Religion & politics in colonial India
How initiatives in vernacular education made an early difference in the Indian public sphere and civil society
This is a fascinating study of the role of vernacular education in the
making of the political and social consciousness in Bengal in the 19th
and 20th centuries. It is an exercise in intellectual history, and
therefore primarily a discussion about the ideas that shaped educational
policy and practice.
In this effort, the author sidesteps the earlier interest in English
education, and demonstrates “the centrality of vernacular education as a
space in which missionaries and native leaders could theorise and
ultimately propagate the practices and norms required of a properly
modern society.” Consequently, this study marks a shift from the
“conventional reliance on conversion, sacred text, or ritual practice as
the primary means to understand religion and religious change.”
That ‘Western rule secularised the non-West’, according to the author,
is one of the most compelling historical fictions. The colonial state,
its ideologues and their disciples advanced this argument in order to
highlight their civilising mission of colonialism. The author challenges
this idea by “demonstrating how the sustained involvement of
missionaries in the expansion of education ultimately reinforced, rather
than weakened, the place of religion and religious identity in the
development of Indian modernity.”
The pursuit and adaptation of modern educational techniques and
institutions, mainly exported to the colonies by Protestant
missionaries, opened up new ways for Hindu and Muslim leaders and the
colonial state to reformulate ideas of community along religious lines.
In the formation of community consciousness, missionary education had a
pivotal role.
Pre-colonial scene
Before the intervention of colonial rule, vernacular education was quite
widespread in Bengal. William Adam, who prepared an exhaustive report
for Bengal for 1835-38, estimated one elementary school for every 4,000
people, or for every 73 children of school-going age, which compared
favourably with most countries in the world. The scene was not different
in the Madras and Bombay presidencies. The vernacular system imparted
elementary education sufficient to meet the demands of the time in
trading and accounting. The institutions which made this possible were
the missionary schools, tolls, madrassas, patasalas and domestic tutoring.
The Indian initiatives in vernacular education through patasalas,
tolls and domestic tutoring were sustained by contributions from the
public, particularly the landowning classes. The East India Company’s
revenue policy impoverished a large section of the landed aristocracy,
which led to the drying up of the main source of income of indigenous
schools. It was in this context that missionary education gained ground.
By the second half of the 19th century, missionaries were well
entrenched in vernacular education.
The study begins with the passage of Charles Wood’s Despatch of 1854,
which formed a landmark in colonial education, as it acknowledged its
responsibility of educating its colonial subjects. It heralded a serious
discussion, since the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy, about the
nature of education the colonial state should provide to the ‘natives’.
This was partly a result of the influence of missionaries, as they
believed that literacy would lay the foundation for conversion and
conversion in turn to loyalty. That was the reason why the missionaries
became the dominant player in the field of vernacular education, which,
the author argues, was not a handmaiden of the Raj or a vehicle for
Christian proselytising; it was a “dense nexus of state, missionary and
local demands and desire.”
Separate space
Vernacular education contributed to the development of a public sphere
and civil society. As the author has observed, “Within the dominating
and coercive regime, vernacular education became a space in which
missionaries and the emerging class of urban educated Bhadralok were
given some autonomy to imagine and plot a different kind of society.”
The interest in vernacular education was focussed on religious and
social reform, and educational policy came to be ‘seen as a proxy’ for
political policy. As a result, the author argues, modern education
became a crucial part of the debates leading up to Partition in 1947.
In this context, the textbook production assumed very great importance.
Several textbook committees came into existence to produce reading
material. The missionaries had an upper hand in it. For instance, the
Christian Vernacular Education Society of India produced 730,000 books
and pamphlets. They were imbued with religious bias and were not
acceptable to all.
Of all attempts to prepare a widely acceptable text book, the most acceptable was Barnaparichay, a primer written by Vidyasagar in 1855. This was written in sadhu bhasha, a sanskritised version of the Bengali vernacular. The remedy was to employ chalitbhasha,
which was closer to spoken vernacular. During the course of the 19th
century, attempts were made to simplify the language in order to make it
a vehicle appropriate for mass education.
In a nutshell, this is an important contribution to the intellectual history of colonial India.
(K. N. Panikkar is an eminent historian and academic)
