Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
what role did Macaulay's minute play in the Orientalist-Anglicist debate and the effect the minute had on the Indian population
Harvard University
The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge2018 •
This study shows that debate over the relations among companies, states, and knowledge is not new, but rather was integral to the politics of the British East India Company. Reconstructing such debate among Company officials and critics from the 1770s to the 1830s, the study makes several further interventions. It argues against what has been perhaps the dominant narrative about Company and British-imperial ideology in this period, a narrative of reorientation from “Orientalist” to “Anglicist” cultural attitudes. It shows instead how the Company shifted from a commercial idiom of sovereignty, concerned with conciliating elites through scholarly patronage, to a territorial idiom, concerned with cultivating popular affection through state-sponsored education. Whereas the field of the history of knowledge has largely developed as a history of structures of knowledge, meanwhile, this study argues for a history of ideas of knowledge. Such an approach is needed to elucidate the category of knowledge and its discursive uses past and present.
The research study critically traces the historical background of the introduction of the western education system with English as the medium of instruction in the Indian subcontinent and its impact on the teaching of various subjects and local languages in the postcolonial phase. It analyzes the transitional shift from the indigenous/regional vernaculars to engraftment (translating western knowledge into indigenous languages for teaching) and eventual shift to English as the medium of instruction, which thwarted the process of engraftment and development of indigenous languages. The study analyzes that how the education in the subcontinent was affected in the wake of diametrical shift in the British political policy from orientalism, engraftment, conciliation and consolidation to hostility, antagonism and oppression. Although, the study repudiates the popular myth of the revolutionary changes claimed by the British education system in the subcontinent, yet it establishes that how in the longer term it contributed to the academic, literary, social, political and economic advancement of the region. Nevertheless its repercussions for the regional languages were immense. The study reveals that how English, which was the language of power, authority and center, became a means of retaliation, communication and resistance at the hands of natives. The study, in its nature, is descriptive and historical one.
Indian Historical Review
The Quest for Education: An Insight into the Educational Theories and Practices of the Colonial Government in Bengal Presidency2018 •
The present article would try to examine the trajectories of an evolving knowledge system or how it travelled from the West and grafted itself on indigenous institutions reconstituting the one already in existence. Western knowledge arrived in India through the coercive agency of colonialism, the colonial administrators, particularly Macaulay, asserting that this knowledge was true and that the indigenous knowledge system, like the gods of the natives, was false. Knowledge was thus sought to be reconstituted rather than being a product of knowing subject from the outside. Thus, the article offers a preliminary analysis of how colonial authority was established over cultural spaces in India first by establishing indigenous centres of higher learning and then by subverting them by bringing the management under colonial authority based on the ideological undercurrent of the superiority of European civilisation and administrative needs. Hence, there were attempts to replace personalised Indian cultural authority by institutionalising and co-opting Indian forms of authority leading to immense changes in the social matrix of the Indian society and culture.
This study aims to examine colonialism in relation to the spatial dimension of play in nineteenth century India. Based on a theoretical framework encompassing education discourse, colonial architecture, and spatiality, this paper intends to further our understanding of how the notion of sports and games in the modern sense emerged on the playgrounds of schools and colleges in the Indian sub-continent during the heydays of the British Raj. The historical literature on sports and games does not necessarily explore this connection with the colonial education discourse, in any of the significant works produced to date. Historians have examined the education discourse for its significant bearing upon the question of national resistance to the British Raj and the formation of regional identities in the early twentieth century and in postcolonial India. In the process, however, they have overlooked how the configuration of colonial spatiality created a new kind of cultural awakening among middle-class pupils in schools and colleges in India during the later part of nineteenth century. While drawing attention to this historical development, this study would suggest that a close examination of education policies since the East India Company period is vital to understanding these later developments, and their effects are interlaid over the course of many decades. This paper also furthers our understanding of the role played by English public schools in Victorian Britain in the dissemination of the games ethos in relation to masculinity and empire, and how such notions concomitantly played off of each other, with an added twist, in colonial India.
The encounter between the pre-colonial education system in India, dominated by poor teachers and students, and the British education system, which defended and perpetuated the 'English class system', created a complex and problematic relationship. This article explores this problematic relationship between poverty and education in the discourse of the colonial state as well as of Indian nationalists.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.
History Compass
‘Education for All: Reassessing the Historiography of Education in Colonial India,’ History Compass, (Vol 6, Dec 2008)2009 •
2011 •
South Asian Studies MA thesis, Columbia University, …
Colonial Knowledge and the Greco-Roman Classics: Resituating the Legacy of Sir William Jones in a Humanist Context2008 •
The Mohsin Endowment and the Progress of Education in Colonial Bengal
The Mohsin Endowment and the Progress of Education in Colonial Bengal2015 •
Indian Historical Review
Community Profile of Primary Education in Madras Presidency in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Part I: 1825-852018 •
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Peter J. Forshaw & Marco Pasi (eds.), Hermes Explains: Thirty Questions about Western Esotericism, Amsterdam University Press
Isn't India the home of spiritual wisdom?2019 •
Comparative Studies in Society and History
"Applied Orientalism" in British India and Tsarist Turkestan2009 •
Reading The Legal Case: Cross-Currents between Law and the Humanities, ed. Marco Wan
Sir William Jones and the Translation of Law in India, 20122012 •