the colonial education service in 1919.1 However, most of the journey of writing this chapter has concerned the theorization associated with the topic. White women educators who were Catholics in a Protestant raj set up a knowledge transfer scenario that transcends the standard centre-periphery modelling often associated with more orthodox stories of settler and expatriate societies in colonial domains, even when the state itself withers away. The chapter is informed by the unique nature of colonial India itself as it relates to the main theme of the essay, which uses the site of Loreto to illustrate the nature of knowledge transfer in a key colonial setting. India’s rich Orientalist period in the 1820s and 1830s marks a fascinating intersection where a part of the empire ‘overseas’ offered a much stronger dynamic in the transfer of ideas than anything occurring ‘at home’ in England in the

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same period. Scholars have been considering this phenomenon since the publication of Eric Stokes’s (1959) work on the application of utilitarian bureaucratic principles in India, before their application back in England. The long interregnum since the publication of Stokes’s work mostly reflects historians’ struggles to come up with a working model that might adequately explain this interchange, particularly as it changed over time and into the early twentieth century. Closer inspection of the educational link between Great Britain and India in the colonial phase immediately reveals strong transformational interchanges that most contemporaries – whether apologists for empire or not – were keen to acknowledge. Yet centre-periphery approaches, which identify just one imperial centre and peripheries only in colonial domains, have been largely unsuccessful in tracing this complex relationship. This is particularly so when the colonial period is perceived, erroneously, as a single, relatively even enterprise of imposition upon settler societies and ‘native’ communities, and where the metropolis itself has not been identified as a cultural space worthy of similar problematization. Networks amongst colonies themselves – and ex-colonies, as the case of the Indo/American relationship – also come into play, creating a perplexing web of imperial and international connections that are difficult to adequately map. Here the theoretical scene is complex. Recent theorization about this very problem and its attendant rejection of simpler centre-periphery approaches has provided robust new approaches. Curthoys and Lake (2005) proffer models of transnational history in which analysis centres on understanding what happens to people and practices when they cross national boundaries. Darian-Smith, Grimshaw and Macintyre (2007), studying Britishness as a global phenomenon, examine what happened to this Britishness in its diffuse forms as the empire declined. However, the network and circuit conception of empire is more compelling for the purposes of this chapter. Lester (2006) uses this notion on multiple levels, analysing colonial practice, performance and experience as productive enterprises rather than simply attempting to locate their putative social, economic and political causes. This builds on Ballantyne’s (2002) impressive organizing metaphor of an agglomeration of overlapping webs to explain the multi-sited history of empire. Loreto in India is an important illustration of these webs and networks, and the knowledge transfer attendant upon them. The lifetime work of Loreto women religious, well engaged with local communities and actually teaching poor Indian girls, transcended the formal raj state divides of race, class and gender. And this transcendence continues today. Whilst Loreto’s work remains firmly anchored in the Judeo-Christian ethic, the communi-

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ties it serves do not see it as a remnant of empire; nor is its professionalism in teaching and education seen as an imposed Western fetish. Its history, understood by way of this recent theorization, explains why this might be so.

SETTING THE SCENE: COLONIAL STATECRAFT AND FEMALE EDUCATION, 1860–1919 Before discussing Loreto’s brand of female education in India it is important to understand its broader historical context and particularly the raj’s construction of its approaches to female education. As was typical of their colonial rule, and in the wake of the utilitarian experimentation in India after 1835, the British sought to bring uniformity, ‘system’ and regulation to level out and control Eastern ‘degeneracy’. This imperative obscured many vibrant, diverse sites of local learning that might have otherwise been usefully developed. The Parsees of Maharashtra (Western India), for example, traditional educators of their girls, had long built communities of female learners, partly using the fulcrum of Native Education Societies, whilst in the north an array of zenana (rooftop) schools across many cities and villages educated women in purdah (seclusion). However, European-directed education for girls evolved differently from that of boys (Allender 2009: 707), even though its language and institutionalization seemed superficially to copy European developments. In England, notions of institutional schooling for girls only solidified halfway through the century; these models were then transferred to the raj. In the early years before 1854 the state funded its girls’ schooling by deferring, when required, to the educational peccadilloes of powerful regional administrators. In Bengal and Madras, most state funding went to the missions’ patchy, urban-centred European schooling, which usually aimed to proselytise rather than teach even Western knowledge (Hunter Education Commission 1884). Meanwhile, Henry Reid’s imaginative Halkabandi village circle system in Northern India engaged poor rural boys and, unofficially, clever girls too, if their parents consented.2 A second level of colonial governance involved a more sinister activism that gained intensity as imperialist mindsets came to dominate softer colonial mentalities. In 1876, Queen Victoria dissembled when accepting her Empress of India moniker from her doting Dizzy (Disraeli) back in England. Meantime in India, a starker raj consideration of female education focused on Eurasians and eugenics. As in Australia and other colonial domains, concerns about children of mixed blood – often deemed ‘orphans’ – were powerful initiators of policy.

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In India the term ‘Eurasian’ was slippery and its meaning unstable, but in the mid-nineteenth century it mostly referred to those descended from, or the issue of, long redeployed soldiers and their Indian mistresses. Many Eurasians worked for India’s railway companies (D’Souza 1976: 36–44). Still, the state increasingly feared the vagrancy levels in this population and what they might tell the still powerful but detached Indian elites about the moral frailty of Indians of at least part European blood. The Uprising of 1857 had already frightened the British, and these elites were content to linger on the edge of India’s latest colonial power. The vista of exploding numbers of second- and third-generation Eurasian children prompted action, which of course concerned Eurasian girls as well as boys. The moral panic this fear created led to Viceroy Lord Canning’s Despatch of 18603 which decreed that Eurasian boys might be deployed as navvies and keepers of accounts for the large merchant houses that now dotted the great river and sea ports of British India. Eurasian girls were consigned to registration and perhaps receipt of sometimes meagre government subsidies to attend government and mission schools.

PATRIARCHAL POWER PLAYS: LORETO’S ENGAGEMENT WITH RAJ AND CHURCH Loreto was caught in powerful cross-currents. As has just been outlined, the colonial context was predicated on strong racial and class barriers at many levels. Intentional or not, this ham-fisted development of state policy between 1860 and 1890 almost entirely bypassed the Indian girl population. However, Loreto’s own networks and approaches to knowledge, which at times circumvented both state and Church, actually enabled it to selectively appropriate these barriers to suit its own agendas for female education. Over time this approach positioned Loreto as well able to withstand and accommodate the rising national movement, which ultimately led to the departure of the British in 1947. Loreto’s foundation in India had in fact begun in 1842, when six women religious from Ireland sailed to India to set up an order in Calcutta. They were responding to calls from the European community in a city that was largely Catholic because of pre-British Portuguese and French settlements there. Belgian and English Jesuits had arrived with the raj, but before Loreto there were no Catholic women religious to compete with ‘encroaching’ Baptists and low church Anglicans in this bustling commercial port that the British now claimed as the capital of their new empire in the East.4 At this

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time Loreto, like nearly all religious orders newly located in India, played its part in the unwieldy and culturally unsympathetic game of protecting a particular sectarian patch. Loreto House took over the Georgian buildings that were once the residence of the Governor of Bengal and later the second Anglican bishop of Calcutta, Bishop Heber. The six Loreto women set up a convent and boarding school that by 1917 had 265 enrolled students. Connected day schools were established at nearby Dharamtala, Bow Bazaar and Sealdah (discussed below) with another boarding school for very poor children at Entally (where Mother Teresa originally worked in the 1940s as a Loretan sister before starting her own order).5 Symptomatic perhaps of this sprawling city, even in the 1840s, Loreto simply divided the vast urban field that lay before it, taking responsibility for one side of the Hooghly River whilst another Catholic order, the charitable Daughters of the Cross, took the other. Elite Loreto boarding schools were also established in the hills of Darjeeling and Simla for the children of wealthy Europeans and Eurasians, with another Mother House at Lucknow in Central North India, where the Great Revolt was at its fiercest in 1857.6 In Calcutta the order was placed under the self-confident and at times autocratic control of the Christian Brothers, who were newly established directly behind the main Loreto House compound. This patriarchal interference was tempered when an order of Belgian Jesuits – a concern for the British but long-standing teaching allies of Loreto in Europe – founded St Xavier’s College in 1860 about a kilometre away. Like government schools, by the late 1880s Loreto relied on Eurasian clientele for its student base. This became all the more so in the early 1890s, when it received a bequest from two financially successful Eurasian women, the Misses Bruce, with the proviso that it should be used to help educate poor Eurasian girls in Calcutta. At this point Loreto House in Calcutta was led by the long-serving Mother Gonzaga Joynt, who had been brought up in India as a Quaker but was orphaned at the age of twelve and enrolled at Loreto by her elder brother when he departed India.7 Loreto’s connection with the raj and the Catholic Church yielded an array of unexpected outcomes. This was mostly because its unusual features and its alignments elsewhere gave it the flexibility to pursue a countervailing educational strategy. For example, its schools offered themselves up for government inspection, even though they were in receipt of less than a tenth of the grant-in-aid money the government offered to Protestant mission schools. Whilst Loreto might well have done without these inadequate funding arrangements altogether, the order used the inspections they occasioned to assuage the raj, which was generally suspicious of Irish Catholic endea-

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vours. The celebratory way in which the women religious welcomed government inspectors, thereby superficially acknowledging their legitimacy without complaining about the order’s lesser state funding, was a useful ploy to keep these visits to a minimum. However, Loreto was also able to sustain itself in other ways because its women religious teachers did not require the professional salary rates commanded by secular, European-trained teachers whom government schools and even Protestant mission schools needed in greater numbers. These higher pay rates were in fact tightly calibrated and regulated in India. For example, in 1917 in the province of Bengal (of which Calcutta was the capital), the salary of a female teacher with a BA recruited from Europe was almost twice that of a teacher with a BA earned in India, and an Indian female teacher without a university degree earned only a fraction of that, barely above subsistence level.8 The state used these pay rates to maintain the racial preference for Eurasian teachers that it had encouraged ever since 1860, even though these rates restricted the spread of its own state female education. But this restriction also played into the hands of Loreto as it competed with the Protestant missions. The latter, with very few teaching women religious (only three in the entire province of Bengal in 1917), were obliged to hire expensive lay teachers to maintain the integrity of their ‘accomplishment’ curriculums centred on music, needlework and drawing. Yet Loreto at this time employed thirty-six women religious as teachers who required only living expenses and still delivered instruction that satisfied the standards of the Eurasian parent market. These women religious constituted 46 per cent of Loreto’s entire teaching staff, giving it a strong financial advantage.9 Though it left Loreto with a relatively free hand as to what it taught, the state’s careful monitoring of the racial element that lay at the core of government administration of female education in India significantly impacted the order. For example, women entered the Loreto order via a novitiate, and permitting Indian women to enter it could have brought about long-term racial assimilation in the order across India. But for just this reason, the state banned the acceptance of Indian women into the novitiate right up to the British departure from India in 1947.10 However, again Loreto was able to design an accommodative strategy. In response to this state-imposed restriction it created a new affiliated Indian order, the Daughters of St Anne. Nurtured and expanded under the supervision of the Jesuits at nearby Ranchi (400 km west of Calcutta), the new order was designed specifically to prepare teaching staff for Loreto’s rapidly growing outreach and teaching programmes for poor Indians. These Indian sisters worked in slums as well as in craft and special education schools in

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places like Morapai, which was adjacent to the tiger- and mosquito-infested jungle delta of the Ganges.11 A typically Western patronizing element was present in the attitude of the European women religious towards this new order. Mother Gonzaga Joynt wrote in 1899 of the teaching of this new Indian Loreto order: ‘They are very edifying, pious, docile, laborious & an immense help in teaching and forming our little savages’.13 Still, Joynt actively promoted the work of these Indian women religious, which transcended anything the state had to offer in teaching destitute and disabled Indian girl students, and she knew this new order was indispensable to continued growth of Loreto’s outreach. The other deity that Loreto needed to navigate was the nearby Catholic Church with its male agents. The Mother Superior vetted all letters that Loreto women religious sent to anyone outside the Calcutta order, and many other such practices within the order restricted their actions in Calcutta. Yet patriarchal authorities within the Church in Ireland, Rome and even Calcutta could be even more antagonistic and capricious. For example, notes such as ‘many nuns are disastrously stupid’ were attached to correspondence that arrived at the office of the archbishop of Dublin.13 But the most significant intervention came when the Christian Brothers in India decided to establish a male Eurasian ‘orphanage’ in Asansol, an unattractive, dusty industrial town serving adjacent coal fields 100 kilometres west of Calcutta. The Church’s rationale for doing so was akin to the justification for policies that led to a ‘stolen generation’ of indigenous children in Australia and other parts of the empire whilst their parents were still living. Extraction of children from the ‘low dance of the slums’ in Calcutta until adulthood was really about conversion and Western assimilation. But the Christian Brothers dubiously defended this strategy as the only way for these children to avoid losing the benefits of a Western education. The move to Asansol in the 1880s obliged Loreto to set up an expensive new school for girls in this new city as well. Being compelled to set up a school in Asansol was a serious challenge for the Loreto order in Calcutta. Nevertheless, these women religious were skilled in eschewing ecclesiastical male authority in various ways. They deliberately took up much correspondence arguing for dispensation from Vespers and participating in feasts for minor European saints, justified, they said, by their elevated pastoral responsibilities. Another issue was whether they might be permitted to wear cooler woollen habits rather than the hotter, heavier ‘serge’ in the non-summer months. These issues were handy distractions that allowed them to maintain autonomy in what they taught while at the same time developing strategies for reaching broader sections of the Indian girl population in Calcutta.

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Furthermore, the order soon gained new status. After Mary Ward’s rehabilitation in Rome in 1909, the Indian order was able to reaffirm that it was a Pontifical rather than a Diocesan order. Loreto women religious in India had pursued this change in administrative arrangements because the bishops especially looked down on their female co-religionists, took too long to make decisions that affected them and, most particularly, prevented them from recruiting and sending members of their order to and from other Loreto communities.14 Work with the Jesuits was warmer and the professional relationship more collaborative compared to interaction with the Christian Brothers, partly because the Jesuits did not convey such strong church authority. But even these church-based networks suffered angst when external emergencies heightened the state’s suspicions. For example, in the First World War, British Prime Minister Lloyd George uncovered a supposed German plot to infiltrate the British in India from a base in the Andaman Islands off the coast of Eastern India. Shock waves went through Loreto ranks when an expulsion order was issued to large numbers of German missionaries working in India, including many German Jesuits. And even after the war, these innocent families were not permitted to return to India. For Loreto, this confirmed that an ill-informed if not brutal raj had little regard for the kinship and teaching work that Catholic orders had entered into with local communities for at least half a century beforehand.

LORETO TEACHING Loreto’s position in India was therefore intricate. Despite an outward latency and probable solemnity in the way women in this order connected with forces that restricted their action, stronger dynamics at work internally related to yet another set of influential networks principally associated with two key educational areas. The first was the education of destitute girls in Calcutta. Second was their work to build a secondary school curriculum for more affluent Eurasian girls that was more apposite to these girls’ position in India than mere preparation for the marriage market. Central to Loreto’s work with the very poor in Calcutta were the unofficial networks of financial subsidy set up by Loreto in Calcutta. These channelled money from the fees paid to their expensive boarding schools in Darjeeling, Simla, Lucknow and Calcutta to fund outreach programmes aimed at imparting basic literacy and numeracy. Building on Hindu ceremonials, Loreto House and its branch schools enticed poor Calcutta girls with sweets and subsistence meals in exchange for elementary tutoring and

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lessons in hygiene, and also took on the task of convincing parents to allow their daughters to attend school. This involved introducing many illiterate parents to the actual structure and value of formal education, something few of them had ever experienced first-hand. The principal objective was to persuade them to allow their daughters to continue to attend for at least two hours a week, which, including travel, meant significant time away from the essential piecework most girls did to supplement family income in the local markets and bazaars of the city. This teaching gave Loreto credibility as a worthwhile educational endeavour, particularly in the eyes of Bengal’s powerful Bhadralok (Indian middle classes). Grinding poverty, particularly of oppressed women, was visible for all to see. The British government claimed thousands of lower-order female schools by the turn of the twentieth century, yet census data continued to show a literacy rate of between just 1 and 2 per cent. The work of Loreto’s women religious, and that of other philanthropic organizations in imparting even elementary education, could lead students to careers as teachers, nurses, dhai (midwives), typewriters and shopkeepers, albeit for very low pay. As well, education could give these girls the capacity to escape the slums and extortionate landlords, and perhaps even allow them to enjoy signifiers of household prosperity such as brass and copper cooking accoutrements instead of the usual earthenware. In the raj, girls’ secondary school instruction was a strong indicator of the robustness of educational institutions’ commitment to education. In most provinces in 1900, only a handful of government schools offered such schooling, and outside of Bengal, teacher training colleges for girls greatly outnumbered actual girls’ secondary schools. Loreto’s secondary-level curriculum competed directly with elite government and Protestant mission institutions in Calcutta and in the hill stations of Darjeeling, Simla and Kurseong, where the traditional accomplishments curriculum was taught. Relatively wealthy Eurasian parents demanded this curriculum for their daughters to signify their social status to white Europeans on the marriage market in India, perhaps with hopes of eventual naturalization and a passport for a life in England. The strong racial bar the raj imposed on female education probably made this accomplishments curriculum more compelling in India than in other parts of the empire. On the subcontinent, the Cambridge Middle and Upper examinations strongly reinforced this curriculum, particularly the part related to drawing. The Middle exam involved mindless copying exercises in drawing flowers – European flowers – and other objects of nature without any scope for creative rendering or interpretation. This didacticism also pointed to a broader academic predication that specifically excluded

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the work of Froebel and other new movements promoting the authentic artistic and architectural heritage of Mughal and Hindu India. Government schooling continued to defend the earlier direct artistic replication from Europe. Moreover, the Calcutta government education department, even as late as 1910, tended to regard the emergence of new Indian art forms in terms of ‘degeneracy’, using arguments (without the anti-Semitic element) akin to those heard when Germany rejected its own expressionist art movement in the 1930s.15 In fact, this departmental approach was part of a long-standing Haileybury tradition of identifying Eastern intellectual deficits that then justified stark and misplaced imperial ‘remedy’. To this day the foyer of the Calcutta College of Art and Craft (founded in 1854) is resplendent with European Arts and Crafts movement decoration and ornamentation. Exploring other aspects of Loreto’s reconfiguration of ‘accomplishments’ is beyond the scope of this chapter. But in 1913, Loreto College became the first women’s college to win access to the Calcutta University exams for its senior girls.16 Loreto women strenuously lobbied for this access to stake out greater academic distinction compared to what was on offer in governmentrun education. These university exams were academically more demanding than the Cambridge exams, and girls who passed them, along with boys of similar age, were granted access to further education in the sciences as well as Indian languages and intellectualism. Loreto’s university strategy was probably also initiated because of the dark skin of many of Loreto’s Eurasian-classified enrolment, which department officials noted even in the early twentieth century. These officials attributed this racial composition to Eurasian Catholic families’ descent from the Portuguese – or even the slaves these families had once employed, whom the Vatican had decreed they should adopt after slavery was abolished in 1833.17 As well, Loreto’s Teaching College for girls achieved affiliation with Calcutta University in 1912. The college itself owed its existence to linkages in another direction, far from the metropolis. A close friendship had developed between Gonzaga Joynt and her counterpart in Ballarat, Australia, Mother Gonzaga Barry in the 1890s. Loreto in Ballarat set up Australia’s first female teaching college in 1884. And in the 24-year-period between 1890 and 1914, Ballarat sent seventeen young, newly graduated women religious teachers to Calcutta, many of whom went on to enjoy long and successful careers in India.18 However, Loreto in India also had its own orientation. Its teacher training programme resourcing was spurred on by fears that the Anglican missions and government would gain ascendancy; as Joynt complained to Barry, ‘they get certified teachers from England & the newest appliances’.19 And

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unlike some European women in India during the First World War, Loreto was not about transferring the feminist mentalities emergent in Europe at this time. Nor did a rising India favour this kind of transferral: the emerging Indian nationalist movement called instead for new forms of social service that would become a strong hallmark of Indian women as part of the broader resistance movement.

TRANSCENDING PARTITION Much of this background, orchestrated or not, contributed to Loreto’s capacity to navigate Partition when it came in 1947. This was despite its Christian foundation and European origins. In fact, Loreto’s traditional European links turned out to be a pathway to establishing its anti-imperial bona fides in India. And, more generally, missionary work, it seems, was not always the starkest form of imperial imposition in colonial domains. By acting as agents of knowledge transfer, some missionaries belonged to traditions that were not even coterminous with empire. This was particularly so in India if their links went back beyond the arrival of the British. For example, in the seventeenth century, some of these links had been based on finding common ground using monotheism as a central reference between Eastern and Western theologies. In this frame Ballenoit (2007: 14–16) has traced Hinduism’s monotheistic bhakti (devotion) and the way Indian mystics and gurus used it to foster deeper intellectual exchanges with Europeans using it as a key reference point. As mentioned above, the Jesuits – who had been in India before the British, under Portuguese jurisdiction – were Loreto’s traditional allies in Europe as a teaching order. And the British mistrusted Jesuits most when it came to education because of their capacity to maintain a long-standing intellectual nexus with Eastern thinkers, even in that latter nineteenth century. For example, in the nineteenth century, Jesuits had engaged with Hindus professing Sadhana-Dharma; a spiritualism where there is no caste, class, male or female distinction, only measures of fitness and worthiness (Staffner 1992: 247). Other Jesuits, such as Constans Lievans and John Hoffman at Chotanagpur (240 km west of Calcutta), made converts in this remote part of India after assisting villagers to challenge raj taxes and land seizures in the law courts. Their dalit (Untouchable) missions also worried the British (Fernandes 1992: 181–82). Loreto, though not as long-standing in India as their brother Jesuits, also took their cue from this tradition of circumventing the binaries that empire set up to justify Western intellectual and cultural imposition.

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For Loreto, crossing the race divide, for example by teaching poor Indian girls, rather than Eurasian girls, in its branch schools, was a key component of this circumvention, as were Loreto’s endeavours to achieve equality with boys in university-level education for its most able students. Furthermore, Loreto nurtured female teacher training of the kind that did not just replicate the English class-predicated accomplishment curriculum. Also noteworthy were the scholastic endeavours of Loreto women religious themselves, an example being Sister Maeve Hughes’s (1994) Epic Women: East and West, a work that enmeshes itself in rich Indian epics to make new parallels with ancient Irish literature on women, bypassing England altogether. High scholarship such as this probably did not make it into the classroom, but in the 1920s and 1930s, sympathetic accounts of the Irish Home Rule movement and leaders such as Eamon de Valera certainly did.20 Leaders of the rising national movement in India saw events in Ireland as akin to their own struggles for independence from the British. And active recruitment of French-speaking women religious from the former French colony of Mauritius (now British) also accentuated Loreto’s separateness from the raj.

LORETO TODAY: SEALDAH Loreto has flourished in India since Partition and how has more than sixty central schools scattered across the North, East and South of India. Strong parallels drawn between the colonial period and work done today would be misplaced. World Bank intervention in India in 1991, the liberalization of the Indian economy, the many NGOs involved in education and new globalization narratives have set a different scene with different theoretical vistas. Yet much of Loreto’s work in India is redolent of Loreto’s past, particularly its capacity for strategic positioning in relation to the state and the direction of its resources to serve the poor. Although the original colonial Loreto schools remain, this final section concentrates on the work of only one of them: the branch school at Sealdah led by Sister Cyril Mooney, who was born in Ireland and who has worked with distinction in India since 1956. The ‘regular’ Loreto school at the central Sealdah compound has 700 free and 700 paying students. The five secondary schools attached to it enrol 6,260 pupils and offer classes for those with special needs. It is accountable to the usual state curriculum and examining authorities at its various levels, and it also participates with government schools in a shared human rights education programme.

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Here, on the top floor – also in other Loreto schools in the region – is a rainbow school, where basic literacy and numeracy skills are imparted to street children. This is part of a longstanding Mary Ward Loreto tradition of senior students giving up some of their time to educate their younger peers. The teaching here is resonant with earlier monitorial teaching methods: small girls sit in circles of eight or so and read letters, words and numbers from cards held up by older girls from the main school. Its low cost and effectiveness in terms of ‘what works’ are striking. Another factor in this method’s efficacy is its strong pastoral element of inclusion and belonging, which is powerful indeed for most of the students, who are poor rural girls, urban street children or slightly older girls who have known the brutality of being trafficked. This important psychological and sociological preparation accentuates inclusion and belonging before any higher-order learning can take place. The work is also reinforced by Loreto’s Barefoot Training, which enables very poor and dispossessed women to become teachers in the many informal and outdoor schools throughout the city. The programme has graduated some 7,000 teachers able to replicate this schooling modality away from the central compound. A second Loreto periphery, lying beyond Sealdah but directly connected to it, caters for children in hidden and abusive domestic child labour situations through strong rescue and advocacy components attached to it. Vocational training – often spurned in India for caste and class reasons – is also an element in this rescue. Loreto participates in the Indian government’s Shikshalaya Prokalpa (midday meal) scheme by using bridging courses to train teachers for the demanding work of imparting primary education to slum children, who come to school only sporadically due to poverty and neglect. Many of these endeavours involve ethically difficult negotiations with malevolent power brokers who exercise control over young girls. For example, throughout Kolkata child slavery exists in plein air brickworks located on land between stagnant watercourses and railway lines in parching sun and choking pollution, and Loreto has negotiated with the owners of these brickworks to establish schools after hours for 1,300 of these children. The Loreto school in Sealdah has also developed a loose but symbiotic relationship with a succession of state governments in West Bengal (some of them communist in designation) that is more productive and interconnected than such relations were in colonial times. The state provides Loreto teachers with training in some subjects, and some financial subsidization occurs as well. Additionally, the school places its branch schools strategically in the sprawling metropolis of Kolkata, particularly where microcredit might have a chance of working.21 In these areas government requires advice from Loreto where state schools are not enrolling to full capacity. After this

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‘efficiency’ capacity is met, Loreto schools are then placed to teach ‘surplus’ women and girls basic literacy and numeracy. Today Loreto Sealdah claims a total outreach of 450,000 mostly underprivileged and destitute girls. First-hand observation of some of it suggests to me that clever academe, with its postcolonial paradigms and other forms of Western constructed knowledge, does not always sensitively or explicitly depict the sheer hard work and dedication of the people it seeks to analyse, nor does it recognize the liberating aspects of this work. This lacuna is partly explained by the theoretical objectification of many women working in India. But in this context, Loreto offers a fascinating site for the multi-centric and entangled theme of women’s history. This chapter’s almost unmanageably long time frame illustrates the kinds of webs and networks pertinent to knowledge transfer and power relations concerning Loreto. Though ruptured and interrupted at times, these networks also move the discussion beyond centre-periphery binaries in which only the colonial state is seen as paradigmatic. Yet the researcher can also see a history informing the present that is not completely apparent to most Loretans today. Fed down via a fragmented, perhaps unconscious Loretan institutional memory, this history has sustained a generally deep, and no doubt flawed, connectedness with surrounding communities at each stage of Loreto’s time in India.

REFERENCES Allender, T. 2009. ‘Learning Abroad: The Colonial Educational Experiment in India, 1813–1919’, Paedagogica Historica 45(6): 707–22. Ballantyne, T. 2002. Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire. Hampshire: Palgrave. Ballenoit, H. 2007. Missionary Education and Empire in Late Colonial India, 1860–1920. London: Pickering and Chatto. Curthoys, A. and M. Lake (eds). 2005. Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective. Canberra: ANU E Press. Darian-Smith, K., P. Grimshaw and S. Macintyre. 2007. Britishness Abroad: Transnational Movements and Imperial Cultures. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. D’Souza, A.A. 1976. Anglo-Indian Education. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Fernandes, W. 1992. ‘Jesuit Contribution to Social Change in India (16th to 20th Centuries)’, in T.S. de Sousa and C.J. Borges (eds), Jesuits in India: In Historical Perspective. Macau: Xavier Centre of Historical Research, pp. 170–185. Hughes, Sister M. IBVM. 1994. Epic Women: East and West. Calcutta: The Asiatic Society.

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Hunter Education Commission. 1884. Madras and Bengal Provincial Reports. Calcutta: Government Printing. Lester, A. 2006. ‘Imperial Circuits and Networks: Geographies of the British Empire’, History Compass 4(1): 124–41. Staffner, H. 1992. ‘Jesuit Contribution to Dialogue in India’, in T.S. de Sousa and C.J. Borges (eds), Jesuits in India: In Historical Perspective. Macau: Xavier Centre of Historical Research, pp. 238–250. Stokes, E. 1959. The English Utilitarians and India. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

NOTES I would like to thank the following for generously sharing their reflections on Loreto work and giving me access to potentially sensitive archival material at a time of government inquiry into Catholic orders. Sister Cyril Mooney, Principal Loreto Sealdah, Calcutta; Sister Christine Coutinho, Principal Loreto House, Middleton Row, Calcutta; Sister Damien O’Donohoe retired head of Loreto Darjeeling; Sister Kathleen, Loreto Archivist, Dublin, Ireland; Mrs Robyn Scott, Loreto Archivist, Ballarat; the IBVN sisters who offered feedback on my analysis and the archivists at the OIOC archive, British Library in London, UK. 1. ‘Indianisation’ was the label the colonial state adopted to describe the decentralization of some government departments, including education, to provincial authorities where Indians were placed in control of their administration. 2. Reid. Report on the Education in the North Western Provinces 1858/9, Oriental and India Office Collections (Oriental and India Office Collections [OIOC], The British Library) V/24/908. 3. ‘Minute by the Governor General, 29th October, 1860’, no. 2, Government of India Proceedings, OIOC, P/188/75. 4. ‘Loreto’s 125 years’, Box H205.3 Loreto Ballarat Archives (LBA). 5. Trait, K. ‘India-Loreto’, Ser. 112, [1], LBA. 6. ‘Loreto in India’, Zn/12, Loreto House, Dublin Archives, Ireland (LHDAI). 7. ‘Mother M. Gonzaga Joynt, IBVM’, uncatalogued MSS, LHDAI. 8. Mercer, A. ‘Report on the Progress of Education of European Children, 1912/3– 1916/7’, OIOC, V/24/4436:37. 9. Hornell. W.W. ‘Report on Public Instruction in Bengal 1919–1920’, OIOC, V/24/986:70. 10. Sr Patricia Harris IBVN, ‘Celebrating 400 Years of Loreto’, 14 September 2009, Bar Convent Conference, York, UK. 11. ‘The Congregation of the Daughters of St Anne’, Ser. 112, [2], LBA. 12. Gonzaga Joynt to Gonzaga Barry, 17 February 1899, Box H205.3, LBA. 13. Appended to the letter of Sister Mary, Rajputana Convent, 23 April 1913, Loreto Nuns, 1905–1911, ‘India’ file box 347, Dublin Diocesan Archives. 14. Account of Mother Damien, former Superior of Loreto, Darjeeling. Interview conducted at Loreto Convent, Dublin, 22 September 2009.

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15. ‘Quinquennial Report of the Art Section of the India Museum, Calcutta 1912/3–1917/8’, OIOC, V/24/4477. 16. Affiliation of Loreto House, Calcutta, to Calcutta University. Education Proceedings, OIOC, P/9193. 17. Hornell, W.W. Bengal Education Proceedings 1915, OIOC, P/9640. 18. ‘Australians who went to India’, Ser. 112, [8], LBA. 19. Gonzaga Joynt to Gonzaga Barry, 17 February 1899, Box H205.3, LBA. 20. Reminiscence, M. M. Columba Sullivan, Superioress, Baluchistan, 26 June 32. Dublin Diocesan Archives. I am grateful also to Professor Jasodhara Bagchi, formerly of Jadavpur University, Calcutta, for confirming this based on her conversations with former Loreto students of this era. 21. A scheme invented by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist and founder of Grameen Bank. Microcredit offers small loans to poor people, usually women, without collateral to help them begin small business enterprises and to establish credit worthy status and eventual financial self-sufficiency.

Contributors

Y Tim Allender is associate professor at the University of Sydney. His extensive publications on colonial education include Ruling Through Education: The Politics of Schooling in the Colonial Punjab (2006) and his forthcoming book, provisionally entitled Brown Ladies: Learning Femininity in Colonial India. Barnita Bagchi teaches and researches comparative literature at Utrecht University, Netherlands. Her publications include numerous essays in edited books and journals such as Women’s History Review, Journal of Postcolonial Cultures and Societies and Paedagogica Historica. Her multiple book-length publications include an edited volume, The Politics of the (Im)possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered (2012); a volume co-edited with A.K. Bagchi and D. Sinha, Webs of History: Information, Communication, and Technology from Early to Postcolonial India (2005); and a critical edition and partial translation of the South Asian Muslim feminist Rokeya Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias (2005). Sabyasachi Bhattacharya is former chairman of the Indian Council for Historical Research, former vice chancellor of Visva-Bharati University, and former professor in the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. His numerous publications include Talking Back: The Idea of Civilization in the Indian Nationalist Discourse (2011), Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation (2011) and Vande Mataram: The Biography of a Song (2003). Alicia Civera is a researcher at the Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas, Cinvestav A.C. México. Her publications include School as a Life Option: Rural Teacher Training in Mexico 1921–1945 (2008); Between Furrows and Letters: Education for Peasants in the 1930s (2003); a volume co-edited with J. Alfonseca and C. Escalante, Peasants and Pupils: The Construction of the School in

244



Contributors

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the Latin American Countryside, XIX and XX Centuries (2011); as well as a volume co-edited with Lucía Lionetti and Flavia Werle, Subjects, rural communities and school cultures in Latin America (2013). Joost Coté is a senior research fellow attached to the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies, Monash University, Australia. Recent publications include Realizing the Dream of Kartini: Her Sisters’s Letters from Colonial Java 1904–1935 (2008) and ‘“A Teaspoon of Sugar. . .”: Assessing the Sugar Content in Colonial Discourse in the Dutch East Indies, 1880 to 1914’, in U. Bosma, J. Giusti-Cordero and G.R. Knight (eds), Sugarlandia Revisited: Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800–1940 (2007/2010). His research focuses on early-twentieth-century colonial cultures in Indonesia. Marc Depaepe is vice-rector and full professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, coeditor-in-chief of Paedagogica Historica, former president of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education, and member of the Board of Directors of the International Academy of Education. He has published several articles and books on the history of the educational sciences; the history of education in Belgium and in the former Belgian Congo; and the historiography, theory and methodology of the history of education as a discipline. Selected writings from his work are collected in the book Between Educationalization and Appropriation (2012). Eckhardt Fuchs is professor of history of Education/Comparative Education at the Technical University of Braunschweig and Deputy Director of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig (Germany). He is currently president of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education. His research areas include transnational and global history of education, textbook and curriculum studies, and history of human sciences. He has published widely on these issues; his books include Transnationalizing the History of Education (2012), Contextualizing School Textbook Revision (2010) and Informal and Formal Cross-Cultural Networks in History of Education (2007). Mary Hilton is a senior research fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge. Her numerous publications include Women and the Shaping of the Nation’s Young: Education and Public Doctrine in Britain 1750–1850 (2007); a volume co-edited with J. Shefrin, Educating the Child in Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (2009); and a volume co-edited with P. Hirsch, Practical Visionaries: Women, Education, and Social Progress, 1790–1930 (2000).

246

Contributors

Simone Holzwarth works as a researcher at the Collaborative Research Centre Representations of Changing Social Orders at Humboldt University in Berlin in the research project Constructing Social Meanings from the Vantage Point of National Self-Determination: Occupation and Education in Peronist Argentina and the Indian Independence Movement. She holds an MA in Social Development (Sussex) and an MA in Education, Economics and Social Anthropology (TU an FU Berlin) and is working on her Ph.D. thesis, provisionally titled Education for “Young India”: Nai Talim and the Vision of a Post-colonial Social Order in India. Hakim Ikhlef is a research fellow at the European University Institute in Florence (Italy). His research areas include the history of colonial India, orientalism and (post)colonial studies. Meera Kosambi is a sociologist trained in India, Sweden and the United States. She was formerly professor and director of the Research Centre for Women's Studies at the SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai, India. Her numerous publications include Women Writing Gender: Marathi Fiction before Independence (2012), Crossing Thresholds: Feminist Essays in Social History (2007), and Returning the American Gaze: Pandita Ramabai’s The Peoples of the United States (2003). Daniel Lindmark is a professor of history at Umeå University, Sweden, where he directs the Umeå History and Education Group and the Historical Media Postgraduate School. His areas of research include literacy studies, religious history, Saami studies, educational history and historical culture. He is currently coordinating two Saami-related projects, The Church of Sweden and the Saami: A White Book Project, and Saami Voices and Sorry Churches: Use of History in Church-Saami Reconciliation Processes. Jana Tschurenev is a research fellow at the Center for Modern Indian Studies (CEMIS) of the University of Göttingen (Germany). She gained her Ph.D. from the Comparative Education Centre, Humboldt University Berlin, with a thesis on Imperial Experiments in Education: Monitorial Schooling in India, 1789–1835 (2009). Currently, she is working in a research group on ‘Poverty and Education in Modern India’.

Index

Y A Adamson, 115 Africa, 1, 12, 31, 41, 44, 47, 61, 150 North, 12 Sub-Saharan, 12 Age of Consent Act, 201, 211n7 Agra, 163 Agri-horticultural Society of Eastern India, 94 Ahmedabad, 132 All India Radio, 219, 221 America(s), 1, 105 Central, 67 Latin, 2, 3, 13, 61–62, 64–65, 67–70, 72–73 North, 12 South, 12 Amsterdam, 14 Anandamela, 224 Anatomist’s Vade Mecum (Hooper), 160, 162–63, 169 Anglican/Anglican Church, 87–88, 92–93, 96, 102–3n4, 106, 111, 231– 32, 237 Catechism, 88 Tory Anglican party, 88 Arabia, 160, 168 architecture, 48 Argentina, 65, 68, 70, 72 Aryanayakam, E.W., 127 Asansol, 234

Asia, 2, 14, 29–31, 36, 61, 94, 105 South, 1–2, 7, 12, 109, 216 Asiatic Society of Bengal, 5, 161–63, 169 associational work, 6, 213 Australia, 1, 228, 230, 234, 237 B Bajaj, Jamnalal, 127, 139n12 Ballantyne, James, 160–61 Baptist, 4, 85–86, 88–89, 93–95, 97–99, 101, 231 Baptist Mission Press, 94 Batavia, 178, 185, 187, 191, 193, 195n34 Bayly, Christopher A., 85, 90, 100, 156–57 Behar, 163 Belgium, 3, 13, 41–43, 45–46, 50 Bell, Andrew, 105–7, 109–17 Bender, Thomas, 16 Bengal, 4–5, 34, 85–86, 88, 90, 93–96, 98–100, 103n12, 108, 110, 125, 138n5, 161, 167, 211n2, 219–20, 222, 230, 232–33, 236, 240 Beweging van Tachtig, 181 Bible, 86, 88, 93–95 Bilgrami Imad-Ul-Mulk, Syed Husain, 166–67, 169 Bolivia, 67–68, 71–72 Bombay. See Mumbai/Bombay Brahmo, 219, 221, 223 247

248

Brazil, 66, 68–69, 70–72 British and Foreign School Society, 88 C Calcutta/Kolkata, 6, 31, 35, 90, 93–94, 98, 108, 129, 138n5, 158,161, 219–20, 227, 231–38, 240, 243n20 Calcutta School Book Society, 89, 94, 99, 108 Campbell, 109 Carey, William, 4, 85, 88, 94–100 Catholic/Catholic Church, 6, 44–46, 48, 51–53, 55, 142, 227–28, 231–32, 234–35, 237 Centre Aequatoria, 47, 55 Centre for the History of Education at the University of Leuven, 41, 42, 46–48 Chile, 66, 68, 69–71 childhood, 35, 128, 202, 204, 209, 217, 220–21 Chittagong, 163 civics (subject), 128 civilization(s), 3, 28–39, 43, 51, 156, 190 discourse of, 3, 28–29, 32, 36–38 European/Western, 28, 31–33, 35, 37, 50, 106, 143, 188 Indian/Hindu, 28, 30–38, 106, 159, 165 civil society, 112, 180, 190, 223–24 cognitive authority, 29, 31, 38, 98 Cohn, Bernard S., 156 college(s), 14, 33–34, 36–37, 68, 70, 98, 158, 201, 206–7, 218, 220, 222, 236–37 Asutosh College, 220 Benares Sanskrit College, 161 Calcutta College of Art and Craft, 237 Calcutta Medical College, 162 College of St Andrews, 111, 115 College Settlement House, 218 Haileybury College, 29 Hindu College, 98, 158

Index

Loreto College, 237 Serampore College, 94, 99 St Xavier’s College, 232 Vassar College, 218 Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, 205 colonization, 42–44, 52, 125, 140, 144, 161, 171n1, 177, 227 Columbia, 67, 71–72 Congo, 3, 41–54, 56 Belgian Congo, 2, 41, 45, 47, 142 Congo Free State, 43 Constructive Orientalist Project, 157–61 constructivism, 90 cookbook, 219, 221 Costa Rica, 67, 69–70, 72 Court of Directors of the East India Company, 106, 157 Cowen, Robert, 20 cross-cultural, 1–2, 36, 43. See also transcultural cultural hybridity, 51, 53–54 curriculum, 4, 46, 54–55, 64–66, 70, 86, 90, 96, 109, 113, 115–17, 124–25, 133, 141–42, 150, 154n5, 233, 235– 36, 239 D Darjeeling, 220, 232, 235–36, 243n14 Darwin, Charles, 92, 104n15 defamiliarization, 217, 224 Denmark, 131–33, 139n16 Devi, Asha, 127 Dewey, John, 129 Dirlik, Arif, 16 discipline, 49, 116, 129 diversity, 21, 33, 36–37, 46, 52, 68 Dodson, Michael S., 156–58, 161 E earning, 131, 209, 210 East India Company (EIC), 29, 93, 106, 111, 113, 157–58

Index

economics (subject), 128, 218 education. See also school(s) boys’, 70, 115, 131, 216, 220, 228, 230, 237, 239 elementary, 49–50, 88, 91, 93, 96, 100, 103n7, 114, 235, 236 female, 7, 221, 227, 228, 230, 231, 233, 236 girls’, 6, 7, 47, 52, 70, 85, 89, 93– 94, 131, 183, 185, 203, 206, 216, 221, 225, 227–41 grammar of, 18 indigenous, 2, 4–5, 29, 44, 49, 50, 55, 64, 67, 71–72, 91, 98, 108, 121–71 missionary, 45–46, 53 monitorial (see monitorial system of education) policy, 4, 5, 12, 19–20, 41, 44–46, 48, 51, 55, 67, 127, 129, 151, 156–57, 168–69, 195n27 progressive, 5, 129–31, 135 state, 88, 233, 239 system, 4, 5, 18–19, 29, 31–32, 49, 51–53, 63, 86, 124, 129, 146, 157, 159, 168, 183 women’s, 2, 5, 6, 63, 64, 72, 183, 186, 189, 198–210, 217, 219, 221, 224–25, 228 Egypt, 169 England, 27, 30–31, 87–88, 90, 100, 102nn3–4, 105–6, 110, 114, 117, 131, 203, 227–30, 236–37, 239 English (language), 12, 34, 46, 89, 93, 96, 98–99, 128, 132, 156–57, 159–60, 162–63, 165, 168, 181, 200, 215–16 Enlightenment, the, 13, 34, 49, 95, 97, 113. See also Scottish enlightenment entertainer-educator, 6, 214, 217, 224 eugenics, 222, 230 Eurasian, 113–14, 117, 193n10, 230–37 Eurocentric/non-Eurocentric, 1, 7, 14, 17, 29, 47, 49, 106, 124–25, 190 Europe, 1, 7, 12–14, 29, 30–35, 38, 47, 53, 100, 105, 109–11, 113, 157,

249

176, 178, 186, 190, 193n15, 217–18, 232–33, 237–38 Evangelical, 85–86, 93, 96, 142, 150, 154n5, 157, 194n17 F Faering, Esther, 132 fairy-story, 222, 225 feminism, 181, 195n32 Ferguson, Adam, 111 fiction, 6, 53, 99, 190, 213–14, 216–17, 220, 221–22, 224. See also science fiction Foucault, Michel, 116 Froebel, Friedrich Wilhelm August, 100, 237 G Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma), 4, 5, 32–34, 36–37, 123–36, 138nn7–9, 139n12, 139n16 Gardner, Philip, 91 gedachten (ideas), 176, 190 gender, 5, 6, 13–14, 62–63, 70, 73, 177, 184, 199, 201–5, 209–10, 211n9, 212, 219, 221–22, 229 geography (subject), 87, 94, 128 Germany, 12–13, 15, 130, 194n, 237 ghost stories, 220 girl(s), 85, 87, 93–94, 183–85, 195–96, 199, 201, 203–4, 206–7, 214, 216, 218–22, 225. See also under education; school girlhood, 217 globalization, 1, 2, 11, 13, 15–19, 21, 239 gospel, 89–90, 96–97, 103n9 gradgrind(ian), 85, 89–90, 102n1 Great Britain, 4, 13, 30, 86, 88–93, 97–98, 107, 111, 117, 140, 157, 168, 215, 229 Grundtvig, Nikolai Frederik Severin, 132 Gupta, Madhusudan, 162 guru, 86, 90, 95, 238

250

H hegemony, 29, 31, 62, 177 Hindi-Urdu controversy, 165, 169 Hindustani Talimi Sangh (HTS), 123, 126–27, 130, 134 historiography, 3, 11–12, 14, 16, 20, 28, 41–45, 48–49, 51, 61–62, 64, 106, 154n1, 156, 176 history, histories. See also research approach colonial, 4, 41–42, 44, 55, 141, 149 connected, 123–25, 131, 135–36 cultural, 7, 42, 47, 49, 62, 64, 176 diplomatic, 15 education, 1–7, 11–13, 20–21, 26n1, 27–29, 37–38, 41–42, 44–47, 51, 61–62, 64–67, 69, 106, 125, 213–14, 216–17, 225 entangled, 4, 106 global, 1–3, 11, 13–17, 21, 27–29, 38, 69 institutional, 66 international, 15 literary, 213, 217 micro, 62 modern, 15–16 national, 1, 3, 13–16, 27–29, 176, 188 oral, 44, 47–48, 51, 53, 55, 62 social, 65–66 translocal, 14–16 transnational, 1–4, 7, 11, 13–17, 21, 28, 64, 229 world, 28–29 Hogan, David, 115 Hooper, Robert, 162–63, 169 Hume, David, 111 humour, 213–14, 217, 219, 224 Husain, Abid, 130 Husain, Zakir, 123–24, 127–31, 135, 138n10 I income, 183, 208, 209, 236

Index

India (and provinces), 3–7, 27–38, 89–90, 94, 96–97, 99, 103n5, 104n14, 105–8, 110–11, 113–14, 123–25, 127– 30, 132–36, 156–62, 164–69, 198, 204–5, 214–15, 217, 219, 221, 227–41 Assam, 163 Bihar, 127, 128 Central Provinces, 127–28 Kashmir, 127–28 Maharashtra, 34, 138n1, 198, 201, 207, 211n3, 211n8, 230 North, 230 Orissa, 127–28, 163 South, 107, 110, 116, 132 United Provinces, 127–28 Indianization, 228, 242n1 Indian language(s). See languages of India inductive (reasoning/method), 85, 89, 92–93, 97–98, 100, 103n8 Islamic world, 12 J jargon, 164, 166 Java, 6, 175–90, 194n22, 195n34, 196n41 Jesuits, 7, 44, 53–54, 228, 231–33, 235, 238. See also Catholic/Catholic Church Joynt, Mother Gonzag, 232, 234, 237 K Kartini, Raden Ajeng, 6, 175–90, 193–97 Kerschensteiner, Georg, 130–31 kindergarten, 100 King, Christopher R., 165 Kinshasa, 44–45, 48, 53–56 knowledge, 4–5, 19, 29, 31, 38, 45–46, 53, 72, 86–93, 95–98, 103n8, 106, 108–9, 111, 113, 116, 127–28, 135, 141, 145, 156–57, 160, 162, 164, 167–68, 187, 213, 222–29, 231, 238, 241

Index

European/Western, 4, 5, 27, 157, 159, 161, 169, 230, 241 Indian, 93, 129, 162, 167, 168 system, 5, 27, 29, 31, 38, 160–61 Kolkata. See Calcutta Kumar, Krishna, 124 Kumar, Nita, 103n6, 109 Kumar Sarkar, Benoy, 106 L Lal, Vinay, 16 Lancaster, Joseph, 87, 117 languages of India/Indian language(s), 31, 37, 89, 128, 156–57, 159–61, 165–66, 168, 237 Arabic, 99, 108, 159, 161–62, 164, 166–69 Bengali, 5, 86, 88, 93–94, 98–100, 159, 163–64, 166, 195n36 Canda, 108 Hindi, 5, 138n2, 138n4, 138nn6–7, 139n13, 139n17, 158, 163–66, 168–69 Hindustani, 128, 139n11, 159, 162, 165–66 Khari-Boli, 166 Marathi, 108, 198, 201, 204–5, 208, 211n1, 211n10 Persian, 99, 108, 159, 162, 164–66, 169 Sanskrit, 5, 30–31, 86–87, 99, 108, 158–59, 161–69 Tamil, 108 Telugu, 108 Urdu, 5, 163–69 Leopold II, King, 42–43, 45 letter writing, 86, 177, 218 liberal(ism), 6, 67, 88–89, 100, 103, 112, 180–82, 186, 195n28, 199, 203, 213–14, 217–18, 239 literacy, 66, 72, 86–87, 89, 91, 96, 98, 103n9, 108–9, 201, 235–36, 240–41 literature, 157, 182, 213–14 Anglo-American, 215–16, 220

251

Bengali, 98–99, 104n13, 195n36, 216–17, 219 Dutch, 41, 190, 194n25 feminist, 185 Indian, 4, 34, 37, 99 Irish, 239 Marathi, 198, 208, 209 Sanskrit, 30, 108 women’s, 5–6 London, 33, 111–12, 228 Loreto, 6–7, 227–41 Lucknow, 163, 166, 232, 235 M Madras, 4, 105–8, 111–12, 114, 117, 127–28, 133–34, 230 Madras Military Male Orphan Asylum, 114 Majumdar, Lila, 6, 213–25 marginalization, 29, 31, 38 marriage, 113, 183–85, 188, 190, 193, 195–201, 203, 205–7, 209–11, 221– 22, 235–36 mathematics, 109, 111, 128, 138–39n11, 222 McCann, Phillip, 111 mentality, 3, 7, 46, 48, 53, 85–86, 94, 230, 238 mental maps, 11 Mexico, 3, 61–64, 67–68, 70–72 Meyer, John, 18 migration, 14–15, 50, 107 millenarianism, 92 missionaries/-y (societies), 13, 42, 45, 85–86, 88, 90, 93, 95–97, 99, 103n9, 103n11, 108–9, 113–14, 116, 135, 142–43, 159, 235, 238 Baptist, 4, 85, 88–89, 94, 97 Belgian Christian, 42, 44–49, 53, 55 British, 108 Catholic, 45 Christian, 45–46, 48, 53, 100, 142–44, 160–61, 238

252

Danish, 124, 131 Danish Missionary Society (DMS), 132–33 German, 108 London Missionary Society, 133 Missionaries of the Sacred Heart, 47 Protestant, 89, 93, 96, 100, 104n15, 108 Swedish Missionary Society, 150 Mitihila, 163 Mitra, Rajendralal, 5, 160, 164–67, 169 Mobutu regime, 45, 52, 55 modernity, 5, 98, 107, 167, 175–76, 178, 180, 184–90 monitorial system of education/mutual instruction, 4, 27, 85–91, 93, 96, 98, 102n2, 103n5, 105–7, 110–11, 115–17, 240 Montessori, Maria, 129 movements, political/social Beweging van Tachtig (the Eighties Movement), 181 Christian evangelical movement, 194n17 Christian revivalist movement (Netherlands), 180 civil disobedience movement, 133 Dutch women’s movement, 179– 80, 184 Gandhian movement, 128, 133–35 Hindi movement, 165 Indian independence movement, 4, 123–25, 130, 134, 138 Indian nationalist movement, 106, 231, 238–39 international feminist movement, 186 Irish Home Rule movement, 239 ‘Los sin tierra’ (Landless) movement, 66 movement for the implementation of Nai Talim, 129 National Education Movement, 34

Index

Non-Cooperation Movement, 127, 130, 133 progressive education movement, 129 Saami political movement, 149 Salvation Army, 194n17 social reform movement (Maharashtra), 211n3 Swadeshi movement, 125 women’s protest movement against the Aceh War, 194n17 Muhammad Ali Pasha, 169 Muir, Sir John, 162 Mumbai/Bombay, 108, 127–28, 201, 206–7, 211n1, 211n6, 214 Muslim, 108, 158, 160, 165–67, 169 N Nai Talim (New Education/Basic Education), 4–6, 123–31, 134–36, 138n2, 138n10, 200 Nandy, Ashis, 16, 171n1 nationalism, 15, 32, 35–37, 40, 50, 100, 132, 165, 169, 175–77, 189, 193n4, 193n6, 197n46, 211n9 cultural, 175–90, 192, 196n41 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 36, 129 Netherlands, 6, 13, 140, 175–82, 184– 87, 196nn39–40, 215 network(s), 1, 2, 14–15, 19, 124, 129, 130–31, 134, 179–80, 188, 229, 231, 235, 241 New Delhi, 131, 214 New Education. See Nai Talim; Reform Pedagogy/New Education novels/novellas, 55, 102n1, 114, 181– 82, 189, 198, 201–4, 206–7, 211, 215, 218, 220–23, 225 numeracy, 235, 240–41 O oral history, 44, 47–48, 51, 53, 55, 62 Orientalism, 95, 106, 156–57, 159, 169 O’Shaughnessy, William Brooke, 162

Index

P pedagogy, 4, 37, 48–50, 64, 85, 87–88, 91–93, 108–9, 114, 116–17, 142 penal reform, 218 Peru, 67–68, 72 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 91–92 Petersen, Anne Marie, 124, 131–35 Philipps, David, 20 Philipsborn, Gerda, 130 Phoenix Settlement, 126 pluralistic, 37 Porto Novo, 133 postcolonial, 3, 16, 45, 49, 51–54, 106– 7, 125, 142, 154n1, 169, 176, 241 Prinsep, James, 162 pupils, 30, 48, 51, 53–54, 86–91, 96, 98, 110, 143–45, 150, 239 R radicalism, 92 Raj, British, 7, 138n6, 215, 228–32, 235–36, 238–39, 241 Rajagopalachari, Chakravarti,134 Rajmeha, 163 Redoubt, Egmore, 106 reform colonial, 178, 181, 183–84, 187, 190, 194n19, 195n27, 196n40 educational/school, 71, 85–86, 90– 91, 100, 105, 108, 116–17, 125, 129, 150, 183, 194n20, 195n27 political, 182 religious, 99 social, 6, 16, 19, 99, 180, 182, 198– 200, 202–4, 207, 209, 211n2, 218, 222 Reform Pedagogy/New Education, 4, 50, 127–28. See also Nai Talim research approach. See also history aggregative, 3, 27–28 area studies, 15–16 comparative, 1, 11, 13–14, 16, 20–21, 27, 48, 51, 56, 63–64, 67–68, 73, 213

253

connotative, 213–14, 217 (cross-)cultural transfer, 1, 2, 7, 15, 17, 69 diffusionist, 3, 27 field research, 54 global educational culture theory, 19 globalization theory, 17, 19 interdisciplinary, 13, 15–16, 43 “lending and borrowing”, 20 network analysis, 13–15, 17, 73 quantitative, 17 spatial turn, 21 world culture, 11, 18 world history, 13–14, 16–17 world polity theory, 18–19 world-society theory, 17 world system theory, 17–18 resistance, 2, 4–5, 7, 50, 62, 67, 69, 85, 121–71, 206, 238 romance, romanticism, 92, 215, 220– 21, 225 Ruskin, John, 126, 138n9 Ryan, Sir Edward, 162 S Saami, 5, 140–51, 154n1, 154nn3–4, 154n8 Sabermati Ashram, 131–32 Said, Edward W., 30–31, 157 sand (writing material), 107, 109–10 Santiniketan/Shantiniketan, 33, 127, 129–30, 134, 220 Sápmi, 140–42, 149, 150–51, 154n3 Scandinavia, 132, 154n4 school(s), 27, 33–34, 37, 39, 86–91, 93–96, 98–99, 101, 103, 179, 185, 187, 194–96, 199, 201, 207, 215– 16, 218, 220, 223, 225. See also education asylum, 106–7, 111–15 boarding, 5, 142, 149, 232, 235 boys’, 52 dame, 86–87, 90–91

254

elementary, 4, 91, 96, 105, 107, 127–29, 150, 179 folk high, 132–33, 220 girls’, 52, 131–33, 196n37, 199, 201, 207, 220, 230, 234, 236 government, 232–33, 236, 239 indigenous, 91, 106, 116, 133 Malabar, 107–9, 115 middle, 53, 207 missionary/mission, 53, 88, 96, 150, 231–33 model, 90, 127, 185 monitorial, 87, 90, 105, 110 pathshala(s) (small schools), 86, 90–91, 96, 108–9 primary, 48, 179, 223 schoolbook/textbook, 27, 29, 31, 33–34, 36–37, 42, 45, 47, 54–55, 87–89, 93–94, 98–99, 124, 141, 159 school song, 47 state, 53, 230, 240 Schwab, Raymond, 157 science/scientific, 4, 5, 19, 29, 36, 85, 88–92, 93–95, 96–100, 103n12, 106, 111–12, 115, 117, 125, 128–29, 139n11, 157–61, 164, 167, 169, 194n20, 195n36, 220, 221, 237 economics, 15, 130 education(al), 1, 11–13, 17, 20– 21 European/Western, 5, 32, 36, 86, 88, 93–94, 97–98, 104n15, 157, 159–61, 164–66, 168–69 historical, 1, 11–15, 17, 21, 51, 53, 124, 154n1 historical anthropology, 3, 65 political, 1, 17, 19 popular, 103n8, 193n12 rural studies, 3, 65 social, 2, 15, 17, 18, 112 sociology, 3, 65, 128 science fiction, 216, 220–21 Scotland, 111–12

Index

Scottish enlightenment, 4, 107, 111–12 Sen, Ram Comul, 162–63, 166, 169 Serampore Mission Press, 88, 94 Sevagram, 127–28, 130–31, 134–35, 139n12 slavery, 14, 35, 71, 96, 140, 207, 237, 240 Smith, Adam, 111 Smith, William, 116 socialism, 180–81, 224 social order, 64, 124–26, 128, 131, 138n9, 142, 210 South Africa, 32–33, 125–26, 130 Southey, Robert, 107, 111 Spain, 140, 167 Spranger, Eduard, 130 Sri Lanka, 127 state, 7, 15, 19, 44–45, 48, 50, 62–63, 65–67, 70–72, 93, 126, 128, 133, 151, 178, 205, 231, 233, 239, 240 colonial, 113, 156–57, 113, 156–57, 168, 177, 199, 203, 230, 234, 241, 242n1 nation, 1, 2, 11–12, 14–15, 17–18, 38, 66, 69 Steiner-Khamsi, Gita, 20 Sweden, 4–5, 131, 140–41, 143, 151, 154nn3–4 Sykes, Marjorie, 124, 131, 133–35 syncretic, 33 Syria, 167 T Tagore, Rabindranath, 33–38, 124, 127, 129–30, 135, 220 Tamil Nadu, 34, 108 teacher(s), 12, 31, 53–54, 63, 66–68, 70, 86, 89–90, 96, 114–15, 117, 124, 126–28, 130–31, 133–35, 142, 146– 47, 185, 193n15, 206, 208, 220, 223, 233, 236–37, 239–40 teacher training, 70, 127–28, 134, 193n15, 236–37, 239–40 technology, 36, 94, 103n6, 125, 129

Index

textbook/schoolbook, 27, 29, 31, 33– 34, 36–37, 42, 45, 47, 54–55, 87–89, 93–94, 98–99, 124, 141, 159 theatre, 31, 205 Thornton, Joseph, 91–92 Tippoo Sultan, 117 Tolstoy Farm, 126 Tolstoy, Leo, 33, 129, 181 Tranquebar/Tharangambadi, 108–9 transcultural, 4–6, 85, 93, 99, 176, 198, 200, 213–17, 221, 225 translation (literal), 20, 30, 55, 86, 99, 103n9, 156–57, 159, 161–64, 169, 181, 216 transnational, 1–5, 7, 13–14, 16– 21, 27–28, 38, 64, 68, 124, 198, 205, 229. See also under history tribal, 213, 217, 220, 224–25 Tyrrell, Ian, 16 Tytler, John, 160–61 U United States (U.S.), 13–16, 35, 43–44, 205, 216 university/universities, 31–34, 36, 48, 56, 126, 132, 134, 233, 237. See also college(s) Berlin, 130 Bombay, 31 Calcutta, 31, 35, 220, 237, 243n16 Jamia Millia Islamia (New Delhi), 127, 130 Leiden, 187 Leuven, 41 Loreto (see under college)

255

Lovanium, 48 Stanford, 18 Visva-Bharati (Shantiniketan), 220 Women’s University (Pune), 207 Utilitarian, 30, 87, 229–30 utopia, 201–02, 204, 210 V Vellore, 133 vernacular(s), 5, 86, 93, 98–99, 108–11, 115, 126, 157, 159–64, 167, 169, 176, 193n1 Virginia, 111 W Wallerstein, Immanuel, 16 Wardha, 127–28, 138n1, 139n12 Wardha Conference, 5, 123, 126, 130–31, 138n2 Wardha Scheme, 123–24, 127, 129, 133 Wardha Training School, 127 Ward, Mary, 227–28, 235, 240 Webster, Jean, 6, 213–18, 221–22, 224–25 weights and measures, 94, 109 and numbers, 109 welfarist work, 6, 213, 223–24 Wilkie, Thomas, 111 women religious, 227, 229, 231, 233– 37, 239, 241 Wood, Charles, 90 Wood, H.G., 134