CHAPTER 8

English as a University Subject in

India and England:
Calcutta, Allahabad, Benaras, London,
Cambridge and Oxford

J. B. HARRISON

MOTIVES FOR THE ADOPTION OF

ENGLISH IN ENGLAND

Until far into the nineteenth century, English was a subject with which
neither Oxford or Cambridge nor the Public Schools bothered
themselves much. The master subjects were the classics. In the 1860s
at Rugby, for example, classics occupied seventeen, mathematics
three, and modern languages or the sciences two hours a week. And
why not? For as Gladstone declared, 'The materials of what we call
classical training were prepared, and we have a right to say were
advisedly and providentially prepared, in order that it might become ...
the complement of Christianity'. But not so the sciences, as Archbishop
William Temple observed: 'Such studies do not make a man more
human, but simply more intelligent.'1
There were at this time only two other English universities in
existence: London (founded 1836) and Durham (1837), the former not
a teaching university until 1900, the latter a shadowy failure. For
London as a teaching institution must be read University College
(1828) and King's College (1834), founded in reaction against the
Anglican ex-clusiveness and classical traditionalism of Oxford and
Cambridge. U.C.'s roots were to be found in Puritan tradition, which
saw language as 'but the instrument conveying to us things useful to
be known' (Milton), and in the Disse iting Academies which the
1662 Act of Uniformity

II
1 56 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
had made necessary and the 1689 Act of Toleration had made possible.
English was studied as a training for the ministry, with an emphasis on
rhetoric, but.also as an essential requirement 'for the business of
manhood'2 (Joseph Priestly). So at U.C. the practical value of the
language was emphasized while at King's the stress was on the humane,
moral influence of literature.
The same years also saw another response to the practical and personal
needs of a more complex industrializing world^the rapid development
of Mechanics' Institutes, from the first London Mechanics' Institute of
1823 to over 500 by 1850 and 1,750 by 1884. These gave working men
an understanding of science and an opportunity of self-enlargement, as
through the study of political economy or of English literature from the
resources of their libraries, The London Institute would develop into
Birkbeck College; those of Leicester or Nottingham would later be
absorbed in civic universities.3
The general changes in society which had led London to offer English
as a subject from the beginning, and which had led nearly half the
endowed grammar schools to drop Latin and Greek by the time the
Taunton Commission on endowed schools reported in 1868, did not
leave the public schools and the old universities unaffected. But particular
pressures also drove them reluctantly and belatedly to make some room
for English in their teaching.
The first of these, perhaps, was the growth from 1853 of competitive
examinations as the means of selecting men ror increasingly professional
government services, the lead here being given by the Indian Civil Service.
The ICS was particularly significant as candidate numbers were large, and
the rewards, including a pension, attractive. Their scheme of examination
was a generalist one: 'anyone well prepared to take high honours at any
of the principal English or Irish universities has a good chance of success',
in examinations which tested 'those branches of knowledge to which it is
desirable that English gentlemen who mean to remain at home should
pay attention'. Candidates sat for whatever papers they chose, the
successful being those who amassed a high total, from whatever
source. But the scheme of marks—1,500 for English and English
history, 1,500 for classics, 1,250 for mathematics, 500 for the natural
sciences, 500 for logic, moral and mental philosophy, and only 375
each for French, German and Italian, Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian—
served to give a new importance to English Studies, especially as
mathematics was generally not well taught in schools.4
Following the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854 on the organiza-
 English as a University Subject in India and England 157
tion of the permanent Civil Service, this new emphasis on English was
carried over into other examination schemes as the Home departments
moved to competitive selection—by 1870 virtually all had done so except
the Foreign Office.5
A second impulse came from the University Extension Movement.
This took two forms: the founding of new Colleges, such as Owens
College, Manchester (1851) or the Working Men's College (1854)
rounded by F.D. Maurice and his colleagues from King's College London,
and from the 1870s the sending out of lecturers from the universities,
often in response to appeals from the Mechanics' Institutes, to provide
courses and evening classes.'1 In thus furnishing 'University Education for
the whole Nation by an itinerant system',7 classics were necessarily
replaced by English as a cultural vehicle. Along with history and political
economy, English became an essential element in a movement for liberal
rather than vocational education. The movement was in part a response
to the demand from craft unions, clerks, and shopkeepers anxious to
better themselves, and also from women, and in part a means, to rtfen like
Maurice, of countering class antagonisms that had surfaced in the
Chartist movement. As the Rev'd Canon Brown told university
extension teachers, 'There are nations in Europe where the students are
a body liable to dangerous explosions of political feeling. . . . But [our]
students . . . are men and women whose studies predispose them to
orderliness.'8 The fellowship of minds should not be carried too far,
however: 'University Extension must not seek to inspire ur suitable
persons with an ambition for callings for which they are not
ntellectually fitted.'9
Finally, as a state system of education was created, the provision of
qualified teachers to teach children for whom Greek or even Latin were
inappropriate also required that English, other modern languages and the
sciences should receive new attention. H.G. Robinson, of the York
Teachers'Training College, argued: 'It is in connexion with what is called
"middle class" education that the claims of English literature maybe most
effectively urged . . . [as] a most valuable agency for the moral and
intellectual culture of the professional and commercial classes. The
student will learn to appreciate the temper with which great minds
approach the consideration of great questions, he will discover that truth
is many sided, that it is not identical or merely co-extensive with
individual opinion, and that the world is a good deal wider than his own
sect, or party, or class.' Robinson added: 'And such a lesson the middle
classes of this country need. They are generally honest in their opinions,
but in too many

Illllliillilllilllilllillllil II
158 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
cases they are narrow.' Furthermore, as the competition from American
and German industry drove England to provide improved technical
education for its workers and managerial cadres, so too the importance of
literature as a humanizing counter-force grew. F.W. Farrar (ed.), Essays
on a Liberal Education (1867), produced a series of pleas for English as
a substitute for the classics in this liberating role, as did the Taunton
Commission of 1868.
But if English was to be a university subject, what form was it to take
and what purposes was it to serve? At London the first University College
Professor, the Rev. Thomas Dale, had proposed to connect mental culture
with moral instruction by teaching the history of the language, its
structure—'the construction of sentences, the force and harmony of
periods'—and 'the use and application of Language in the various kinds
of speaking and composition, commencing with the plain and
perspicuous and proceeding upward to the elevated and majestic style'. 10
In his lectures on English literature he classified his texts by rhetorical
form and genre, but was also at pains to provide a biographical history
of his authors." So did R.G. Latham, Professor from 1839, who set
questions such as 'State what you know concerning the personal history
of Donne, Cowley, Lee, Butler and Otway'. AJ. Scott (1848) more truly
emphasized the historical approach: 'Mention the events and
circumstances having most influence on the literary character of
Elizabeth's age'—declaring 'A poet of the first order is the voice of a
great era'. His successor, David Masson, further strengthened the
historical study of English literature. This, as D.J. Palmer argues in his
The Rise of English Studies, was fostered by the German historiographical
revolution which had become aware 'not merely of states and empires
but of civilizations and cultures'.12
The use of English as a core subject in Civil Service examinations—
'Foremost among these subjects we place our own language and literature'
as the ICS examiners put it in 1855—also offered a model of how English
might be approached. The ICS paper of 1855 was designed 'to show the
extent of their knowledge of our poets, wits and philosophers'. G.W.
Dasent, an examiner for the ICS and the Council of Military Education,
explained how this was done. His practice, he said, was to select forty or
fifty passages from major authors and ask: 'Here is a passage. State where
it comes from, explain any peculiarities of English in it, and state the
context so far as you are able to do so.'13 This very open-ended approach
was still much in evidence in 1890 where the first English paper of that
year demanded wide reading and a categorizing approach with such
questions as:

ii i

i l l ....<
 English as a University Subject in India and England 159
Arrange, in accurate historical order, the periods in the growth of English
Language and Literature . . .
With which of their works do you chiefly associate Chaucer, Bacon, Milton,
Swift, Dryden, Scott and Wordsworth? Give your reasons for selecting the
particular work you choose, and characterise it.
Write a shoit note on the variations of the English 'Sonnet'.
Trace the history and development of the English 'Novel' from Defoe to
Walter Scott.
Mention the chief humorists in English Literature distinguishing their salient
features.
Write abrief note on the rise and progress of Periodical Literature in England.14
English literature was seen here as a contribution to the well-furnished
mind rather than as a subject for intensive analysis and study. The Literary
Scientific and Mechanics' Institute were also criticized for just such a
stress on reading 'while study has had to take care of itself. And by their
nature Extension Lectures likewise tended to be general studies of great
authors—descriptive and eulogistic, rather than critical—and to handle
broad themes extensively since large audiences could not all be armed
with common texts for close study.15 Technological change was, however,
making access to standard authors much more widely available. By the
1860s steam presses and machine-made paper were making possible the
mass production of anthologies, selections and cheap editions—the
Chandos Classics, Blackwood's Universal Library of Standard Authors,
or Moxon's Popular Poets—in tremendous numbers and at modest
prices.16
By the late nineteenth century, this broad cultural approach to English
had submerged the earlier practical and vocational one—the attention to
composition, orthography and speaking, found earlier in London, in
Sheffield or at Owen's College, Manchester. 'Eng. Lit.' had penetrated the
schools, too, as an element in pupil teacher training—the Newcastle
Commission on Popular Education in 1861 recommended that English
language and literature should be studied by student teachers 'just as the
Greek and Latin Classics are read in superior public schools'—and in the
grammar schools.17 There, the Headmaster of Marlborough advised, 'I
would give unusual weight to the teaching of the English language,
literature and history, to the attempt to humanize and refine a boy's mind
by trying early to familiarize him with English poetry, and to inspire him
with a taste for the best authors. . .'18 And in the education of adults such
fellowship with great minds would promote sound moral habits, driving
out less reverent and more radical working class ideas.

(((Illltj ■■■■ill Ill

 160 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia

REACTION IN THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES

But what attitude should Oxford and Cambridge take when, after Royal
Commission prodding and Parliamentary action, they agreed to accept
English as a subject they might teach? There was certainly little interest
in English as a working tool for everyman, and when it was proposed to
attach a Professor of English Literature to the School of Modern History,
Stubbs, the Regius Professor, declared that 'to have the History School
hampered with dilettante teaching, such as the teaching of English
Literature, must necessarily do great harm to the School'. 19
But both Oxford and Cambridge already had Chairs in Anglo-Saxon,
harking back to the seventeenth century. These had been given new
vigour and authority in the nineteenth century by the modern Germanic
philology, and in 1868 a Chair in Comparative Philology had been
created for Max Miiller at Oxford. When in 1885 the Merton
Professorship was created at Oxford, for lecturing on 'the history and
criticism of English Language and on the works of approved English
authors', the problem of how to make English a serious, examinable
subject was solved by appointing A.S. Napier, a German-trained
philologist, who also brought with him the ambition to see Oxford
develop a strong tradition of research on continental lines rather than
merely to provide undergraduate teaching.20 The English to be taught
would be treated linguistically and historically.
The appointment did not go unopposed. One of those passed over was
John Churtoii Collins, at that time lecturing for the London Society for
the Extension of University Teaching, and a Classicist who saw English
as the new medium for a humane liberal education. He embarked upon
a sustained, ferocious attack on the appointment, and on philology as a
subject which neither enlarged, stimulated nor refined the mind. Redrew
wider and vvidci circles into the debate, and with the intervention of Lord
Motley and Lord Goschen, Oxford was stirred in 1887 to propose a new
School of Modern Languages and Literature. It failed to gain approval,
the vote being tied, but in 1891 a Final Honours School of English was
proposed and was brought into being in 1894.
The syllabus and examination scheme for the degree proposed to the
Board of Studies in 1895 consisted often papers; it will be seen that
this scheme uneasily but deliberately yoked together philology-based
papers and those of a literary flavour: 1. Old English Texts (Beowulf
and Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader); 2. Middle English Texts (King Horn,
Havelock, Laurence Minor, Sir Gawayne); 3. Chaucer (Selections), Piers
Plowman (Selections); 4. Shakespeare—six plays; 5. History of the

....... Jll.............. 111. .. ,11(11. 1 . illilililillllilllllilllilillll

 English as a University Subject in India and England 161
English Language; 6. History of English Literature to 1800; 7. Gothic
(Gospel of St Mark), Unseens from Old and Middle English; 8. Literary
Criticism; and 9. and 10. Special Subjects. Eventually in 1908 the
examination, though retaining four common papers, was rearranged so
as to offer either a further six language or six literature-based papers.
At Cambridge the Senate had agreed by 1878 to create a Board of
Modern and Mediaeval Languages within which English could acquire
a recognized place, together with that provided by the Bosworth Chair of
Anglo-Saxon. In 1882 English became an obligatory part of the Ordinary
Degree Modern Languages, with papers on composition, the history of
the language, a period of literary history, and prescribed texts
philologically treated. In 1891, by which time Mediaeval and Modern
Languages had become a full tripos, English was arranged in two sections,
one mediaeval, the other with a paper on Shakespeare and one and a
half papers on literature after 1500—extended in 1900 to two papers in
English Literature from 1500 to 1832.
If we examine the syllabuses and examination papers of the Cambridge
Mediaeval and Modern Languages Tripos for 1900 and 1910 We find
six papers: 1. Old English; 2. Middle English linguistically treated;
3. Chaucer; 4. Middle and Modern English Writings (modern being
Elizabethan); 5. Shakespeare; and 6. Modern English Authors, Spenser
to Wordsworth. In four of the papers the approach is largely scientific,
with questions on textual authenticity or on philological, syntactical,
historical or phonological issues. In the Shakespeare, as in the Modern
Authors paper, dates, sources and revisions, excisions and interpolations
and philology are still much in evidence; for example 'Discuss the date,
the sources, the revision of Love's Labour's Losi (1900).
By 1910 disciplinary purism had been slightly relaxed, but only
markedly so in the History of English Literature from 1500—1832 where
candidates wric invited to write essays on the prose of Bacon or Milton,
or the importance of Marlowe or Ben Jonson as poets and dramatists,
to compare Wordsworth and Coleridge as poets, or to locate the essential
genius of Byron. After 1912, when H.M. Chadwick became Prolessor of
Anglo-Saxon, pressure mounted to divorce literature from language—
he thought philology unsuitable for undergraduates. In 1917 it became
possible to avoid taking any language papers, or any literature earlier than
1350.
At London University English followed no such path. A solid
contingent of strictly linguistic material, eminently examinable,
remained firmly in place. The BAHonours paper of 1890 consisted of
three BA pass papers: 1. History, Structure and Development of the
English Language;

■iiiililliliiilllllllllllllllllllllli
 162 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
2. Anglo-Saxon Grammar and Translation; 3. History of English
Literature from 1625 to 1660; to which were added for Honours, 4.
History of English Literature from 1558 to 1625; and 5. English
Language and Literature (Anglo-Saxon to Ben Jonson). What had been
true of Dale's papers in 1828 still seemed true of the first question on
the first paper: 'Point out and explain the literary inferiority of the first
half of Queen Elizabeth's reign to the second half. You were expected to
repeat what you had been taught, or r ad learnt off by heart, as in this
question from the other paper: 'Give eximples of worry, eloquence,
over-confidence, and mistaken judgement i n Julius Caesar, and quote
some of its more famous passages'.21 For 19001 he London BAHons.
syllabus consisted of 5 papers: 1. Elements of Germ, mic Philology-Gothic
and Anglo-Saxon; 2. Anglo-Saxon and Middle Ei lglish texts, plus
unseen material and questions on Grammar and philology; 3. History of
a prescribed period of English Literature; 4. Prescribed texts other
than Anglo-Saxon and Middle English; and 5. An Essay on a question
of literary history or criticism.
The validation of English as a university subject in England had thus
proceeded, in the main, upon German lines of scientific rigour, formalism
and research, learning for its own sake, rather than by any appeal to the
practical needs of an industrial society or even the need to humanize newer
elements in its elites. It also offered a substitute for the older training
in the classics—the papers in Anglo-Saxon, Icelandic, Old or Middle
English providing those alternatives to the grammatical exercises of Latin
which uninflected modern English failed to provide. But as with die study
of Latin and Greek, the study of English still addressed itself much more
to form, structure and linguistics than to the thought content of the
authors studied. The questions set also make it clear that there was little
consideration of the social, economic or even political context of literary
production. Rather the evidence suggests a natural following of older
intellectual lines of enquiry, especially those reinforced by German
research, together with aYi equally natural desire to bolster professional
prestige by making the subject less rather than more accessible to the
common people. The same emphasis upon the scientific and the esoteric
might also make it possible to secure for the teachers of English a personal
ciitrc'c into tlie classically educated (*lito.

ENGLISH IN CALCUTTA
For Allahabad and Benaras Hindu Universities the immediate model, for
all subjects, was Calcutta University, of which they were offshoots. In
looking at English as a university subject in North India, I would like

■■■
 English as a University Subject in India and England 163
therefore to glance first at Calcutta. English was a central subject for
examination in Calcutta University since its inception in 1857—that is
before Oxford and Cambridge had a School of English at all. In Calcutta
University, by the 1860s, BA Honours could be taken in English
Language and Literature. In 1866, for example, six papers formed the
syllabus: 1. Chaucer, Spenser, Southey and Campbell; 2. Macbeth and
Henry IV; 3. Raleigh, Bacon, Browne and Locke; 4. Burke, Scott,
Brougham, Carlyle; 5. an Essay; and 6. a paper on Comparative
Grammar. Here surely is that spread, that omnivorousness, which die
Indian Civil Service examiners required and which, at home, crammers
rather than the older universities were providing.
When the papers set for 1866 are studied it will be seen, however, that
they are more 'technical' than the ICS equivalent and closer to the early
London models by then available. (The first London B.A. examination
inEnglishwasheldin 1859.) Thus, the'Chaucer to Campbell' paper asks
for a general view of linguistic change from 1100-1400: scansion,
prosody and a comparison of Spenser with Ariosto, the root letters of
interrogatives and relatives in Aryan languages and what happens to the
Teutonic 'h' in other Aryan branches, word meanings, literary
allusions and parsing. In only part of just two questions is judgement
asked to be passed upon an author. The other papers are no more
evaluative of content and rarely invite the response of the candidate to the
prose or verse of the author—unless in questions inviting pastiche—
'Reproduce, in the style of Raleigh, the history of the plantation of the
Greeks in Sicily' or 'Write on Chivalry in the style of Sir Walter Scott'. If
the question 'Now-a-days we write women and pronounce wimmem is
there any reason for our pronunciation?', has a light-hearted feel to it,
not so the thought of a host of Bengali boys struggling to answer it. The
one paper which does take note that it was being set in India was that on
Comparative Grammar in which Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit have an equal
place. As with the ICS papers, all questions were to be attempted—an
invitation, as with the ICS, to cram or rote-learn.
By 1890 (here had been little significant shift at Calcutta except that
the last paper now introduced Anglo-Saxon passages for translation, and
passages to l>r put into Anglo-Saxon, and the authorities appealed to
include M.ix Mil lie i aiul W Inn icy anil .iimiii^M i ritusi lie iiuulrin (ionics
ofTaineand Dowden. The form of the papers is not very diferent—either
in overall pattern, in the standard authors chosen or in the unequal mix
of technical and aesthetic elements—from that found in the papers set
for English candidates for the ICS or for London undergraduates,
except in the lesser attention paid by Calcutta to the Teutonic
languages:

in jiih
164 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
Anglo-Saxon, Old and Middle English. What is striking however, is the
complexity of individual questions, many containing several distinct
issues, and the degree to which the sub-divisions seem to expect set
answers, learned by rote:
7(a) 'No more the thirsty entrance to the soil,
Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood'.
1
Various conjectures have been made toward the getting rid of the difficulties
in these lines. The Dering MS gives a materially different text: Discuss the
question, mentioning the proposed corrections, the objections to them, and to
the received text.
This is only the first of a two part question. There were eleven questions
in all, all to be answered.22
REBELLION IN NORTH-WEST INDIA
It was in part against the way in which Calcutta University taught and
examined that the Government of the North-Westem Provinces and the
colleges of the province, hitherto affiliated to Calcutta since 1870,
rebelled. Sir William Muir, the Lieutenant-Governor, argued that at
Calcutta, the perfectly sound requirement of proficiency in English as the
pre-condition of university training had been 'pushed too far and made
too stringent'.23 Claims for semi-independence for the N.W.P. colleges
were rejected but in 1872 a government college, Muir Central College,
was established at the new N.W.P. capital, Allahabad. Fostered as the
possible nucleus of a university, it stood second only to Presidency College
at Calcutta in academic success. In 1887 claims to independence were
accepted and Allahabad University came into being. However, Allahabad,
like Calcutta, was to be an examining university only, presiding over a
group of affiliated colleges.
At the new university's first convocation in November 1887 the
Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Alfred Lyall, in his address gave pride of place
to letters and philosophy—two subjects which all the affiliated colleges
were equipped to teach. They were, he said, 'the means of fixing the
measure of liberal education and general culture', and 'by common
consent and the latest verdict of European experience and discussion, still
of paramount value, not only in themselves, but as. . . the necessary
antecedents of all special studies'.2'1
The first Allahabad BA papers I have, those of 1889, are, by comparison
with Calcutta, startlingly free of minutiae, syntactical, philological etc. It
is true that, of the twelve questions set, five require explanations of
sentence structure, of word meaning, contextual allocation or a discus-
 English as a University Subject in India and England 165
sion of variant readings, but in each case applied to a single quotation.
But the other questions—
Discuss Shakespeare's portrayal of the common people in Coriolanus.
Milton's attitude towards nature is not that of a scientific naturalist, nor even
that of a close observer. It is that of a poet who feels its influence too powerfully
to dissect—discuss and illustrate.
What is Dryden's idea of a perfect satire?
is the name Butler's Sermons a misnomer? To what extent are they polemical?
How is his style affected by the nature of his subject and his mode of treating it?
—are quite different from the Calcutta type in their demands upon the
student.
The same is no less true of the first available MA papers (for 1893)
which required neither 'Say what you know' answers, nor a 'Can you
remember the note about this bit in your bazaar' 'students'-guide?'
response. Four papers were set. Three were on a range of authors—Chaucer,
Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, Prior, Swift, Pope, Thompson, Young,
Johnson, Collins, Gray, Cowper, Crabbe, Blake, Tennyson, Bacon, and
George Eliot. The spread is notably wide, though many are read in
selections only, and Addison and George Elliot look mther lonely
representatives of imaginative prose literature. The fourth japer has as
set books selections from Macaulay and Froude, J.S. Mill's Liberty,
Maine's Popular Government and Fitzjames Stephen's LJbtrty, Equality
and Fraternity. In 1893 the five questions set were on Ma;aulay's
description of the state of England prior to the Revolution, one on
Froude's doubts on whether the present system of education is proof that
we live in an age of progress, and three on Mill. (Both books and
questions are strong meat, which scarcely suggests that the University
was acting as an instrument of imperial thought control.) The literary
questions, too, are broad in scope:
What are the dramatic unities? How far do theTempest and King Lear observe
them and satisfy poetical justice?
Compare Paradise Lost with any other great narrative poem you know.
How appropriately has Shakespeare been called myriad-minded? Can Milton
be called myriad-minded?
(jive an account of the state of English society as described in Chaucer's poems.
What was his attitude to the Church?
What is the importance of Cowper and Crabbe in the history of English
literature?
From what sources did Tennyson derive the subject-matter of his Louis-Eaters
and Ulysses?—compare the two.25

Illlllllllllllllll
 166 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
This broadness in scope may perhaps have been a response to two
like-minded memoranda, from M.J. White, Principal of Canning
College, and from J.C. Nesfield, Inspector of Schools, Lucknow. These
were contributed to a general discussion in 1891 of what sort of
university subject its teachers wished English to be. Nesfield had set
down two aims: 'to enable the student to write and speak English
correctly' and 'to enable him to understand with facility any English
book that he may wish to read'. To achieve his twin aims he
recommended that the text books prescribed should be 'liberal both in
amount and in variety', to preclude that rote learning of notes made
possible by a short course and also to give practice 'in the run of
sentences and idiomatic use of words... and . . . a more varied stock of
facts and ideas. In a modern and uninflect-ed language like English
practice is the only safe road and practice is impossible without a wide
and varied stock of material to practise upon.' Up to a third of the courses
should be devoted to poetry which 'aids in the formation of taste, as well
as in the acquirement of words and ideas', Nesfield added; 'The aim
should notbe to enable him to criticise (or rather affect to criticise)
peculiarities of style, or . . . to write meagre accounts of the lives of those
authors . . . or to discuss allusions which may happen to occur in
textbooks on matters of no practical importance or interest.'26 (A hit at
Calcutta question papers, surely?)
The other major contribution to the 1891 debate was from Theodore
Morison atrAligarh. After declaring that 'a University has the right to
expect that the learning of her graduates should be scholarly', Morison
continued:
We must remember that English is the most important of the University studies,
for the sake of which our students consent to struggle with other uncongenial
subjects . . . The Board will not be satisfied with any system of teaching English
which does not give the student a reasoned understanding of the.language; that
we require something more scholarly than the undigested vocabulary which a
commercial traveller acquires by the Ollendorfian method. . . . The means
employed ... at present are to make our scholars read certain text-books in the
English language. We expect them to know certain selections from some of the
most difficult authors thoroughly; but we do not, directly, test their command of
idiomatic English. . . .The tacit assumption is that when they have read a certain
number of masterpieces they will know the language those masterpieces are
written in. . . .The University papers, as at present set, foster a tendency to work
at anything radier than the English language. The difficulties. . . found most
often . . . consist. . . in allusions to things with which the Indian student is not
familiar; he, therefore, works' hardest at the history, manners, religion, folklore,
prosody, grammar and style of several unconnected epochs. . . .He cannot for all
 English as a University Subject in India and England 167
that write a paper of English without a fault. The Professors in our Colleges are
peculiarly competent to correct the faulty English of their classes, and to explain
the idioms of their own language; but it will profit the student more in the
University Examinations to have pored over the voluminous foot-notes of a
Bengali editor . . .
Morison then set out his proposals for correcting these biases: not
general essay-writing but paraphrase, the nearest substitute for
translation into English from the vernacular—'there is no better exercise
than turning the idioms of one language into the corresponding idioms
of another'. Such passages should be 'unseen' to foil cram. There
should be some teaching of grammar. 'Our students leave school with
notions of grammar hardly more significant than those which are
caned into a fourth form boy.' Finally he pleads, 'May nothing of the
nature of Litemturgeschichte or the study of Literature ever creep into our
course.'27
It is unfortunate that at this point, i.e. 1891-92, discussion of the
teaching and examining of English, as recorded in the University
Minutes, virtually stops. I have noted only one later intervention,
seemingly effective, by W. Knox Johnson, Queens College, Benaras
who, in 1901, attacked the creeping intrusion into the Allahabad MA
papers of those pernicious multiple questions within a question found in
Calcutta—that 'kind of omnibus question . . . too comprehensive for the
conscientious student' but only too easy for the man 'armed with one of
our exiguous commentaries as his only trust'.28 Change, or the absence of
change in the syllabus, and in the way the syllabus was examined,
thenceforth provide such reflected light as we have on purposes.
The structure of the Allahabad MA was both enlarged and
systematized. In 1900 eight papers were set: an essay, unseen passages
on the history of English Literature, and six papers on set periods. Within
the six a choice was offered between two pairs of papers, i.e. either
Anglo-Saxon plus Chaucer, Spenser and English philology or
Elizabethan dramatists plus prose writers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries.29 In being thus able to avoid philology and Early
English, Allahabad preceded Cambridge by 17 years.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH AT ALLAHABAD

Next I would like to comment on certain other aspects of the way
English developed at Allahabad, from its spring-like freshness in the
1890s to its rather more sober or dowdy middle age of 1920.
Throughout that period Allahabad was an affiliating and examining,
not a teaching

.I
168 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
University. I" 1')()() oipjit colleges were approved lor teaching I'.iigl up
to MA standard: Benaras, Lucknow, Aligarh, Agra, Cawnpore and
Jeypore, and of course, Muir, with another ten up to BA level only—
these bringing in Ajmer, Jabalpur, Gwalior and Jodhpur. By 1914 there
were thirteen MA colleges, inspected and approved, Nagpur and Lahore
among them, and there were eleven accepted up to the BA standard,
including Meerut and Indore.
Now, as Irene Gilbert reminds us (in her 'The Organization of the
Academic Profession in India: the Indian Educational Services, 1864-
1924') it was in these colleges, with perhaps eight or so professors apiece,
that all the teaching was done. Many of the professors necessarily had to
teach outside the speciality of their own degree—and to instruct classes
from Intermediate through BA to MA level—in effect from the fifth
form to undergraduate levels (and with classes of 60, at that, even in
Muir College!).30 It was from the leading colleges that the Subject Boards
were drawn which decided the syllabus and selected prescribed text-
books, set examinations, and chose who should mark them. (This last
was a valuable if laborious perquisite; examiners' fees were a significant
addition to a salary and examinerships were a useful piece of patronage.
Once secured they were jealously guarded.) The task of assembling
Subject Boards, or a Syndicate to approve their decisions, from colleges
scattered over such vast areas of North and Central India, was physically
difficult. In 1891, White pressed his Board of Studies for a rapid policy
decision 'as the time at our disposal is so short, and the Board will not
have the opportunity of meeting and must discuss every question
brought forward by correspondence . . .'31 In 1899 A.W. Ward
complained bitterly to the Chancellor about the Syndicate—that
'heterogeneous collection of Principals, Professors, Judges, Barristers,
Engineers and nondescript—a motley body to act as executive head of
the University', for choosing to meet at 5.00 p.m. on Saturdays so as
to suit the convenience of the judges and banisters, and then for
gabbling their way through business—college principals having
meanwhile had to travel in by night trains and kick their heels all day in
Laurie's Hotel.32 Such a system must surely have imposed a desire not to
alter the existing syllabus or to introduce radical or frequent changes
which would require extra or prolonged meetings.
Another practical consideration must have been the provision of
textbooks. Again, the temptation must have been to change set and
recommended books as little as possible. College libraries were small and
their funds even smaller. If students had to buy their own books, their
poverty would have dictated continuity in the choice of set books since a
supply

Ilillllllilll
 English as a University Subject in India and England 169
ol second-hand hooks would be very helpful. And the .Mock which local
bookshops earned in towns like Nagpur must surely have been limited;
indeed in 1891 Theodore Morison in Aligarh wrote of'being at a distance
from libraries and booksellers'.33 The set books were always announced
two years before the examination date, and there were certain grammars,
anthologies and volumes of criticism such as by Dowden or Bradley,
which were almost permanent elements of the English syllabus; but
given the very small market outside the student body for many of the
prescribed books—or for any wider range of English books—I cannot
imagine the bazaar offering much choice. At several points in the early
decades efforts were made in vain, by members of various faculties, to do
away with set books so that the teacher could choose from what sources
to draw and so that what he had to say would be more important than
the sacred words of the set book.34
None of the towns in which affiliated colleges were to be found could
have lacked a station club library—Allahabad certainly had quite a
respectably stocked one. But students themselves would certainly have
had no access to it, and only a handful of more senior Indian government
servants and pleaders could have borrowed as parents (and that too only
when Indians were allowed to be members of the club). The Allahabad
Club rules affixed to every library book expressly forbad borrowers to
allow non-members access to them. In Allahabad there were also the
Bharti Bhavan library in the city and a small Bengali library in the
suburbs, but neither catered to the needs of the students of English. There
was the Thornhill-Mayne Memorial Public Library, remote from the city,
but near enough to Muir College. When the issue of providing a library
for the University was raised in 1887 it was held that none was needed,
given that the Muir College library and the Memorial Library were
available.
The Memorial Library, though serving the whole of UP was not open
to school students, and borrowing rights were granted only after a
written and sponsored application and a deposit of Rs 16. 'Textbooks
used in colleges', it was ruled, would not be lent out without specific
permission of the Secretary. Those barriers once overcome, however,
the Library was a very useful one, with solid collections of standard works
of literary history and criticism by Ker, Palgrave, Saintsbury and other
editors of series. There were sections which covered poetry—to Spenser;
Spenser to Milton (complete poems of Donne, Drayton, Herrick,
Chapman, Marvell, Milton, Spenser, Vaughan and Waller); Milton to
Wordsworth; early nineteenth century, Victorian and Modern poets;

mini .. mi
170 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
drama—pre-Shakespearean to Oscar Wilde; prose—Ascham, a rich
Baconian store, and so to H.G. Wells; and finally English fiction—Jane
Austen onwards. There was also a small section on American poetry and
prose and a modest, but up-to-date section on philology.35 Since history,
geography and the sciences were also well represented, one can see why the
university authorities and the U.P. Government made several vigorous
attempts, as in 1912, to get hold of the Memorial Library, or at the very
least to make it more open to postgraduate students. 36 If a list of
subscribing members—1,043 in 1922—had survived, the library's
influence would be much clearer.
A University Library proper was only opened in 1915. It was granted
Rs 50,000 for initial stocking, Rs 20,000 in 1925 and Rs 3000 in 1936
but its annual grant was only Rs 10,000—to cover building, book
purchases and re >lacement of lost and despoiled books. In 1922 it had
22,000 books as compared to the 35,000 of the Memorial Library. 37 In
attempting to ur derstand why the university teaching of English
developed as it did—c ertainly to estimate the nature of any political
purpose in that development—the constraints just reviewed need
always to be borne in mind. '

THE ROLE OP ENGLISH LITERATURE IN INDIA

So far this'essay has surveyed what English was taught and how it was
examined in the five universities considered, together with a brief account
of how English came to be a university subject at all—this last relying
heavily on the surveys by D.J. Palmer, Chris Baldick and Brian Doyle.
One aspect to which Baldick in particular pays attention to is the role of
English literature in providing a common core of experience and of
morality across the divide of class. English would be a means of weaning
the working class away from radical ideas and of rescuing the new middle
classes of industrial Britain from philistinism too. But it has also been
argued at great length by Gauri Visvanathan in Masks of Conquest:
Literary Study and British Rule in India—and by others more
incidentally—that, in India too, English was used as an instrument to
secure that consent to British rule which was the alternative to force.
Visvanathan quotes J, Farish of the Bombay Presidency (1838): 'The
Natives must either be kept down by a sense of our power, or they must
willingly submit from a conviction that we are more wise, more just,
more humane and more anxious to improve their condition than any
other rulers they could possibly have.'38 The grandeur, the moral and
humanistic values
 English as a University Subject in India and England 171
of English literature, would extort a willing consent to British rule. Was
English literature, then, being consciously used in India and in England
as an instrument of social control, in one case over subject peoples, in
the other over the working classes?
In England it was possible to use the established church as such an
instrument—though its utility was seriously impaired in the new
industrial areas, South Wales for example, where popular Non-
conformity displaced Anglicanism or indifference displaced both—but
in India a government policy of religious neutrality had disarmed the
administra-' tion. If one accepted Visvanathan's thesis then one might
argue that the early adoption of English by Indian colleges and
universities, and its late use in England, reflected the different time scales
upon which control by religious sanction broke down and a substitute
weapon had to be forged from literature.
In England, during the nineteenth century, classical education in
public schools guarded the elite aloofness of the ruling class, while
elementary vernacular education, given in the charity and Sunday
schools, controlled the lower orders through the administration of
'such little portions of Holy Scripture as recommended industry,
gratitude, submission and the like virtues'.39 But there were new classes
growing— manufacturing, commercial and prosperous artisan—which
had larger appetites, which they set about satisfying in their own
academies and in national educational systems increasingly supported
by the state on secular grounds. If English was to be used
instrumentally, it would need to be used in a new way. It was a state
official, an Inspector of Schools, Matthew Arnold, who was most
influential in arguing for a new social role for the subject. Lower middle-
class teachers should be brought, he wrote, 'into intellectual sympathy
with the educated of the upper classes' since they, so far as they teach
the children 'an orderly, decent and human behaviour, so far they
civilise the neighbourhood where they are placed'. For where culture did
not spread, anarchy threatened.
Fascinatingly Arnold follows Farish in Bombay in posing that stark
alternative. Either culture unifies the nation into 'a whole society that has
resolved no longer to live by bread alone', Arnold wrote, or the state, as
the highest unifying agent, must use force to suppress active dissent.
Those who spread that culture, moreover, must come from those
established centres in which 'the human spirit has manifested it§
approaches to totality and to a full harmonious perfection', i.e. the old
universities and the church (though privately he had doubts about the
fitness of both, and saw culture itself as their ultimate successor).40 And
by culture was

■n
 172 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
meant, as Walter Pater argued, 'a harmonious development of all the parts
of human nature in just proportion to each other'41 or, as in his conclusion
to The Renaissance, 'the aim of our culture should be to attain not only
as intense but as complete a life as possible'.42 This was a Hellenistic stance,
but with English literature elevated to the role of the old classics, and
taking over their cultural authority.
The teaching of English would dissolve divisions as H.G. Robinson
explained: 'Large views help to develop large sympathies and, by converse,
with the thoughts and utterances of those who are intellectual leaders of
ilit: race, our heart comes to beat in accord. . . . We discover that no
differences of class, or party, or creed can destroy the power of genius' in
that 'serene and luminous region of truth where all may meet and
expatiate in common'. Or, putting it in less rarefied terms, 'As a clown
will instinctively tread lightly and feel ashamed of his hob-nailed shoes
in a lady's boudoir, so a vulgar mind may, by converse with minds of
high culture, be brought to see and deplore the contrast between itself and
them . . .'43
And 'minds of high culture' are those, Pater argued, which have
instinctively known where to look for the best that has been thought and
felt, the moral absolutes of the good society, and have absorbed them, not
by some mechanical process of analysis, or historical and biographical
research, but by sensitive openness, 'pure perception' as he put it.44 It was
then the task of these fine-tuned critics to identify rhe masters and their
master-works, 'the Best which had been thought and said', thus selecting
from inward and individual experience rhe material from which to
construct a harmonious social whole. In such a test there is, of course,
no place for science, for 'the melancholy workers at their task of tying
Latin labels on to withered sticks. Definition and division are the
watchwords of sciences, where art is all for composition and creation',
as Professor Walter Raleigh said.45
But if so much turns upon carefully cultivated taste in identifying the
best and highest, how can this be taught, and still more difficult, how
can it be examined? To claim the moral and cultural high ground for
English was useful for a professional body wishing to gain acceptance, but
it was dangerously insecure. Whence, as we have seen, the firm
attachment of London, Cambridge and Oxford until the First World
War to heavy doses of philology and to classificatory rather than
evaluative processes. The syllabuses, when they came to be prepared,
were designed to establish specialist professionalism rather than broad
social control.
Is Visvanathan's argument for the social control model better based in
India, then? Much of her most telling argument centres upon the work

in MI minimi will
 English as a University Subject in India and England 173
of Alexander Duff and the General Assembly Institution which he opened
in Calcutta in 1830. Here certainly English literature was used instru-
mentally, though with a deliberately added ethical and religious content.
Horace Wilson had argued, 'mere language cannot work any material
change. Only when we initiate them into our literature . . . and get them
to adopt feelings and sentiments from our standard writers [can] we . . .
effect any considerable alteration in their feelings and notions.'46 Duff
went further. Mere literature, too, could not work any good change. 'The
policy of knowledge without religion . . . is no less pernicious to the
stability of British rule than idolatry and superstition.'17 The high
authorities to be studied had to be those with a religious and moral
content. Moral education must replace liberal education. The intell .-
ctualism and scientific rationalism which Utilitarianism had imparted
must be displaced. But in this the missionaries were to be disappoint ;d.
This is not to say that no Indians were ever persuaded to g ve their active
consent to British rule, or that English, or moral philosop ly or political
economy had no part in that acceptance. The whole history of nineteenth-
century reform movements within Indian society, or of the early days of
the Congress, would say otherwise. Ellen McDonald's instructive article
'English education and social reform in the Bombay Presidency' is very
helpful here. She argues that the early choice of English texts for study
at Elphinstone College—Bacon, Joseph Butler, Wordsworth and Scott—
were of particular value to reformers struggling to dethrone scholastic
tradition in Pune and as individuals to resist the pressure to conform
exercised by family and caste fellows—Bacon helping to demolish
scholasticism,48 Butler supporting self-improvement and moral
autonomy in the individual. At a later period, when it became clear
that individual campaigns were not achieving results, then J.S. Mill,
Spenser, Darwin and H.S. Maine, newer elements in the syllabus, could
be used by reformers to provide agenda and methods for institutional
effort to secure change, with utility and effectiveness rather than
morality as prop.49
While Ellen demonstrated what (some) Indian students drew from the
education offered to them—using their essays, or their writings in later
life as evidence—she does not assert that the choice of authors for the
syllabus had been made with this in mind. Bacon might have been chosen
as a demolition expert, but his Advancement ofLearningv/o\i\d be set (as
in England) more naturally as 'the fust great prose work on a secular
subject', a natural opener in the paper on 'English prose, 16th to 18th
century'. And the principal authority she quotes on character formation,

ii 11 i
i
1 III
 174 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
K.M. Chatfield, principal of Elphinstone, refers to the influence exercised
not by texts but by teachers, operating in a tradition of pastoral care within
the closed community of the college. In Irene Gilbert's study of
Presidency, Muir and M.A.O. colleges, we can see exemplified just
those attitudes, just that exercise of personal influence within the
college family.50 H.R. James, principal of Presidency, proclaimed twin
beliefs: 'The right spirit that must grow up among the body of students
can be communicated... only by the teachers', and then only by
devising means 'of making the College feel and act together, share
common aims and interests'. This is where social control—the
transmission of elite attitudes and alien ideals—takes place, as F.D.
Maurice and the Christian Socialists had argued that it should in
England.
To be able to argue convincingly that English was being used as a
political instrument, it would be necessary to show that the construction
of syllabuses was politically directed. Of that I see little evidence—though
other material one would like to have had, on the tone and content of
lectures and tutorials, is not available. We can, however, look for guidance
at the examination papers set.
When we do look at the Calcutta MA papers for 1866, we see questions
which are very technical, very 'bitty' and very demanding if answers of any
seriousness and originality were required. Here is one of the twelve
questions, all of them compulsory, in the Spenser to Campbell paper:
Give a brief outline of the Faerie Queene, showing the meaning which underlies
the allegory. What do you understand by allegory? How is the unity of design
marred in the construction of the poem? In what does the obsoleteness of
Spenser's language chiefly consist? What is the measure of the Spenserian stanza?
Spenser is generally compared with Ariosto. Wherein does the resemblance lie?
Una—Duessa—Gloriana—what is the meaning of these words, and of what are
they personifications?"
With what ulterior political aim could that have been set?
The 'Raleigh to Locke' and 'Burke to Carlyle' papers, set by the Rev.
W.C. Fyfe, looks more supportive of Visvanathan's line of argument,
with questions on Bacon—'The use of human reason in religion is of
two sorts. Explain'—and on Locke—'Reading furnishes the mind only
with materials of knowledge, it is thinking makes what we read ours'—
which makes one wonder how these two authors were taught. But
two evidently loaded sentences—'Superstition is the religion oi feeble
minds' and 'Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for
human wants,'—prove thoroughly disappointing since they required the
student merely to explain the origin of the words italicized, with their

II! Illl
 English as a University Subject in India and England 175
meaning and component elements. Students were not required to
respond to the substance of the two sentences, unless subliminally. 52
If the 1866 Calcutta papers show scant trace of any direct ideological
thrust, those of the 1889 MA show, in their mechanical intricacy,
absolutely none. Such papers seem little likely to have encouraged
admiration for the moral and humanistic values of English literature;
what they extolled was the supreme value of thorough cramming.
In the same year at Allahabad two of the questions in the paper on J.S.
Mill, Macaulay and Froude might seem to have some political as well as
literary aptness:

What are the limits to which Law and Public Opinion may use coercion to
promote virtue?—with reference to Mill's Liberty.
The causes of this state of feeling (the restless desire for political change) appear
to arise in a very small degree from intelligent conviction, but to a very great extent
from the remote effects of words and notions derived from broken-down political
theories. Discuss.
But if so, the questions pull in rather opposite directions; and, as we
have seen, the other papers are remarkably 'open' and politically un-
coloured.
Equally, in the Allahabad discussion in 1891 of what English should
be taught and how, there was no hint of any political aim. Rather, if the
Minutes of 1889 are consulted, the Hon'ble W. Benett will be found
denouncing Professor Flint's Theism for 'its polemical character as an
open attack on Pantheism'—and its uncertain intellectual honesty,53 and
on 13 January 1890 we see that the Regulations in Arts were being altered
to exclude any such Christian or imperialist purpose. A new rubric was
agreed upon—'Mental and Moral Sciences, including Logic, Psychology,
Ethics and either Natural Theology or the History of Ethical Systems' in
which 'The History of Ethical Systems' had been added as an alternative
to 'Natural Theology'. A note explains why: 'This, though Gough will no
doubt keep his pupils to Natural Theology . . . allows it to be omitted by
Hindu students, for whom it is altogether unsuitable, being a professed
and open polemic against their religious systems'.54 The Government of
India might seek to promote the interests of morality in schools by the
compilation of 'text-books having a direct bearing on conduct'; the
Government of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh might prescribe
Mr Nesfield's English Reader with its 'excellent moral tendency' for
Middle School classes, or seek to replace Hara Prasad Sastri's History of
India by Lee-Warner's Citizen of India, but the University clearly would
have none of this.55

iiiiiiiiiMui iniii
 1
176 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia

ENGLISH IN ENGLAND-INTENSIFICATION OF
SOCIAL AGENDA

I would like now to go back to survey the effect of the First World War
upon the development of English studies in England. The early years of
the twentieth century were marked by growing alarm about the competi-i
tive effectiveness of the country, the threat of die poor and the growing
radicalism of the working class. Harold Perkins argues that inequality in
Britain was at its most extreme between 1880 and 1914. The
consequences were displayed in the two massive studies of Charles Booth
(1839-1902) and Seebohm Rowntree (1889), and in recruiting
sergeants' records of unfitness in recruits at the time of the Boer War.56
Here was a nation physically in decline, with a spawning, sickly urban
working class. The 1903 report of the Committee on Physical
Deterioration alarmed the public: 'this seething mass of human misery
will shake the social fabric', Samuel Smith warned.57 The government
responded with school meals, panel doctors, the National Insurance Act
of 1909 and the Housing and Town Planning Act of the same year.
Declining industrial competitiveness also drew attention to the
sickliness of English education as compared to the robust strength of
the German system. In 1889 Alfred Marshall had denounced
educational poverty: 'in the world's history there has been one waste
product so much more important than all the others, that it has a right to
be called THE Waste Product. It is the higher abilities of many of the
working classes; the latent, the underdeveloped, the choked-up and
wasted faculties for higher work, that for lack of opportunity have come
to nothing'.58 Sidney Webb's influential article on National Efficiency
took up the same theme in 1901.59 South Kensington science and the
1902 and 1907 Education Acts, which between them provided a system
of public secondary schools and of scholarships to them, were some of the
responses in the educational field.
Gladstonian radicalism aiming for social reform, the founding of the
Socialist League in 1884, the New Fabianism, the massive growth of
Trades Unions from three-quarters of a million members in 1888 to two
million in 1900 and to four million by 1914, and the violence of the strikes
and lock-outs in the same period, together with the enlargement of the
franchise and appearance of the Labour Party provided cause for yet other
fears. Political dangers threatened no less severely than the physiological
or economic. Lord Milner pointed to one answer, arguing'If the present
Social Older is to endure it is simply necessary, at whatever cost, to effect

■iiiiiiiiuiiiii mm ■
 English as a University Subject in India and England 177
a great increase in the nurnbet of people who have a direct personal interest
in the maintenance of private property', 60 while Samuel Smith stressed
that 'the proletariat may strangle us unless we teach it the same virtues
which have elevated the other classes of society'.61 In that latter process of
moral reform, English was to have a leading role.
The Oxford House Mission to the East End saw in English a means 'to
make the masses realise their spiritual and social solidarity with the rest
of the capital and the kingdom', and 'to face the elementary laws of
economics' especially when offered, as it there was, by 'the imperishable
youth of Oxford'. 62 The English Association, founded in 1907 and
presided over by Saiinsbury, Bradley, Ker, Gosse, Balfour, Morley,
Asquith, Curzon, Hadow, Sadler and Mansbridge of the WEA, likewise
sought to secure the recognition of English 'as an essential element in the
national education', and as Sidney Lee, founder editor of the D.N.B., put
it, 'the constant, the unresting ally and companion of whatever other
studies the call of national enlightenment and national efficiency may
prescribe'.63
The most complete statement of these attitudes is provided by the
Newbolt Report on the Teaching of English in Secondary Schools,
published in 1921, but laboured up on by the Board of Education officials
and a large contingent of English Association members since 1910. This
report claimed a central role for English on the grounds that literature
provided the essential addition to the limited personal experience of the
individual, more especially 'the dull superficial sight of the multitude'.
For it is through English literature that 'we hear the voices of those who
have known life better than ourselves'—'the native experiences of men of
our own race and culture'. Whereas industry and commerce have caused
divisions, literature can bind together, closing the gulf between 'the mind
of the poet and that of the young wage-earner'. Literature, because it
'endows the mind with power and sanity' can neutralize both the
Bolshevik hostility towards 'the culture of capitalism' and that contempt
for literature found 'among the working classes, especially those
belonging to organised labour movements'. The Report concludes by
restating its belief that 'this much -desired spiritual unity in the
nation and . . . uplift. .. of the popular imagination can only come
through a general acknowledgement of the paramount place which the
native speech and literature should occupy . . . in the common life of
our people'."
English in the universities was strictly outside the Commission's
remit. But it did stress how much English was needed as a core subject

■■■■■■■HHH ■i
178 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
in every faculty. 'It is the one subject which for an Englishman has the
claims of universality. Without it he cannot attain to full powers either
of learning or teaching in any.' And its importance is all the more greater
'at this moment when English is nearer than ever before to becoming a
universal language'. Nor do universities have a duty towards their own
students only, for beyond them lies a 'faire felde full of folke'. Their
professors of literature, posted 'to every important capital of
industrialism in the country', must look out towards the teeming
millions beyond university walls and rear up a body of assistant
missionaries to spread the Gospel of English among them. And whereas
the cultivation of classics had created a gulf between classes, English as
a common heritage could link together the mental life of all classes. The
war had made this more necessary and also more possible. For during
the war, English at the university level had in many places been purged
of those Hunnish influences which Arthur Quiller-Couch, Professor of
English Literature at Cambridge, in his Patriotism in English Literature,
had denounced.65 At both Oxford and Cambridge a marked reduction
had come about in the importance of the Teutonic philological element
in the English curriculum, whie l to that extent had become more
accessible.

THE ACADEMIC REACTION

I want now to take a rapid look at the inter-war period in British
universities to jud ;e their reactions to these social and political demands
put upon English'as a subject. During the war Lloyd George had made
immediate use of English literature by deploying such established figures
as Galsworthy, H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett in the War Propaganda
Bureau, to ram home, in France and America, the danger of German
scholasticism and the values of English culture.66 But he also saw how
powerful an aid to the German war machine the high quality of its schools
and colleges had been. He planned therefore to ensure a widening of
academic opportunity in Britain after the war. This would be part of his
plan to make 'a fit country for heroes to live in'—an answer to the demand
for better education which the war had shown to exist: 'Men serving with
the forces revealed an unanticipated eagerness for instruction'.67 And for
their families too: Frederick Guest saw as a major element in national
hopes—'the extraordinary demand by all classes of the people for enlarged
opportunities of education for their children', and added, as reason for
responding, the certainty that 'the production of thoughtful and well-
balanced minds in our young people will be returned a hundredfold in

III
 English as a University Subject in India and England 179
social stability'.68 In 1918 an Education Act made education
compulsory and free up to the age of 14, provided more scholarships at
11-plus and free places in the grammar schools. A year later, in 1919,
several hundred state scholarships to university were instituted.
It might have been expected that the widening and extension of
educational opportunity would be matched by an attempt to broaden the
appeal of imaginative literature at school and university. The Newbolt
Report said, 'The vital thing is to make it obvious from the outset'that
literature is alive, that it is the sublimation of human thought, passion,
feeling, that it is concerned with issues which are of universal interest, that
in short it is flesh and blood, not stucco ornamentation.' By 1921,
however, the government, reinforced by the Geddes Committee, began
to hack away the improvements introduced or foreshadowed by the Act
of 1918 whose costs 'far exceeded what the country can at present
afford'.69 And the universities, as Brian Doyle argues, worked to make
English scholastically professional, a matter of faculties, disciplines,
research; 'Inter-war English studies were devoted to professional
scholarship, research and publication rather than to a programme of
cultural intervention.'70
Thus, contrary to the war-time expectation that in the immediate
postwar years English studies would lead social change, by the mid-
twenties those associated with the Review of English Studies (founded in
1925) had moved towards a defensive, esoteric scholarship of research
and publication. Only London did not need to change as it had never left
its linguistic stronghold. In 1920 London offered Prescribed Old
English Texts; Prescribed Middle English Texts; English Historical
Grammar with Gothic; History of Literature to 1660; Shakespeare; two
Special Subject papers on English History 1603-88, and, as the sole
adventure beyond the 1660s, the History of English Literature 1660-
1850.71 In 1940 London had brought its terminal date to 1880 in just
one paper, with questions recognizably of the same character as those
set at Oxford, Cambridge or for the Civil Service. The overall structure
of the degree, however, remained as firmly linguistic in its bias as ever.
One distinctive feature of the Oxford teaching of English after 1909,
when teaching was taken from the hands of college tutors and organized
by the university professoriat, had been a stress upon research and on the
B.Phil, as a methodological training for it. By the mid-twenties, post-war
growth in the number of undergraduates and of fellows had tipped the
balance back towards college-based undergraduate teaching of a more
familiar form. It was in Cambridge, though it went through a similar

Illllllillililil
180 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
post-war pattern, that a major revolution occurred—-a revolt against
those English dons who sought only to 'inherit, preserve and pass on
tradition'.
Its aim, however, was not to take literature to the masses but rather to
save it from them. The issue was first taken up by LA. Richards, angered
by the dishonesty of wartime propaganda and the return of the exploiters
of the verbal machine to civilian life 'where the power of the word among
the masses remains paramount'.72 He feared the growth of classes no
longer prepared to accept guidance, and foresaw a collapse of values, a
transvaluation by which popular taste replaced trained discrimination',
a process aided by the sinister possibilities of ciuema and loud speaker, the
very speed of the advance of the mass media. The collapse of older habits
of cultural deference posed a particular problem: 'The expert in matters
of taste is in an awkward position when he differs from the majoricy. He
is forced to say in effect "I am better than you. My taste is more refined,
my nature more cultivated, you will do well to become more like me than
you are" '3
How then to show that the expert is neither a prig nor a charlatan, that
his preferences really have value? One way is by exposing the methods of
the advertiser and propagandist so as to arm students against their falsities
and their stock judgements. The other is by showing that the critic's
training enables him to bring more experiences into ordered and
complete wholes than ordinary men.74 He achieves that ability only by
working at it, by exposing his mind to pure poetry. Poetry of all the arts
most stores up 'hours in the lives of exceptional people, when their
control and command of experience is at its highest. . .'75 Its values can
be captured only by those who give their whole personality to it—and in
so doing, as he warns, we judge not only the poem but ourselves.
But this was one of the special merits of the procedure that Richards
proposed, for to judge reader and poem was of course to examine, just
what that demanding rigour in the subject required. Hence Richards' use
of practical criticism as an examining procedure required students to
evaluate poems presented to them stripped of any clues and guide-posts.
Evaluation by the highly-tuned mind is now the key.71' The Leavises
pushed the process of restoring authority to those who had the gift of full
response to literature—a small beleaguered minority—still further, with
Scrutiny, founded in 1932, as their instrument.
Thus in the 1930 Tripos papers, Part I, the orderly procession of papers
labelled 'English literature, life and thought'—four in all—from 1066 to
Kipling, Shaw and D.H. Lawrence, together with a paper on 'Specified

'■........ ' ... ' ... " . ■ "■ ■ ■■ « .■ ■ ■ ■ . I ... I .11ililil1111111111111 1111
 English as a University Subject in India and England 181
Anglo-Saxon and early Noise works' and one on 'Shakespeare', were
joined by one on 'Literary criticism: passages for comment'. The questions
in the more orthodox papers were themselves more critical and evaluative
in tone, the emphasis on 'Life and Thought broader, their wording less
conventional, their number greater and more liberal than in earlier years.
Richards' voice could surely be heard in the 'Essay' question on 'Mass-
education in taste'. But the first section in 'Literary criticism is the real
novelty—'Assign the following passages to their periods . . . justify your
opinion; compare the quality of the writing in the foUowii ig pairs of
passages; comment critically upon the differences between versions A
and B\
In Part II of the Tripos, with a paper on the 'History an 1 theory of
literary criticism' and a whole paper of'Passages for critical comment'—
three full pages, 37 excerpts from which to choose—-we are in a different
world from London or earlier years in Oxford and Cambridge. Only the
wide-reading ICS candidate might have felt at home. By 1940 Cambridge
had become still more confident. Now, even in Part I of the Tripos a
whole, undiluted paper of'Literary criticism: passages for comment' was
set, while the corresponding paper in Part II was voluminously teasing and
taxing.

THE RESPONSE AT ALLAHABAD AND BHU

It is time now to see what had happened during the war and post-war years
to English studies in Allahabad—and after 1917 in Benaras Hindu
University, or BHU. In England during the war the wish to use English
as a healer of divisions, to be prescribed to a disaffected and alienated
underclass, was at its strongest. Could it have some such role in India? The
answer must be that even if the will to heal had been there, practitioners
were lacking. It is true that in 1920 the Professors of English at
Allahabad, Lucknow, Aligarh, Agra and Kanpur were all English or
American. But during the war the European element in Indian colleges
and universities, like the European element in other services, was
weakened by the call to arms. After the war, European recruitment to
the Indian Educational Service ceased, and education became a
provincial subject. Moreover, by the mid-twenties financial stringency
was preventing their Indian successors from taking degrees in Europe, as
men like Professor K. K. Mehrotra at Allahabad had once done. Benaras
University never had a European in its English department; Allahabad
lost its last European, S.G. Dunn, a distinguished Wordsworth scholar,
in 1930. There were

ill! ill III I.

illinium Illl
 182 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
neither imperialists nor committed collaborators available, who had
social and intellectual control through the teaching of English as their
objective.
The values embedded in English culture, expressed in English
literature, were proclaimed by the government and felt by its officials,
but its utility in securing employment and establishing status, its value as
a link language within India and, for some, its international usefulness,
stressed at home by Newbolt, were probably more compelling
arguments in its favour. So when the newly founded Benaras Hindu
University was advertising its wares, it made it a point to stress the
importance of English in its courses 'compulsory for all students at the
Intermediate and B.A. stages . . . it is also an optional subject in Science
courses leading to the B.Sc.' It went on to announce:
A special feature is the prescribing of a number of general books representing
various types of composition and serving not only as models of style but also as
aids to intellectual culture. Students of science, besides, are given the opportunity
of studying well-known English writers who have been particularly successful in
combining lucid exposition of science with excellence of style. Another feature
is the prescribing of books having a bearing on Indian culture and civilization as
part of the English courses, as it is recognised that while the best masterpieces of
English must necessarily be associated with English life and civilization, the
Indian student must also have matter relating to his own environment presented
in some of the forms of literary art. The works of Rabindranath Tagore, selections
from Tod's Rajasthan, and such sympathetic studies as Sister Nivedita's Footfalls
of Indian History, have been prescribed from time to time, for general reading.77
Note the 'general reading'—not being prescribed texts they were gestures,
not a serious innovation. What the inclusion of these few works does
illustrate, of course, is that no very considerable body of English writing—
novels, poems, short stories etc.—had been produced by Indian members
of English faculties to be drawn upon.
BHU by 1925 could boast of a very valuable English Department
Library —'the standard literary masterpieces [and] a large number of
foreign classics available in translations and a considerable body of books
on literary criticism.>7a In addition, by 1927 BHU's main library had
44,000 volumes, journals and pamphlets—though accommodation for
them was inadequate and grossly overcrowded. It could nevertheless
claim a great increase in book issues, though with a wry postscript: 'While
this is to be welcomed it has got the other side also. In several cases it has
been found that important portions and illustrations have been
removed . . .and they have been hopelessly disfigured. On the Arts side
also much difficulty is felt in recalling the library books. Some
professors

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiyiiiiiiyiiiiiii
 English as a University Subject in India and England 183
simply keep quiet in reply to a number of reminders. . . . Same is the case
with the Journals, sent to the Heads of various Departments, some oi
them are never returned . . .'79 Here is a nice example of the truth that
Knowledge is Power: heads of departments kept the latest journals to
themselves because they understood this clearly.
Indian universities were well aware of what was going on in England.
At Allahabad, for example, the English Department, straitened for funds
though it was in years of post-war economic depression, nevertheless
contrived to make a serious effort to keep abreast of developments in its
subject, world wide. Thirty-two journals were subscribed to: The TLS
and New York's Saturday Review of Literature, the Fortnightly Review,
Spectator and New Statesman, the Adelphi, Apollo, Criterion, Life and
Letters Today, the Quarterly Review and Scrutiny plus Englische Studien
from Leipzig, the Jahrbuch der Shakespeare Gesellschaft, Modern Language
and Notes horn Baltimore and a selection of annual publications.80 Here,
as in Benaras, the flow of argument in Europe about what form English
as a subject should take could have been closely followed.
BHU, however, made no move to follow Cambridge fashions and
rejected London's linguistic approach outright. No Old or Middle
English, no Anglo-Saxon even, was ever offered. It had begun in 1918
with a nine-paper MA in English—two on poetry, two on prose and two
on drama (of which one was on Shakespeare, Shakespearean art and
criticism, the other on drama from Ben Jonson to Shaw), split 1350 to
1700 and 1700-1914, a paper on English Criticism, Sidney, Addison,
Wordsworth, Arnold, Meredith plus Saintsbury, Hudson and Courthope,
a paper on the history of English Literature, and an essay. The novelty was
a viva-voce covering the entire prescribed course. In 1940 we again have
a nine-paper81 degree, but shorn of its oral content. The course was
designed ' to cover all the periods from Chaucer to 1914', poetry, prose
and drama, in seven papers, with a paper now called Literary Theories
(Plato to Pater), plus an essay. The questions set were very
straightforward, very middle of the road. The contrast with earlier years
is marked: there is much less of rhe classificatory or technical, for
every 'Discuss the merits and limitations of the Spenserian stanza' or
'Explain the Comedy of Manners—is The Way of the Worlds good
example?' there are half a dozen evaluative or historical questions;
'Discuss Chaucer's attitude to the Church', 'Discuss the influence of
patronage in Shakespeare's day', 'Is The Alchemist Ben Jonson's best
play?' or 'Collins and Gray are craftsmen without fire. Discuss.' But the
only possible nod towards the experiments at Cambridge might seem to
be the 1940 essay topic: 'The place ot authority in mutters of literary
taste'.

■■■■1
 184 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
Allahabad in 1920 had not been as bold as BHU in selecting modern
authors for study before they had been authenticated by faculty attention
in England. And though the papers most commonly sat for consisted of
Drama, Poetry and Prose, each covering the period 1500 to 1800, there
were two alternative options, 'Literature prior to 1100' and 'Literature
1100 to 1500' and a paper in the 'Literary and social history of England'
which still tied Allahabad to the older tradition of Calcutta and of English
universities.82 By 1930, however, the pre-1500 options had been
discarded and there were now not eight but nine papers. In a paper such
as that on the 'Literary and social history of England' there are
classificatory questions on the Spenserian stanza or the heroic couplet,
but also questions on the influences that shaped the development of the
novel in the eighteenth century, on Literature as an instrument of social
reform, and on Shaw and Galsworthy as critics of contemporary life. In
general the questions in all the papers are more open and evaluative than
those set by Benaras. The new, ninth paper, moreover, provided a
miniature version of LA. Richards' invention, the criticism of unseen
passages in prose and verse, 'assign the following passages . . .
commenting on the evidence of style, subject, etc. . . . and on the
metrical techniques' together with questions in the history of language
and on prosody.83 In general, the English departments of both
Allahabad and Benaras had changed the range of their subject, the
manner of its treatment and the modes of examination over time, in
ways tolerably close to the changes taking place at Oxford and at
Cambridge (until the later twenties at least), though understandably the
linguistic elements which had been universally present in 1890 were
shed more quickly in India than in England. Given the stresses to which
Indian universities had been exposed—war, political upheaval,
economic crisis, Indianisation and a rapid expansion in student
numbers—what is striking is rhe modest nature of the change which
occurred. And in the handling of English as a university subject there is
minimal evidence of overt political interference either to impose or
throw off alien influence or control.
If pressures for change were evidently at work at Allahabad and BHU,
they were the demands which business or other disciplines made upon the
English departments, and the constraints imposed by financial stringency
or by student and parental expectations. One persistent pressure was to
make English a more practical subject, an effective tool, rather than a
cultural end in itself. The Pioneer, then published in Allahabad, had
declared on 19 March 1880, 'It would be a good thing if none but books
written during the last three or four years . . . were given out. The object

................... •................
 English as a University Subject in India and England 185
should be to promote among its alumniia good working knowledge of the
English language, as it is spoken today, not as it was written two hundred
years ago . . .' In 1891, as we have seen, the members of the committee
on the structure of Allahabad's English degree, Nesfield and Theodore
Morison, proved equally anxious to foster the teaching of modern written
and spoken English, language as well as literature. In 1914 T.C. Jones,
Principal of Agra College, pressed the Faculty of Arts to stiffen the BA'so
as to include the study of standard Modern English prose', while 'English
literature, as distinguished from the study of the English language should
be an optional subject.'84
Pressures also came from other disciplines within the University.
Mathematicians pointed to inordinate time spent upon English and
lengthy set books: 'It is probable that the Cambridge Wrangler would by
this time have become an extinct species if all undergraduates at the time
of matriculation had been require to comment in grammatical Latin on
difficult passages in Tacitus or Virgil'. 85 The Economics Department
pressed that the writings of economists should be used for the unseen
passages to be set in English papers taken by economics students. Science
teachers asked for a fuller course of English for those students who after
taking a science degree proposed to go on to postgraduate law degrees, but
for shorter runs of English papers for those whose further studies would
be in the natural sciences. It was argued that such students would learn
English much more satisfactorily from daily close contact with English
laboratory assistants than from an occasional word from a Professor facing
classes of seventy or eighty on the overcrowded Arts side, and from the
English of Clark Maxwell rather than of Sheridan. 86
And there were negative pressures, too, such as the constraints of
inadequate resources which ruled out experiment and change, and of low
expectations in students. When Arts graduates in Allahabad could hope
for no more than Rs 30 or 40 a month as clerks, there was little
encouragement to invest in post-graduate study, and in an agricultural
province hard-hit by the world slump, every reason to demand well-
directed cramming that would secure the prized degree, rather than more
imaginative teaching. Numbers expanded between the wars, bringing in
students increasingly ill-equipped to work the academic machine. In my
own time in Allahabad, if I may use a personal experience, poor students
coming from homes in which no earlier generation had been to college
needed to be instructed by Miss Crawford, the Holland Hall Librarian,
in how to use an alphabetically arranged index, how to handle a catalogue
and how to take notes other than by mutilating a reference work.

till
 186 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
But I would guess that in India, as in England, the strongest force in
the shaping of English studies, was that of professionalism in the academic
staff of English departments.87 There was a self-regarding desire to play
the game well and by the rules. The English members of the Indian
Education Service had set these out and the training in Europe which
many of the first generations of Indian professors had received only
strengthened them. There was a borrowed image of the Professor and of
the Moral Tutor to live up to, and, in many cases to fill. At Allahabad I
would instance my neighbour R.N. Deb, his elder brother S.C. Deb or
Professor K.K. Mehrotra as exemplars known to me—and very splendid
exemplars too.

NOTES

1. Answers to the (Clarendon) Public Schools Commission (1864), quoted in W.J.

Reader, Professional Men (London, 1966), p. 107.
2. Joseph Priestly, An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life
(London, 1765), Preface.
3. W.H.O. Armytage, Four Hundred Years of English Education (Cambridge,
1964), pp. 98-100; for a much fuller treatment see T. Kelly, A History of Adult
Education in G'eat Britain (Liverpool, 1970), pp. 112-33.
4. See W.J/Reader, Professional Men, p. 92.
5- Robert Lowe, C hancellor of the Exchequer, was a driving force on this reform,
pushing for a meritocracy, broadly and liberally educated, chosen by open
competition, u ing English and other languages as means of communication
rather than for mental gymnastics, the product of much more open
universities. See D.^J( . Sylvester, Robert Lowe and Education (Cambridge,
1974), pp. 162-204. i
6. Sec T. Kelly, A History of Adult Education, ch. 7, The Universities Enter the
Field', pp. 216-42.
7. Ibid.
8. Quoted in R.D. Roberts (ed.), Aspects of Modern Study (1894), p. 27. Roberts
was Cambridge University Extension Secretary.
9. H.J. Mackinder and M.E. Sadler, University Extension, Past, Present and Future
(3rd edition, 1891), pp. 73-4.
10. T. Dale, An Introductory Lecture Delivered in the University of London (London,
1828), p. 30.
11. John Ruskin reported to his father on Dale's teaching; see D.J. Palmer, The Rise
of English Studies (Oxford, 1965), p. 23.
12. Ibid., pp. 25-6. He quotes from material held in the University College Library.
13. Ibid., p. 46.

Willi .... Illillilllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllliillllllllllllllllllll!

 English as a University Subject in India and England 187
14. The ICS examination papers are to be found in the India Office Library,
ref. y 171212.
15. See D.J. Palmer, The Rise of English Studies, pp. 33-4.
16. Ibid., p. 25.
17. Newcastle Commission on Popular Education, Report (1861), vol. i, p. 120.
18. Taunton Commission, Report (1868), vol. iv, p. 420.
19. Royal Commission on Oxford and Cambridge, Minutes of Evidence (1881),
P. 75.
20. For this, and the whole Churton Collins episode see Palmer, The Rise of English
Studies, chs. v and vi, pp. 66-103.
21. Ibid., pp. 21-2.
22. Calcutta University, Calendar, 1866-67, pp. xcvii-cxix.
23. Quoted in Irene A. Gilbert, 'Presidency, Muir and Aligarh', in S. Rudolph (cd.),
Education and Politics in India (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 179.
24. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1887-88, p. 10.
25. Allahabad University, Calendar, 1893-94, pp. 287-92.
26. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1891—92, pp. xii; xxii-xxiii.
27. Ibid., pp. xv—xxi.
28. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1901-2, pp. 122-3.
29. Allahabad University, Calendar, 1900, pp. 538-65.
30. Gilbert in Rudolph (ed.), Education and Politics in India, pp. 319—41.
31. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1891-92, p. xii
32. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1899-1900, p. 219.
33. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1891-92, p. xix
34. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1899-1900, p. 220.
35. Catalogue and Index of the Allahabad Public Library, 1912.
36. See for example Allahabad University, Minutes, 1913, pp. 21-3, and 1917, pp.
11-12.
37. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1922.
38. G. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India
(London, 1990), p. 2.
39. M.G. Jones, The Charity School Movement (Cambridge, 1938), p. 74.
40. C. Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932 (Oxford, 1983),
p. 43, quoting Arnold, Letters to Clough. Sec also Lionel Trilling, Matthew
Arnold(London, 1949), chs. viu, ixandxii.
41. W. Patei, Marius the Epicurean (London, 1904), vol. i, p. 121.
42. W. Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London, 1873), p. 198.
43. C. Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, p. 66. quoting Robinson,
'English Classical Literature', Macmillan's Magazine.
44. SecW. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 144.
45. W. Raleigh, Style (London, 1897), p. 41.
46. Sec Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, p. 48.
47. Alexander Duff, Indian and Indian Missions (Edinburgh, 1839), p. 587.
48. Consider this Baconian passage set for comment in 1893: 'For the wit of man,
if it work upon matter, which is the contemplation of the creatures of God,
 188 The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia
worketh according ro the stufTand is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself,
as the spider worketh its web, then it is endless, and brings forth indeed
cobwebs of learning, admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no
substance or profit.' Allahabad, University, Calendar, 1893-94, p. 298.
49. E. McDonald, 'English Education and Social Reform in the Bombay Presi
dency', Journal of Asian Studies, xxv: 3 (1966), pp. 453-69.
50. See I.A. Gilbert, 'Presidency, Muir and Aligarh', p. 191.
51. Calcutta University, Calendar, 1866-67, p. ci.
52. Ibid., pp. cxi and cxiv.
53. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1889, pp. 160-1.
54. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1890, p. 27.
55. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1889, pp. 66-7, and Education Dcpt. NWP
and P., 30 Nov. 1898, File 83A, No. G-2460.
56. H. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, England Since 1880 (London, 1989),
pp. 28-36.
57. Ibid., pp. 56-7.
58. Ibid., p. 155.
59. S. Webb, 'National Efficiency', Nineteenth Century, Sept. 1901.
60. See H. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, pp. 152—3.
61. Ibid., p. 52.
62. Quoted in Brian Simon, Education and the Labour Movement, 1870—1920
(London, 1965), p. 83.
63. S. Lee, English Association Bulletin, 35 (Sept. 1918).
64. This and the next paragraph are based upon the analysis of the Newbolt Report
in Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (London, 1989), pp. 45—67.
65. See G.S. Gordon, The Discipline of Letters (Oxford, 1923), p. 20 for 'Q>
influence.
66. N. Mathieson, The Preachers of Culture (Ixrndon, 1975), p. 70.
67. D. Loyd Georges speech, 24 November 1918; J. Dover Wilson, Milestones on
thg Dover Road (London, 1969), quoted in Baldick, The Social Mission of English
Criticism, pp. 94-5.
68. F. Guest, letter in The Times, 11 Nov. 1920, quoted in B. Simon, The Politics
of Educational Reform, 1920-1940 (London, 1974), pp. 31-2.
69. B. Simon, The Politics of Educational Reform, pp. 28-30.
70. B. Doyle, English and Englishmen.
71. Professor R. W. Chambers not only defended the stronghold, but summoned all
' teachers of English to join him: 'The Teaching of English in the Universities of
England', English Association Pamphlet l]u\y 1922).
72. I.A. Richards and C.K. Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning (London, 1923),
p. 18.
73. I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1925), pp. 25-6.
74. Ibid., p. 47.
75. Ibid., pp. 22-3.
76. On Richards' ideas and methods see Baldick, The Social Mission of English
Criticism, pp. 134-56, and F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, pp. 162-93.
77. BHU, Calendar, 1922-25, pp. 1139-40.

i ■ . ■ . ■ ........... i —m❁m i 11111iifi111 f 111ii111

'I
 English as a University Subject in India and England 189
78. Ibid., p. 1140. The Department stressed the need for further staff 'to insti
tute Libnuy classes in small tutorial groups which form such an e fective feature
of language study . . . and'to provide for more detailed specializ; tioninvarious
periods of literary history', p. 1141.
79. BHU, Minutes, 1928, Appendix A.
80. Allahabad University, Minutes, 1939, pp. 63-73, and Annual l'.eport, p. 5. By
this date the University Library held some 98,980 items (for 2 200 students).
The Librarian noted that this should be compared with the 200,000 held by the
School of Oriental and African Studies alone, even as early as 1926.
81. BHU, Minutes, 1930, p. 100.
82. Allahabad University, Calendar, 1920, pp. 297-300.
83. Allahabad University, Calendar, 1930, pp. 750-69.
84. Allahabad University, Calendar, 1914, pp. 43-4.
85. Allahabad University, Calendar, 1893, p. 25.
86. Allahabad University, Calendar, 1889-90, p. 26.
87. Susanne Rudolph perceptively comments, 'The relationship between education
and politics is affected by the professionalisation of learning. Professionalism
creates mediating structures and communities . . . that interpose their own
goals and standards between those of the educational and political systems'. See
S. Rudolph, Education and Politics in India, p. 313. The evidence here
assembled seems to me amply to support that view.