S o u t h As ia n h is t o r y / P ost c o l o n ia l s t u d i es

se th
Subject Lessons offers a fascinating account of how western knowledge “traveled” to India,
changed that which it encountered, and was itself transformed in the process. Beginning in
1835, India’s British rulers funded schools and universities to disseminate modern, west-
ern knowledge in the expectation that it would gradually replace indigenous ways of know-
ing. From the start, western education was endowed with great significance in India, not
only by the colonizers but also by the colonized, to the extent that today almost all “serious”
knowledge about India—even within India—is based on western epistemologies. In Subject
Lessons, Sanjay Seth’s investigation into how western knowledge was received by Indians
under colonial rule becomes a broader inquiry into how modern, western epistemology
came to be seen not merely as one way of knowing among others but as knowledge itself. Subject Lessons

the Western Education of Colonial India

Drawing on history, political science, anthropology, and philosophy, Seth interprets
the debates and controversies that came to surround western education. Among these

Subject Lessons
were concerns that Indian students were acquiring western education by rote memoriza-
tion—and were therefore not acquiring “true knowledge”—and that western education
had plunged Indian students into a moral crisis, leaving them torn between modern, west-
ern knowledge and traditional Indian beliefs. Seth argues that these concerns, voiced by the
British as well as by nationalists, reflected the anxiety that western education was failing to
produce the modern subjects it presupposed. This failure suggested that western knowl-
edge was not the universal epistemology it was thought to be.

“Subject Lessons revives a field that has remained dormant for years: the history of education
in colonial India. This in itself is no small achievement. But Sanjay Seth does a lot more
than that. Weaving together history and philosophical critiques of historicity and moder-
nity, Seth has produced a book that is at once thoughtful and provocative. This outstanding

cover photograph: University of Bombay, Rajabai, by an unknown photographer

book makes an original contribution to postcolonial criticism.”
—Dipesh Chakra b a r t y , author of Habitations of Modernity:
Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies

“Subject Lessons is a very important contribution to understanding of the coloniality of knowl-

edge and of being. Imperial control is mainly control of subjectivity, and the control of
subjectivity is largely based on education, on the formation of those to be subjected. Sanjay
Seth’s study of education in colonial India has implications far beyond the subcontinent.
Touching on epistemology, politics (governmentality), religion (Muslims in India), the idea
of the nation, gender and sexuality, ethics and history, Seth describes how the logic of colo-
niality has been and continues to be globally enacted.”
—Walter Migno lo , author of The Idea of Latin America
the Western Education of Colonial India
Sanjay Seth
is Reader in Politics at La Trobe University,
Melbourne, and Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths
College, University of London.

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Subject Lessons
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Subject Lessons
The Western Education of Colonial India

Sanjay Seth

Duke University Press

Durham and London
2007
© 2007 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 
Typeset in Trinité by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
appear on the last printed page of this book.
To Raju and Nishad
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1

part i: subject to pedagogy

1 Changing the Subject:

Western Knowledge and the Question of Difference 17
2 Diagnosing Moral Crisis:
Western Knowledge and Its Indian Object 47
3 Which Past? Whose History? 79

part ii: modern knowledge, modern nation

4 Governmentality and Identity:

Constituting the ‘‘Backward but Proud Muslim’’ 109
5 Gender and the Nation:
Debating Female Education 129
6 Vernacular Modernity:
The Nationalist Imagination 159
Epilogue:
Knowing Modernity, Being Modern 183

Notes 197
Bibliography 235
Index 259
Acknowledgments

This book has been long in the making, and I have many people and institu-
tions to thank. I am grateful to the librarians and archivists of Indian Office
Library and Records (incorporated into the British Library partway through
my research), the National Archives of India, the Nehru Memorial Library and
Museum, the Scottish National Library, the Gokhale Institute, the Cambridge
South Asia Centre Library, the State Library of Victoria, and the Borchardt
library of La Trobe University—especially its Inter-Library Loans section. The
Australia Research Council provided small grants to facilitate research trips,
as did La Trobe University, which also provided a supportive and congenial
environment in which to write. The Japan Society for the Promotion of Sci-
ence awarded me a year-long fellowship to work on this book; I am grateful to
Professor Nariaki Nakazato and the Toyo Bunka Kenkyujo of Tokyo University
for hosting me during a blissful year when I was able to work obsessively on
the manuscript. Earlier versions of some of these chapters were presented at
New Delhi, Princeton, Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, Santa Cruz, Berlin,
Tokyo, Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Brisbane; my thanks to my audiences at
these occasions, and to the organizers of these talks.
Many friends and colleagues have answered queries, provided references,
and made helpful suggestions; my thanks to Shahid Amin, Robin Jeffrey,
Francesca Orsini, John Fitzgerald, the late Ravinder Kumar, Pauline Nestor,
Hilary McPhee, Joel Kahn, Barbara Cain, Angus McIntyre, Richard Delacy,
Sudhir Chandra, Kama Maclean, Greg Bailey, the late Fred Hardy, Ashok
Aklujkar, Dennis Altman, Joel Kahn, Robert Manne, and Kunal Chakrabarti.
My thanks also to Sarbajeet Mukherjee for rendering research assistance in
the National Library, Calcutta.
A number of colleagues read and commented on one or more chapters of
this book. I am grateful to Ranajit Guha, Sumit Sarkar, Tanika Sarkar, Robin
Archer, Leela Gandhi, Michael Dutton, Ian Hunter, Anita Ray, and Nariaki
Nakazato for taking the trouble to do so, and for their comments and criti-
ix
x Acknowledgments
cisms. I am grateful to Julia Adams and Reynolds Smith for editorial feedback
and for shepherding this book through the publication process, and to Fred
Kameny for his very professional copy editing.
Since my graduate student days Dipesh Chakrabarty has been a friend
and interlocutor, and he has read, commented upon, and discussed this book
with me over the years that it has taken to write it. It gives me pleasure to
acknowledge my debt to him, and to thank him. Barry Hindess once again
demonstrated that there is no more acute reader of an argument, with a keen
eye for flaws and evasions; I hope that there are, thanks to his comments,
fewer of these than there might have been. Akeel Bilgrami engaged me in
long-distance debates during my year in Tokyo, and his comments have never
failed to be stimulating and challenging. Rajyashree Pandey read the chapters
through their successive drafts, and offered unconditional encouragement
coupled with unconstrained criticism!
Many friends offered sustenance and hospitality while I was away from
home: in India, Sudhir Chandra, Geetanjali Shree, Atul Joshi, Jayanti Pan-
dey, Sara Rai, and Muhammad Aslam; in England, Terry Shakhanovsky, Robin
Archer, Chris Macpherson, Greg Patching, and above all the Hardy family;
and in Japan, Sonoe Matsui and her family. A community of friends in
Melbourne provided occasions for ongoing addas; my thanks to Deborah
Kessler, Pauline Nestor, and my fellow editors of Postcolonial Studies, Amanda
Macdonald, Michele Grossman, and—especially—Leela Gandhi and Michael
Dutton.
I am unusually blessed in that my siblings constitute not only my af-
fective, but also my intellectual, community. I subjected Vanita Seth and
Suman Seth to endless drafts of the manuscript, which they read with acuity
and humor. It remains a source of great sadness to me that my mother, the
person who would have derived the greatest pleasure from seeing this book in
print, is not here to see it. My father has been a source of unqualified support
and encouragement in this as in other endeavors. I owe him and my mother
more than could ever be acknowledged.
Finally, and closest to home, Rajyashree and Nishad Pandey have provided
me with a world which includes, but also extends well beyond, thinking and
writing. I dedicate this to them.
Introduction

The colonial era is roughly coterminous with the rise of a knowledge that I
will be calling ‘‘modern, western knowledge’’—‘‘modern’’ to denote its rela-
tively recent emergence, ‘‘western’’ to indicate the cultural specificity of these
historical origins. Along with guns and goods, this knowledge traveled to the
colonies, and it was in part through this knowledge that the non-western
world came to be conquered, represented, and ruled. But although it arrived
from the outside, often at the point of a bayonet, this knowledge ceased to
be merely the colonizer’s knowledge. It found a home in its new locales. A
number of agencies served to disseminate it, among them armies, railroads,
trade, and the institutions and practices of colonial government.
In India the most direct and one of the most important of these agen-
cies was western education. The 1830s witnessed a bitter dispute in the ranks
of colonial officialdom over whether the British Indian government should
patronize ‘‘Oriental’’ knowledges, or whether it should direct its attentions
solely to promoting western knowledge, initially through the medium of
English. Victory went to the ‘‘Anglicists,’’ led by Thomas Babington Mac-
aulay, and from 1835 India’s colonial rulers became the agency for promoting
‘‘western education,’’ that is, education which sought to disseminate mod-
ern, western knowledge through modern institutions and pedagogic pro-
cesses. It was anticipated and desired by the victorious party that this would
gradually supplant indigenous knowledges, which were condemned as (vari-
ously) ‘‘superstitious,’’ ‘‘mythic,’’ ‘‘primitive,’’ and, more generally, untrue; or,
as Macaulay characterized them, ‘‘medical doctrines which would disgrace an
English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English
boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns
thirty thousand years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of
butter.’’ 1
After 1835 India’s colonial rulers spent the bulk of the state money allo-
cated for educating their subjects on modern, western education. When in
1
2 Introduction
1854 the authorities in Britain gave instructions for extending the provision
of education beyond the élite classes of native society for which it had ini-
tially been intended, they made it clear that ‘‘the education which we desire
to see extended in India is that which has for its object the diffusion of the
improved arts, science, philosophy and literature of Europe; in short, Euro-
pean knowledge.’’ 2 Schools were established to teach this knowledge, and in
1857 the universities of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras were established, soon
to be followed by universities in other parts of India.3 The British thus under-
took a task that lent its name to the title of a work by CharlesTrevelyan, one of
the architects of the decision of 1835: The Education of the People of India. While
this effort was being made, from the early decades of the nineteenth century
colonialism itself came to be seen as an essentially pedagogic enterprise.Those
aspects of British rule which had long been hailed as the justification for for-
eign rule of another peoples—the Pax Britannica which created peace where
once there had been disorder and brigandage, the ‘‘rule of law,’’ the provision
of public works, and so on—were now seen not only as goods in themselves
but also as having an educative value. A textbook of 1897 told its audience
of Indian schoolboys that the Penal Code, public works, railways, irrigation
and civil works, schools, the post office and telegraph, and a free press were
all forces working to educate India.4 The ascription of pedagogic effects and
benefits to almost all the practices and institutions of colonial rule became
pervasive, so much so that sometimes it assumed burlesque forms: in 1913
a government enquiry declared, ‘‘The Committee regards the provision of
proper latrine and urinal accommodation as not only necessary in the inter-
ests of . . . health . . . [and] sanitation . . . but also as having a distinctly educa-
tive value.’’ 5 It became common to describe formal instruction or schooling
as but an aspect or subset of this wider pedagogic mission.6 Partly because it
came to be seen in this way, western education was endowed with great sig-
nificance, even though the sums expended upon it were minuscule, and the
numbers directly affected by it a small proportion of the total population.7
There was also, for a long period, a keen awareness of the ‘‘exoticism’’ of
western knowledge. The architects of the decision of 1835 were in no doubt
as to the momentousness of the decision they had made. Charles Trevelyan
wrote, ‘‘The decision which was come to is worthy of everlasting record.
Although homely in its words, it will be mighty in its effects long after we
are mouldering in the dust.’’ 8 The Pioneer, an English-owned newspaper pub-
lished from Allahabad, wrote that ‘‘the experiment [of Western education]
 Introduction 3
going on in India is onewhich, in the immensityof its scope, the gravityof the
issues depending on it, and the conditions under which it has to be carried
on, has had no parallel in the world’s history.’’ 9 Schooling, not on the face of it
the setting for high drama, was frequently treated in highly dramatic terms,
and described in flowery language. Nor was this by any means confined to the
British. Syed Mahmood wrote: ‘‘The origin, rise and progress of English edu-
cation in India . . . constitute one of the most significant episodes, not only
in the annals of India, but in the history of the civilised world.’’ 10 Not to be
outdone, a contributor to the nationalist Modern Review scaled new rhetorical
heights: ‘‘The English education of India! It is one of the most momentous
events the world has ever seen and most difficult problems the human brain
has ever faced. How to transport the learning, method, and spirit of Western
Europe to Middle Eastern Asia, among a subject race . . . and make it grow as
native of the soil . . . It is a more difficult achievement than the annihilation
of time and space by modern science.’’ 11
That sense of exoticism has long since faded. Today almost all serious,
‘‘respectable,’’ and officially disseminated knowledge about the non-western
world shares the presumptions and guiding categories of modern western
knowledge. This is so whether the sites for the production of knowledge are
located in the western world, or in the non-western world. And usually, this
fact occasions little comment, let alone sustained reflection, because western
knowledge is no longer seen as only one mode of knowing but as knowledge
itself, compared to which all other traditions of reasoning are only Unreason,
or earlier stages in the march toward Reason.
This book is a study of how western knowledge came to be disseminated
in India, such that it came to assume its current status as the obvious, and
almost the only, mode of knowing about India. The book is principally con-
cerned not with the thinking and intentions of the colonizer but with how
western education was received and consumed by the colonized. It is also,
and simultaneously, an argument that the status of modern western knowl-
edge—the assumption that it is not merely one mode of knowledge but is
knowledge ‘‘as such,’’ that it must be adequate to its Indian object because it
is adequate to all objects—is questionable, and needs to be rethought. What
follows thus has certain affinities with recent studies, some of them under-
taken under the sign of postcolonial theory, that seek not to ‘‘apply’’ our mod-
ern western knowledge to the non-western world, but rather to make that
knowledge itself a matter for investigation and problematizing.12
4 Introduction

Subject to Pedagogy
New knowledges do not simply stuff the heads of existing people with new
ideas; they serve to create new people, which is why ‘‘the history of knowl-
edge constitutes a privileged point of view for the genealogy of the subject.’’ 13
Knowledges position and construct knowers in different ways, and this was
especially true of modern, western knowledge. Why ‘‘especially’’ so? Because
modern knowledge helps initiate, and is a defining feature of, a deep trans-
formation which creates a knowing subject who is set apart from, even set up
against, the objects to be known.
This transformation has been characterized in a variety of ways, one of
the more famous of which is Max Weber’s notion of ‘‘disenchantment.’’ Ac-
cording to Weber, modern western man’s increasing capacity to ‘‘master’’ the
world is attributable to a type of knowledge that approaches the world look-
ing for laws and regularities rather than purposes and meanings.The efficacy
of what might initially be a more-or-less methodological or technical postu-
late—that we act as if the world were rationally calculable—results in turning
it into a natural stance. The world is disenchanted in the sense that no magic
and no mysteries pervade the world nor yield up knowledge of it; and in that
the world is external to us, it does not resonate with our longings and aspi-
rations. We can find no support or vindication for our choices, values, and
beliefs, for a disenchanted world does not provide us with our own reflec-
tion—it is blank, and cold. Our knowledge of it does not reveal its meaning:
the only meanings we find ‘‘out there’’ are those which we have put there.14
This knowledge is fundamentally different from the premodern knowl-
edge(s) of Europe, which were displaced by this new knowledge, and which,
Charles Taylor writes, required ‘‘understanding the world in categories of
meaning, as existing to embody or express an order of Ideas or archetypes, as
manifesting the rhythm of divine life, or the foundational acts of the gods, or
the will of God,’’ and ‘‘seeing the world as a text, or the universe as a book.’’ 15
Such knowledges presumed a very different relation between the knower and
the known, between humans and their world; for one thing, they did not
draw the line between the two so sharply. To simplify, they presumed that
humans found meaning and purpose in the world; and as modern knowledge
emerged and was defined through a critique of scholastic and other medieval
knowledges, this was seen as the source and root of the errors of premodern
knowledges. To find an order in the universe and seek to harmonize with it,
or to find the correspondences so loved by the Renaissance, or to subscribe
 Introduction 5
to theories of knowledge which attribute to man an ‘‘innate’’ disposition to
assent to the good and the true—all these appeared, from an emergent, mod-
ern, and scientific perspective, as a confusing of man with his world, most
clearly manifested in attributing to the world a meaning and purpose which
in fact belongs to us, and which we have projected onto it. A conception of
knowledge that posits a knowing subject and an object external to it is also
one that makes policing this distinction the very basis of any valid knowl-
edge. Any confusion between the knowing subject and the object must be
guarded against; solipsism on the one hand, and ‘‘projecting’’ one’s desires
and purposes onto the world on the other, become the two cardinal sins to be
avoided.
This was once a novel conception of knowledge, and the subject it pre-
sumed was not found ready-to-hand but rather had to be forged, had to be
created through new pedagogic practices, and through the transformations
and disciplines enforced by industrialization and capitalism, modern armies,
and the modern novel—a process that was complex and difficult, and one
that met with resistance. All the more so in the Indian subcontinent, where
the knowledges in question were not autochthonous, and where the instru-
ments for forging the new subject had not been slowly working away through
the centuries of industrialization and the emergence of new disciplinary ma-
trixes of family, prison, school, and factory, but were heavily dependent upon
the violent and coercive agency of colonial rule.
As a study of western knowledge in colonial India, this is also a work about
subjectivities. It is about how Western education in India posited and served
to create—and sometimes failed to fully create—certain sorts of subjects.

Subject of History
This is in part a work of history, and it is also a work about writing history,
and the possibility thereof. Why it should be about writing history is readily
discernible, for this book is in a very precise sense a product of the history
which it retells. It is a history of the western, rational type, approved of—
and practised by—Macaulay, rather than, say, a Puranic history (Macaulay’s
‘‘history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand
years long’’). As a history of western knowledge in India written from within
that knowledge, a work such as this needs a reflexive moment; it needs to
ask whether the ensuing circularity is an enabling hermeneutical circle or a
disabling, self-referential one.
6 Introduction
But what could it mean to ask about the ‘‘possibility’’ of history writing?
Here I will try to explicate this question by returning to my brief descrip-
tion of Weber’s account of ‘‘disenchantment,’’ this time to complicate it by
juxtaposing it with another account.
Part of the appeal of Weber’s account is that in arguing that there are no
meanings and purposes and values ‘‘in’’ the world, he does not conclude that
meanings and values are superfluous. Weber’s well-known insistence that
the scientist seek to keep fact and values distinct is not born of a positivist
denigration of the latter; indeed, in part Weber argues, in Kantian fashion,
for a realm of objectivity in order to make room for values—as distinctly
human products.16 This yields, or can be made to yield, a historicism which
is possibly more appealing now than it was in its own day. Just as individu-
als assign meaning and choose values, so different peoples at different times
have shaped collective values and ways of being in the world. Scholars of the
human sciences can, from texts, monuments, artworks and the like, recon-
struct their world-picture or Weltanschauung—a favorite word of Weber’s,
as of a number of his contemporaries. Medieval men and women attributed
their own actions and conceptions to transcendent beings; this was a part
of their Weltanschauung, something the historian can reconstruct or piece
together from their art, their philosophy, and so on.We moderns know better,
although—the source of Weber’s melancholy—the price of our superior (self-)
knowledge may be that we are less at home in the world. In all cases, man
is a meaning-endowing and culture-secreting being, and from the material
and textual traces and remnants he leaves behind, we can piece together what
sort of man he was.
In ‘‘The Age of the World Picture’’ Martin Heidegger seems at first glance
to be offering an account similar to this one. Like Weber, he sees the more
obvious manifestations of modernity—individualism, technology, and so on
—as based upon something which is, however, more fundamental.This some-
thing ‘‘more fundamental’’ reads not entirely unlike Weber’s distinction be-
tween a subject who has become central and a world of objects which is dis-
enchanted, and Heidegger too talks of a world picture. But his account is in
fact very different.
Heidegger also states that at the heart of modernity is the rise of an abso-
lute subjectivity, such that the world appears to man as if it were ‘‘for’’ him.
But this is not a new Weltanschauung, replacing the older one: the modern
age is not distinguished from other ages by its peculiarly ‘‘modern’’ picture of
 Introduction 7
the world, but rather by the very fact that it can conceive and grasp the world
as picture.17 Nor can the difference between the modern and the medieval
and ancient worlds be understood in terms of different ‘‘cultural values’’ or
‘‘spiritual values,’’ for there was nothing, writes Heidegger, like ‘‘culture’’ in
the Middle Ages or ‘‘spiritual values’’ in the ancient world: ‘‘Only in the mod-
ern era have spirit and culture been deliberately experienced as fundamental
modes of human comportment, and only in most recent times have ‘values’
been paraded as standards for such comportment.’’ 18 The difference between
our age and other ages (and other peoples, then and now) cannot be rendered
in terms of different ‘‘outlooks,’’ ‘‘views,’’ ‘‘values,’’ and ‘‘experiences,’’ because
such ways of thinking are already modern, are already products of a histori-
cal and intellectual transformation which places Man at the centre of things,
which now exist for him and only exist inasmuch as they are pictured, valued
or experienced.19
Unlike Weber and many others, who rightly urge that we recognize ‘‘our’’
way of understanding and engaging with our world as possibly specific to us
rather than part of a ‘‘human condition,’’ Heidegger goes further, question-
ing thevery idea that man has always been a culture-secreting being, and that
different men in different epochs ‘‘secreted’’ different values and meanings.
To recognize, as Weber did, that others may have viewed the world differently
is an advance over an ahistorical ascription of similarity, but under the seem-
ing defamiliarization of this sort is still an unwarranted assumption, namely
that always, everywhere, there is ‘‘Man,’’ whose way of being in the world is
to ‘‘view’’ it. One way of approaching Heidegger is thus to see him as radi-
calizing and going beyond such historicizing, and in so doing ‘‘explaining’’
its limitations. Historicizing approaches take a feature of the modern, Occi-
dental world—namely that we are subjects whose values and world-picture
become embodied in socially produced meaning—and read it into the world
as such.
Pressing into service this aspect of Heidegger’s thought, I will ask: Where
Man has not become subject and the world has not become picture, is it still
possible to write history? History writing is always the ‘‘history of ’’—that is,
it has a subject whose past it recapitulates. For modern historiography, which
is deeply imbued with humanist and anthropological premises, this subject
is Man, conceived as a being who produces culture and meaning, and whose
meanings can be deciphered from his texts and his monuments and other
‘‘traces’’ of his subjectivity. But if, as this book shall show, modern knowl-
8 Introduction
edge failed fully to produce a subject and to produce ‘‘the world as picture’’ in
India, then how do we write history, and what is the status of the knowledge
we produce when we do write it?

The Plan of This Book

These are questions of general, theoretical import. But how do these theo-
retical ambitions connect with a historical study of the diffusion of western
education, and of the debates to which it gave rise? Moreover, what I am call-
ing modern, western knowledge is internally highly differentiated—there are
liberals and Marxists, Kantians and Hegelians, empiricists and idealists, and
so on. Is it even possible to write about the dissemination of an object called
‘‘western knowledge’’? And—a final question—if this book is a critique of as-
pects of modern western knowledge, do I write from a position outside this
knowledge?
What makes it possible to speak of ‘‘modern western knowledge,’’ not-
withstanding the numerous camps within it, is that for all their differences,
they share some ‘‘core presumptions,’’ ‘‘categories,’’and ‘‘background assump-
tions’’—terms that I will be using interchangeably. These are usually un-
stated, because they are (or have become) naturalized, and have assumed the
status of axioms. Some prefer to call these core presumptions an ‘‘episteme’’
or ‘‘social imaginary,’’ but whatever the nomenclature, in all cases what is
being referred to is not any specific intellectual position, representation, or
practice but the ‘‘foundational assumptions about what counts as an ade-
quate representation or practice in the first place.’’ 20 I seek to explicate these
assumptions in the chapters that follow, and also to subject modern west-
ern knowledge to critical scrutiny, by showing that the presumptions that it
takes to be axiomatic and universal are not in fact so, and were not so in India.
The character of this critical enterprise needs to be carefully specified. I
do not argue that the presumptions characterizing western knowledge were
falsified by the ‘‘reality’’ of India. Arguments of this sort—an example is the
‘‘nativist’’ contention that western knowledge is an ‘‘alien’’ imposition, and
therefore an inadequate instrument by which to know India—suffer from a
number of crippling defects. Critiques of this sort assume that knowledge is
‘‘of ’’ an object external to it, and thus that acquiring knowledge is a matter of
‘‘mirroring’’ the ‘‘real’’; 21 in this view, if western knowledge is to be criticized,
that is because it fails to provide an adequate account of its Indian object. In
arguing so, this adherents of this view partake of a representational episte-
 Introduction 9
mology which, ironically, is that of the modern knowledge which they seek
to call into question. And in judging western knowledge to be inadequate,
they presuppose a correct or adequate understanding of the ‘‘reality’’ of India
without being able to account for where such knowledge itself comes from,
and what warrant we have for treating it as the standard by which to measure
modern knowledge.
Here I do not seek to step ‘‘outside’’ western knowledge, measure it against
the ‘‘reality’’ of India, and show it to be wanting. I seek instead to show that
in the course of the dissemination of western knowledge in India, the de-
bates and discourses to which it gave rise can be read as registering the fact
(often experienced as a disquiet) that its ‘‘foundational assumptions’’ could
not really be assumed. It is through an attentiveness to these disturbances on
the surface of western knowledge in the course of its dissemination, rather
than from a vantage point outside it, that one can locate and demonstrate
how western knowledge was rendered problematic in India. Since knowl-
edges do not merely cognize a world external to them but serve to constitute
that world, I also remain attentive to the ways in which, in colonial India,
western knowledge reshaped what it was thought to be merely describing.
This means that I write with and from within western knowledge. It also
means that the enquiry into how this knowledge was disseminated, and the
argument that its presumptions and axioms cannot always be taken as axi-
omatic, are not two separate exercises. It is not that I first provide a his-
torical narrative of the arrival of western knowledge in India, and then seek
to evaluate its truth claims, and its adequacy to its Indian object; it is pre-
cisely through the study of how the knowledge was disseminated that I show
how its enabling epistemic presumptions were rendered problematic—orelse
served to remake its Indian object.
Chapters 1 and 2 follow a common intellectual strategy. Each documents
a controversy and the discourse that it generated, and delves into the implicit
(and sometimes explicit) presumptions which are shown to underlie and ani-
mate the debates. Chapter 1 surveys the century-long complaint that Indian
students treated western education as a mere means to an end, and that they
learned by rote, thereby defeating the purpose of an education predicated
upon the idea that knowledge is only truly such when it has been ‘‘under-
stood’’ rather than simply memorized. I interpret this complaint as articu-
lating the anxiety that modern knowledge was not producing the modern
subject which it presupposed, and ask whether we should conclude that this
was because another subjectivity, corresponding to indigenous modes of re-
10 Introduction
lating to knowledge, was diverting and frustrating the impact of western
education. This question turns upon whether the desire to read historical
evidence in a fashion which does not naturalize the modern, western mode
of being a subject (thereby treating it as the norm) is best served by reading
‘‘difference’’ into ‘‘subjectivity,’’ or whether doing so only renders all forms of
being human into different ways of being a subject, thereby dissolving the
very difference to which this strategy seeks to remain sensitive.
Chapter 2 documents the widely expressed belief that western education,
expected not only to transform Indian students’ knowledge but also their
character and morality, had indeed done so—but not for the better. Western-
educated Indians were thought to have been plunged into the throes of a
‘‘moral crisis’’ as a result of their exposure to western knowledge, evidenced
in their moral and intellectual ‘‘inconsistency.’’ According to this view, the
‘‘inconsistent’’ beliefs and practices of educated Indians arose out of their im-
mersion in two incommensurable worlds, each informed by different beliefs
and its own moral code: the modern world of western knowledge and the in-
stitutions and practices of colonial civil society, and the world of traditional
beliefs and institutions. I show that this diagnosis was enabled by a num-
ber of presuppositions that were and are modern presuppositions, encoded
in modern, western knowledge; thus here the knowledge being disseminated
in schools and universities was simultaneously put to use to characterize
and explain an unexpected effect of this knowledge. How adequate was this
knowledge to explaining its own effects? Could it comprehend and account
for its own failures? What was the relation between western knowledge as a
means for comprehending social change in India and western knowledge as
one of the agents of that change?
We who live in an age gifted, or cursed, with the ‘‘historical sense’’ often
think that everything has a history—that history simply ‘‘is,’’ even if not all
peoples developed a sense of historicity and the means by which to record
and write it. In chapter 3 I argue the contrary: it is not that there is the fact
of history, which among some peoples at certain times leads to history writ-
ing, but rather that the code and representational form which constitutes
the modern practice of writing history gives us the history we think we had.
If this argument, baldly summarized here, is valid—if history is not some-
thing which is always there, and which can be reconstructed well (as through
modern protocols of history writing) or badly (as through myths and epics
and legends), but something which is constituted and constructed through
the codes which purport to simply re-present it—then we need to inquire
 Introduction 11
more closely into the enabling presumptions of modern practices of history
writing. We should not be surprised to discover that these presumptions are
part and parcel of modern, western knowledge; history writing is itself, after
all, a modern knowledge. However these presumptions include those which
are discussed and shown to be problematic in the preceding chapters. Thus
here I formulate and address a paradox: modern western knowledge provides
many of the enabling assumptions of history writing, yet history writing
finds these presumptions rendered problematic when it seeks to narrativize
the emergence and dissemination of modern, western knowledge in India.
Whereas part I of this book seeks to interrogate the discourses to which
the spread of education gave rise for their hidden presumptions, part II seeks
to discern what place education acquired in the imagination of nationalists,
and others, who both sought this education and criticized it. Western educa-
tion was not only where the question of subjectivity came to be posed; it was
also the site where collective identities were produced. Indeed, the impact
of western education derived less from the transformations that it effected
upon the relatively small numbers who were subject to pedagogy, and more
from its having become the object of desire and contestation; less, for in-
stance, because many nationalists were western-educated, and more because
nationalism made western education an important part of its vision of what
was required to bring into being an independent and modern nation. The
role that western education came to play in the production of collective iden-
tities, and in particular the role that it played in the nationalist project to
found a nation at once modern and yet different, provides the subject matter
for part II of this book.
In the nineteenth century alarm was expressed over Muslim ‘‘backward-
ness,’’ this backwardness being measured in terms of the failure of Muslims,
by comparison with Hindus, to avail themselves of western education. Chap-
ter 4 enquires into the epistemic conditions enabling this discourse, this time
locating them not in unstated ontological and epistemological presumptions
that characterize western knowledge but more specifically in the practices
of colonial governmentality, and in intellectual disciplines closely associated
with them. It was only when ‘‘population’’ became an object of knowledge
and governance that ‘‘backwardness’’ could become a subject for investiga-
tion and concern. But measuring the backwardness of the Muslim entailed
conceiving what it meant to be Muslim in a novel way, and thus a debate
centering on western education and Muslims also created new ways of think-
ing—and being—Muslim.
12 Introduction
Partha Chatterjee and others have shown that in the nineteenth century
an emergent nationalism made the Indian woman the emblem and custo-
dian of Indianness, at the same time as nationalists sought to imitate and ac-
quire those ‘‘material’’ advantages of the West which were necessary to found
an independent nation.22 But if woman were to become the repository of an
essential cultural identity which needed to be preserved, this did not mean
that she was not herself to be subjected to change. At the same time that
woman was made into an icon of Indian identity and culture, there began a
concerted project to transform and ‘‘modernize’’ the middle-class woman and
the Indian home. Female education was an important part of this project, and
chapter 5 examines this and the tension which marked it. Because of the sym-
bolic load which woman was required to bear, any signs that this project was
failing not only testified to the continued backwardness of the Indian home,
and thus of the would-be nation, but also, and more fundamentally, seem-
ingly disqualified the educated nationalist élites’ claims to being the modern
vanguard of an ancient nation. Incapable of transforming their homes, how
could they transform the nation they wished to lead?
Most books dealing with India’s recent past find that the opposition be-
tween colonizer and nationalist was a decisive one, and many structure their
investigations around it. For the most part that is not so of this book, and
chapter 6 explains why.There were of course some important lines of division
between nationalists and rulers over the subject of education. Many impor-
tant nationalist figures, including Gandhi and Tagore, not only were tren-
chant critics of western education in India but sought to elaborate alternative
visions of what education in India should be, and to give institutional expres-
sion to these visions, as did many lesser-known figures. This chapter seeks to
remain attentive to the variety and richness of the nationalist imagination,
while drawing attention to what is of central importance and yet nonetheless
frequently overlooked: few nationalists doubted that what India needed was
modern, western education, and hardly any advocated a return to ‘‘indige-
nous’’ knowledge practices, even as they urged that modern knowledge be
disseminated through Indian languages rather than through the medium of
English. That modern Western knowledge has come to be normalized, such
that it is identified with knowledge as such, is as much the ‘‘gift’’ of nation-
alism as it is of colonialism.
Almost all the personages who figure in this book viewed western knowl-
edge just as we tend to view it: as being in some sense intimately linked to
modernity. The burden of my argument, however, is that while India was
 Introduction 13
transformed, and western knowledge was an important agent in this trans-
formation, this transformation did not principally occur because education
‘‘modernized’’ those Indians who were subject to it. Even as they engaged
with modern institutions, engaged in modern practices, and acquired west-
ern knowledge, Indians often seemed to do so in ways that did not render
them modern, and that did not accord with the core presumptions of this
knowledge.The Epilogue of this book thus inquires into the relation between
modern knowledge and modernity, and suggests that the homology we usu-
ally assume between the two needs to be rethought.
part i

Subject to Pedagogy
chapter one

Changing the Subject

Western Knowledge and the Question of Difference

Presiding over the ‘‘Anglicist’’ policy in education enunciated three years

earlier, in 1838–39 the General Committee for Public Instruction in Bengal
declared, ‘‘the ultimate object which we have in view is to infuse into the stu-
dent, possessed of talents and leisure, a taste for literature and science,’’ all of
which would ‘‘hasten the regeneration of the country.’’ The committee noted
with satisfaction that western education was proving very popular with the
middle classes, but also noted: ‘‘At present, education is for the most part ap-
preciated only for the direct returns it yields.’’ 1 As the ‘‘at present’’ indicates,
the committeewas hopeful that over time education would be appreciated for
other reasons; and in the meantime, its instrumental value constituted a use-
ful and even necessary inducement. But a few years later the same body ob-
served that while many more students were entering and completing school,
thus achieving their goal of attaining ‘‘the qualifications requisite to perform
the mechanical duties of a writer [a clerk],’’ ‘‘our object to raise the character
of the people by education and not by their purses is still far distant.’’ 2
The ensuing decades did not lessen the distance. The tendency to treat
western education as a purely material or pecuniary asset came to be be-
moaned with increasing frequency in subsequent years. In an exam answer at
the Elphinstone Institution in 1850 a student wrote, ‘‘it is painful to write that
the objects of the natives to send their children to the Government school
are not the same as those of the Government. Their object is that their chil-
dren may get a living for them.’’ 3 Over half a century later India’s eminent
chemist Prafulla Chandra Ray, writing on ‘‘The Bengali Brain and Its Misuse,’’
declared that a ‘‘diploma is judged by its monetary equivalent—as something
which can be turned into cash.’’ 4 These and numerous others observed, and
usually lamented, that western education was treated as a means to an end,
seldom valued in and for itself.
17
 18 Subject to Pedagogy
This chapter seeks to document in all its richness a discourse which spans
over a century and which was generated from across all the usual cleavages
demarcating opinion—the authors of it were British and Indian, loyalist and
nationalist, humble and exalted, official and unofficial. What I call the ‘‘com-
plaint concerning instrumentalism’’ and the closely associated ‘‘anxiety of
cram’’ did not only voice the concern that there was a failure in the dis-
semination of western knowledge. When read carefully, this discourse can be
shown to implicitly register and articulate the anxiety that western knowl-
edge was failing to produce the subject who was the counterpart to this
knowledge.
Contemporaries suggested that this failure was occurring because Indian
students were appropriating the new knowledge much as they would have
appropriated indigenous knowledges. I shall show that indigenous knowl-
edges indeed posited and produced a different relation between knower and
known, or between what we have become accustomed to see as the subject
who knows and the object which is known; and the conclusion to be drawn,
it would seem, is that cramming and instrumentalism testified to the (stub-
born) presence of another subjectivity, an indigenous or premodern one. Such
a conclusion would at once allow us to explain the failure being registered
in the discourse of instrumentalism and cram, and moreover do so in a way
which recognizes and remains sensitive to the different ways of relating to
knowledge, tied to different ways of being in the world. But the category of
‘‘subjectivity’’ has a certain normativity built into it, and the question arises
of whether it can be reworked to accommodate different ways of inhabiting
the world, different ways of being a ‘‘self.’’ Do such historicist emendations
of our categories allow us to recognize difference, or do they unwittingly sub-
stantialize and universalize the difference to which they seek to attend?

‘‘The Pinnacle of Bengali Ambition’’ . . .

The Complaint of Instrumentalism
It was frequently commented that education was not only regarded solely as
a means to employment but more narrowly still: that it was treated (in the
words of Viceroy Lord Irwin) as a ‘‘turnstile leading into the arena of Govern-
ment service.’’ 5 Western education was valued, according to an inspector for
schools, because the natives had the idea that it would lead to ‘‘what is the
highest pinnacle of Bengali ambition—employment under Government.’’ 6
In the early years of the new education a middle school certificate was enough
 Changing the Subject 19
for a lowly position in government service, but very soon the requirements
began to escalate, leading to the ditty,

idil midil ki chodo aas

leke khurpa khodo ghaas 7
Abandon the desire for middle school and the like,
get a scythe and cut the grass.

A middle school certificate usually meant education to a certain standard

in the vernacular. However, it was reported, such learning was not much
valued, and it became progressively devalued once the acquisition of a gov-
ernment job of even lowly rank began to require more advanced qualifi-
cations, and hence education in English. Thus when the Despatch of 1854
sought to redress the earlier emphasis on education in English by urging
that the ‘‘grant-in-aid’’ system be used to establish schools teaching mod-
ern knowledge in Indian languages, government officials reported that the
middle classes were only interested in contributing to the establishment of
English schools which might lead to government employment, and would
‘‘not lift a finger to aid in the establishment of a Vernacular School’’; ‘‘they
will be taught English or not taught at all.’’ 8 This lack of enthusiasm for
western learning conveyed in the vernacular, compared to the enthusiasm
for western education in English, was seen to betoken a hardheaded calcula-
tion that only an English education would lead to a government job of the
right sort of rank and income. The Calcutta Review noted that ‘‘for vernacular
schools of an improved class there is little or no demand,’’ ‘‘a knowledge of
English . . . pays so much better than anything else, that it is the only thing
much in demand.’’ 9 Even as the middle classes wanted only education in
English, the lower classes, who were not in a position to aspire to government
jobs and hence to an education in English, were widely reported to prefer
indigenous modes of learning to the vernacular schools provided by the gov-
ernment; an inspector of schools in Bengal reported, ‘‘Petty shop-keepers and
traders are satisfied with what the Gooroomohashoy [the traditional village
schoolteacher] teaches, [and] can see no use in their children learning Bengali,
Geography, or the history of Bengal.’’ 10 Muslim parents, as we shall see in
chapter 4, were commonly thought to be resistant to sending their children
to schools of the modern, western type, with many preferring to send their
children to traditional schools that combined instruction in worldly matters
with religious instruction.
20 Subject to Pedagogy
A universitydegree—or indeed, even having sat for the matriculation exam
for university entry and failed it 11—was a mark of distinction, but only, ac-
cording to the Englishman, because of its instrumental use, for the natives do
not ‘‘attach the smallest value to . . . degrees, diplomas or certificates’’ issued
by the University of Calcutta, ‘‘unless as passports to Government employ-
ment.’’ 12 Indeed, the suspicion was widely voiced that the knowledge which
secured one these qualifications was regarded with a certain skepticism, by
pupil and teacher alike. Stories abounded of schoolmasters who told their
pupils to give the ‘‘right’’ answer rather than the true answer—‘‘you must
learn these things so that you may be able to give satisfactory answers to the
Superintendent when he comes,’’ one teacher told his students, ‘‘but God only
knows whether they are true or not.’’ 13
The alleged obsession with government employ could be explained in a
number of ways.14 For some it was a symptom of the Indian middle class’s
regrettable, even reprehensible, aversion to manual or commercial employ-
ment: that itself could be linked to the excessively impractical and ‘‘literary’’
character of the education imparted, which fitted students for nothing other
than government employ.15 For others, by contrast, the narrow and utilitar-
ian character of the education that the colonizers gave their subjects made
these subjects ill-qualified and ill-equipped to be anything other than under-
lings in the administration of the colonial state.16 Others would point out
that the desire to seek a regular income and a secure job—the chief attrac-
tions of government employ—were perfectly reasonable and explicable given
an underdeveloped and distorted economy, which afforded few other oppor-
tunities. As a speaker to the Kapole Students Union told his audience, ‘‘[gov-
ernment] service is one of the best sources of earning a livelihood without
any capital.’’ 17
Since an educated young man had the potential to acquire a secure job and
a steady income, he was a very eligible marriage prospect. This meant that
education could be translated (‘‘cashed in’’) not only into an income, but also
into a dowry: according to the Reverend Holmes, ‘‘It is a familiar fact that
at each stage of his career a Bengali youth commands as bridegroom a price
proportionate to the particular rung of the educational ladder on which he
has succeeded in placing his foot. Should he have passed the matriculation,
his father can command so much as his price . . . but if he have passed the
B.A., up goes the price; whilst the M.A., B.L’s are the prizes of the marriage
market.’’ 18
Another dimension of the complaint I have labeled ‘‘instrumentalism’’
 Changing the Subject 21
was that because education was seen only as a path to an income and perhaps
a dowry, learning and even curiosity were seldom awakened. A ‘‘song of Cal-
cutta University’’ published in the Statesman in 1904 captured both this lack
of enthusiasm and an acknowledgment of the worldly benefits of education:
Shall we sigh for the souls thou hast deadened?
Shall we blame thee for brains thou hast sucked?
Shall we ask how thy records were reddened?
Or plead for the hosts that are plucked?
Thy slaves are all dead to enjoyment,
And sombre and barren their lives;-
But thou leadest them on to employment
And dowries and wives.19
Any intellectual awakening which did occur ceased, it was claimed, once
the instrumental end was realized; nothing new was acquired, and that
which had been acquired earlier was lost. Numerous commentators, Indian
and British, complained that after completing their education, students de-
clined to ever read or indeed even think.20 According to one pamphleteer,
‘‘There are hardly any such things as students in the proper sense of the term
in our country . . . people study for material gain . . . for situations in life . . .
After getting into office they become like machines or worse still like fossils.
They lose all interest in study.’’ 21
The most common explanation of this widely diagnosed condition was
that instrumentalism flourished because Indians did not understand the
character and significance of western education, including its transforma-
tive, regenerative powers. Education was what one acceded to because it was
what the ruler required if one was to get ahead, not something embraced
because one had come to value it or the knowledge that it produced. Instru-
mentalism was at once a sign that English education had been misunder-
stood and the particular form that this misunderstanding took: a subordina-
tion of learning to material concerns—jobs, marriage prospects and dowry—
exogenous to education. Governor William Malcolm Hailey was adverting to
something like this when opening the Punjab Educational Conference and
Exhibition of 1926: ‘‘few of us would feel that education has exerted on the
minds of the people at large that general stimulus, at once an awakening and
a broadening of the mind, that we would have hoped to see.There is a general
enthusiasm for the spread of schooling; yet paradoxically and unfortunately,
people at large seem doubtful whether schooling in itself confers any lasting
 22 Subject to Pedagogy
benefit on the scholar.’’ In fact, Hailey went on, ‘‘one encounters the expres-
sion of a lurking feeling of regret that it should be necessary to adopt this
somewhat mysterious device to hold one’s own in the world; one finds even
a feeling that the world would possibly be a better place if a man did not
have to subject his children to a process which, for other purposes, seems to
possess no very marked benefits of its own.’’ 22
There were of course those who pointed out that not all Indian students
regarded education so instrumentally, or that to treat education as a passport
to a job was hardly a uniquely Indian problem. The Indian student had his
defenders, including British defenders. Many observers would note that in-
strumentalism was not unknown among British students, and Syed Bilgrami
declared that the modern spirit of commercialism was responsible for trans-
forming education into a commodity everywhere.23 W. A. Potter, addressing
the assembled graduates of Madras University in 1873, told them that ‘‘an
ideal man who loves culture purely for its own sake and into whose mind
there never enters . . . any idea of personal aggrandisement in the shape either
of money or fame . . . is not, I venture to say, the type of ordinary graduate
in any country.’’ 24 But the critics would reply that while instrumentalism
was not an exclusively Indian trait, in India it took on an exaggerated form.
In England also, the Calcutta University Commission conceded, students
tended to equate education with exams, and good performance in exams with
worldly success: ‘‘But,’’ the commission wrote, ‘‘we do not find that general
closing of the ears and mind to everything that does not contribute to exami-
nation success.’’ 25

‘‘Copying Machines’’ . . . The Anxiety of Cram

In 1902 the viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, told the convocation of Calcutta
University, ‘‘The great fault of education as pursued in this country is, as we
all know, that knowledge is cultivated by the memory instead of the mind,
and that aids to the memory are mistaken for implements of the mind.’’ 26
For more than fifty years on either side of this date, it was a constant lament
that Indian students studied by ‘‘cramming,’’ by which was meant not last-
minute preparation but rather ‘‘getting a thing by rote, without understand-
ing it or digesting its truth’’;27 the technique was sometimes also referred to
by students as ‘‘to by-heart it.’’ The complaint begins very early, and it is made
of primary schools as well as of universities, and of girls’ education as well
as boys’. It is not confined to British India, but is heard also in the princely
 Changing the Subject 23
states.28 Perhaps most important, it is an observation and lament made by the
British as well as by Indians, by colonial officials and also by nationalists. One
complainant, the principal of Elphinstone College, spoke for many when he
pithily declared, ‘‘Cram is the great canker of [Indian] education.’’ 29
Various explanations were advanced for why the ‘‘problem’’ of cram loomed
so large, with remedies varying accordingly. The importance of exams in the
Indian system of education were widely cited as a reason for cram. There were
variations between provinces, but as an example, in Madras in 1896 there
were three exams to be passed (primary, upper primary, and lower second-
ary) before the all-important matriculation exam. For half a century ‘‘aided’’
schools were assisted on the basis of a payment-by-results system, with re-
sults measured by success in exams; as was often observed,30 the school had a
powerful incentive to make passing exams the focus of all teaching. And then
of course there were the examinations at university, which usually had to be
passed in all subjects for the student to proceed to the next level. The exces-
sive importance of exams meant—so ran the argument—that the entire sys-
tem became distorted. The Hindi novelist and short-story writer Premchand
told an educational conference in Gorakhpur that the ‘‘examination men-
tality is destroying education.’’ 31 This argument came to be widely accepted;
in a declaration on educational policy in 1904 the government observed that
while external exams could not be entirely dispensed with, ‘‘their influence
has been allowed to dominate the whole system of education in India,’’ and
announced that the number of exams leading up to university was to be re-
duced, and grants to schools no longer to be based on payment-by-results.32
However, the problem remained; a decade later, in its next major statement
on education, the government was still complaining that exams ‘‘encourage
cram,’’ 33 and the link between exams and cramming continued to be made
in subsequent years.
Although exams were widely held to be overemphasized at all levels of edu-
cation, that was especially true at university level. The succession of exams;
the need to pass in every subject to proceed to the next level; the high stakes
for students whose families had made many sacrifices to get them this far—
all conspired to make exams everything, and rote learning the be-all and
end-all of university. The result, according to the Reverend Lal Behari Day,
was that students ‘‘only take down the Professor’s words, commit them to
memory—often without understanding them—and reproduce them in the
examination hall. A copying machine could do the same.’’ 34 Numerous wit-
nesses made it clear that cram was not a matter of lack of effort, but rather
24 Subject to Pedagogy
of the wrong sort of effort; it was to be condemned, but condemned above all
because of its cost to the student. An Indian author of a pamphlet called Our
Young Men bemoaned that these young men learned ‘‘every paragraph, every
sentence, every phrase, every word in the text books . . . with a care and atten-
tion which . . . is simply painful.’’ 35 The Calcutta University Commission rose
to lyrical heights in describing the process: ‘‘It is impossible to peruse the evi-
dence on the examination system as it exists today in Bengal without a feeling
of profound sadness. The immensity of the efforts, disproportionate to the
results; the painful anxiety of the candidates; the mechanical award of marks
encouraging the least fruitful of efforts of the mind . . . the sterilising influ-
ence of the whole system on both teachers and taught and the consequent
crying waste of the intelligence of the youth of Bengal.’’ 36
What greatly compounded the problem was that the first three univer-
sities in India—in Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras—were modeled after Lon-
don University, then newly established. The university was merely a body
affiliating colleges, conducting examinations, and conferring degrees; all
teaching was done in the colleges, but the colleges were obliged to teach
with a view to the ‘‘centrally’’ administered exams. The result, the editor of
the Dawn opined, was that colleges in India were nothing like the colleges
of Oxford or Cambridge but were rather ‘‘coaching agencies mis-named col-
leges’’;37 and the vice-chancellor of Calcutta University, Sir Asutosh Mooker-
jee, adjudged that the institution of examination-only universities ‘‘nec-
essarily produced the disastrous result that teaching was subordinated to
examinations,’’ 38 which in turn led to cram.
That teaching and examination were done in English rather than the
mother tongue of students was another reason widely given for the tendency
of students to cram. Forced to learn in an unfamiliar language, students
found their normal processes of study and thought rendered too difficult, and
responded by committing things to memory. Numerous observers affirmed
that the English of most students was simply not good enough to follow a
lecture or write an essay. They either compensated by memorizing the text,
or else teachers compensated for their poor English by dictating ‘‘word for
word, what they wish them to learn,’’ as the distinguished historian Jadunath
Sarkar ‘‘confessed’’ he and most other college teachers did.39
The system of setting texts was often blamed for facilitating cram. The
knowledge that exam questions would always be on or derived from a given
source made it possible, even ‘‘rational,’’ to memorize large chunks of the
textbook. Schoolchildren, it was complained, ‘‘shut their eyes to everything
 Changing the Subject 25
which nature or books other than their text-books can supply’’;40 they were
‘‘text-book gramaphones.’’ 41 Attempts to alleviate the problem did not prove
successful. Madras abolished the English textbook for the Matriculation
exam but after fifteen years reintroduced it, declaring the experiment to have
been a failure;42 and in Calcutta a proposal to replace a single textbook with
a number of required readings was met with the objection that it would only
result in a further proliferation of ‘‘keys’’ or digests, ‘‘giving rise to a worse
sort of cramming than the one we are trying to check.’’ 43 Thus the prob-
lems created by textbooks were greatly compounded by the proliferation of
‘‘keys’’ and ‘‘made-easies,’’ which relieved students of the need to study even
the textbook, and provided model exam questions and answers besides.There
was a flourishing market in these keys, which were ‘‘sold by every book-seller
and advertised by every post.’’ 44 The eminent lawyer and Liberal politician
Tej Bahadur Sapru told the Calcutta University Commission that when he
had been a student twenty-five years earlier it had been common for students
to read a key in place of the textbook, and that according to his sons, now
students at college, this continued to be so.45
Teachers were often held responsible for cramming. At college level a
racialized education sector meant that Indian teachers, however able, were
unlikely to advance far up a career ladder principally meant for Europeans.46
This diminished the incentives for Indian teachers; conversely, European
teachers occupied an exalted position irrespective of their abilities.47 The col-
lege teacher at least had some status and a decent income; the schoolteacher
had neither. ‘‘If we appraise the work of a village teacher only at three annas
a day,’’ a speaker told the Madras Educational Conference in 1896, ‘‘we should
also be prepared to get a return of work proportionate to this starvation allow-
ance.’’ 48 The miserable pay and poor prospects of the school teacher meant, as
witness after witness testified, that school teaching occupied an exceedingly
poor position on the social scale.49 On the eve of Independence, at the lower
level of the educational ladder teachers were being paid rates at or below those
earned by people in menial professions,50 and most continued to be ill quali-
fied and ill trained (or untrained) for teaching.51 The headmaster of a high
school in Bengal described the ‘‘typical’’ high school teacher: ‘‘Humble and
unassuming in dress, deserving and craving for pity everywhere, he trudges
along, a hopeless bundle of present woes and past miseries. When the first
streak of light strikes the Eastern sky, he moves along the public road to serve
as a domestic coach to a couple of young hopefuls and is generously paid five
or six pieces of silver at the end of the month, comes home at about nine
26 Subject to Pedagogy
to attend to the multifarious domestic duties that await him. Dog-tired, he
goes to school, sits in a ricketty chair, teaches a variety of subjects with occa-
sional dozes . . . With the falling shades of the evening, he goes again to his
coaching work.’’ He went on to ask, ‘‘How can such a body of human beings
who have no hope for the future, who are ever anxious to keep himself and
his family out of the grip of dire starvation, stimulate young minds, kindle
the Promethean spark, and show that life has its joys?’’ 52
As with the charge of instrumentalism, there were voices which would de-
fend the Indian student, and not simply on the grounds that the poor fellow
had little choice but to cram. In a widely reported convocation address, Henry
Maine questioned whether cramming necessarily led to superficial knowl-
edge, and wondered whether the accusation of cram arose simply because
‘‘Natives of India learn with singular rapidity.’’ 53 Maine’s defense of cram-
ming found few followers, but a more common response was to point out
that cramming was not a vice limited to Indians. An Indian author quoted
that unimpeachable English source, Pall Mall magazine, to the effect that
English schoolboys and Oxbridge pupils passed their exams ‘‘by dint of cram-
ming,’’ 54 and Viceroy Curzon, in a later avatar as chancellor of the Univer-
sity of Oxford, had occasion to defend Oxford students from the charge that
they passed their exams by cramming with the same vigor with which he
had earlier condemned Indian students.55 But again, as with the complaint
of instrumentalism, the reply was that even if the problem was not confined
to India, it occurred in a particularly acute form there, and with especially
unhappy consequences.56

The Subject of Knowledge

The two complaints were linked, and indeed they often occurred side by side
in the same texts, as two sides of the same counterfeit coin. Sometimes it was
suggested that because students had no real understanding or appreciation
of the character and value of education, they regarded cram as an adequate
way of acquiring it; or else, because cram was the only way they could get
through the system, they were never really able to develop any understanding
or appreciation of education, and were unable to regard it other than in in-
strumental terms. In either case, the discourse of cram and instrumentalism
articulated the perception that western education could neither presume, nor
had succeeded in creating, an Indian subject who could value and appropriate
it in the terms which it required.
 Changing the Subject 27
Does this mean that the British ‘‘aimed’’ to create a new (colonial) subject—
for instance, a rational, enlightened, and even ‘‘expressive’’ subject? Not at
all. Western education was not aimed simply at producing clerks to staff the
lower ranks of the colonial administration, as was sometimes claimed (if it
had been, it would have been wound up in the early 1870s, when British offi-
cials began to warn educated Indians that their numbers exceeded the pro-
portion of positions the government was willing to make available to them),
but neither was it aimed at producing Indian Emiles or Tom Paines. It is the
way of posing the question that is unhelpful here; if posed in the language
of intentionality the immediate response, not unnaturally—given that colo-
nialism was an exploitative and oppressive system—is to deny any proposi-
tion that could be construed as ascribing good intentions to the colonizer. My
argument is not about intention; my claim is not that the British sought to
produce modern subjects, but rather that western, modern knowledge posits
and presumes a subjectivity or type of selfhood, and that this is so irrespec-
tive of intentions. The introduction of modern, western knowledge implied
not just the absorption of ‘‘facts’’ and theorems, the replacement of one set of
ideas with another, but also a deportment, a stylistics, a whole series of ‘‘ad-
justments’’ in how human subjects inhabit the world (a great many of which
are informal rather than formal, unstated rather than thematized). It does
not necessarily follow that the production of such subjects was ever seriously
‘‘intended’’—indeed, if one insists on imputing ill intentions to the rulers
one could even, adapting an argument from Pierre Bourdieu, argue that ‘‘fail-
ure’’ was part of the intention, that the intention behind western education
was to demonstrate the inability of most Indians to acquire it. However, be-
cause knowledge necessarily presupposes a corresponding subjectivity, what
does follow is that any discourse about a failure in disseminating knowledge
would also at some level register this fact, even if it did not explicitly thema-
tize it. I read the discourse of cram and instrumentalism as registering, and
on occasion thematizing, the perception that this subjectivity was lacking.
Thus instrumentalism and cram did not simply express the concern that
western knowledge was being ineffectively diffused. In part they did not even
signify the belief that knowledge was failing to be acquired, for inasmuch
as the successful dissemination of knowledge was gauged by being able to
perform certain functions—doing sums, passing exams—it sometimes had
been acquired. But it turned out that even where this was so, sometimes
the results had to be discounted. Hence an educationist complained that
while Indian students in primary schools displayed an extraordinary facility
28 Subject to Pedagogy
at learning their times-tables, they had ‘‘no real comprehension of quite ele-
mentary number work when presented . . . in an ordinary, everyday, con-
crete way’’;57 and another remarked that even where students could recite
their lessons, they usually had no idea of the meaning, and indeed sometimes
‘‘they did not believe that the sentences could convey any meaning beyond
being read.’’ 58
How and why could successful performance of designated tasks still con-
stitute failure? Unlike the joke that intelligence is defined as that which is
measured by an IQ test, the position taken here was that what was at issue
was not a verifiable skill but rather a mode of relating to knowledge, so that
even where students met the test measuring their acquisition of a skill (such
as by passing their exams after cramming), the result could still be deemed
a ‘‘failure’’ of education. It was a failure of education because mastery of the
task had been achieved by means that sidestepped the transformation of the
subject and the relation between subject and knowledge. What I draw atten-
tion to here is not that the complaint about cram and instrumentalism could
be interpreted as ‘‘also’’ being about subjectivity; I am making the stronger
claim that it made no sense unless it meant this, that only this meaning even
makes intelligible the presumption that cramming and instrumentalism are
a failure of knowledge rather than a form of it.
When the authors of the statements I have been documenting sought to
explain why cramming and instrumentalism were a failure of knowledge
rather than a form of it, they usually did so by distinguishing between under-
standing and ‘‘merely’’ memorizing, between learning how to ‘‘think’’ on the
one hand and regurgitating on the other, between knowledge which is ac-
quired by oneself and thus sustained by conviction and that which is accepted
in deference to authority. Such a conception of knowledge has a lineage. The
Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment all play a part
in the emergence of the notion that only what is independently acquired,
and sustained by personal conviction, counts as knowledge. By the latter part
of the eighteenth century Kant would define Enlightenment in terms of the
free and independent use of one’s reason;59 and Kant the pedagogue, in his
‘‘Announcement’’ of his winter courses for 1765–66, told prospective students
that ‘‘the method of reflecting and concluding for oneself is the skill the stu-
dent is really seeking.’’ 60
For some members of the Indian élite such a conception of knowledge
had become part of their understanding, which is precisely why they were
co-authors of the discourse of instrumentalism and cram. Sir Gooroo Dass
 Changing the Subject 29
Banerjee, High Court judge and first Indian vice-chancellor of Calcutta Uni-
versity, was only one of the more distinguished of many in India who em-
phasized the critical difference between having a student understand some-
thing and ‘‘merely’’ rote-learn it, and between knowledge that had been made
one’s own and secondhand knowledge.61 In his autobiography, the national-
ist leader Bipan Chandra Pal explained that he had taken little interest in the
‘‘traditional’’ education he received as a young child, because the requirement
that he learn Persian passages by heart did not ‘‘suit’’ his ‘‘impatient intellect,
which was eager to know and understand.’’ 62 A play in Hindi about a dis-
enchanted young man, product of an Indian university, has him announce
that he will dedicate his life to founding a ‘‘national’’ school where patrio-
tism will be inculcated, all instruction will be in the vernacular, and rote
learning will be abandoned in favor of teaching pupils how to think.63 An
American observer of the Indian scene used the same language as scores of
Indians and Englishmen when he contrasted teaching students ‘‘to think and
reason’’ with the prevailing ‘‘parrot-like memorizing.’’ 64 Even at the lower
reaches of the educational ladder the difference between successful educa-
tion and failed education was expressed through contrasts of this sort; one
educationist urged adoption of his proposed reforms of primary teaching on
the grounds that ‘‘Dull routine’’ would ‘‘give way to freshness and change, for
passivity we shall have activity, for constant repetition of meaningless sounds
we shall have varied use of intelligent words, and for the stilted and insincere
expression of somebody else’s formal thoughts we shall have the direct and
sincere, even if imperfect, expression of the boy’s own simple thoughts.’’ 65
Lord Curzon’s speech at the convocation of the University of Calcutta in
1902—the same speech in which he declared, in a passage quoted earlier, that
the great fault of education in India was its tendency to cultivate the mem-
ory instead of the mind—is a fine example. Curzon is at this point addressing
himself to those young graduates who may go on to become teachers, and he
continues:

Knowledge is a very different thing from learning by rote, and in the

same way education is a very different thing from instruction. Make
your pupils, therefore, understand the meaning of books, instead of
committing to memory the sentences and lines. Teach them what the
Roman Empire did for the world, in preference to the names and the
dates of the Caesars. Explain to them the meaning of government and
administration and law, instead of making them repeat the names of
30 Subject to Pedagogy
battles or the populations of towns. Educate them to reason and to
understand reasoning, in preference to learning by heart the first three
books of Euclid. Remember too, that knowledge is not a collection of
neatly assorted facts like the specimens in glass cases in a museum.The
pupil whose mind you merely stock in this fashion will no more learn
what knowledge is than a man can hope to speak a foreign language by
poring over a dictionary. What you have to do is not to stuff the mind
of your pupil with the mere thoughts of others, excellent as they may
be, but to teach him to use his own. One correct generalisation drawn
with his own brain is worth a library full of second-hand knowledge.66

In this remarkable passage Curzon tries through a series of contrasts to

convey the critical difference between rote learning and ‘‘real’’ learning. In
one short passage he manages to make the following contrasts:

Knowledge/rote
education/instruction
meaning/memory
explanation/repetition
understanding, reasoning/learning by heart
own thoughts/others’ thoughts
own generalisations/second-hand-knowledge

The first and fifth contrasts are different iterations of the distinction that
Curzon is seeking to make: between genuine knowledge, the ability to under-
stand the meaning of something through one’s own reasoning processes, and
committing something to one’s memory. This difference, the last two con-
trasts indicate, is also the difference between having made knowledge one’s
own, and being ‘‘stuffed’’ with others’ ideas and therefore in possession of
only secondhand knowledge.The second and fourth contrasts refer to the dif-
ferent pedagogies corresponding to these two knowledges—one is inculcated
through an education that explains, the other through an education that re-
quires the student to repeat. Curzon also employs two metaphors to make
his point: knowledge is not like a neat collection of specimens in a museum,
and it cannot be acquired if conceived of thus any more than a language can
be acquired simply by poring over a dictionary. The contrasts and repetitions
weave in and out of each other as Curzon strives to make the same point from
different angles and by use of different metaphors, and returns, again and
again, to the distinction which he fears his student audience may not see:
 Changing the Subject 31
a distinction in which good knowledge and failed knowledge map onto the
distinction between autonomy and heteronomy, between an active subject
and a passive one.

The Indian Heart

If the discourse of cram and instrumentalism expressed the anxiety that west-
ern education was not remaking subjects, we can now in fact go further. The
discourse of cram and instrumentalism expressed the fear that not only was
western education failing to remake colonial subjects, but Indian students
and native practices were deflecting and ‘‘remaking’’—that is, bending and
distorting—education.
To return to the discourse of instrumentalism, attending to it carefully:
the complaint is not, or not usually, that Indian students and their parents
have only mundane and material desires and goals. The complaint is rather
that while they do have other, nonmaterial desires and goals, they do not
see western education as having anything to contribute to the fulfillment of
these. An essayist in the Modern Review wrote, ‘‘The English learning is uni-
versally considered as an Arthakari vidya or learning that enables one to earn
money.’’ 67 Neither the essayist nor his audience assumed that earning money
was the only goal of his fellow countrymen, but rather that ‘‘the English
learning’’ pertained only to this goal. In a similar vein, it was a commonplace
that for a Bengali, ‘‘English is the language of commerce, Bengali the lan-
guage of the heart.’’ Apart from again indicating the instrumental nature of
the engagement with English and with western education, what this com-
monplace also registered was that the Bengali did, afterall, have a heart. How-
ever, his western education did not address this; it addressed him only in his
capacity as a householder, desirous of providing for his family and making his
way in life. Education was failing to have the desired effects not only because
it was inadequately understood and appreciated and hence used instrumen-
tally; more than that, it was being compartmentalized or quarantined, put
into the slot of ‘‘that which enables one to get ahead in life,’’ instead of refash-
ioning the understanding of what constitutes the good life. Such an attitude
was cheerfully and pithily summed up by an unrepentant Muslim judicial
official, who told an inspector of schools, ‘‘Men labour for Din [otherworldly
purposes, salvation] or Duniya [this-worldly purposes]. For Din we have our
own books, for Duniya ‘Marshman’s Guide to Civil Law in Urdu.’ This is sure
to lead us to a Principal Sadir Aminship [i.e. a promotion].’’ 68
32 Subject to Pedagogy
And what of cram? As we observed earlier, it was frequently noted that
Indians had a ‘‘gift’’ for memorizing. The Calcutta University Commission Re-
port observed, ‘‘There is clear evidence that the average student in Bengal has
powers of memorization that would be regarded as exceptional in Europe . . .
his main effort is devoted to memorization, and . . . such memorisation en-
ables him to pass the university examination.’’ 69 This capacity was seen to be
closely connected with an indigenous pedagogy which, it was generally be-
lieved, had relied largely or exclusively on rote learning. The Indian student,
many concluded, had drawn upon this, such that what was meant to be trans-
formed had infected the agency of transformation. The report of the Bom-
bay Board of Education for 1845 observed that the government-established
vernacular schools were a ‘‘considerable improvement’’ over the indigenous
schools they were intended to replace, but then noted: ‘‘we do not think that
we are at liberty to assume that our vernacular establishments as at present
conducted are capable of operating any effective permanent improvement
on the native mind.’’ Why was this so? A major reason was that the govern-
ment schools had been infected by old methods, simply applying them to new
materials: ‘‘The same inefficacious habit of committing everything which is
put before them to memory exclusively prevails; catechisms of geography,
of grammar, and the Government regulations are all treated in this man-
ner, besides the complicated and needlessly long multiplication tables. And
the people we are assured are much prepossessed in favour of these old prac-
tices.’’ 70 Seventy years later the same point about the relation between the
‘‘old’’ and the ‘‘new’’ learning was still being made: ‘‘There were no radical
changes, no new experiments in education . . . There was the same teaching
of set and prescribed textbooks . . . the same emphasis on the study of words,
the same taxing of the memory . . . The only marked difference was that the
pale glow of religion which had cast a halo round education was swept away
and it emerged definitely as a secular activity. It would not save your soul but
it might secure you a job.’’ 71

Western education was to transform knowledge and the recipient of it,

but indigenous practices had warped the system, and the Indian student had
bent the system to his own strengths, finding loopholes which resulted in
the pedagogic process being shaped by Indian students (and teachers), rather
than the students reshaped by pedagogy. One could ask whether this result
should be read as an example of ‘‘resistance’’—the native fighting back, by
subverting the practices and disciplines being foisted upon him. There is a
 Changing the Subject 33
sense in which one could see this as resistance, but it is a very specific sense
of ‘‘resistance,’’one not closely tied to intentionality, and partly as a conse-
quence of this, lacking heroic connotations. Wendy Brown notes that ‘‘resis-
tance is by no means inherently subversive of power . . . it is only by recourse
to a very non-Foucaultian moral evaluation of power as bad or as that which
is to be overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with that which is
good, progressive, or seeking an end to domination.’’ 72 Just as I have insisted
that western education posited the relation between knowledge and knower
such that memory and mere mastery of authorities could not be regarded as
a form of knowledge—without having the ‘‘positing’’ done by colonial offi-
cials who intended to produce modern Indian subjects—so one can say that
it met with resistance in the form of the Indian student, who frequently
failed to become such a subject. In both cases what is principally at issue
are not intentions but rather the ways in which knowledge positions the re-
cipient, and sometimes fails to do so. Thus are we able to recognize that the
potentially transformative force of western education met an immovable ob-
ject in the form of cramming and instrumentalism, and yet we avoid the
absurdity of treating dowry-seeking crammers as heroic figures, resolutely
fighting off British hegemony. And because we can write of resistance with-
out presuming that Indian students were ‘‘seeking an end to domination,’’
we shall observe in chapter 6 that those who did seek an end to (colonial)
domination, such as nationalists, did not resist western education, which
they instead saw as necessary to the emergence of a free and independent
nation.
The question for the moment is this: If the Indian student was bending
things his own way, was the failure to shape subjectivity occurring because
another subjectivity was intervening—an indigenous one? Having shown
that western knowledge presupposed a corresponding subjectivity, and that
the discourse of instrumentalism and cramming registered its absence, we
can now ask whether this insight testifies to the presence of another subjec-
tivity, one connected to indigenous knowledges. For these knowledges, as I
show below, posited a different relation between knowledge and the knower.
The answer to this question turns on whether the ‘‘difference’’ at issue is one
best registered by stretching the category of ‘‘subject’’ to accommodate di-
verse ways of relating to the world and our knowledge of it. But to arrive at
the point where this question presents itself to us, first we need to address
the indigenous knowledge practices that Indians were said to be drawing on
as the source of their prodigious powers of rote.
34 Subject to Pedagogy

Other Knowledges
Modern knowledge, for all its diversity, is conceived as unitary. It is distin-
guished according to its objects (the human sciences, further subdivided by
discipline; and the natural sciences, similarly subdivided), rather than ac-
cording to the persons for whom it is intended. One consequence of con-
ceiving it thus is that the transmission of knowledge can be organized ac-
cording to degree of difficulty: primary, secondary, tertiary, but in principle
accessible to all. By contrast, in India knowledge was always in the plural,
always took the form of so many knowledges and practices: esoteric and re-
stricted knowledges accessible only to some social groups, ‘‘practical’’ and
more widely available knowledges, varying according to caste and region and
religion, and none of all this organized as an ‘‘educational system.’’ Collec-
tively this situation yielded a riotous variety of knowledge practices, from
unstructured and occasional ones to more structured ‘‘institutions’’ such as
maktabs and madrassas and tols and pyal ‘‘schools’’ and patshalas and others,73
with knowledge passed on by gurumahashoys and pandits and pantojis and
maulvis and upadhyayas and acharyas—only some among the variety of words
for ‘‘teacher’’ or ‘‘learned man’’ in the subcontinent.Thus we cannot compare
modern knowledge with indigenous knowledge, but rather have to specify
to what we are choosing to refer among the various indigenous knowledges
(and the practices in which they were embedded and those through which
they were transmitted).
One type of knowledge with strictly coded and prescribed forms dictat-
ing how it was to be transmitted was knowledge of the Vedas, the sacred
Hindu texts that go back some three thousand years and more. Knowledge of
the Vedas was to be cultivated by those Brahmins whose task it was to recite
from the relevant sacred sources at sacrificial occasions, and to preserve the
Vedas through recitation.74 (The Vedas had been orally composed and have
been maintained, over an extraordinary time span, by oral transmission—
Vedic texts are srutis, truths meant to be heard, which were not committed to
writing till late in the day, and the tradition has injunctions against learning
them from writing.) Each Brahmin family which cultivated Vedic knowledge
had its own sutra, to be kept and passed on (but only to those considered
authorized to receive it) through svadhyaya, oral transmission. The archaic
Sanskrit in which the Vedas were composed was superseded by classical San-
skrit and then the various vernaculars, but they continue to be recited and
transmitted in their original form. It was to become a common criticism that
 Changing the Subject 35
these Brahmins were in fact unlearned, for they did not understand what
they recited. Even Indians who sought to defend indigenous traditions were
sensitive to this charge, and either denied its truth or devised ingenious argu-
ments to explain and excuse it.75 But the criticism missed the point: the Vedas
are apauruseya, of nonhuman origin, and the words are the meaning—that is,
the meaning of the texts is imbricated with their sounds and the forms of
their recitation. Hence how they were said was all-important, and the sacred
texts include elaborate instructions on how they are to be recited—with what
accents, where the tone is to fall, and so on. In svadhyaya, Frits Staal explains,
‘‘there is no sharp distinction between word and meaning.’’ 76 This does not
mean that they have no meaning, or that the meaning is unimportant, but
rather that what the reciter and the Indologist understand by ‘‘meaning’’
might be two different things; and any approach predicated on the notion
that words express or represent a meaning anterior to them will always find
this to be ‘‘mere’’ memory.
It may be objected that this example is unilluminating, because this par-
ticular knowledge of theVedas (there are others) is essentially liturgical. I have
already noted that the subcontinent had knowledges rather than knowledge,
so let us then consider other forms.
Also part of subcontinental knowledges are arts or sciences, such as (what
we would call) grammars, logic, poetics, medicine, and astrology. These are
certainly not liturgical; they involve intellectual operations like interpreta-
tion and classification. For instance, a philosophy was extracted from (or read
into) the Vedas, producing Vedanta. Here ‘‘meaning’’ in a sense that we would
recognize is very much present. But even here, we should notice two impor-
tant differences when these knowledges are contrasted with modern ones,
apart from the obvious differences of content.
First, memory learning was still an essential component of these knowl-
edges.77 The mode of transmitting knowledge invariably required commit-
ting vast amounts of material to memory (the texts memorized were usually
composed in the form of verses, aphorisms, and other mnemonic forms, in-
dicating they were composed to be memorized); and memory learning in the
form of recitation and chanting was valorized by the traditions in which these
knowledges were embedded, in the form of injunctions to memorize, prayers
asking for the gift of memory, and rituals and initiation ceremonies.
The common ‘‘explanation’’ for the emphasis on memory learning is that
books and manuscripts were scarce, in other words that memory learning
was a ‘‘technique’’ necessitated by the shortcomings of technology. We are all
36 Subject to Pedagogy
familiar with Derrida’s argument that western metaphysics privileges speech
over writing; when it comes to historical understanding, however, we appar-
ently assume that speech and memory are what you have to take recourse to
in lieu of writing (else why does memory learning need ‘‘explaining’’ at all?).
But this explanation does not account for premodern traditions of learning
even in Europe, where (as in India) even after book manuscripts were made
more widely available, memory training did not become redundant. In the
high Middle Ages Thomas Aquinas had stored an extraordinary number of
‘‘texts’’ in his memory; Aquinas’s capacity was exceptional, but the phenome-
non was still common. Books themselves were for a long time conceived of as
mnemonics, as ‘‘memorial cues and aids,’’ and people often read books in order
to commit them to memory.78 In her important The Book of Memory: A Study of
Memory in Medieval Culture, Mary Carruthers tells us that in medieval Europe
memoria was not just a ‘‘technique,’’ necessitated by the absence of the print-
ing press, but an ethical practice, a discipline, and a way of developing char-
acter, judgment, and piety.79 The knowledges of the subcontinent were very
different from those of medieval Europe, but they shared this feature—that
memory was an essential component of knowledge—implying a different re-
lation between knower and known—not simply a technique necessitated by
the absence of technology.
The second feature to note about knowledges of these higher arts is the ex-
traordinary importance attached to forms or observances—to a stylistics and
a deportment—as distinct from the content of learning. This feature is seen
above all in the emphasis on absolute respect and devotion to the teacher.
Texts which discuss how knowledge is to be transmitted devote at least as
much attention to this aspect of it as to questions of method or ‘‘curricu-
lum.’’ Indeed, the question of how matters are best learned was in large part
answered by the injunction to respect and obey the teacher. Lessons were to
be commenced and concluded by having the student clasp the teacher’s feet
in his hands; and the injunction acarya devo bhava, ‘‘may your teacher be your
god,’’ was something every student knew.
We moderns have a ready-made explanation for this. Schooling, we will
say, is not just about the transmission of knowledge but also about social-
ization, and about power. The child who is enjoined to treat his teacher with
respect is receiving lessons in authority and order, over and above the knowl-
edge he receives. If we are moderns who are capable of subjecting our own
practices to the same critical scrutiny, we will add that the same is true of
modern schooling; the discipline of the school bell, of standing in line and
 Changing the Subject 37
the like, instills the more abstract notions of order and authority which our
societies require and continually reproduce.
Such an explanation of indigenous education would not be beside the
point, but it would be grievously incomplete. Power and authority in India
there were aplenty, no doubt; but the limit of this explanation is reached
when we assume that modes of transmission are separable from the knowl-
edge transmitted. We assume this for our knowledges, because a defining
feature of modern knowledge is its formal character, the assumption that it
is in principle conceivable outside of the current network of relations (and
power) which characterizes the transmission of knowledge in most societies.
Rationalization in the Weberian sense means precisely this: that knowledge
is freed from substantive contexts and can be used ‘‘technically,’’ to match
means to ends. But the same is not true of the knowledges I am describing
here. In ‘‘traditional’’ learning the content and the form are indistinguish-
able: absorbing the ‘‘information’’ or mastering the ‘‘skills’’ is not the content,
with respect and awe for one’s teacher the form, the process through which
the knowledge happens to be transmitted; all are aspects of the same process.
The knowledge transmitted was not a separable ‘‘thing,’’ which happened to
be transmitted through the guru-shishya relation; it could only be transmit-
ted through that relation. This is not to say you cannot separate the two; some
of these knowledges have now been wrenched from their contexts and have a
new life as part of modern knowledge (for example, ayurvedic medicine), even
if usually at the fringes of it. We sometimes think that this characteristic—
that these knowledges can be reproduced in and through altogether different
contexts—goes to ‘‘prove’’ that theircontexts were so much window-dressing,
contingent and inessential form rather than substantive content. In fact, of
course, it proves nothing of the sort. We can treat machines and the knowl-
edge which produces them as magical, and worship them—people do—and
we do not thereby assume that this is their reality, and that scientific pro-
tocols and factories and laboratories are so much window-dressing, fetishes
obscuring the enchantment which is the truth of these machines.
Let us finally consider one more form, or class, of knowledge practices. I
have said that in the subcontinent knowledges were related to status, for the
more ritualized and specialized knowledges were not available to all—not just
‘‘in fact,’’ because of poverty and inequality, but ‘‘in principle.’’ The knowl-
edges described above fall into that category. But therewere other knowledges
which were suitable for almost all: for higher castes that might tarry briefly
before proceeding to acquire knowledges corresponding to their status, for
38 Subject to Pedagogy
trading castes, for occupations connected with administering land and col-
lecting revenue, and even, sometimes, for the children of tillers of the soil.
The patshala and pyal schools (whether of the ‘‘basic’’ sort or the more special-
ized sort which taught account keeping, writing business letters, and other
skills to children who were to go on to the hereditary profession of their
caste) often transmitted a knowledge which, unlike that described above, had
a practical value but little or no ritual status. Moreover, these schools often
did so in a manner which was exceedingly effective. The British authorities
were sometimes obliged to acknowledge as much, though they would usu-
ally add that this ‘‘success’’ was a form of failure. Almost all observers noted
that in indigenous schools the boys memorized their times-tables with ex-
traordinary facility. A senior official of the education department reported
that the traditional or ‘‘native’’ system of math instruction, which entailed
learning tables (including fractional tables) ‘‘up to an incredible standard,’’
combined with the use of rules of thumb or formulae ( gurs), ‘‘produce in the
pupil a capacity for rapid and certain calculation which would quite nonplus
an English schoolboy’’;80 and an article in the Calcutta Review on arithmetic
teaching in indigenous schools commented, ‘‘the method employed may not
be as rational as ours, but the practical result is a much greater facility in
simple calculations and account-keeping than is gained by the pupils of Gov-
ernment schools.’’ 81
Why, then, was this a shortcoming? Because the same students, asked to
do anything out of the ordinary, could not apply their arithmetic, just as
the students could sometimes read entire passages well, but on being asked
what they meant, often could not explain them, and sometimes did not even
know that the passages had a meaning beyond their recitation. That is, these
students confused knowledge with its application, and had no knowledge
outside its application. Our conception and practice of knowledge are very
different. To be sure, we too have ‘‘applied knowledges,’’ but each of these
is an application of a knowledge which is always in principle independent
of its uses. Indeed, the processes of rationalization mean that increasingly,
knowledges and skills which could once only be acquired ‘‘on the job,’’ and
which had no existence outside their use or application, are now deemed to
have a formal component, which is a knowledge like any other; their practical
component now presupposes a mastery of the theory of which the practical
component is the application. Nursing and tourism become university sub-
jects, knowledges which have to be learned in such a way that the students
can draw upon their stock of formal knowledge and ‘‘apply’’ it according to
 Changing the Subject 39
context—each person his or her own casuist. One can see why for the modern
observer the Indian child’s facility with arithmetic, however impressive, was
deemed inadequate—to modern eyes a pedagogy which cannot produce the
ability to apply a general knowledge to specific cases is a failed pedagogy.

Knowing and Being

From this description one thing at least should be very apparent, namely that
comparing the different curriculums and pedagogies of indigenous schools
with those of the modern type is to miss the point, because indigenous prac-
tices were not the same thing with a different content. As Tim Mitchell ob-
serves (in the context of a discussion of the sort of learning which occurs in
the great mosque of al-Azhar), in cases such as this the very category of edu-
cation ‘‘is a misnomer, a misapprehending of the kinds of practice in which
the life of the community . . . was lived. It is to take a dominant practice of
the late nineteenth and twentieth century and project it back onto a world in
which it did not exist, resulting in unhelpful observations about the limited
nature of its ‘curriculum.’ ’’ 82 If we categorize these knowledges as a form
of ‘‘education,’’ we are condemned to reproduce Macaulay’s understanding,
seeing in these knowledges only inferior versions of modern knowledge and
pedagogy. It is only if we grant that these knowledges corresponded to differ-
ent ways of constituting the relation between knower and known, different
ways of being and not just learning, that we can begin to grasp them in their
specificity.
If it is true that indigenous education corresponded to what I here pro-
visionally label a different way of being and not just knowing, this helps to
explain why ‘‘indigenous education’’ continued for quite some time to be
popular (often disconcertingly so, for educational officials), especially among
those (lower) classes which did not see themselves as being in a position to tap
into the instrumental benefits of western education. The Indian Education
(Hunter) Commission noted that ‘‘the schoolmaster of an old fashioned in-
digenous school is much respected’’; and even the ‘‘shouting and confusion’’
in class which the commission saw as characteristic of indigenous schools,
‘‘form part of the peculiar charm which parents appreciate in the indigenous
system.’’ 83 The institution of the indigenous ‘‘schoolteacher’’ was, many ob-
servers attested, one which ordinary folk were reluctant to regard as super-
seded. A speaker at the Madras Educational Conference of 1898 sought to
explain why this might have been so: ‘‘[The pyal school teacher] begins the
40 Subject to Pedagogy
school with the rising sun, and the din of the school house, which is like
music to the parents’ ears, is over only with the setting sun. He makes the
pupils cite correctly or incorrectly stanzas from standard authors, entertains
them with stories of perennial interest from the great epics of the Maha-
bharata or Ramayana . . . When the Dussera [festival] comes once a year it
delights the heart of many a proud mother to see her son decked out in all the
colours of the rainbow, and march with banners flying and music playing,
and perform the kolatum dance.’’ By contrast, the teacher of the government
vernacular school ‘‘goes to school after the sun has risen high and closes it
before the sun sets. He does not allow the pupils to cry out at the top of their
voice, and the absence of the accustomed din of the school house goes much
against him. He does not pay court to every villager. He scorns the Dussera
festivities.’’ 84
No doubt this description does not speak for all parents whose children at-
tended a pyal school or patshala; I am not claiming any ‘‘representative’’ status
for the passages excerpted above. Nor am I ‘‘romanticizing’’ the pyal schools:
untouchable castes were not permitted access to these institutions, and more
generally, the life of the communities in question was also characterized by
considerable inequality and brutality. What I am pointing to in drawing at-
tention to how ‘‘indigenous schooling’’ differed from modern schooling is
this: if and only if we assume (as we often unthinkingly do) that both these
were types of schooling, then we are bound to rush to our normal judgments
about the inadequacies of ‘‘indigenous education,’’ and to assume that what-
ever the failings of modern education may have been, and may still be, it is
incomparably superior to its Indian predecessor and competitor. But if the
comparison is not of like with like, then judgments become less obvious and
more complicated.
This was perhaps why even those whose western education had been pre-
ceded by a few years of ‘‘traditional education’’—and there were many such in
the nineteenth century and into the twentieth 85—were of two minds about
this ‘‘premodern education.’’ One might expect that those who had been
graced by ‘‘understanding’’ rather than repetition, and who had gone on to
inhabit the modern institutions of law courts, councils, and universities,
might be unambiguous in rejecting a pedagogy which stifled their subjec-
tivity; that having experienced two kinds of education, they would, in J. S.
Mill’s terms, emphatically opt to be ‘‘Socrates dissatisfied’’ rather than a ‘‘pig
satisfied.’’ In fact, reactions were sometimes more complex.
An interesting example—again, I do not claim any representative status
 Changing the Subject 41
for it—is that of S. N. Chaturvedi, an official in the Provincial Educational
Service of the United Provinces. Chaturvedi was the author of two books, and
in The History of Rural Education in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (1840–
1926) he describes his own experiences of indigenous education.86 After some
basic instruction from a maulvi at home Chaturvedi attended a patshala in his
village, then a mahajani patshala in Allahabad where he learned bookkeeping,
arithmetic, and the mahajani (bankers’) script, and then a Sanskrit patshala
where he learned Sanskrit vocabulary, verses, and grammar, and a few verses
of the Vedas, before he moved on to the English schools which ‘‘had caught’’
his ‘‘fancy,’’ subsequent to which he took a degree from Allahabad University
and a teacher’s diploma from London. Chaturvedi is an official of the newedu-
cational system (he is receiving the patronage of an eminent Englishman, Sir
Philip Hartog, who has written the foreword to his book, and he dedicates it
to the director of public instruction of the United Provinces). He intersperses
the description of his indigenous education with a condemnation of its nar-
rowness, its lack of practicality, and the great reliance on memory learning.
But these criticisms are belied by the tone of his description, his detailed ac-
count of the daily routine, of a teacher whose ‘‘stern looks and authoritative
voice were generally sufficient to keep us little urchins in order,’’ 87 and of the
festivities that the schoolchildren indulged in on the Nag Panchami day, as
well as by his reproduction in full of some of the couplets and aphorisms
that the pupils learned, and his summation of the attributes that the edu-
cation instilled: ‘‘Respect for authority, devotion to learning for its own sake,
humility, an almost ascetic attitude towards life, and great regard for spiri-
tual values were the outstanding traits of the products, of these schools.’’ 88
At the point where the lyricism of the description threatens to overwhelm
the narrative, Chaturvedi draws back thus: ‘‘these very virtues were their de-
fects . . . The respect for authority was so much emphasized that the pupil
could not think or act for himself . . . Humility was so much encouraged that
all courage to differ or resist was completely killed.’’ 89 To those concerned
with ‘‘national advancement’’ all this made the people look too much toward
the past. From the point of view of the individual, however, ‘‘in spite of the
disadvantages they suffered owing to the causes described above, the more
educated of them obtained a capacity of intellectual enjoyment and material
contentment which made their lives bright, cheerful and happy. Even those
who could obtain only the necessary rudiments of the three R’s shared in
these advantages.’’ 90
This is, at the very least, a rather ambiguous condemnation. When it
42 Subject to Pedagogy
comes to evaluating his childhood experiences under the category ‘‘educa-
tion,’’ the (modern) criteria built into this category lead Chaturvedi to the
standard oppositions (thinking versus remembering, one’s own knowledge
versus secondhand knowledge) and compel a negative judgment. But the
terms of his description overflow ‘‘education’’ and clearly become a descrip-
tion of a way of life—and as they do so, the description itself assumes an
altogether softer and more benign hue.

Subjectivity and Difference

Documenting the discourse of what I have labeled ‘‘cram’’ and ‘‘instrumen-
talism,’’ I have argued that this discourse did more than signify a widespread
feeling that knowledge was being unsuccessfully disseminated: it is best read
as signifying that the dissemination of western knowledge required, but had
not produced, a corresponding form of knowing subject. I have gone on to
ask whether this meant that there was another subjectivity present, one frus-
trating the emergence of the desired one.
It would seem that I have answered this question very emphatically. Cram-
ming, as we have seen, was widely attributed to the survival and adaptation
of indigenous knowledge practices. These other knowledges and associated
forms of learning corresponded, I have argued, to a subjectivity or selfhood
different from that presumed by modern knowledge and pedagogy.The obvi-
ous implication—‘‘obvious’’ only because I have carefully been leading the
way to it—is that the failure to produce the modern subject testified to the
resilience of an existing one, the one it was to have displaced, the ‘‘native’’
subject presumed by the indigenous learning practices described above.
I will embrace this conclusion, though in a very provisional way, sug-
gesting that it is indeed necessary to think this thought, but only to then
problematize and surpass it. I will conclude by arguing that it is necessary
to entertain the idea of a ‘‘different subjectivity,’’ but that we cannot end
the argument there, for the ‘‘different’’ in ‘‘different subjectivity’’ is simulta-
neously enabled and obscured by the concept of ‘‘subjectivity.’’
Built into the discourse of cram and instrumentalism is a certain ambi-
guity or imprecision. In some cases cram and instrumentalism are seen as
failures of pedagogy: too much rote learning, and the wrong sort of under-
standing of the value and purpose of western knowledge. That this concern
is tied to and presumes a certain conception of the subject is something that
we, as readers and interpreters of this discourse, unearth in it. In other cases
 Changing the Subject 43
(such as in Curzon’s convocation speech, discussed earlier) the failure of peda-
gogy is explicitly connected to subjectivity, and even dimly registers that the
absence in question is not a complete lack, but something indicating the
presence of another way of relating to knowledge. The second understanding
is unquestionably the deeper one, but upon closer examination it turns out
to be not that different from the first: the absence of the desired subjectivity
is understood as the presence of another, but this ‘‘other’’ turns out to be an
inadequate or, more accurately, unrealized version of the first. The subject
who loses himself in the world by cramming, for instance, is clearly differ-
ent from the subject who stands apart from the world and makes it his own;
but he also turns out to be a (potentially) modern subject who has simply
failed to emancipate himself from his background. Why this ambiguity or
imprecision?
Because within the categories in which this question is posed, ‘‘different
sort of subject’’ and ‘‘failing to fully become a subject’’ are in principle in-
separable. All forms of subjectivity turn out to be variations upon—and more
precisely, partially realized versions of—a single subjectivity: a ‘‘different’’
subject is always one who has failed to ‘‘fully’’ become a subject. Facetiously:
in this categorical frame there are only acorns, oaks, and acorns on the way
to becoming oaks; a chestnut will always appear as an acorn which for some
reason is suffering from arrested development. My point is not simply that
the notion of subjectivity has a teleology built into it, such that all forms of
subjectivity culminate in modern forms of selfhood, nor, by implication, that
subjectivity has a certain normativity built into it. The point I am seeking to
make incorporates both of these, but also goes beyond them. To clarify, let
me use an example.
The term ‘‘slave’’ is for us moderns a social category, meaning that we
understand ‘‘slave’’ to signify a free man en-slaved, rather than, as for the
Greeks, understanding it to denote a form of selfhood. Our idea of human
selfhood or subjectivity has, in other words, a certain notion of ‘‘freedom’’
already built into it.Words like freedom make us think of Rousseau and Kant
and the French and American revolutions, and of ‘‘fuller’’ conceptions of free-
dom—not just freedom as non-enslavement but as autonomy, as choosing
our ends, and the means toward them. These associations are of course apt,
and are part of what I have been invoking in insisting that modern knowl-
edge presumes a form of subjectivity—active rather than passive, and so on.
But the ‘‘first’’ sense of freedom—first in the sense of being both logically
prior and historically earlier—is freedom in the sense of not being merged
44 Subject to Pedagogy
into the background, lost into nature like animals and slaves, nomos rather
than physis. The Greeks did not think that all men possessed this freedom,
and thus it was not built into their conception of what it means to be a
human self.91
My point is this. When it comes to the modern self—the self who is heir
to the bourgeois revolutions and to Kantian philosophy—we, being intelli-
gent products of a historicist age, can acknowledge that the free, autonomous
chooser possessed of rights is not the only type of human that there has been.
With a certain effort and a certain vigilance we can try to desist from reading
all other forms of selfhood as leading toward and culminating in this one,
and thus as being incomplete forms of this one. Doing so is our way of stay-
ing sensitive to difference. But our notion of self or subject is not thereby
rendered, as we imagine, into an empty form into which any content can be
poured; it already has a certain content inscribed into its very form. When we
‘‘think’’ difference we do so in the manner of Weber, as described in the Intro-
duction; we picture other humans who in turn picture the world in ways
very different from our own. The subject who threatens to merge into the
world appears, to be sure, as very different from us, but his difference lies in
his adopting a stance toward the world that is one of merging. The subject
who attributes his agency to supernatural powers is again very different from
us; but his difference lies in his attributing his own beliefs and capacities to
another. Yet like us, he too pictures the world, he too endows it with mean-
ings (meanings different from ours); and that being so, we are inescapably
led back to seeing his sense of self as a version of ours, lacking only in self-
consciousness (all subjects endow the world with meaning, but we modern
subjects know that this is what we do). If we nonetheless declare that this
subject’s way of looking at the world is ‘‘as valid’’ as ours, our intention is
belied by the mode in which it is thought. Our commitment to difference
remains embedded in intentions, while our categories, the grammar of our
thought, lead us always into teleology and normativity. The best we can do
is to be vigilant; but it is an unequal struggle, for we struggle to express one
thing, while our conceptual language leads us to express another.
It seems to me necessary to entertain the thought that cramming and in-
strumentalism testified to the presence of another subjectivity, and to travel
this route of argument. Without doing so—if we did not ‘‘stretch’’ the cate-
gory ‘‘subject’’ so that we could imagine different kinds of subjects—the ques-
tions of cramming and instrumentalism would remain ones of pedagogy and
technique, and ‘‘difference’’ would appear only in its racist form, as the ques-
 Changing the Subject 45
tion of the stubbornly unintelligent Indian.We cannot dispense with histori-
cizing, because the alternative is a universalism in which there is only ever
one norm, and all difference is a deviation from it, or a journey toward it. But
nor, I end by suggesting, should we be content with it. I do not wish to end
this chapter with a resounding demonstration that the absence of modern
subjectivity, to which the discourse of cram and instrumentalism testified,
was the consequence of another subjectivity, an indigenous one. Instead I
suggest that we need to search for ways by which we can ‘‘think’’ this dif-
ference without substantializing it into another ‘‘subjectivity,’’ and thereby
bringing it under a category which erases with one hand the difference which
it writes with the other. We need to search for forms of thought which allow
us to recognize that there have been and are ways of thinking the world other
than modern, occidental ones; but also ways of thinking difference without
invoking the Subject and without setting into motion an anthropology which
ceaselessly transforms human beings into Man.
chapter two

Diagnosing Moral Crisis

Western Knowledge and Its Indian Object

Nineteenth-century discussions of education presupposed that education

was not simply about the transmission of knowledge, but also about the
shaping of character. The elementary education provided for the poorer
classes, for which the English state undertook responsibility in 1870, was in-
tended to inculcate the virtues of industry, thrift, and self-discipline in the
lower classes. For the upper classes the public school was thought to instill
manly independence and leadership. When the British Indian government
undertook some responsibility for educating its Indian subjects, there was a
similar expectation that this would lead ‘‘to the introduction among them of
useful knowledge and to the improvement of their moral character.’’ 1 With
the subsequent decision of 1835 that government patronage was to be limited
to western education, this emphasis was affirmed; if education had a bene-
ficial effect upon character, then instruction in western, rational knowledge
was surely likely to lead to the greatest improvement in the Indian character.
It was generally assumed that the western-educated native would be hon-
est and upright, and thus more reliable and diligent in the service of gov-
ernment than his corrupt predecessor; and that a sign of his intellectual and
moral superiority would be his recognition of the virtues of British rule, and
his secure attachment to the continuation of that rule. Christian missionaries
also hoped to improve the native by means of the schools that they provided,
by weaning him from evil customs and mistaken beliefs, and equipping him
with the means to make his way in the world without falling prey to its temp-
tations. They hoped to effect the greatest improvement of all by making him
a Christian.
However in 1913 a major government statement on educational policy ob-
served that ‘‘the most thoughtful minds in India lament the tendency of the

47
48 Subject to Pedagogy
existing system of education to develop the intellectual at the expense of the
moral and religious faculties,’’ and went so far as to declare the tendency ‘‘un-
questionably the most important educational problem of the time.’’ 2 This
claim marked the climax of the discourse on the ‘‘moral decline’’ and ‘‘moral
crisis’’ of the educated Indian—a discourse expressing the fear that the im-
provement consequent upon education had not in fact occurred, but rather
that educated Indians had become less moral, less pious, and less disciplined
than before. This discourse was coterminous with the beginnings of west-
ern education, and had been gaining in intensity since the last quarter of
the nineteenth century. By the early years of the new century ‘‘moral crisis’’
was a matter of almost obsessive debate; an Englishman observed that it was
the subject of mention in ‘‘every discussion on Indian education,’’ 3 while an
Indian educator complained that the subject of the ‘‘moral decline’’ of the
educated Indian, and the commonly proposed remedies of moral or religious
education, had become a ‘‘pest of the platform.’’ 4
Western knowledge was disseminated through schools and universities
because it was presumed superior to the indigenous knowledges it replaced.
In this chapter I examine how the same knowledge being disseminated in
schools and universities was also pressed into service to characterize and ex-
plain the moral decline of the educated Indian. Howadequatewas this knowl-
edge to explaining its own, unexpected effects? Could it comprehend and
account for its own failures? And more generally, what was the relation be-
tween western knowledge as a means for comprehending social changes in
India and western knowledge as one of the agents of that change?

‘‘Unhinged and Unsettled’’

The warning that educated Indians were in danger of being plunged into a
moral crisis was first raised, principally by missionaries, in the years follow-
ing the earliest government patronage of western education. The policy of
not permitting religious instruction in government schools and colleges—
so much at odds with the situation in Britain, where state involvement in
education was to be accompanied by bitter debates over the religious charac-
ter of education, and over whether secular or religious bodies were to control
it—was pursued because of a strong feeling in official ranks that any inter-
ference with the religious beliefs of their Indian subjects might endanger
British rule and East India Company profits. It became one of the goals of the
missionaries’ agitation in India to persuade the government in India or the
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 49
authorities back home to overturn what they called a ‘‘godless’’ educational
policy. One of their chief arguments was that the resolutely secular education
offered in government schools and colleges was bound to lead to impiety and
skepticism.5
Missionaries did not object to the provision of secular learning as such.The
historic controversies which had marked the advance of secular knowledges
in the Christian West were never played out in colonial India. Missionaries
and government officials alike shared the belief that modern science was a
solvent of Indian religious beliefs, which in their view mingled a false the-
ology with fantastical and nonsensical explanations of the world and its func-
tioning. Inasmuch as western learning undermined native understandings
of how the world worked, it could not but also call into question their faith
in their religion.Those who had played a leading role in the decision of 1835 to
limit government patronage to western education, including Thomas Mac-
aulay and Charles Trevelyan, had insisted that government-provided educa-
tion must not allowany religious instruction and must not be associated with
any attempts at conversion. Nonetheless, they and many others anticipated
that this education would be conducive to the Christianization of India. Mac-
aulay wrote in 1836, ‘‘No Hindoo, who has received an English education, ever
remains sincerely attached to his own religion . . . It is my firm belief that,
if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater
among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence.’’ 6 Sharing in this
conviction, missionaries made the provision of education one of their chief
tasks in India, in the hope that western education would prove corrosive of
Hindu beliefs and would thus prepare the minds of educated Hindus for a
later receptiveness to the word of God.7
The Scottish Church missionary Alexander Duff revealingly described how
he came to the important discovery that the ‘‘truths of modern literature and
science’’ could play an important, if largely negative or destructive, role in
promoting Christianity. In his monumental India and Indian Missions, he re-
counts how, soon after the opening of his General Assembly Institution in
Calcutta in 1830, he was conducting a junior class in which he asked, ‘‘What
is rain?’’ A student replied that it came from the trunk of the elephant of the
god Indra. Pressed for his source, the student cited his guru, whose authority
in turn was a Shastra, a Hindu text. Instead of directly contradicting the stu-
dent, Duff describes how he led his students through the everyday example
of rice boiling in a pot—the rising of steam, condensation, the re-formation
of water—at each point explaining the process and gaining the assent of stu-
50 Subject to Pedagogy
dents for the explanation. Assent is spontaneously given—heat causes the
evaporation of water in the form of steam, etc.—until suddenly one boy, ‘‘as
if . . . finding that he had . . . gone too far,’’ manifests alarm and exclaims,
‘‘Ah! What have I been thinking? If your account be the true one, what becomes
of our Shastra?’’ The explanation, Duff writes, introduced the first doubt, the
first suspicion, regarding the truth of the Hindu faith, and thus constituted
the first step in ‘‘a mental struggle, which, though painfully protracted . . .
only terminated in the case of some, with the entire overthrow of Hindu-
ism.’’ 8 If this encounter with western scientific knowledge was a revelation
for his student, the incident was also, Duff declares, something of a revela-
tion for him: ‘‘It now seemed as if geography, general history, and natural
philosophy,—from their direct effect in destroying Hinduism,—had been di-
vested of their secularity, and stamped with an impress of sacredness. In this
view of the case, the teaching of these branches seemed no longer an indirect,
secondary, ambiguous part of missionary labour,—but, in a sense, as direct,
primary, and indubitable as the teaching of religion itself.’’ 9
In Duff ’s school what had been destroyed could be replaced, since the
corrosive or ‘‘destructive’’ effects of western learning only paved the way for
teaching the true word of God. But where, as in government schools, this was
not permitted, missionaries contended that only destruction occurred, and
that the result would be skepticism, impiety, and immorality among the edu-
cated classes in India. In the first half of the nineteenth century they would
frequently point to the controversy surrounding Hindu College as proof of
their contention. Established in 1817 by some of the leading Brahmins in Cal-
cutta as a nondenominational center for the teaching of the new, European
knowledge, in the 1830s Hindu College was to briefly become home to a ratio-
nalist and skeptical ‘‘movement,’’ led by a young and charismatic teacher,
Henry Derozio. Although it nevercomprised more than a handful of students,
‘‘Young Bengal’’ scandalized Calcutta society by its mocking of established
convention and religious beliefs, and its espousal of agnosticism and athe-
ism.10 The commotion caused in respectable Calcutta society led to the dis-
missal of Derozio from the college staff and to denunciations of the immoral
and ‘‘skeptical’’ effects of western education, which missionaries denounced
as secular or ‘‘godless.’’ Duff, for instance, very often presented his institu-
tion as an alternative model to that provided by Hindu College, and even
as a measure to ‘‘reclaim’’ Hindu College students who had gone astray, but
‘‘whose education and worldly circumstances invest them with such mighty
influence among their fellow-country-men.’’ 11
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 51
While Hindu College provided missionaries with a useful example of the
dangers of secular education, and an opportunity to extol the virtues of their
own schools and colleges, there was nonetheless a very real sense in which
government-provided secular education was seen as an ally in their struggle,
even if one much inferior to the desired alternative of Bible-teaching govern-
ment schools. Duff approvingly quoted the editor of the Inquirer newspaper,
a former student at Hindu College and a convert to Christianity, to the effect
that ‘‘the Hindu college . . . has . . . destroyed many a native’s belief in Hindu-
ism . . . No missionary ever taught us to forsake the religion of our fathers;
it was Government that did us this service.’’ 12 Another Scottish Church mis-
sionary, James Bryce, wrote that even if government education did not make
Christians of its students, ‘‘it at least un-Hinduizes them,’’ 13 and added in-
dulgently, ‘‘ ‘Young Bengal’ . . . are indulging the very silly, but not perhaps
unnatural pride, that their ‘little learning’ is carrying them beyond . . . priest-
craft, as they designate all religious belief whatever. Teach them to drink a
little deeper of the stream, and they may bend submissive to the apostles of
the Cross.’’ 14
However, the relative confidence of this earlier period—the expectation
that western education would eventually lead to weaning more and more of
the educated classes from their own religion and winning them over to Chris-
tianity, even if indirectly, after detours through the reformed Hinduism of
the Arya Samaj or the Hindu-Christian eclecticism of the Brahmo Samaj—
began to give way to concern in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
The concern was fueled, above all else, by the sense that the hoped-for tran-
sition to Christianity was not in the offing. For most of those who became
dissatisfied with existing forms of Hinduism, the reformed versions which
they embraced proved to be not stopping-places on a longer journey toward
Christianity but rather the terminus. Moreover, from the latter decades of
the nineteenth century the Arya Samaj in the north of India became more ag-
gressively anti-Christian and even began to make efforts to reconvert Hindus
who had converted to Islam or Christianity, while in the south the Hindu
Preaching and Tract Societies similarly sought to combat missionary influ-
ence.15 The missionary critique of ‘‘godless education’’ continued, but with
a new sense of urgency; the dire predictions that had been made were now
held to have come true, and the educated Indian was said to have fallen prey
to impiety and immorality. Lurid pictures were painted of the mental and
moral state of educated Indians. The headmaster of Bishop Corries Gram-
mar School in Madras warned the government that ‘‘in the present transi-
52 Subject to Pedagogy
tion state, brought about by European knowledge and science,’’ the students
and graduates of government colleges ‘‘threw off all restraints’’; indulging in
the vices of ‘‘pride, discontent, drunkenness,’’ they ‘‘defile the flesh, despise
dominion.’’ 16 The Reverend M. A. Sherring wrote, ‘‘The educated classes in
all directions are revolting from ancient superstitions . . . The landmarks of
ancient Brahmanical thought are being abandoned one after the other, and
nothing positive is taking their place . . . Mental distraction and disorder have
taken the place of mental stagnation, and at present the intellectual condi-
tion of the educated classes is that of chaos and doubt.’’ 17
By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the government also began
to voice concerns about the morality of educated Indians. The Report of the
Indian Education [Hunter] Commission of 1883 found that there had been a dete-
rioration in the morality and manners of college students, and recommended
the preparation of a ‘‘moral text-book’’ for teaching morality and manners; it
also recommended that in all government colleges, and all private colleges in
receipt of government aid, a senior professor or the principal give a regular
course of lectures on ‘‘the duties of a man and citizen.’’ 18 These recommen-
dations were not accepted by the Government of India, but the existence of a
‘‘problem’’ was affirmed a few years later in a government circular which ac-
knowledged that a western, secular education ‘‘has in some measure resulted
in the growth of tendencies unfavourable to discipline and favourable to ir-
reverence in the rising generation,’’ and had ‘‘cut loose the rising generation
from many of the moral and social bonds of their forefathers.’’ 19
The problem of moral decline, and the search for some form of moral
training and disciplining which would remedy it, now became a regular fea-
ture of governmental discussions. The issue was discussed at the Simla Con-
ference of educationists, convened in September 1901 by Viceroy Curzon as
the prelude to his far-reaching educational reforms,20 and the suggestions
made there were incorporated into the text of a Government of India Resolu-
tion on Indian Educational Policy issued in 1904.21 In 1905 the mass campaign
against the colonial government’s decision to partition Bengal began, and the
‘‘indiscipline’’ of Indians, especially educated ones, became a favourite topic.
This was all the more so since students played a very prominent role in the
Swadeshi movement, and a boycott of official educational institutions was an
important feature of the agitation. Valentine Chirol’s series of articles in the
Times, revised and immediately collected into a book titled Indian Unrest (1910),
was widely quoted and very influential. ‘‘The estrangement of . . . the young
Hindu who has passed or is passing through our schools and colleges,’’ Chirol
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 53
wrote, is ‘‘the most alarming phenomenon of the present day . . . of all the
problems with which British statesmanship is confronted in India none is
more difficult and more urgent than the educational problem.’’ 22 In Chirol’s
analysis the source of the Hindu student’s disaffection was not western edu-
cation per se but the imperfect assimilation of this education. It had been
imperfectly assimilated, according to Chirol, because in India education had
been divorced from religion.This separation was something of an experiment
even in Europe, which relied upon ‘‘a highly-developed code of ethics and an
inherited sense of social and civic duty to supply the place of religious sanc-
tions’’; but it was an absurdity in India, where ‘‘morality apart from religion is
an almost impossible conception.’’ 23 Thus according to Chirol, the complete
exclusion of religious teaching from schools and colleges had been a mistake;
it had alienated some Indians from their values and traditions, and that in
turn had unleashed a counter-reaction. Chirol asked rhetorically, ‘‘Did not
the incipient revolt against all the traditions of Hinduism that followed the
introduction of western education help to engender the wholesale reaction
against western influences which underlies the present unrest?’’ 24
Complaints about ‘‘indiscipline’’ and ‘‘moral decline’’ were clearly expres-
sions of alarm at the rise of criticism and agitation from the ranks of educated
Indians. However, the authorities were at pains to insist that their diagno-
sis was not simply a way of pathologizing and belittling the phenomenon of
nationalist unrest. They sought to show that the problem of moral decline
was a much wider one, of which unrest was only a manifestation; and that
the existence of a problem was also attested to by Indians. The director of
public instruction for Bengal, for instance, reported: ‘‘there is a strong feel-
ing amongst parents and teachers of whatever creed or caste that the divorce
of education and religion, contrary as it is to the whole of the Indian tradi-
tion . . . has not been good for the youth of the country and has resulted in a
large measure of moral deterioration.’’ 25 Governor Sir George Clarke of Bom-
bay told a conference, ‘‘it is widely admitted by thoughtful Indians that there
are some signs of the weakening of parental influence, of the loss of rever-
ence for authority, of a decadence of manners and of growing moral laxity.
The restraining forces of ancient India have lost some of their power; the re-
straining forces of the west are inoperative in India. There has been a certain
moral loss without any corresponding gain.’’ 26
Ruling circles, Anglo-India hands in England, and the unofficial English
community in India were now all receptive to the claim that the educated
Indian was undergoing a moral crisis, and that some form or another of moral
54 Subject to Pedagogy
education was the required antidote. Proposals for moral textbooks of vari-
ous types abounded,27 and many were already in use, such as Todd’s Student
Manual, Murdoch’s Indian Student’s Manual and his My Duties, Roper Leth-
bridge’s A Moral Reader from English and Oriental Sources, John Sime’s Man and
His Duties: A Moral Reader, Norton’s Courtesy Reader, Waldegraves’s Handbook of
Moral Lessons, as well as many readers in the vernaculars, such as (to give but
one example) Lala Narain Das’s Shikshamani, published from Jullundar in 1905
for use in girls’ patshalas, with thirty short chapters on duties to God, parents,
and so on. Such moral readers for junior grades often contained elevating
stories drawn from Indian sources, and biographies of great men—though
the efficacy of these, as of moral textbooks intended for senior students, was
widely doubted.28 The Sanatan Dharma series produced by Annie Besant’s
Central Hindu School and College, for the purpose of ‘‘organizing and sys-
tematizing Hindu religious and moral instruction throughout India,’’ 29 was
in use in schools in the princely state of Mysore, as well as some Hindu
schools in British India.
Even the hitherto taboo question of allowing religious instruction was
discussed at the highest levels of government after 1910. In the course of in-
ternal discussions Viceroy Minto wrote, ‘‘For various reasons British adminis-
trators have kept clear of moral and religious teaching, and it is consequently
ceasing to exist, with the terrible results we now have to recognise.’’ 30 The
education member of the Government of India thought that for political rea-
sons it would be disastrous to formally renounce the policy of ‘‘religious neu-
trality’’ in schooling, but also thought that ‘‘by degrees we shall drift quietly
into a system in which religious and moral instruction will play a not in-
considerable part.’’ 31 And in fact Punjab and the United Provinces were by
now already permitting religious instruction to be imparted in government
schools, where the parents of pupils requested it and took the initiative. Thus
the government had even begun to overcome its long-standing aversion to
allowing religious teaching in government schools, though to the chagrin
of missionaries, it was not the propagation of Christianity that was counte-
nanced but rather the instruction of children in their own faith.The question
of moral decline continued to occupy the Government—officialdom returned
to the issue after the First World War 32—and thus for some forty years the
bureaucracy wrestled with the problem and explored ways of addressing it
through some form or other of moral and religious education.
The accusations were of course widely disputed. Government itself did not
speak with one voice; for instance, when in 1887 the Government of India
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 55
issued a circular diagnosing the problem and asking provincial governments
to suggest measures to tackle it, a number of these responded by contesting
the diagnosis, or the precise terms of it. An official in the Bombay Depart-
ment of Public Instruction wrote, ‘‘I must decline to believe that our present
system is producing a generation of irreverent and insubordinate youth.’’ 33
The official response on behalf of the Bombay government, presented by its
secretary, did not go so far as to dispute that there was a problem, but attrib-
uted it to the occurrence everywhere of a one-sided and materialistic tran-
sition, producing similar effects: ‘‘The morality of the rising generations of
Englishmen . . . does not present such uniform or so satisfactory features as to
enable Englishmen to parade it for the example of Asiatics.’’ 34 The response
from Madras was similarly lukewarm, and later a senior British official in
the Madras Department of Education declared that in ‘‘integrity and truth-
fulness,’’ educated Hindus in his presidency stood ‘‘immeasurably above the
men of the past generation.’’ 35 The idea of the moral decline of the educated
Indian was similarly the subject of frequent refutation at university convo-
cation ceremonies.36
Educated Indians, as one might expect, frequently contested the diagnosis
of a moral decline. Justice Telang, one of the few Indian members appointed
to the Hunter Commission, disputed its analysis of the issue and dissented
from its recommendations urging ‘‘moral education.’’ 37 Others protested
that western education, far from leading to immorality, had ‘‘made better
men and better citizens.’’ 38 Indian students were far more religious, accord-
ing to the distinguished lawyer Tej Bahadur Sapru, than one was ‘‘entitled to
expect from young men of their age.’’ 39 Some, like Brajendranath Seal, pro-
fessor at Calcutta University, simply responded with derision to ‘‘the hunt
after orgies of secret vices or indulgences among a class so staid and generally
abstemious as the Bengali youth of our colleges.’’ 40
But the numerous denials only testified to the ubiquitousness of the com-
plaint, and to the fact that a wider public—including Indian members of it—
participated in producing the discourse, as well as in contesting it. Members
of the Brahmo Samaj, who regarded themselves as having abandoned idolatry
and achieved a rationalist deism in their eclectic mix of Hinduism and Chris-
tianity, lamented the fate of their fellow countrymen who had failed to follow
their path. A public meeting of the Brahmo Samaj in 1861 adopted a state-
ment telling the ‘‘British Nation’’ that the ‘‘sublime principles and truths of
Western Science’’ it had introduced to India had served to ‘‘emancipate the
native mind from the horrors of Hinduism,’’ but ‘‘he has just learnt to dis-
56 Subject to Pedagogy
believe all that his creed would have taught him, without finding aught that
would close up the hiatus. The mind hence becomes unsettled in its doc-
trines.’’ 41 The Brahmo Samaj leader Keshab Chunder Sen warned that India
was undergoing a tremendous revolution, in the course of which some edu-
cated Indians ‘‘run into the wildest vagaries of infidelity and scepticism and
habits of dissipation. It is sad to reflect that the number of enlightened scep-
tics is growing in our midst . . . [men] who laugh at religion and morality . . .
Their number may soon assume fearful proportions’’;42 ‘‘In times of transi-
tion . . . we always find that men for a while become reckless. The old faith is
gone, and no new faith is established in its place. Society is unhinged and un-
settled.’’ 43 Even Bipan Chandra Pal, a radical (the word used at the time was
‘‘extremist’’) nationalist, commiserated with those who, having been exposed
to western education in the first decades following its introduction, had be-
come alienated from their own traditions, but who had lacked the fortitude
to defy Hindu tradition and become Brahmos like him.44
Those who had established or were proposing denominational and
‘‘national’’ schools and colleges found that the discourse of moral decline
could be pressed into service for their own ends. Madan Mohan Malaviya,
nationalist and a moving force behind the plans for a Hindu University,
wrote: ‘‘one of the strongest arguments in favour of a denominational Uni-
versity is that it will be able to make up an acknowledged deficiency in the
present system of education; that it will be able, to use the words of the Gov-
ernment of India, to ‘supply religious and ethical instruction to complete the
educational training of . . . scholars’ and thus to lay the surest foundation
for the formation of their character.’’ 45 At a public meeting held in Calcutta
in 1911 to publicize and seek support for a Hindu University, Surendranath
Banerjea was even more blunt: ‘‘We hear a great deal about moral education
these days.The Government universities have failed to grapple with the ques-
tion. The Hindu University will solve it.’’ 46
Indian educationalists, not to be suspected of a generalized opposition
to western education, sometimes testified to its moral ill effects. In 1905 a
memorial to the viceroy signed by 378 Indians and British, including a large
number of headmasters and other teachers, expressed concern that in schools
little attention was paid to the ‘‘moral culture’’ of their boys, who conse-
quently did not always display the desired ‘‘robust moral tone.’’ 47 At the same
time the princely government of Mysore decided to introduce moral and reli-
gious instruction into schools and colleges, citing as its reasons the increase
in disrespect, vanity, and aggression among students.48
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 57

Diagnosing Moral Decline

The observation of moral decline always camewith an explanation.The symp-
toms of decline, and the evidence for it, lay in impiety, dissolute behaviour,
bad manners, conceit, immorality, and a decline in respect for elders and for
‘‘authority’’ more generally; these were usually gathered together under the
rubric of ‘‘inconsistency.’’ The etiology of this intellectual and moral incon-
sistency and confusion was traced back to an incomplete (or stalled) tran-
sition, which left the educated Indian caught between two worlds and two
moral codes, unable to choose consistently between them. The ‘‘inconsisten-
cies’’ which no doubt also marked the life of Indian peasants—and which
presumablyare a feature of social life everywhere, for there is no society where
people’s diverse ideas and practices seamlessly interlace with one another—
were not seen to generate equivalent difficulties, and did not become the sub-
ject of a discourse of moral decline, because the peasant was not seen to be
straddling different cultural worlds, and thus liable to being stranded be-
tween them.
That the educated Indian was given to intellectual inconsistency was a
commonplace. Writing in 1913, Sir Bampfylde Fuller observed that educated
natives ‘‘give eager intellectual assent’’ to ideals inspired by English litera-
ture, science, and romantic love; and yet, he observed, they ‘‘live their lives
unchanged.’’ 49 ‘‘An Englishman,’’ he concluded, ‘‘is constantly disconcerted
by the extraordinary contradictions which he observes between the words
and the actions of an educated Indian, who seems untouched by inconsis-
tencies which appear to him scandalous.’’ 50 A few years later William Archer
wrote, ‘‘Indians have an amazing capacity for learning, and for ignoring the
consequences of what they learn,’’ 51 an inconsistency that he attributed to a
native aptitude for western learning, combined with a continued reverence
for authoritative texts and gurus. Educated Indians also frequently noted,
and sometimes bemoaned, their inconsistency. A contributor to the Modern
Review wrote:

We have a divorce between college and life. We read in our text-books

that men are born equal and free, that the stars do not influence human
life . . . We give intellectual assent to these propositions, we prove
them—in our answer papers,—so satisfactorily as to secure first class
marks. But we do not translate them into action, we do not apply them
to our life and society. Every Hindu (and Mussalman) graduate regu-
58 Subject to Pedagogy
lates his marriages and very often his journeys by astrology, which, in
the answer-paper, he has proved to be an exploded science. Even social
reformers, who have celebrated widow-marriages in their families in
the teeth of social opposition, still believe in their descent from mythi-
cal ancestors . . . The Principal of a College (now no more) where chem-
istry was compulsory . . . believes that he cured a case of cholera in his
family by making the patient drink the washings of the butcher’s knife
in the temple of Kalighat.The v-c of a learned University kept a Senate
meeting waiting for half an hour, because he had scalded his fingers
in cooking his own meals in the absence of any other member of the
sub-caste of Brahmans to which he belonged . . . In hardly any college
can all the Hindu members of the staff be induced to take even light
refreshments together, and yet they are not sanskritists, not orthodox
Pandits, but Masters of modern European subjects and even Masters of
Science or Kantian philosophy.52

This intellectual and moral confusion was attributed to the need of the
educated Indian to negotiate two distinct worlds, cultural domains charac-
terized and governed by radically different conceptions of how the world
worked, what a man’s place in it was, and what constituted moral behaviour.
Other observations and complaints—the much-lamented unpunctuality of
the educated Indian, and his alleged inability to identify his interests with
the institution of which he was a part, despite his acknowledged capacity to
identify with, and sacrifice his interests to, the joint family—were similarly
interpreted as arising out of his carrying the values, practices, and rituals of
the joint family and caste into the world of the law court, office, and univer-
sity. According to this explanation, the educated Indian had lost faith in the
governing presumptions and beliefs of traditional Indian society, without yet
being in a position to embrace the mores and presumptions governing mod-
ern, western life. We have already encountered this line of reasoning: have
heard Governor Sir George Clarke explaining that the ‘‘restraining forces’’ of
ancient India had lost their force among the educated, while the restraining
forces of the West had not taken their place, resulting in a net ‘‘moral loss’’;
and Keshab Chunder Sen and other Brahmos attributing moral decline to
the Hindu’s being ‘‘emancipated’’ from his own creed without having found
another to take its place. Many other voices joined in characterizing and ex-
plaining the moral crisis of the educated Hindu in similar terms. The Pioneer
observed: ‘‘we have introduced [the educated Bengali] to a literature which
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 59
at every page proves the foolishness of his old beliefs,’’ but have ‘‘given the
native no new religion whereon to found a new morality’’; the result was that
whereas ‘‘of old he had a moral code he felt he had to obey because he feared
the displeasure of the gods by whom he believed it had been promulgated,’’
now ‘‘the Hindu Pantheon has fallen, and with it all the Bengali ever had of
morality.’’ 53 A contributor to the Educational Review similarly attributed ‘‘the
slackness of discipline, want of self control and decay of the reverential spirit
in the life of the student’’ to the fact that ‘‘the old bonds of moral and reli-
gious sanctions are loosening and the new ones have not yet got sufficient
grip.’’ 54 The author of a history of education, denying that Bengali graduates
were more immoral than graduates of other countries, nonetheless conceded
that their education ‘‘loosened the hold on them of the conventions and de-
cencies of Indian society, while it did not or could not provide regulating
principles of equal authority or usefulness.’’ 55 And a witness explained to the
Hartog Commission, ‘‘We Indians are at present at a stage of transition and
we do not know where we are.The old religious beliefs, the old traditions, the
old culture is fast slipping away from our sight and we have yet to find and
assimilate a culture which we can call our own.’’ 56

One of the chief symptoms of moral crisis was ‘‘inconsistency,’’ usually

thought to arise from an incomplete ‘‘transition.’’ In some instances educated
Indians were thought to hold inconsistent ideas; in others, there was thought
to be an inconsistency between on the one hand their ideas and beliefs and
on the other their actions and practices; and in other instances still, the ac-
tions and practices that they engaged in were held to be inconsistent with
one another. But while it is clear enough what it means to declare that ideas
or beliefs are inconsistent or contradictory, what could it mean to say that an
idea is inconsistent with a practice, or that two actions or practices are in-
consistent with each other? This makes sense on the presumption that every
action and practice can be traced back to the idea or belief animating it, and
to then find these to be inconsistent with one another; that is, it makes sense
on the presumption that actions and practices are underpinned by and are
expressions of ideas, beliefs, and values. In the discourse of moral decline,
morality, even when it was something ‘‘done,’’ was seen as something that
was ‘‘held’’ in the form of beliefs and convictions, usually having their basis
in religious belief and commitments. The moral confusion of the educated
Indian could thus be seen not only in his openly professing values which were
not consonant with, or were antithetical to, each other, but also in his engag-
60 Subject to Pedagogy
ing in practices which (in the view of the authors of the discourse of moral
decline) were animated by ideas and convictions which were at odds with one
another. Thus an important presumption underlying the explanation by in-
consistency was that it accorded centrality to consciousness and the ‘‘mind’’;
all actions, social practices, and institutions were seen to be expressions and
manifestations of ideas and beliefs. As Marx put it in Capital I, ‘‘what distin-
guishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect
raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality.’’ 57
In the passage quoted above, Marx points to this uniquely human faculty
as one that serves to differentiate men from animals, whose activities are not
objectifications of their thoughts. But historically this faculty also served—as
indeed it did for Marx and Engels—to exorcise the gods. Gods are not another
source and origin of practices and institutions, because now gods are them-
selves seen as the manifestations and creations of men; gods exist in men’s
consciousness. When in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Feuerbach,
Marx, Tylor, Frazer, Muller, Durkheim, Weber, and others wrote about reli-
gion and magic, they presumed—irrespective of their own religious convic-
tions—that the religion of their subjects was to be understood first by seeing
it as an emanation of their (or their society’s) fears, thoughts, aspirations, and
desires. The privileging of consciousness thus turns out to be connected to
another, ‘‘anthropological,’’ presumption: the consciousness that is privileged
is that of Man. Every act, practice, and institution is the manifestation of an
idea or belief, and the only source and origin of ideas and beliefs is Man.
If it is assumed that Man is the source of ideas and representations, and
hence that the social world is to be explained by reference to men—that there
is nothing ‘‘more’’ needed to understand social phenomena—it is also as-
sumed that there is nothing ‘‘less,’’ that once you have traced practices back
to ideas, and ideas back to men, there is no further regress possible. The pre-
sumption that Man is source and origin is thus connected to another pre-
sumption, namely that he is singular and indivisible. He is not for instance
regarded, as he is in the thinking of some societies, as divisible into the
‘‘forces’’ or components which constitute him.
As my references to figures as diverse as Marx, Tylor, Frazer, Muller, Durk-
heim, Weber, and others indicate, the presumptions to which I am draw-
ing attention were not those of any particular intellectual current or school,
but rather those of modern thought as it came to be constituted from the
early modern period onward.There are of course many important differences
between Marxists and Weberians, between Tylor and Durkheim, and so on;
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 61
these differences have constituted the stuff of intellectual debate in the West
(and not only in the West) for a long time. But there are also shared presump-
tions, which we often overlook, in part precisely because being shared by the
diverse intellectual currents which compose our intellectual life, they have
become naturalized, and have come to appear not as presumptions made by
a particular mode of thinking but as the very preconditions of any sort of
thinking.
The presumptions to which I am drawing attention are similar to Kant’s
and Durkheim’s ‘‘categories.’’ Arguing against skepticism and empiricism,
Kant sought to show that certain intuitions and categories are not derived
from experience but are the precondition for experience and knowledge.
Drawing directly (but loosely) upon Kant, Durkheim (also rejecting empiri-
cism) argued that a priori mental conceptions are what make it possible
to have experience and knowledge. However, whereas for Kant these cate-
gories are transcendentally necessary and hence universal, Durkheim traces
the ‘‘necessity’’ of the categories to their social and religious origins. In the
process these categories are rendered historical and variable, although, not-
withstanding some readings of Durkheim, they are not thereby ‘‘relativized.’’
Durkheim’s categories are still ‘‘necessary and universal,’’ but their content
‘‘varies incessantly’’ from society to society.58 The presumptions underlying
the characterization of moral crisis—the privileging of consciousness, the an-
thropological view of Man as the source and origin of all ideas and practices
and institutions, and the idea that Man and his consciousness are indivis-
ible—are, I suggest, analogous to categories in the Kantian or Durkheimian
sense.They are not ‘‘hypotheses’’ or explanations, but fundamental categories
which make hypotheses and explanations possible (in this case, the explana-
tion of moral crisis in terms of inconsistency and transition).
Below I suggest, however, that when pressed into service in characteriz-
ing and explaining the moral crisis of the educated Indian, these categories
reveal that they are inadequate to their object; and that, pace Kant and Durk-
heim, these categories are in fact not universal and necessary but specifically
modern.They are modern in a twofold sense. First, a number of the presump-
tions to which I have drawn attention only assume their self-evident and
axiomatic status in modern times. Second, taken collectively, they signify a
tectonic shift from the world to the subject. If Cartesianism and empiricism
effected a split between a perceiving, knowing subject and an object known,
philosophy after Kant has accorded to the subject an increasingly ‘‘active’’
role. The categories are not ways of recognizing and naming a world which is
62 Subject to Pedagogy
in fact ordered in those ways, but rather something which we impose upon
the world, which apply to experience because they serve to constitute it.

Diagnosing the Diagnosis

The view that religion is principally a matter of belief, and that religions vary
according to what is believed, is the product of a very specific European and
Christian history. This is one in which deism and the ‘‘discovery’’ of ‘‘natural
religion’’ play a large part, because the presumption that there was a natural
religion underpinning all religions is what gave rise to the view of religions
as systems of belief. Peter Harrison argues that in England in the course of
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ‘‘ ‘religion’ was constructed along
essentially rationalist lines, for it was created in the image of the prevailing
rationalist methods of investigation . . . inquiry into the religion of a people
became a matter of asking what was believed.’’ 59 If religion was conceived as
a matter concerning belief, it is this, conversely, which made it possible to in-
vent the category ‘‘religion,’’ as the species of which different religious beliefs
are the genus. It is in the course of the history of Christianity and debates
around it in Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Europe that ‘‘religion’’
and ‘‘belief ’’ emerge as mutually constitutive categories.Thus the very notion
of ‘‘religion’’ is itself ‘‘a Christian theological category,’’ 60 ‘‘a modern inven-
tion which the West, during the last two hundred years or so, has exported to
the rest of the world.’’ 61
We can see this process of ‘‘exportation’’ at work in the eighteenth century,
when European observers tried to characterize the religion of the ‘‘Gentoos,’’
and did so by interpreting Hinduism, in modern and Christian (often specifi-
cally Protestant) terms, as ‘‘a set of hard and fast doctrinal presuppositions.’’ 62
In some readings Hinduism was even found to be a more-or-less monotheis-
tic creed, with the profusion of Hindu gods representing different aspects
of one God. That many Hindus had reified these aspects of the one God into
different deities to be propitiated was seen as a consequence of the vulgariza-
tion of this intricate creed by the unlettered masses. The distinction between
a high or classical Hinduism and a ‘‘primitive’’ popular Hinduism became a
common distinction in European writings from very early on,63 and it was
to have a long life. This was so not only among the Orientalists, who were
not much interested in popular Hinduism, but also in a later, ‘‘ethnologi-
cal’’ literature. Studies such as W. Crooke’s The Popular Religion and Folk-lore
of Northern India (2nd edn, 1896), Henry Whitehead’s The Village Gods of South
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 63
India (1921), and L. S. S. O’Malley’s Popular Hinduism: The Religion of the Masses
(1935), to cite but a few, drewa distinction between a primitive, even ‘‘animist’’
popular Hinduism, swarming with gods and spirits and idols, and a more
philosophical and genuinely spiritual Hinduism, for which the multitude of
gods were different facets of a singular supreme Being.64 These accounts usu-
ally arranged religions on an evolutionary scale, with primitive forms of ani-
mism and fetishism giving way to ‘‘higher’’ forms. What was unusual about
India in this view was that its primitive forms were not displaced but rather
continued to survive, so that different kinds and ‘‘levels’’ of religious devel-
opment coexisted, making India a valuable laboratory for studying religion
and religious ‘‘evolution.’’
Some Hindus also came to reinterpret and redefine their religion in ways
influenced by western accounts and critiques of it. In the course of the nine-
teenth century movements of religious reform such as the Brahmo Samaj and
the Arya Samaj sought to reform or redefine Hinduism (often by claiming
that popular, ‘‘superstitious’’ forms represented a degradation of an original
Hinduism, or ‘‘survivals’’ of the religious beliefs of the pre-Aryan inhabitants
of India). The result was that the riotous pantheon of gods was downgraded,
and Hinduism emerged, like other ‘‘proper’’ religions, as a philosophy and
a set of coherent beliefs to which its adherents subscribed. But for the vast
majority of Hindus, then and even today—as ethnologists continually dis-
cover 65—their religious practice was not an expression of their religious be-
liefs. This continued to be true as well of a great many western-educated
Hindus, as Max Muller found when he quizzed Indians about their religion
on their arrival in Oxford, only to discover that ‘‘they hardly understood what
we mean by religion. Religion, as a mere belief, apart from ceremonies and
customs, is to them but one, and by no means the most important, concern
of life, and they often wonder why we should take so deep an interest in mere
dogma, or as they express it, make such a fuss about religion.’’ 66
Hindus did not in fact ‘‘believe’’ in their religion, and it was not be-
liefs that constituted Hinduism. Indeed, Hindus do not even ‘‘believe’’ that
their numerous gods exist; they know them to coexist with humans. What-
ever the validity of seeing these gods as ‘‘projections,’’ or as ‘‘symbols,’’ or, in
Durkheim’s words, as ‘‘exist[ing] only because they are represented as such in
minds,’’ 67 these interpretations are far removed from the Hindu understand-
ing, in which gods and humans coexist as persons. It is of course true of many
religious people that they do not simply ‘‘believe’’ in their gods or spirits, but
know them to exist. There is an inherent paradox in seeking to characterize
64 Subject to Pedagogy
a society of this sort in the rationalist categories of modern thought, a para-
dox that we will attend to more closely in chapter 3. For present purposes,
however, it is sufficient to note that what is at issue is not simply the polite
skepticism of the social scientist versus the devotion of the religious. Hindus
did not ‘‘know’’ their gods to exist in some supernatural realm, they knew that
their gods existed because they formed part of the everyday world of humans.
Ashis Nandy writes, ‘‘Deities in everyday Hinduism . . . are not entities out-
side everyday life, nor do they preside over life from outside; they constitute
a significant part of it . . . Gods are above and beyond humans but they are,
paradoxically, not outside the human fraternity.’’ 68 There is no sharp separa-
tion between a sacred realm inhabited by gods and a mundane one of men;
as C. J. Fuller observes, popular Hinduism is ‘‘premised on the lack of any
absolute divide between them. . . . human beings can be divine forms under
many and various conditions, and the claim to divinity is unsensational, even
banal, in a way that it could never be in a monotheistic religion lacking 330
million deities.’’ 69
The numerous deities of Hinduism are co-present with humans, and
highly visible; they exist as spirits, as ghosts, and in the form of those numer-
ous idols that so offended the sensibility of their rulers. ‘‘Sympathetic’’ ob-
servers, as well as those Hindus who sought to defend the honor of their reli-
gion by denying that idolatry was an integral element of it, often suggested
that these representations were a popular corruption. Others suggested that
they were allegorical devices made necessary to render the ‘‘supreme being’’
of Hinduism ‘‘intelligible to the vulgar.’’ 70 The first explanation drew upon
the distinction between a vulgar, debased religion and a high, pure one,
mentioned earlier. The second explanation additionally drew upon a Chris-
tian understanding and defense of idols. Christianity has been hostile to the
worship of ‘‘graven images,’’ but it nonetheless finds a legitimate place for
religious images. St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, wrote that there was a
‘‘threefold reason for the institution of images in the Church: first, for the
instruction of the unlettered, who might learn from them as from books;
second, so that the mystery of the Incarnation and the examples of the saints
might remain more firmly in our memory by being daily represented to our
eyes; and third, to excite the emotions which are more effectively aroused by
things seen than by things heard.’’ 71
But the analogy suggested by the comparison does not hold: whereas in
the Christian tradition images were very clearly representations of an origi-
nal, for most Hindus idols or murtis (images, forms) are not in fact ‘‘represen-
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 65
tations’’ of gods that reside elsewhere.72 At the very least, the idol or image or
murti, once its eyes have been pierced and appropriate ceremonies observed,73
partakes of the shakti (power) of the god; for most Hindus, it is a god. As Diana
Eck explains, ‘‘the murti is more than a likeness; it is the deity itself taken
‘form.’ The uses of the word murti in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita
suggest that the form is its essence. The flame is the murti of the fire . . . or the
year is the murti of time . . . the murti is a body-taking, a manifestation, and
is not different from the reality itself.’’ 74
Thus the profusion of icons in Hinduism is also a profusion of gods; they
are ever present, part of the world of humans. To render this by saying that
‘‘Hindus believe that there are numerous gods,’’ as the sociologist of religion
must do (since modern social science cannot treat gods as real beings, as actors
in the world), is not only and obviously to deny the self-understandings of
the subjects of one’s study. It is also, and less obviously, to translate their
self-understandings into our categories—to claim that the gods ‘‘actually’’
reside in human consciousness, and are thus a matter of beliefs.75 But inas-
much as Hindus did not inhabit a world in which the existence of their gods
was dependent upon human belief in them, a key presumption of the whole
discourse of moral crisis becomes deeply problematic. How could western-
educated Hindus have been torn between their traditional religious beliefs
and the ideas that they encountered as a consequence of their exposure to
western education, if their Hinduism was not a matter of beliefs in the
first place?
With murtis our commonsensical distinction between an original and its
image, sign and referent, reality and its representation, does not hold. Other
religious objects can also be both themselves and not themselves; such logi-
cal and ontological leaps are an everyday part of Hindu practice. Fuller gives
some commonly known examples. In Bengali Vaishnavism the saint Chai-
tanya is at once revered as the founder of the Gaudiya Vaishnava devotionalist
order, as an incarnation of Krishna, as Krishna himself, as Krishna’s perfect
devotee Radha, and as the combined Radha-Krishna. The Ganges is at once
an ‘‘image’’ of the goddess Ganga and Ganga herself; the cow is an ‘‘image’’ of
Lakshmi and Lakshmi herself. Other religious objects can include all others
and simultaneously be infinitely replicable; the holy city of Kashi (Benares)
is said to include all other tirthas (pilgrimage sites) within it, so that by going
to Kashi one can also make a pilgrimage to all tirthas; conversely, going to any
holy site is to visit Kashi.76
Examples like these could be almost endlessly multiplied, and confronted
66 Subject to Pedagogy
with similar phenomena, observers sometimes concluded that Indians were
simply lacking an elementary grasp of logic. The principal of the Inter-
denominational Women’s Christian College in Madras attributed Indian in-
consistency to the absence of any tradition of Aristotelian logic, and thus to
knowledge of the law of noncontradiction: ‘‘The mind of the South Indian
student works paratactically rather than hypotactically; opinions formed on
different grounds remain side by side within their consciousness without
mental contact, and there is little effort at combination.’’ 77 In Hegel’s view
Hindu ontology displayed a cavalier disregard for the categories of logic: he
told the students attending his lectures on religion, ‘‘there is here no cate-
gory of being. [Hindus] have no category for what we call the independence of
things, for what we articulate by the phrase ‘there are’ or ‘there is.’ ’’ 78 In more
sympathetic and sensitive readings, this inability to ‘‘fix’’ things, to identify
them and keep them distinguished from one another, is sometimes captured
by words such as ‘‘fluidity.’’ 79 The ‘‘fluidity’’ in question here is, however,
perhaps not so much a fluidity of Hinduism (especially given that the same
society and religion, viewed from the perspective of caste, is frequently found
to be extraordinarily ‘‘rigid’’ and ‘‘inflexible’’); rather, it may be the ethnolo-
gist’s way of registering and staying sensitive to the imperfect fit between her
categories and their object, an object which viscously slides and spills across
the organizing distinctions of thought.
The profusion of gods in India, embodied in the innumerable idols which
they inhabit, thus indicates not only that Hindus did not ‘‘believe’’ in their
gods but also that the logical distinctions which we assume to be fundamen-
tal to thought were here conspicuous by their absence. Some concluded from
this that the Hindus possessed no logic; others that this was a world of ‘‘fluid’’
categories. By contrast Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, studying the evidence on societies
which similarly seemed prone to fundamental category mistakes, thought
he discerned an alternative logic at work. Lévy-Bruhl rejected the explana-
tion that ‘‘primitives’’ attributed mystical and anthropomorphic qualities to
natural phenomena (‘‘animism’’), on the grounds that such an explanation
attributed to the native a fundamental distinction between nature and the
supernatural, between matter and the mystic, and between the observing
subject and the object, which was not his.80 The ‘‘superstition’’ of the native
was in fact quite different from the superstitions which continue to exist
even in ‘‘civilized’’ societies: ‘‘The superstitious man, and frequently also the
religious man, among us, believes in a twofold order of reality, the one visible,
palpable, and subordinate to the essential laws of motion; the other invisible,
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 67
intangible, ‘spiritual’ forming a mystic sphere which encompasses the first.
But the primitive’s mentality does not recognize two distinct worlds in con-
tact with each other, and more or less interpenetrating. To him there is but
one. Every reality, like every influence, is mystic, and consequently every per-
ception is also mystic.’’ 81 As a consequence, ‘‘in the collective representations
of primitive mentality, objects, beings, phenomena can be, though in a way
incomprehensible to us, both themselves and something other than them-
selves . . . The ubiquity or multipresence of existing beings, the identity of one
with many, of the same and of another, of the individual and the species—in
short, everything that would scandalize and reduce to despair thought which
is subject to the law of contradiction, is implicitly admitted by this prelogical
mentality.’’ 82
The use of unfortunate terms such as ‘‘primitive,’’ ‘‘mystical,’’ and ‘‘pre-
logical’’ notwithstanding, we could conclude, as Rodney Needham does, that
Lévy-Bruhl’s insights allow us to conceive the ‘‘strangeness’’ of other mentali-
ties not as ‘‘mere errors, as detected by a finally superior rationality of which
we were the fortunate possessors,’’ but as evidence that ‘‘other civilizations
present us with alternative categories and modes of thought.’’ 83 That would
be an advance over declaring Hinduism to be possessed of no logic at all, or
registering its ‘‘difference’’ by means of terms such as ‘‘fluidity.’’ However,
Lévy-Bruhl’s explanation still presupposes an active subject who organizes
and experiences the world through the categories of mind—the work from
which I have been quoting is titled Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés infé-
rieures. Lévy-Bruhl takes us ‘‘beyond’’ Durkheim in allowing us to recognize
that these categories may vary quite radically, but the categories in question
are still those which humans ‘‘impose’’ upon the world, in the sense that
they are what is necessary for them to be able to experience and understand
their world.
By contrast, Timothy Mitchell, rereading Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the
housing of the Kabyle people, seeks to avoid reducing different understand-
ings to mental categories and the operations of the mind. Presented with
understandings that see in material objects homologies and attractions, and
forces and potentials that require balancing and tending, we are apt to read
these relations as ‘‘representations’’ and ‘‘symbols.’’ Mitchell resists such read-
ings:

There is nothing symbolic in this world. Gall is not associated with

wormwood because it symbolizes bitterness. It occurs itself as the trace
68 Subject to Pedagogy
of bitterness. The grain does not represent fertility, and therefore the
woman. It is itself fertile, and duplicates in itself the swelling of a preg-
nant woman’s belly. Neither the grain nor the woman is merely a sign
signifying the other and neither, it follows, has the status of the origi-
nal, the ‘‘real’’ referent or meaning of which the other would be merely
the sign. These associations, in consequence, should not be explained
in terms of any symbolic or cultural ‘‘code,’’ the separate realm to which
we imagine such origins to belong . . . resemblances and differences do
not form a separate realm of meaning, a code apart from things them-
selves; hence this very notion of a ‘‘thing’’ does not occur. For the same
reason, there is not ‘‘nature’’—in our own sense of the great referent,
the signified in terms of which such a code is distinguished.84

The relations in question ‘‘are not the relations between an object and its
meaning, as we would say, or between a symbol and the idea for which it
stands.’’ 85
The ‘‘primitives’’ studied by Lévy-Bruhl and the Berber-speaking Kabyle of
Algeria discussed by Mitchell are of course societies very different from that
of India. I draw attention to them not to suggest a strict analogy, but rather to
suggest that where we see an apparent absence of logic, or a ‘‘symbolism’’ run
riot, we may in fact be observing a different logic at work,86 or an ontology
which is not accessible to knowledge or experience only through the cate-
gories of a collective mind. The latter point is one to which I shall return. But
for now, let us conclude by noting that even the idea of a unified self as the
source and site of ideas and of consciousness, seemingly so undeniable, was
a category not at all self-evident to every Hindu. It has often been observed
that the Hindu philosophical tradition has a ‘‘weak’’ conception of selfhood.87
(The Buddhist doctrines of anatman, or not-self, and dependent origination
go considerably further, denying that there is a reality corresponding to the
grammatical subject of verbs, and suggesting that the personality is not a
permanent self or subject but rather a temporary constellation composed of
five forces or skandas.)88 Persons are not indivisible, bounded units but are
‘‘dividual’’ or divisible, in the sense that they are themselves composed of sub-
stances and essences. These are absorbed and passed on through various ex-
changes: in McKim Marriot’s description, ‘‘To exist, dividual persons absorb
heterogenous material influences. They must also give out from themselves
particles of their own coded substances—essences, residues, or other active
influences—that may then reproduce in others something of the nature of
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 69
the persons in whom they have originated. Persons engage in transfers of
bodily substance-codes through parentage, through marriage, and through
services and other kinds of interpersonal contacts. They transfer coded food
substances by way of trade, payments, alms, feasts or other prestations.’’ 89 In
all this ‘‘the assumption of the easy, proper separability of action from actor,
of code from substance . . . that pervades both Western philosophy and West-
ern common sense . . . is generally absent.’’ 90 E. Valentine Daniel, in his study
of personhood among Tamil Hindus, describes how the Tamil villager seeks
to find an equilibrium between his own substance and the substance of vil-
lage, house, sexual partner, and so on. Again, each person himself is assumed
to be composed of substances which are exchanged, altered, and conducive
(or not) to good health and prosperity, and this militates against the easy-
going and ‘‘natural’’ presumption that while society, group, and family can
all be decomposed into individual persons, the person or self is not subject
to further division.
The gap or mismatch between the categories employed to diagnose ‘‘moral
decline’’ and the moral and religious life of Hindus would seem to extend
even to the self. Far from being the unified, indivisible seat of consciousness
and source of moral ideas and actions presumed by our categories, the Hindu
self appears as a ‘‘leaky’’ one, with porous boundaries.91

What Counts as an Explanation?

It may be objected that all I have done is demonstrate how social actors made
sense of their situation in ways not consonant with the explanations offered
of their predicament, but that this in no way invalidates the explanations.
Not only are explanations within the social sciences often expected to be at
odds with those offered by the subjects of study, but it is sometimes con-
sidered a sign of their superior quality that they go ‘‘behind’’ or ‘‘beneath’’
the self-understandings of their subjects to explain what is ‘‘really’’ going on.
Sometimes this is thought to be because there are systematic and more or less
insurmountable reasons why social actors are condemned to misunderstand
their own situation; society is opaque to its constituents, and necessarily so.
In Durkheim’s words, ‘‘social life should be explained, not by the notions
of those who participate in it, but by more profound causes which are un-
perceived by consciousness.’’ 92 For others, there are systemic factors leading
social actors to misread their own circumstances, but this opacity is not in-
surmountable.The correct reading, once presented to those whose own situa-
70 Subject to Pedagogy
tion is opaque to them, renders the situation intelligible, and can emancipate
social actors (or patients) from their misunderstanding.93 In either case, to
demonstrate as I have done that the self-understandings of social actors are
at odds with the categories employed in the explanation of moral crisis does
not in any way negate this explanation.
Inasmuch as the tools of analysis—what I have labeled presumptions or
categories—are here drawn from the modern western intellectual tradition
and applied to understand colonial India, what is at issue is how well the
fundamental assumptions of modern western thought ‘‘traveled’’ when re-
located in colonial India. This is a question to which we shall return repeat-
edly, for it is one of the central questions animating this book. But for present
purposes,whatever the general merits of the proposition that the social scien-
tist can disregard or at least ‘‘bracket’’ the self-understandings of those being
studied, in the case of a diagnosis of moral crisis these self-understandings are
critical to the explanation being offered. For irrespective of whether the sub-
jects of this explanation would have recognized or embraced the categories,
these categories had to be part of the world they inhabited if the phenome-
non of moral crisis was even to be visible, let alone become the subject of
speculation and explanation.
Let me explain what I mean by way of an example. When Freud discusses
the dreams of historical figures, he is operating in the manner prescribed by
Durkheim. That some of these people from times past regarded their dreams
as revelations, and thus that their own conceptions are at odds with those of
the analyst, can be discarded or bracketed, and the dream can be analyzed.
However, where Freud engages in psychoanalytic practice, with the aim of
analyzing dreams to identify a neurosis, it is necessary for the patient to ac-
cept, as a minimum, that dreams reveal the workings of his or her mind,
rather than revelations of the gods, if the analysis is to serve any therapeutic
purpose. Analogously, if the subjects of the discourse of moral decline did not privi-
lege consciousness, then consciousness could not have been the battleground upon which
their contending beliefs met; if their ‘‘religion’’ was not something ‘‘believed’’ and their
morality something ‘‘held,’’ they could not have been torn by conflicting beliefs and
moralities; and if they did not have a unified self, they could not have suffered from a
divided one. In short, if the subjects of this explanation did not inhabit a world
where categories of consciousness, mind, and the indivisible self pertained,
they could not have experienced a moral crisis, and there would be nothing
to explain in the first place.
Could we then draw the opposite conclusion—not that there was a moral
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 71
crisis which was then explained in terms of inconsistency and transition, but
rather that the categories presumed and employed by the explanation made
visible or ‘‘produced’’ the very crisis which was to be explained? Were ‘‘in-
consistency’’ and ‘‘crisis’’ built into the categories of explanation, rather than
being a feature of the life of the educated Indian—which would render com-
prehensible why so many educated Indians remained blithely unaware that
they were ‘‘torn’’ and in the throes of crisis?
This will not do either, because there were those who testified to having
emerged from a moral crisis, or who testified that some of their fellow
countrymen were undergoing one. Many examples of this were provided
earlier in this chapter, such as Keshab Chunder Sen declaring that India was
undergoing a transition in which ‘‘the old faith is gone, and no new faith is
established in its place’’; or a witness before the Hartog Commission explain-
ing, ‘‘We Indians are at present at a stage of transition and we do not know
where we are. The old religious beliefs, the old traditions, the old culture is
fast slipping away from our sight and we have yet to find and assimilate a
culture which we can call our own.’’ Thus it cannot be that the explanation
of moral crisis conjured up a phenomenon that did not exist. Our demon-
stration—that the categories in which this crisis was explained did not corre-
spond to the world inhabited by those whom it sought to explain—cannot be
dismissed as irrelevant on the grounds that the categories of explanation do
not have to accord with the self-understandings of those being explained. But
at the same time, we have to be able to account for why some educated Indi-
ans did explain themselves in these ways. Our question now becomes: Why
did some Indians find the categories underlying the explanation of moral
crisis adequate for explaining and making sense of their experience, or that
of others, while a great many educated Indians did not?

Compartments of the ‘‘Mind’’

In his When A Great Tradition Modernizes (1972), Milton Singer studied a small
sample of nineteen industrialist leaders based in Madras, men whose occu-
pation made them very much a part of the modern, but other aspects of
whose lives, he found, continued to be marked by ‘‘traditional’’ patterns and
practices.94 Singer found that ‘‘the industrial leaders not only did not experi-
ence soul-shattering conflicts between their religious and social traditions
and their industrial careers, but in fact adapted the two spheres.’’ 95 They did
so by
72 Subject to Pedagogy
a compartmentalization of two spheres of conduct and belief that would
otherwise collide . . . The physical setting for the traditional religious
sphere is the home, where many of the traditional ritual observances of
Sanskritic Hinduism are performed. The physical setting for modern
practices is the office and factory; there English is used, Western dress
is worn, contacts with different castes and communities are frequent,
and the instruments and concepts of modern science and technology
engage the attention. Each of the leaders passes daily from one con-
text to the other and symbolizes the passage by changing from Indian
dhoti to Western shirt and trousers and from his Indian language to
English . . . The home is categorized as the domain of one’s family, caste,
religion, and language community; the norms appropriate to these
groups are in operation here. The office and factory, on the other hand,
are categorized as a domain that includes nonrelatives, other castes and
communities, and even foreigners; the norms of behaviour there will
accordingly be very different from those prevailing in the home.96

‘‘By compartmentalizing their lives in this way,’’ Singer writes, ‘‘they are
able to function both as good Hindus and as good industrialists.’’ 97 Whereas
the discourse of moral crisis purported to find that trafficking between the
world of universities and offices and the world of home and religious ritual
produced people who were troubled and even torn, Singer concludes that the
‘‘coexistence of the traditional and the modern in India have not produced
the ‘schism in the soul’ predicted by classical [modernization] theory.’’ 98 He
does so, however, by employing the same categories of understanding and
analysis as those used by the producers of the discourse of moral crisis. Thus
he uses the verb ‘‘categorized,’’ indicating that it is the agent who assigns the
norms of belief and action to different spheres; and he explains that the in-
dustrialist divides his norms into two compartments of his mind, applying
each to the relevant sphere of social action, rather as a bilingual speaker keeps
two languages in her head, using whichever is appropriate according to con-
text. The same categories which inform the analysis of moral inconsistency
are here employed to yield a diametrically opposed result.
In Provincializing Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses a Bengali text writ-
ten by Bhabanicharan Bandyopadhyaya, a Bengali Brahmin and magazine
editor. Kalikata kamalalaya (1823) stages a debate between a Brahmin living
and working in Calcutta and a newcomer from the countryside. The new-
comer gives voice to many of the anxieties of the time, for example that
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 73
making a living in the emergent ‘‘civil society’’ of colonial Calcutta entailed
neglecting ritual observances appropriate to a high-caste Hindu: that it en-
tailed the mixing of languages, clothes, food, and so on. The resident of Cal-
cutta concedes that there are those of whom this is true, but adds that good
Hindus manage to straddle two worlds: that of obligations and rituals to the
gods and one’s male ancestors, and that of (necessary) engagement with colo-
nial civil society in the course of pursuing worldly interests such as wealth
and power. They do so by seeking to erect and maintain boundaries between
these domains—for instance, they continue to perform their ritual duties
(adjusting the times when making one’s livelihood requires this), and they
do not stay at work longer than necessary. There is nothing here, according
to Chakrabarty, ‘‘that suggests any attraction to the idea that the time of the
household should keep pace with the time of the civil-political society. The
themes of discipline, routine, punctuality . . . are absent from kk [Kalikata
Kamalalaya]. If anything, there was an emphasis to the contrary. In the world
kk depicted, the householder never spent more time at office than was mini-
mally needed and concentrated on ministering to the needs of gods and an-
cestors.The self, in its highest form,was visualized as part of the male lineage,
kula, and was thus more tied to a mytho-religious practice of time than to the
temporality of secular history.’’ 99 The Brahmin who successfully negotiates
the world of colonial civil and political society and the Hindu world of ritual
and caste obligations (and the protagonist of kk concedes that there are those
who do not successfully do so) is not riven by conflict and inconsistency—
though here, as in Singer’s account, there is a palpable tension around the
allocation of time, since the limited number of hours in the day means that
compromises must be made. The protagonist of kk explains to his interlocu-
tor (in Chakrabarty’s words) ‘‘that in spite of the new structuring of the day
required by colonial civil society, the true Hindu strove to maintain a criti-
cal symbolic boundary between the three spheres of involvement and action
(karma) that defined life. These spheres were: daivakarma (action to do with
the realm of the gods), pitrikarma (action pertaining to one’s male ancestors),
and vishaykarma (actions undertaken in pursuit of worldly interests such as
wealth, livelihood, fame, and secular power).’’ 100 The practices belonging to
colonial civil society belong to vishaykarma, and ‘‘the city-dweller’s aim was to
prevent [these practices and the words and ideas associated with them] from
polluting the ritually purer domains in which one transacted with gods and
ancestors (daivakarma and pitrikarma).’’ 101
At first glance this may seem very similar to Singer’s account: the suc-
74 Subject to Pedagogy
cessful Brahmin is one who manages to ‘‘compartmentalize,’’ to straddle two
domains requiring different values and practices without being torn or con-
flicted. However, in Chakrabarty’s reading of this text there is nothing to sug-
gest that it is the Brahmin who assigns or ‘‘categorizes,’’ as if the continued
existence of these different realms were conjured up by and maintained in
the mind, or by ‘‘culture’’ as a sort of sedimented, collective mind. Rather,
the good Brahmin is one who maintains categorical distinctions which are
not of his making, but which precede his activities and understandings; they
are what endow human activities with their boundaries and meanings, what
make a meaningful human life possible. Daivakarma, pitrikarma, and vishay-
karma are not logical categories, features of the human mind, but rather onto-
logical ones: they are not what humans use to categorize and organize experi-
ence; they are what make meaningful and ethical experience possible in the
first place.
In chapter 1 we saw that the Indian student was accused of treating west-
ern education instrumentally, as something only pertaining to worldly suc-
cess. This ‘‘decision’’ by the student was usually seen as unfortunate, even
reprehensible; here, as in Singer’s reading, the presumption was that students
did the categorizing and assigning. If we attend to the evidence carefully,
though, we will notice that the guilty parties often explained their actions
by referring to existing realms similar to those employed by the protagonist
of kk. They distinguished between ‘‘arthakari vidya’’—knowledge pertaining
to artha (worldly affairs)—and knowledges pertaining to dharma (ethical and
lawful life) and kama (pleasure); or, as with the Muslim judicial official quoted
in chapter 1, between knowledge pertaining to duniya (worldly matters) and
that pertaining to din (religious matters). Here again, as in kk, these different
domains can be seen—and were seen by those who explained their actions in
these terms—not as ways of dividing up human realms and actions but as
existing categories towhich human actions, to be ethical, had to conform.The
judgment that western knowledge belonged to the realm of artha or duniya
(rather than dharma or kama or din) was made by the student; but it was not
the student who divided the world conceptually into these domains. To the
student, as with Kant or Durkheim, these categories were the precondition
for having meaningful experience, and also for living an ethical life. But for
the student, if not for Kant or Durkheim, these distinctions were part of an
existent order, part of the furniture of the world that had to be acknowledged
and adapted to, rather than categories of the ‘‘mind’’ or of Reason, by means
of which humans organize and order their world.
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 75
We have seen that the categories of our modern, western thought, even
where they were not adequate to their object, sometimes did become so. Some
Indians did come to endorse and contribute to the discourse of moral in-
consistency and crisis. Therefore it is perfectly possible, even plausible (the
plausibility of this does not rest upon our wholly endorsing Singer’s meth-
ods or his conclusions) that the world described in kk should have yielded to
the world described by Singer, one in which educated and ‘‘modern’’ Indians,
now possessed of mind and consciousness and an indivisible self, could ex-
perience conflict—or devise ways to avoid it. Such changes have undoubtedly
occurred; we are now better placed to specify the nature of the ‘‘transition.’’

Diagnosing Moral Crisis: A Second Opinion

The discourse of moral decline arose because it was felt by many that the
knowledge disseminated through schools and universities had produced an
unexpected effect: educated Indians had been plunged into a moral crisis, no
longer fully able to believe in the moral code derived from their own religion
and worldview, without yet being in a position to embrace the rationality
and morality corresponding to the new world of colonial civil society. I have
argued that this characterization and explanation presumed categories that
were not adequate to their object; a great many educated Indians who were
described as being in the throes of a moral crisis were themselves quite un-
aware that they were. Others, however, had come to subscribe to this expla-
nation and to characterize their own experience in terms of it. Why was this
so, and what was the nature of the difference between the two groups?
As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Duff, Macaulay, and others an-
ticipated that the introduction of western education would lead Hindus to
forsake their religion, and eventually to become Christians.They were wrong;
a few conversions aside, most educated Hindus did not abandon their religion
(this was precisely what led missionaries to add their voice to the discourse
of moral crisis, a ‘‘crisis’’ which functioned, in part, as an explanation of why
the desired conversions had not occurred). The prediction was mistaken for
many of the reasons we have been discussing: it assumed that religion was a
matter of belief, and that belief in Hinduism would be undermined when its
tenets were challenged by other ones. However, that some educated Hindus
did convert, and in doing so gave explanations that supported Macaulay’s and
Duff ’s reasoning (recall, for instance, the Indian Christian who declared that
the western knowledge imbibed at Hindu College had been instrumental in
76 Subject to Pedagogy
leading Hindus like him away from their religion) might suggest that this
explanation or prediction, and the presumptions that were embedded in it,
came to be true (for some). Change did occur, a crisis was experienced, and
inconsistency was one of the manifestations of this crisis.
However, in the light of the preceding discussion, we would now offer an
explanation in terms very different from those employed in the discourse of
moral crisis.We would now say that a conflict of beliefs and ensuing inconsis-
tency and crisis were not the ‘‘cause’’ of religious conversion but rather were
a way of describing and making sense of this conversion. Conflict and crisis
could only be experienced where the categories through which we experience
the world came to be seen as ones that human consciousness imposes upon
the world, rather than distinctions to which humans adapt themselves. It is
not that there were conflicts in their mind that led some to become Chris-
tians; it is rather that once they had become Christians and had come to see
their religion as something consisting of beliefs and values, they retrospec-
tively made sense of their conversion in these terms. The explanation is a way
of making sense of and narrating a change (and making sense of change by
narrating it), and doing so in the terms and categories of one’s changed posi-
tion, explaining both how one could once have been wrong and why one is
now right. Here to ‘‘explain’’ is not the same thing as to locate a ‘‘cause’’; and
the explanation is something integral to the transformation being character-
ized, rather than external to it.
An example may help to make the point. In his rereading of Freud’s analy-
sis of the Wolf Man (in which Freud traces the patient’s neurosis back to an
episode when the patient saw his parents having sex), Slavoj Žižek locates this
trauma within the ‘‘real’’ rather than the symbolic. One could say that this
real event was the ‘‘cause’’ of the subsequent neurosis. However, at the age
of two the episode was not a trauma for the child at all; it only became so
later, when the child entered the symbolic order and could not fit this scene
into it: ‘‘the trauma has no existence of its own prior to symbolization,’’ and
therefore it would be a mistake to ‘‘obliterate this retrospective character of
the trauma and ‘substantialize’ it into a positive entity, one that can be iso-
lated as a cause preceding its symbolic effects.’’ There is thus a peculiarity
about invoking the trauma as an explanation for the neurosis, which Žižek
characterizes as ‘‘the paradox of trauma qua cause, which does not pre-exist
its effects but is itself retroactively ‘posited’ by them,’’ and which involves ‘‘a
kind of temporal loop.’’ 102 I do not offer this illustration as a strict analogy
(we obviously cannot fit the social phenomenon in question into the Lacan-
 Diagnosing Moral Crisis 77
ian categories of the real and symbolic); it is the form of the argument that
is relevant. Žižek suggests that with the Wolf Man the very idea of cause
only makes sense inasmuch as it is retrospectively posited; the question of
whether it was ‘‘really’’ a cause (‘‘really’’ meaning antecedent to its effects, not
retrospectively posited by them) is unanswerable, because it is meaningless.
The explanation of moral crisis in terms of inconsistency and transition,
I submit, is of this sort. Only those for whom the categories of mind, belief,
the indivisible self, and the like had become meaningful could characterize
their experience (or that of others) in terms of crisis and inconsistency. They
would have had to experience the world through categories of the mind, in
the form described by Kant and Durkheim, rather than as described by the
protagonist of kk. Conversely, those for whom these categories did not make
sense—for whom the categories which made experience possible and gave it
its characteristic forms were ontological ones, such that knowledge and ex-
perience were ‘‘of ’’ these distinctions rather than ‘‘through’’ them—could not
even see or experience the effect which was to be explained. The conceptual
vocabulary that would allow them to even experience, let alone describe, a
crisis in ‘‘the mind’’ was not available.
This, let us note, is not the same as simply saying that the explanation of
moral crisis was ‘‘sometimes’’ accurate, that the explanation seemed to hold
for some educated Indians but not others. It does say that, but it goes fur-
ther, clarifying what it means to say that some Indians experienced a crisis—
namely that they now inhabited a world and lived a life in which religion
and morality were beliefs held, and in which the dissonance between beliefs
rooted in a Hindu life-world and those of the modern, ‘‘rational’’ world of
colonial civil society could be perceived and experienced as contrary pulls and
as conflict. The question of why—of why some Indians experienced this and
others did not—has not dissolved, because we have not dismissed moral crisis
as false, as a mere specter produced by a faulty explanation. But we have so
formulated the question that it does not simply involve identifying which
sociological factors led some to succumb to crisis and others not, as if the
fact of crisis were separate from and anterior to the explanation of it. We are
rather asking, Why did some cross over into that realm where they could ex-
perience crisis and (which is the same thing) have the language with which
to perceive and articulate it?
The factors that historians normally cite when explaining fundamental
changes in India, and the ‘‘transition’’ from one form of society and way of life
to another, may all continue to be relevant: the rise of the market and an im-
78 Subject to Pedagogy
personal cash nexus, the erosion of traditional communities, and so on.103 The
account we are now offering does not displace these historical explanations
but rather reconceives what we mean by ‘‘explaining a phenomenon.’’ We
now see these social phenomena and social changes not as acting upon social
actors so as to change the ways they thought and believed and the values they
embraced, but as bringing into being conceptions of ‘‘belief ’’ and ‘‘values.’’
As a result we must see the categories of our western, modern social sci-
ence not simply as ways of explaining change but as constitutive of it. The
modern western knowledge introduced and disseminated through western
education, and through the bureaucratic operations of the office and the im-
personal cash nexus of the market, was not just a way of knowing India but
also a force in reshaping it. And the knowledge which traveled to India was
most at home in its new locale—that is to say, was best able to fulfill its func-
tion of ‘‘understanding’’ and ‘‘explaining’’ India—where it had the effect of
reshaping the object that it sought to know.
chapter three

Which Past? Whose History?

History writing in a form that we would recognize as such arrived in India

with the British. From the moment that the British became territorial rulers
of Bengal down to the moment they were forced to relinquish their Indian
possessions, they wrote histories of India, beginning in the latter eighteenth
century with Alexander Dow’s The History of Hindostan and continuing in
the nineteenth with Mark Wilks’s Historical Sketches of the South of India, John
Malcolm’s Sketch of the Political Historyof India, James Mill’s The Historyof British
India, Duff ’s History of the Mahrattas, Mountstuart Elphinstone’s The History
of India, and W. W. Hunter’s A Brief History of the Indian Peoples and in the
twentieth with V. A. Smith’s Oxford History of India and the multiauthor and
multivolume Cambridge History of India. It was from such works, and from
the teaching of history in schools and colleges, ‘‘that the Bengali intellectual
learnt to rethink his own past according to a post-Enlightenment, rational-
ist view of history.’’ 1 The history textbooks which proliferated in schools and
universities, Ranajit Guha goes on to observe, played an especially important
role: ‘‘It was these text-books which, more than anything else, helped his-
tory to establish itself as a normal knowledge—normal in a Kuhnian sense—
within a culture still largely anchored to the Puranic tradition.’’ 2
Histories of India by British authors were very soon followed by Indian
ones. At first these histories tended to accept the narrative of Britain’s im-
proving mission in India, but soon historiography became the site of contes-
tation, as nationalists sought to write histories that would do justice to the
past of their people. These were not, however, Puranic histories of colonial-
ism but histories in the rationalist, post-Enlightenment mode.3 Whether the
histories written by Indians were loyalist or nationalist in their content, they
took for their form the modern and western mode of history writing.
The same is true of this book. A history of sorts, it tells of western edu-
79
80 Subject to Pedagogy
cation, the chief vehicle for the dissemination of western knowledge, from
within that knowledge. The Introduction observed that at some point it
would be necessary to problematize this fact, to render history writing into
an object of enquiry rather to presume its adequacy to its subject matter.
What does it mean to write a history of western education and knowledge
from within that knowledge? When we write a history of those who inhabited
‘‘a culture still largely anchored to the Puranic tradition,’’ and who therefore
would not necessarily recognize their past in the rationalist histories that we
write of them, what is the status of the knowledge that has been produced?
Most historians assume that there is an object called ‘‘history,’’ and that
their task is to re-present it more or less objectively, to the degree that its
surviving documents allow us to do so. To be sure, nowadays only innocents
aspire to write history ‘‘as it really was.’’ Most historians will concede that his-
tory writing is influenced by the historical circumstances of its production,
and will acknowledge that because history is written, it is shaped by the re-
sources of a linguistic community and the narrative conventions characteriz-
ing it. Nonetheless, the modern historical enterprise presumes that an object
called ‘‘history’’ exists, and that because it does it can be objectively repre-
sented, even if only through a ‘‘qualified objectivity’’;4 and on these grounds it
is assumed that ‘‘real’’ history writing is qualitatively different from, say, epic
and myth. If we too assumed that rationalist historiography is the privileged
medium by which to recount all pasts, there would be no reason to enquire
into the implications of writing a history of western education from within
western knowledge. In posing and pursuing this question, I therefore en-
gage those modes of thinking about history with a similar skepticism toward
the presumption that rationalist historiography affords objective knowledge,
and that it is the only true mode of representing the past.
Since there are a number of steps in the argument of this chapter, a brief
sketch may be helpful. I begin by examining those writing within the her-
meneutical tradition, who characterize encounters with past texts as engage-
ments with the intellectual tradition from which we reason, rather than as
a mode of gaining ‘‘objective’’ knowledge about the past. In outlining and
endorsing their position, I also suggest that while it provides a better way of
understanding what we do when we write history, it is corrosive of the idea
that history writing as a discipline is possessed of its own object, namely ‘‘his-
tory’’ or ‘‘the past.’’ If, as Hans-Georg Gadamer argues, all understanding in
the human sciences is hermeneutical and also historical—that is, grounded
 Which Past? Whose History? 81
and enabled by the inescapably temporal nature of Being—then it is difficult
to see what the specific object of historiographical enquiry could be.
Historiography, I go on to argue, is not the objective retelling of a self-
evident object, the past, but neither is it a reflex or expression of human
temporality; it is instead a ‘‘code,’’ one that creates its object. Drawing upon
Foucault, Certeau, and Lévi-Strauss, I suggest that the central element in
this code is humanism-anthropology. It is not because man is a meaning
producing being, who leaves behind traces of himself, that it is possible
to engage in history writing: the re-creation of the sort of man this was
through an examination of his traces. Rather, it is historiography that helps
to secure this humanist-anthropological presumption. Moreover, the pre-
sumption that Man is a culture secreting and meaning producing being—for
instance, that gods are to be explained with reference to men rather than men
with reference to gods—is not a universal, ‘‘transcendental presupposition’’
but rather a specifically modern presumption. Writing the history of those
who did not share this presumption—who thought, for instance, that the af-
fairs of men were best understood by reference to the designs of their Creator,
not that their God was understood and explained as a creation of these men—
is thus an anachronistic enterprise. Where, as in Europe, this view yielded
to the humanist presumption underlying history writing, the anachronism
in question can be a productive one. In this case the practice of history does
not yield objective knowledge of the past, for we are ‘‘translating’’ the world
and the self-understandings of our subjects into our modern terms; but it
can yield an understanding of how their world gave way to ours, and thus of
how we are both connected to and different from the objects of our historical
enquiries.
The value that this has when practiced in a hermeneutic rather than ob-
jectivist mode only applies, however, inasmuch as the code of history is ap-
plied to the past out of which the code itself emerges; when applied to Indian
pasts, it is neither an objective way of knowing what happened nor even a
dialogue which enables better self-understanding. Here the code of history is
not an outgrowth of earlier intellectual traditions but an external imposition;
and because it does not arise out of the past that it retells, the hermeneutic
‘‘payload’’ of an anachronistic engagement with the past is lost. I conclude,
therefore, by considering what the status of history writing is in this case,
and specifically what the status is of a history of western education like that
undertaken in this book.
82 Subject to Pedagogy

History and Hermeneutics

In a commonly told story, the successes of the mathematical and physical sci-
ences led to the extension of their methods to the emergent sciences of man
to found a ‘‘science of society.’’ Such a science would be based upon knowl-
edge of the universal and invariant features of the human mind, and of the
laws presumed to govern the functioning of society, just as they governed
the natural world. This bred a reaction which, while willing to concede the
fecundity of this approach when applied to nature, denied that it was equally
applicable to the human sciences or, as many of those making this argument
came to call them, the Geisteswissenschaften. It was claimed that the knowl-
edge produced in the human sciences was different from that of the natural
sciences, and required methods which recognized this difference. It was vari-
ously argued that the human sciences required an ideothetic rather than a
nomothetic method; that they produced understanding rather than expla-
nation; that the knowledge gained was of particulars, rather than general-
izable laws and predictions based upon them; and that the human sciences
were concerned with meanings, not causes. Many of these arguments were
made with special reference to the domain of history. It was often claimed
that knowledge of human affairs was inescapably historical in a way that
knowledge of nature was not, with this having implications for the method
of enquiry to be pursued, as well as for the character and status of the knowl-
edge produced.
By the latter part of the nineteenth century Wilhelm Dilthey could declare
that the successes of the ‘‘historical school’’ had emancipated the human sci-
ences from their bondage to the natural sciences, but that they had done so
without adequately specifying their own philosophical foundations. Much of
Dilthey’s large corpus was thus devoted to trying to develop the ‘‘philosophi-
cal foundations of the human studies.’’ 5
According to Dilthey, in the human sciences the objects to be known are
products of human consciousness, as objectified in texts and other works of
men; and the knowledge in question takes the form of understanding and
interpreting, rather than coming to know causal processes and laws.6 Dilthey
borrows the term ‘‘objective mind’’ from Hegel to designate the object of the
human sciences: ‘‘the manifold forms in which what individuals hold in com-
mon have objectified themselves in the world of the senses. In this objective
mind the past is a permanently enduring present for us. Its realm extends
from the style of life and the forms of social intercourse to the system of pur-
 Which Past? Whose History? 83
poses which society has created for itself and to custom, law, state, religion,
art, science and philosophy.’’ 7 The knowledge sought by the human sciences
is still conceived in terms of correct or adequate cognition, that is, in terms of
consciousness grasping its object—Dilthey affirms that he works within the
philosophical tradition of Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant—but Dilthey
also registers an important difference: ‘‘no real blood flows in the veins of the
knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume and Kant; it is only the diluted
juice of reason, a mere process of thought. . . . However, my historical and
psychological studies of man as a whole led me to explain cognition and its
concepts in terms of the powers of man as a willing, feeling and imagining
being . . . The questions we all ask of philosophy cannot be answered by rigid
a priori conditions of knowledge but only by a history which starts from the
totality of our nature and sketches its development.’’ 8
Dilthey does not just historicize the object to be known: he goes consider-
ably further by historicizing the subject who knows. This step took him be-
yond the Cartesian and Kantian legacy within which he was working, because
epistemological certainty was rendered problematic the moment the subject
was not a transcendental subject but rather one situated in a time and place.
In his ‘‘Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason,’’ Dilthey put it as follows:
‘‘On the one hand, the knowing subject creates this mind-constructed world
and, on the other, strives to know it objectively. How, then, does the men-
tal construction of the mind-constructed world make knowledge of mind-
constructed reality possible? This is the problem of what I have called the
Critique of Historical Reason.’’ 9
This was a problem that Dilthey posed sharply and with which he strug-
gled, but it was one he never surmounted. He is often approvingly quoted as
having written that Man ‘‘understands history because he himself is a his-
torical being.’’ 10 But this statement, as Hans-Georg Gadamer points out, far
from constituting a solution, simply restates the problem and underlines the
gravity of it: ‘‘Is not the fact that consciousness is historically conditioned in-
evitably an insuperable barrier to its reaching perfect fulfilment in historical
knowledge?’’ 11 For Hegel this problem was overcome because absolute knowl-
edge gathers all of history up into it. But while Dilthey borrowed ‘‘objective
mind’’ and much else besides from Hegel, this was a step he was unwill-
ing to take; he and the entire generation who sought to provide philosophi-
cal grounding for history and the human sciences were united in rejecting
Hegel’s speculative philosophy, which in Dilthey’s words ‘‘leaves the tempo-
ral, empirical and historical relations behind.’’ 12 Dilthey sought instead to
84 Subject to Pedagogy
ground historical knowledge in ‘‘life experience,’’ and as Gadamer notes, ‘‘if
life is the inexhaustible, creative reality that Dilthey conceives, then must not
the constant development of the meaningful context of history exclude any
knowledge attaining to objectivity?’’ 13
In the terms in which Dilthey posed the problem, it could not be solved.
For while Dilthey went beyond his Kantian and Cartesian legacy in posing the
problem, he nonetheless ‘‘remained committed, in some fundamental sense,
to their nonhistorical ideal of interpretation, that is, to apodictic certitude
and universal validity.’’ 14 Any solution to the problem that Dilthey poses—
namely, how can we achieve objective knowledge given that our knowledge
is historically conditioned?—requires rethinking historicity, rethinking the
requirement of objective Truth, or both.This task is undertaken by Gadamer,
who continues the ‘‘hermeneutical’’ enquiry of Dilthey and his predecessors,
by means of a detour through Heidegger.

Ontology and ‘‘Effective History’’

For Gadamer the Enlightenment search for certitude is misconceived, in part
because there is no Archimedean point from where we can survey and know
the world without being influenced by our own location in it: ‘‘It is true that
all understanding of the texts of philosophy requires the recognition of the
knowledge that they contain. Without this we would understand nothing at
all. But this does not mean that we in any way step outside the historical
conditions in which we find ourselves and in which we understand . . . The
standpoint that is beyond any standpoint, a standpoint from which we could
conceive its true identity, is a pure illusion.’’ 15 It therefore follows that ‘‘the
idea of an absolute reason is impossible for historical humanity.’’ 16
According to Gadamer, this does not mean that interpretation and knowl-
edge are arbitrary—that if objectivity is impossible, only pure and arbitrary
subjectivism is left. It is this misconception that makes us cling to the search
for pure objectivity, but in fact the choice is not between an unachievable
objective certitude and an understanding that is wholly contingent upon
our individual predilections. For the key element of our historical situat-
edness is that it is collective. Our prejudgments and preconceptions are not
arbitrary individual ones, but those of our community and our intellectual
tradition: ‘‘Long before we understand ourselves through the process of self-
examination, we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family,
society and state in which we live. The focus of subjectivity is a distorting
 Which Past? Whose History? 85
mirror. The self-awareness of the individual is only a flickering in the closed
circuits of historical life.’’ 17
The preconceptions through which we conceive of and approach the object
that we seek to understand are those of our tradition, but ‘‘tradition’’ con-
ceived not, in Enlightenment terms, as the antithesis of Reason (as blind obe-
dience to authority); rather, tradition is something which survives because
it is continually being renewed, affirmed, and also cultivated and changed.18
This conception leads to Gadamer’s famous rehabilitation of prejudice. In-
stead of seeking apodictic truth, for which our historicity will prove an in-
superable problem, we must accept the inescapability of our location within
traditions, and hence of prejudice: ‘‘What is necessary is a fundamental re-
habilitation of the concept of prejudice and a recognition of the fact that
there are legitimate prejudices, if we want to do justice to man’s finite, his-
torical mode of being.’’ 19 This need not mean that we are imprisoned within
our prejudices—we need, Gadamer writes, to distinguish between legitimate
prejudices and those which reason needs to overcome—but it does mean that
we cannot somehow erase or bracket them and encounter the object of under-
standing as if they did not exist.20 Conversely, the ‘‘object’’ of our understand-
ing—say, a text from the past—is itself never a ‘‘pure’’ object, for it comes to
us with accretions of meaning, as always already interpreted. Understanding
is therefore not an encounter between a disembodied consciousness which
seeks to know a pure object, but an encounter between a subject and an ob-
ject, both of which come with their own pre-understandings and accretions,
their own historical ‘‘horizon.’’ Understanding consists of a genuine dialogue
or conversation (a favored metaphor of Gadamer) which aims at a fusion of
horizons. Where this aim can be met (and it cannot always be met, because
sometimes we will not be able to accept the truth of the horizon the object
brings in its train), the resulting ‘‘fusion,’’ as Georgia Warnke points out, is
very like a Hegelian synthesis: ‘‘In the consensus or synthesis that results the
truth of one’s own position and that of the object are both preserved in a new
stage of the tradition and cancelled as adequate positions on their own.’’ 21
Gadamer takes the step that Dilthey found himself unable to take, namely
to recognize that the historicity of the enquiring subject renders objec-
tive knowledge impossible. Gadamer thus redescribes what happens in the
human sciences as a dialogue between the tradition out of which we reason
and the objects by which we are addressed. But it is not that Gadamer simply
urges us to now regard as a virtue what previously appeared as a vice, namely
the impossibility of any objective grounding for knowledge, and the apparent
86 Subject to Pedagogy
inescapability of subjectiveness in our judgments. He claims not merely that
our historical situatedness is a fact with important epistemological implica-
tions, but that our historicity is itself grounded in the ontological structure
of what it means to be human. He does this by drawing upon the thought of
Martin Heidegger.
Gadamer draws upon the fundamental ontology of Being and Time to re-
think our historicity not as an inescapable limit to our knowledge but as
its enabling condition. As Ricoeur describes it, the idea that hermeneutics
is concerned with providing an epistemological grounding for the human
sciences is displaced by Heidegger and then Gadamer, as they ‘‘attempt to
dig beneath the epistemological enterprise in order to disclose its ontologi-
cal condition.’’ 22 For Heidegger, history as historians understand it, as ob-
jective events and processes of the past, is merely the ontic manifestation of
a more fundamental ontological condition that provides its ground, namely
the temporalizing modes of human being. The abstract time of world his-
tory presumed by the historian is moreover the least authentic of the modes
of human temporality, for it is rooted in the forgetting of human finitude.
It is these modes, unified in the three ekstases of future, past, and present,
that constitute our historicity, not as an objective past that affects us but
as the ‘‘happening’’ that we ourselves are: ‘‘The historical is not only some-
thing from which one gets information, and about which there are books; it
is much more what we ourselves are, that which we bear.’’ 23
Gadamer writes that after Heidegger the phrase ‘‘we study history only in-
sofar as we are ourselves historical’’ no longer means, as it did for Dilthey, that
there is a resemblance between knower and known (a resemblance which can
lead only to a grounding of history in intuitive and psychological terms); it
now means ‘‘that the historicalness of human There-being [Dasein] in its ex-
pectancy and its forgetting is the condition of our being able to represent the
past.’’ 24 As Gadamer summarizes it, ‘‘the hermeneutic importance of tem-
poral distance could be [properly] understood only as a result of the onto-
logical direction that Heidegger gave to understanding as an ‘existential’ and
of his temporal interpretation of the mode of being of There-being. Time is
no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged, because it separates, but is actually
the supportive ground of the process in which the present is rooted. Hence
temporal distance is not something that must be overcome . . . the impor-
tant thing is to recognize the distance in time as a positive and productive
possibility of understanding. It is not a yawning abyss, but is filled with the
continuity of custom and tradition.’’ 25
 Which Past? Whose History? 87
What Gadamer terms ‘‘effective history’’—the fact that our historicity is
present as the enabling condition of enquiry in the human sciences, taking
the form of a conversation between tradition and ourselves—is not a method
but a description of what all understanding necessarily involves. The famous
‘‘hermeneutic circle’’ is now described not as a method to be followed but
as ‘‘an ontological structural element in [all] understanding,’’ 26 and the her-
meneutic enterprise, thus redefined with the aid of Heidegger, is proposed
not as ‘‘a new discipline ancillary to the human sciences’’ but as that which
allows us to ‘‘understand ourselves better and recognise that in all under-
standing, whether we are expressly aware of it or not, the power of effective-
history is at work.’’ 27 All historical enquiries, even naïvely objectivist ones
that are unaware of their own historicity and that aim to present things ‘‘as
they really happened,’’ are in fact consequences of this ontological and exis-
tential condition.Understanding becomes superior when this fact is brought
to self-consciousness. For then one no longer seeks an epistemological cer-
tainty which is quite simply unattainable, nor does one strive through empa-
thy or other methods to recreate the past and bracket the present, a procedure
equally impossible once one realizes that any event or aspect of the past ap-
pears before us as always already interpreted. Effective history, grounded in
the reality that the texts of the past come to us already interpreted and that
we encounter them through our tradition, is always operative; it is not so
much a limit to our knowledge which cannot be surpassed, but is the very
basis of understanding. It does not mean that we are trapped within our tra-
dition, but rather that the engagement with texts of the past is a search for a
fusion of horizons, where the object comes to be differently understood and
the interpreting subject works within his tradition in a manner which opens
it to amendment and transformation.
This argument rests upon the claim that because of the fact of human
temporality and historicity, all intellectual enquiry (Gadamer partly exempts
the natural sciences) is subject to ‘‘effective history.’’ This, we should note, is
not the same as providing a new, non-objectivist epistemological ‘‘ground-
ing’’ for the discipline and practice of modern historiography. Indeed, to argue
that all the human sciences are equally subject to effective history is poten-
tially to deprive history writing of any specific object; if all consciousness is
‘‘historical consciousness’’ then it is difficult to see what place exists for a
discipline specifically addressed to an object called ‘‘history.’’ Gadamer him-
self is somewhat ambiguous on this matter: he sometimes writes of ‘‘histori-
cal research,’’ as if the ontological argument has specific epistemological im-
88 Subject to Pedagogy
plications for historiography, a historiography which would be an improved
version of the existing discipline. But he also, and more consistently, suggests
that what a recognition of human historicity leads to is not better knowledge
of the ‘‘historical object’’ but rather self-knowledge: ‘‘The effective historical
consciousness knows that which shows itself as the object of investigation
is not an ‘‘object’’ which the progress of research will somehow eventually
unveil in seinem Ansichseins [in its being as it is in itself ]. Rather, with a his-
torical phenomenon—a picture, a text, a political or social event—one is able
to see one’s own self in the other, in the sense that through it one learns to
comprehend oneself better.’’ 28

Historicity and Temporality

Even if the temporal and finite mode of human being provides the founda-
tion for our historicity, there are many ways by which people have consti-
tuted and represented their past to themselves, of which historiography, as
we have come to understand it in the modern West, is only one. Historicity
is also registered and represented in myth, legend, epic, and the like. Is there
any reason for regarding history writing as more representative of our his-
toricity than these? Does the analytic of finitude do more than establish the
irreducibly temporal character of Dasein—does it in some way also serve to
‘‘ground’’ historiography, once the objectivist position that history is simply
‘‘there,’’ waiting to bewritten about, has been rejected? The question, in other
words, is whether the historicality of Dasein has any implications for histo-
riography, and in particular whether it can be made to give us any ground
for preferring one mode of thinking and recounting the past over any other.
In division 2, part V, of Being and Time (especially S 75–77) Heidegger shows
that historiography’s objectifying notion of the past derives from an inade-
quately grounded concept of time, or more precisely from an exclusive focus
on only one of the three modes of human temporality. In Ricoeur’s words,
‘‘The structures of fallenness, of everydayness, of anonymity, that stem from
the analytic of Dasein are sufficient, Heidegger believes, to account for this
misunderstanding by which we ascribe a history to things.’’ 29 But it does not
thereby follow that a proper ontology will lead to an alternative conception
of historiography. In Being and Time Heidegger does seem to indicate that his
analysis of finitude and the historicality of Dasein have implications for his-
torical science or ‘‘historiology.’’ He argues that historical science is enabled
by the historicity of Dasein, which is itself ‘‘rooted in temporality’’;30 and
 Which Past? Whose History? 89
thus ‘‘the Interpretation of Dasein’s historicality will prove, at bottom, just a
more concrete working out of temporality.’’ 31 Heidegger seems to be signal-
ing that a proper appreciation of the historicality of Dasein, rooted in an ap-
preciation of its temporality and specifically in its ‘‘authentic Being-towards-
death—that is to say, the finitude of temporality,’’ 32 will put historiology on
a better footing, and more generally will yield dividends for the theory of the
human sciences. However, what these might be is not a question that Heideg-
ger pursues in Being and Time. And as early as the Davos debate with Cassirer,
Heidegger was already seeking to refute what he would later call ‘‘anthropo-
logical’’ readings of Being and Time, and denying that one could extract from
it an alternative philosophy of the human sciences.33 The writings after the
kehre, or ‘‘turning,’’ explicitly move away from such themes (it is telling that
Gadamer’s use of Heidegger’s thought for his own project relies almost ex-
clusively on Being and Time), and there is ample reason to believe that the later
Heidegger would have regarded attempts to derive a rationale for historiog-
raphy from his analysis of temporality as fundamentally misconceived.
Paul Ricoeur writes that while moving ‘‘behind’’ epistemological ques-
tions to theirontological ‘‘ground’’ is important and illuminating, ‘‘With Hei-
degger we can move backwards to the ground but any return from ontology
to the epistemological question about the status of the human sciences is im-
possible.’’ 34 As his use of ‘‘impossible’’ indicates, in Ricoeur’s view it is not
that the epistemological consequences of Heidegger’s ontology have not been
followed through, but that Heidegger’s philosophy is inhospitable to episte-
mological questions, tending to dissolve rather than solve them. With regard
to history, Ricoeur writes, ‘‘The only way of justifying the ontological pri-
ority of historicality over historiography would be, it seems to me, to show
convincingly how the latter proceeds from the former. Here we run into the
greatest difficulty for any thinking about time that refers every derivative
form of temporality to one primordial form, the mortal temporality of Care.
This poses a major obstacle to any historical thinking. I cannot see how the
repetition of possibilities inherited by each of us as a result of being thrown
into the world can measure up to the scope of the historical past.’’ 35 At the
end of Ricoeur’s monumental three-volume study Time and Narrative, he con-
cludes that ‘‘temporality cannot be spoken of in the direct discourse of phe-
nomenology, but rather requires the mediation of the indirect discourse of
narration.’’ 36 For instance, the basis of both individual and collective iden-
tities—what allows us to speak of a person or community as being the same
entity across all the changes that it undergoes, and what thus allows us to
90 Subject to Pedagogy
think of ‘‘it’’ as having a ‘‘history’’—is narrative: ‘‘subjects recognize them-
selves in the stories they tell about themselves.’’ 37 He gives as an example
the Jews: ‘‘it was in telling these narratives taken to be testimony about the
founding events of its history that biblical Israel became the historical com-
munity that bears this name. The relation is circular—the historical com-
munity called the Jewish people has drawn its identity from the reception of
those texts that it had produced.’’ 38 I am sympathetic to this argument, but
it is clear that here there is no object belonging to history which might pro-
vide the subject matter for historiography; rather, historical and other nar-
ratives constitute the object, thus making it available for historical enquiry.
For Ricoeur as with Gadamer, an insistence upon the ‘‘historicity’’ of human
beings serves not to produce a new, ontologically grounded version of the
discipline of historiography, but rather to undermine the possibility of any
distinctively historiographical enterprise.
Why should historiography as we practice it be in any way privileged as
the mode by which humans understand their historicity, and represent it to
themselves? If the ontological argument demonstrates, in Gadamer’s words
quoted above, that ‘‘time is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged, because
it separates, but is actually the supportive ground of the process in which
the present is rooted,’’ and that ‘‘temporal distance is not something that
must be overcome,’’ then do not other modes of representing the past, such
as those which treat the past as an ever-present resource, ready to hand as
a guide to the present, not meet this description better? And to the degree
that this analysis is grounded in Heidegger’s ontology of the temporal fini-
tude of Dasein, where the most authentic past is one that can be retrieved for
repetition in an authentic future,39 are not these other modes of narrating
the past in fact more ‘‘authentic,’’ and true to the temporality of Dasein, than
historiography? In short, the ontological grounding of human historicity in
temporality may undermine an objectivist understanding of history, but it is
difficult to see what ‘‘productive’’ implications it has for the specific practices
by which humans have represented their past to themselves; and even more
difficult to see how it could ground modern, rationalist historiography, even
an alternative, nonobjectivist version of this historiography.

The Code of History

The objectivist presumption that history simply ‘‘is’’ and that historiography
is the best way of representing the past will not do, even in its modulated,
 Which Past? Whose History? 91
post-Rankean formulations. It is not that history simply happens, and that
historiography is the attempt to recreate what has happened through a rig-
orous method, as objectivist historiography imagines. But neither is histori-
ography the reflex of our historicity, grounded in the temporality of Dasein.
It is an intellectual and cultural construct, one particular way of construct-
ing and construing the past; at once a tradition of reasoning, a way of being,
and a certain practice of subjectivity. The desire to write history is specific
to certain people (societies, classes) and not others. It is connected to some
phenomena—the emergence of the modern state, ‘‘progress,’’ scientific ratio-
nality—and not others, against which it usually defines itself (magic, gods).
Paul Veyne writes that ‘‘the problem of the birth of historiography is not dis-
tinct from that of knowing why it was born in a particular form.’’ 40 That is,
the emergence of history writing as a specific mode of relating to and consti-
tuting the past is not derivative of some deep underlying reality, and certainly
not of human temporality: ‘‘History is a bookish, not an existential notion; it
is the organization by the intelligence of data relating to a temporality that
is not that of Dasein.’’ 41 Lévi-Strauss similarly argues that historiography is a
code which organizes and constitutes its object, through chronology.42
If history writing constitutes its object, then how does it do so? If it is a
code, what is it that it encodes?
Various answers to these questions have been given, including Lévi-
Strauss’s famous claim that the code of history is chronology, and the claim
that historiography codes or effects an absolute divide between a dead past
and the present.43 Both features are important and defining ones of the code
of history, but above all else, historiography encodes the humanism or an-
thropology that became a defining feature of western thought from the early
modern period. It does so, first of all, inasmuch as its subject is Man. This
seems unremarkable—who else could the object of history be, if not Man?
That this seems obvious only indicates how much we are heirs to the trans-
formation which made anthropological assumptions the axioms of our intel-
lectual practice and the bedrock of our culture. Tracing the semantic and
epistemic changes underlying the emergence of the concept of history, Rein-
hardt Koselleck however notes that before the Enlightenment ‘‘there was no
history for which humanity might have been the subject’’ 44 but rather his-
tories in the plural, of specific institutions and communities. The emergence
of historiography thus corresponds to the emergence of a ‘‘collective singu-
lar’’—Man—as the object of history. Of course, history continues to be writ-
ten in the plural. Histories of an earlier sort—of kings and kingdoms and
92 Subject to Pedagogy
so on—continue to be written, and because the emergence of historiography
coincides with another Enlightenment innovation, the invention of the idea
of society,45 in addition to these earlier histories we also gain histories of soci-
eties and of nations. That histories of various kinds continue to be written
helps to disguise the change which has occurred, and allows us to imagine
that history writing is continuous with earlier modes of thinking and writing
about the past, distinguished principally by its more rigorous method, in par-
ticular its fidelity to sources. In fact modern historiography and the modern
historical sense are something altogether new, for although histories in the
plural continue to be written, these are now all subplots of a larger narrative,
the one History of Man, and as such are to be related to each other as different
moments in a larger narrative enclosed within a singular time frame.
That historiography emerges as the study of the past of Man also means
that nature no longer has a history. Voltaire’s essay on ‘‘Histoire’’ in the En-
cyclopaedia, for example, declares that ‘‘natural history’’ is in fact a part of
physics, not history. More generally, ‘‘historia naturalis’’ has ceased to belong
to the domain of history.46 Gods are also expelled from the domain of history,
and not because of secularization: historiography can coexist with religion,
and indeed even, as in Ranke’s case, with the conviction that a divine Provi-
dence animates history. But God or gods can no longer be historical actors, be-
cause the subject of history is man, and only man. It is this anthropological-
humanist presumption that disqualifies many of the other forms by which
peoples have conceived and narrated their past—these are now declared to
not be history writing at all, and indeed the emergent discipline defines itself
against them. It also means not only that God ceases to be a historical actor,
but he is himself to be explained, as a creature of men.
This last is one of the more dramatic implications of an epistemic and
cultural shift, which among its other effects saw the ways in which Euro-
pean men and women related their past (and related to the past) replaced by
this new ‘‘code,’’ or ‘‘bookish notion.’’ ‘‘The task of the modern era,’’ Ludwig
Feuerbach wrote, is ‘‘the humanization of God—the transformation and dis-
solution of theology into anthropology.’’ 47 The modern era has been steadily
discharging that task. Once, to understand men you had to understand God;
now, to understand the gods of men you have to understand the men, because
their gods are the fantastical creation of their minds. Once the purposes and
the acts of gods explained the world of men; now gods are themselves signs
of men, traces from which historians, anthropologists, and sociologists can
recreate the meanings and purposes with which these men endowed their
 Which Past? Whose History? 93
world.Thus it is not only that the subject of history is Man, but that this sub-
ject is a Subject—a meaning-producing and purpose-endowing being who
objectifies himself in the world, and through whose objectifications we can
recreate what sort of men these were, and what sort of world they had created
and inhabited.
To be sure, there are important differences in how all this is formulated.
In some cases the signs which give us information about their makers are
understood as ‘‘objective spirit’’; in others, collectively they constitute a ‘‘cul-
ture’’; in others still, these are the signs which make up the social text. In
some versions that men are authors means that their productions are more or
less transparent to them, or will become so once Man produces the conditions
of his life and his own nature under conditions of freedom; in others, we are
the products of our own productions, but these productions operate in ways
which are opaque to us and partly beyond our control and determination.
Different disciplines constituted on the basis of these founding presump-
tions also operationalize or mobilize them in different ways. In ethnology
and anthropology, for instance, culture is often treated as a text which, to
quote James Clifford, has a ‘‘generalized author [which] goes under a variety
of names: the native point of view, ‘the Trobrianders,’ ‘the Neuer.’ ’’ 48 From
the text one can ‘‘read backwards’’ and gain knowledge about its author.
In historiography, the specific form in which anthropological assump-
tions are encoded can be clearly seen in the fetishistic concern with the pri-
mary source, the text, or text analogue, which after Ranke was seen to define
historiography when it became institutionalized as a discipline. Paying at-
tention to primary sources is the essence of historiography not principally be-
cause it is more ‘‘rigorous’’ than earlier methods, but because primary sources
are, according to an idea now naturalized, remnants that objectify the mean-
ings and purposes of historical actors, from which we can piece together
the past. Thus, Marc Bloch wrote, ‘‘it is men that history seeks to grasp,’’ 49
through ‘‘a knowledge of their tracks. Whether it is the bones immured in
the Syrian fortifications, a word or form whose use reveals a custom, a nar-
rative written by the witness of some scene . . . what do we really mean by
document, if it is not a ‘track.’ ’’ 50 For documents to exist as such it is precisely
necessary that they be seen as ‘‘survivals,’’ as ‘‘tracks,’’ as ‘‘traces.’’ Only when
we see the score of a Beethoven symphony as something surviving from the
past that might be mined for information about music, court culture, and
many other things besides—rather than as wrapping paper—does it become
a document. That is precisely why even documents of dubious value for the
94 Subject to Pedagogy
direct information which they contain—forgeries are an extreme instance—
are nonetheless of historical value, since they can, as traces, be made to yield
other sorts of information.51

A ‘‘Transcendental Presupposition’’
Historiography thus ‘‘encodes’’ anthropological presumptions with specific
reference to the object that it constructs and of which it purports to offer
knowledge, namely the human past. Historiography is by no means the only
site where this epistemic and cultural transformation, one which marks the
birth of modern, western knowledge and culture, came to be effected. The
transformation in question is very much wider. One after another, modern
writers of diverse philosophical affiliations, working from within different
disciplines—Vico, Herder,Tylor, Cassirer, Geertz, Dilthey, Greenblatt and the
‘‘New Historicists,’’ and numerous others—testify that behind most things
lurks Man; that art and literature, religion and morality and myth, law and
custom, and common sense are all ‘‘products,’’ ‘‘expressions,’’ or ‘‘traces’’ of
‘‘societies’’ or ‘‘peoples’’ or ‘‘cultures.’’ I have designated this shift, in short-
hand, as anthropology-humanism. As observed, what precise form these pre-
sumptions take varies, across authors and also across disciplines. The differ-
ences are important, but underlying them is a more basic commonality, a
shared epistemological space. Max Weber characterized it thus: ‘‘The tran-
scendental presupposition of every cultural science . . . is that we are cultural
beings, endowed with the capacity and the will to take a deliberate attitude
towards the world and to lend it significance.’’ 52
I cite Weber not only because ‘‘transcendental presupposition’’ is a particu-
larly apt formulation, but also because Weber recognizes that the adoption of
this presupposition marks a cultural and epistemic transformation. This is
precisely the transformation which we discussed in the Introduction, a shift
from seeing the world as a text, imbued with meaning and purpose, of which
men, as creatures made in God’s image and endowed with grace and reason,
are privileged readers, to the view of the world as a social text of which men
are the authors. In Weber’s account this presupposition arises with the ‘‘dis-
enchantment of the world,’’ as modern men and women in the Occident rec-
ognize that they are cultural beings who endow the world with significance
precisely because, and in proportion to the extent to which, they are forced to
recognize the absence of meanings already in the world, waiting to be ‘‘dis-
covered’’: ‘‘The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge is
 Which Past? Whose History? 95
that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the
results of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to
create this meaning itself.’’ 53 This has not always been presumed, and thus
this disenchanted outlook has a history, consisting in the specific form that
rationalization took in Occidental religions, culminating in Protestantism
and the social and scientific developments with which it was associated.
But if the realization that we endow meaning upon the world has a his-
tory, in what sense is this a transcendental presupposition? That is, if it is borne
of the specific history of the modern West, how can it be said to be a pre-
supposition of universal import? For example, if in the past men and women
in Europe saw God as the source of reality and of meaning, whereas we dis-
enchanted moderns do not, then by what warrant do we privilege our pre-
supposition, and conclude that their God has to be understood and explained
as meanings with which they endowed their world, rather than as that which
gave them life and the world meaning? And by what right to we do so for
the nonwestern world, which may not have undergone the same processes of
rationalization, culminating in the disenchantment of the world?
The answer, according to Weber, is that while we moderns have come to
see the world as disenchanted because of a very specific (Occidental) history,
humans have always been the producers of meanings and purposes, even
when they have not realized it. David Kolb writes, ‘‘In Weber’s eyes, moder-
nity is an explicit recognition of what the self and society have been all along.
Modern identity is not just another in a sequence of historic constructions;
it is the unveiling of what has been at the root of these constructions.’’ 54
From this perspective, it is enchantment, as intellectual ‘‘error,’’ that needs
‘‘explaining’’; the disenchantment of the world, while it has a history, is the
truth finally uncovered. Like other moderns,Weber sees modernity as a privi-
leged vantage point that finally makes comprehensible all the history that
preceded it—a point to which we shall return in the Epilogue.
Weber’s analysis of disenchantment is deeply indebted to Nietzsche.When
Nietzsche has a madman announce the death of God, and when he announces
the advent of nihilism and the destruction of values, he too is announcing
that belief in a transcendent realm of values, in God, in Platonism, is near-
ing its end. At times he sounds like an upbeat Weber, one who welcomes and
celebrates this development, because it allows man to recognize as his that
which he once attributed to others: ‘‘All the beauty and sublimity we have
bestowed upon real and imaginary things I will reclaim as the property and
product of man; as his fairest apology. Man as poet, as thinker, as God, as
96 Subject to Pedagogy
love, as power; O, with what regal liberality he has lavished gifts upon things,
only to impoverish himself and make himself feel wretched! His most unself-
ish act hitherto was to admire and worship and to know how to conceal from
himself that it was he who created all that he admired.’’ 55 The transcendent
values to which men have subordinated themselves have in fact always been
their own products; every discovery was in fact an invention, every interpre-
tation a new creation. Nietzsche sees in the advent of nihilism the possibility
of a freedom to revalue all values, recognizing them all as human creations,
borne of a will to power. But there is an important difference, and it does
not simply lie in Nietzsche’s tendency to view with gaiety and lightness what
Weber announces with foreboding. The Genealogy of Morals and other writ-
ings provide also a genealogy of the subject, not as a natural being whose
essence is to be possessed of consciousness and the capacity to create meaning
but as someone created to be able to make promises, feel guilt, subscribe to
values, and the like.Thus for Nietzsche—albeit inconsistently so—the subject
is not the source and origin of meaning and value but is himself a histori-
cal product, forged on the anvil of Christian morality and Roman law. Weber
assumes that the value-creating or culture-secreting individual has always
existed, but only becomes aware of himself as such in modern times, whereas
for Nietzsche this individual is himself a creation or invention. The differ-
ence is significant, because if the presumption that humans are the source of
all values and meanings is in fact historically and culturally produced, then
we may not be entitled to presuppose it where such a subject has not been
created.
This, as we saw in the Introduction, is Heidegger’s position. Heidegger
rejects all talk of Weltanschauung and of different ways of ‘‘picturing’’ the
world precisely because it assumes that men have always pictured the world
and ascribed value to it. The difference between the medieval and modern
worlds is not, however, that modern men and women picture the world dif-
ferently and have different values. To see the world as picture, to have values
and cultures and experiences, is not to have a set of transcendental presuppo-
sitions which have finally come into their own, but rather is a consequence of
cultural and epistemic shifts, including the rise of a metaphysics of subjec-
tivity that Heidegger labels ‘‘anthropology’’: ‘‘That the world becomes picture
is one and the same event with the event of man’s becoming subiectum . . .
the more extensively and the more effectively the world stands at man’s dis-
posal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more
subjectively . . . does the subiectum rise up, and all the more impetuously,
 Which Past? Whose History? 97
too, do observation and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of
man, into anthropology. It is no wonder that humanism first arises where
the world becomes picture . . . Humanism, therefore, in the more strict histo-
riographical sense, is nothing but a moral aesthetic anthropology. The name
‘anthropology’ as used here . . . designates that philosophical interpretation
of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the
standpoint of man and in relation to man.’’ 56
The contemporary anti-humanists who are the heirs of Nietzsche and
Heidegger similarly insist that man, far from always having been a value-
creating and meaning-producing being who with modernity finally becomes
aware of that fact, is himself a historically produced, and possibly transient,
consequence of contingent historical events. One effect of their analyses is
that historiography is immediately rendered problematic: if Man is a product
of history, he cannot be the constant whose changes and transformations it
retells. Indeed, analyses of this sort reverse our normal sequence of cause and
effect, suggesting that Man is the subject of anthropology and history not be-
cause he is the origin and source of meaning and values, but rather that this
presupposition and its correlates, embedded in our culture and our thought,
serve to create and secure humanism and anthropology. Historiography is
one of the important means by which, and sites upon which, this process
is achieved. ‘‘Making historical analysis the discourse of the continuous and
making human consciousness the original subject of all historical develop-
ment and all action,’’ according to Michel Foucault, ‘‘are two sides of the same
system of thought,’’ one characterized by ‘‘the sovereignty of the subject and
the twin figures of anthropology and humanism.’’ 57 Indeed, history writing
has an especially important function to fulfill, for as this humanism and an-
thropology have come to be assailed in the studyof language, myth, sexuality,
and kinship, historiography becomes ‘‘the last resting-place of anthropologi-
cal thought,’’ 58 or in Lévi-Strauss’s words, ‘‘the last refuge of a transcendental
humanism.’’ 59

Historiography, God, and Tradition

If Weber’s transcendental presupposition cannot in fact be presupposed, if
it confuses cause with effect, then this constitutes a problem for the code of
history whenever it is applied to an object where the anthropological pre-
sumptions of the code are absent. Michel de Certeau points out that when
historians study religion, they take it as their task to ask what religion tells us
98 Subject to Pedagogy
about the society from which it sprang.Theyassume ‘‘society,’’ in other words,
to be the axis of reference that will render religious phenomena intelligible,
whereas for their subjects religion was (often) what made society intelligible:
‘‘The religious history of the seventeenth century . . . implicates a difference
between two systems of representation, one ‘social’ (so to speak) and the other
‘religious’; that is, between two periods of consciousness, or between two his-
torical types of intelligibility, our and theirs. Thus, we have to wonder what
may be the meaning of an enterprise that consists of ‘understanding’ a time
organized as a function of a standard of comprehension other than ours.’’
For ‘‘In this [our] perspective, ‘comprehending’ religious phenomena is tan-
tamount to repeatedly asking something else of them than what they meant
to say . . . taking as a representation of the society what, from their point of view,
founded that society.’’ 60
The study of a past that is significantly ‘‘other’’ is here characterized by a
reversal which Certeau renders through a metaphor drawn from chess: ‘‘Be-
tween their time and ours, the signifier and the signified have castled. We
postulate a coding which inverts that of the time we are studying.’’ 61 As a
modern, rational practice, historiography cannot accord to God the role of a
historical actor, and thus we translate seventeenth-century understandings
into our terms. Far from being defined by its avoidance of ‘‘anachronism,’’
history writing as discipline and practice is in fact based upon anachronism,
continually translating the understandings of historical subjects into our
modern, anthropological understanding. But the converse is also true: our
historical practice is not an ex nihilo creation but arises out of previous de-
bates: ‘‘when they refer to their own practices . . . historians discover con-
straints originating well before their own present, dating back to former
organizations of which their work is a symptom, not a cause.’’ 62 ‘‘Our’’ his-
torical discourse is a product of those debates and processes which, beginning
four or more centuries ago, rendered religion into a phenomenon susceptible
to being explained in sociological terms, rather than regarding the human
world as one to be understood as the product of divine instigation. ‘‘Just
as the ‘model’ of religious sociology implies, among other things, the new
status of practice or of knowledge in the seventeenth century, so do current
methods—erased as events and transformed into codes or problematic areas
of research—bear evidence of former structurings and forgotten histories.
Thus founded on the rupture between a past that is its object, and a present
that is the place of its practice, history endlessly finds the present in its object
and the past in its practice.’’ 63
 Which Past? Whose History? 99
Earlier in this chapter, I examined Gadamer’s argument that all encoun-
ters with past texts and text analogues were intrinsically interpretive, and
that all interpretation in the human sciences is intrinsically historical. His
conclusion that such encounters occur within a tradition and can lead to
greater self-consciousness of that tradition was, I suggested, an important
and potentially fruitful notion, even though it could not ground historiogra-
phy as a specific practice. I now wish to return to Gadamer to illustrate how
fruitful this understanding can be.
If we translate Certeau’s observations into Gadamerian terms—recogniz-
ing that to do so is not to stay with Certeau’s thought—we could say the
following: When we encounter a text from, say, seventeenth-century Europe,
one which explains society and its functioning in terms of God, the distance
between the text and our historical situation cannot be bridged by canceling
one of the terms. Understanding is achieved neither by imposing our current
understandings upon the text (for example, by treating God as a ‘‘projection’’
or ideology), norcan we seek, as romantic hermeneutics would, to recreate the
context and meaning of that text in order to restore it to its original meaning
and intention. An acknowledgment of the historicity of our own understand-
ing means that we cannot accord any privilege to our categories of interpreta-
tion; but the same acknowledgment of the historicity of our understanding
means that there is no way of encountering the text ‘‘in its own right.’’ Be-
cause this is something more than an epistemological dilemma, it is capable
of ‘‘resolution.’’ The text is not just an object of the past belonging purely to
the present: it comes to us already interpreted, not as a mere object but as a
tissue of interpretations. We must remain open to its ‘‘truth,’’ and if we be-
come convinced of this, it forces us to rethink our current understandings,
and to redescribe the tradition through which it arrives to us. However if we
find ourselves, as is more likely, unable to reach an agreement with the text—
if there can be no fusion of horizons—we are then entitled to try situating it
in terms of its context. But even so, the end-point is not the same as it would
be had we dismissed the truth of the text from the beginning, since we have
re-encountered, and arrived at a better understanding of, how we relate to
a tradition in which God once bestrode the world and made it in his image,
but which later gave way to a ‘‘secular’’ view in which God had his historical
agency withdrawn from him. The ‘‘former structurings and forgotten histo-
ries’’ which have brought us to our present historical situation are no longer
‘‘forgotten’’; they have been disinterred and reexamined, and we have arrived
at a better understanding of the tradition through which we speak, as a re-
100 Subject to Pedagogy
sult of this encounter. History ‘‘finds the present in its object and the past
in its practice’’ self-consciously as result of such a dialogic encounter, even
where, as in this instance, we cannot acknowledge the truth of the text nor
achieve a fusion of horizons.
Recently, Constantine Fasolt has given us another example of something
very much like this in his The Limits of History. In this book Fasolt provides
a close reading of the Discoursus novus de imperatore Romano Germanico (New
Discourse of the Roman-German Emperor; 1642) by Hermann Conring (1608–
81),64 in which Conring sought to refute claims that the Roman Empire still
existed in any recognizable or significant form; that the king of Germany was
the Roman emperor; and that he derived his title from the church and ulti-
mately from God. One of those whom he singled out as upholding these un-
justifiable claims was Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14–57), the great medieval
jurist. In fact Bartolus was well aware that even by his time the emperor did
not in fact rule the world. He explicitly recognized that France, for instance,
was ruled by the king of France, and even acknowledged that his dominium
over France was legitimate. But this did not affect his claim on behalf of the
Roman Emperor and church. Why not? Because in his argument, to be ruler
of the world does not mean that those whom the emperor rules obey him;
it is a question of jurisdiction, not obedience. The emperor has jurisdiction,
not the capacity to command obedience; his right is universal, but that is not
the same as total; his dominium is distinct from ownership and control—
just as a shepherd may have dominium over a flock of sheep without having
dominium over even a single one of the sheep in the flock. Conring’s refu-
tation, by contrast, is achieved through historical argument. He sets out to
show that even at the height of the Roman Empire, the emperor’s power was
not coextensive with the world; that the Romans never had the right (ius) to
rule the world; and (this constitutes the bulk of the New Discourse) he provides
a historical narrative from antiquity to his present, showing that whatever
authority the Roman Empire and emperor once possessed had been steadily
diminishing.What the detailed arguments so summarily rendered here indi-
cate, according to Fasolt, is that Conring and Bartolus were arguing at cross-
purposes: ‘‘Bartolus focused on law; Conring focused on politics . . . Bartolus
looked to eternity; Conring looked to history. For Bartolus the universe was
integrated into one hierarchy; for Conring it was divided into an infinity of
separate self-subsisting parts. Bartolus maintained that politics and law were
fundamentally the same, Conring that they were essentially distinct. Barto-
 Which Past? Whose History? 101
lus thought the nature of things consisted of relationships; Conring, that it
consisted of an invariant essence. And so on.’’ 65
The central difference, the one that renders their arguments incommen-
surable, is that for Bartolus the source of all overlordship and of the unity of
the world is God, the ‘‘efficient cause’’ of the empire and the church; while
Conring’s argument is historical in a way that Bartolus’s is not and could
not be. ‘‘Could not be’’ because this mode of understanding was new; the
Renaissance humanists had invented it, and Conring was drawing upon and
developing their legacy, of which we too are heirs. That is why in reading
this debate we cannot but find ourselves in sympathy with Conring. More
importantly, it is why even when we exercise historical charity and seek to
place Bartolus ‘‘in his own context,’’ this historicizing maneuver only aligns
us all the more securely on the side of Conring and history: ‘‘To seek a histori-
cal understanding of the relationship between Bartolus and Conring is . . .
an oxymoron: either the understanding will be historical, and then it will
confirm the wall of historical consciousness that Conring built to separate
himself from Bartolus. Or it will break that wall: but then it cannot be his-
torical.’’ 66
Fasolt thus makes an argument similar to the one I am seeking to advance:
that history writing is informed by certain presumptions that are not them-
selves ‘‘true’’ (or for that matter false), but rather represent a particular way
of construing the world, ‘‘one particular and limited form of understanding
that is itself party to the proceedings it describes.’’ 67 But he also—and here
less self-consciously and thus not explicitly—illustrates the potential value
of a hermeneutical approach to the past. Fasolt insists that the intellectual
worlds of Conring and Bartolus are incommensurable.68 But Conring’s debate
with Bartolus, and more generally his refutation of ‘‘medieval universalism,’’
is only possible because both thinkers and bodies of thought are addressing
questions of Roman law and the nature of the commonwealth, and both are
using a common, inherited language of ius, lex, dominium, and so on to do so.
As Fasolt acknowledges, ‘‘they are similar in many ways’’ and ‘‘there are con-
nections, echoes, overtones, traditions connecting them.’’ 69 Thus even as he
argues that history is an invention of the Renaissance humanists, and seeks to
specify the limits of this form of understanding, Fasolt also illuminates the
process by which this mode of understanding arose, engaged with, and re-
placed preceding forms of understanding. Precisely in the process of arguing
that history as a code is anachronistic when applied to the medieval world,
102 Subject to Pedagogy
Fasolt also sheds light on how the struggle to refute and replace earlier ways
of understanding shaped the mode of understanding to which we are now
heirs. In Gadamerian terms, one could say that such an exercise shows the
impossibility of a ‘‘fusion of horizons’’ with the texts of Bartolus of Sassofer-
rato—to engage with Conring and Bartolus historically is already, as Fasolt
says, to put ourselves on Conring’s side and into Conring’s world—but writ-
ing such a history in full consciousness of its limits as a mode of understand-
ing also illuminates the continuities and breaks in a tradition where, to put
it too simply, once God explained the world, and later history came to do so.

I am asking what it means, using the code of history, to write about those
who do not live by that code or recognize themselves in it. I have argued that
this question arises with reference not only to the nonwestern world but also
to premodern Europe. To explain the world of men and women of medieval
times historically is to translate their understandings into our terms or, to
repeat Certeau’s words, to ‘‘postulate a coding which inverts that of the time
we are studying.’’ However, this exercise, while anachronistic, is nonetheless
productive; even where we cannot accept the ‘‘truth’’ of texts from the past,
we gain better self-understanding, that is, understanding of the tradition
out of which we reason.
The same is not true when we apply the code of history to Indian pasts,
for the simple reason that the object of enquiry does not belong to the same
tradition as the enquiring subject.70 To write a history of India from within
western knowledge is to confront the fact that the ‘‘now’’ from which we
write is not itself linked in a thousand ways to the ‘‘then’’ of those of whom
we write, because a profound caesura has occurred: the tradition from which
we write is not the same as that of which we write. The threads connecting
the subject and the object have snapped; western education, and the rational-
ist historiography which it produced and which it sanctions, do not bear the
same relation to India as the knowledge(s) disseminated and the tradition(s)
once cultivated in the madrassa and the tol. Thus what might validate the
anachronism which is an inescapable feature of historiography even when it
encounters European pasts does not apply here, because here history ‘‘finds
the present in its object,’’ but it does not find an Indian ‘‘past in its practice.’’
The knowledge from which we write a history of India—in this case, a his-
tory of western education in India—is not continuous with the knowledges
of India. These intellectual traditions had not died of inanition when the
British first came to India; as we shall see in chapter 6, around the period that
 Which Past? Whose History? 103
Conring was writing there was an explosion of scholarly writing in Sanskrit,
testifying to the vitality of an extraordinarily long and continuous intellec-
tual tradition. Some of the navya or new scholars of the seventeenth century
self-consciously saw themselves as effecting innovations; but they were still
heirs to a tradition going back two millennia, which they actively engaged,
disputed with, and developed. The same is not true of historiography, for
neither the Sanskrit tradition nor any other indigenous tradition found an
echo in the code of history which we now use to write of Indian pasts. This
code was an imposition, an act of ‘‘epistemic violence,’’ to borrow a phrase
from Gayatri Spivak. It did not engage with Indian traditions, did not re-
fute them and thereby displace them. Its victory was won cheaply—through
a colonial administrative fiat. As a result, the code of history cannot even
fulfill the hermeneutic function that it fills elsewhere, that of being one
of the modes by which men and women of the West can, through the self-
consciously anachronistic exercise of translating the lives and worlds of their
dead forebears into their own terms, illuminate both what connects and what
separates them from this past and these forebears. In India that role con-
tinued to be performed by the genealogist, the balladeer, and the storyteller,
who interpreted and refurbished the tradition to which they belonged, by re-
telling the past.71 The historian, however,was closer to the position of colonial
officials (many of whom, like James Mill and Macaulay, were also historians);
she was discontinuous with, and in a position of pure externality to, the pasts
of which she wrote.

Which Past? Whose History?

I have suggested that anthropology-humanism has fostered an illusion, mis-
taking effect for cause. ‘‘Man’’ does not give rise to the sciences of man; it is
these sciences that encode and thus serve to produce and secure humanism.
In characterizing modern thought as anthropological, Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Foucault, and other writers I have drawn upon to develop my argument also
offer a critique of this anthropological presumption. For instance, they argue
that the subject is neither sovereign nor transparent to himself; that just
as he is an effect of certain events, he may one day disappear; and so on. I
am sympathetic to these arguments, but here I have invoked them for their
characterization, rather than for their critique. The assumption that Man is a
creator of meanings and values, I suggest, is not a ‘‘transcendental presuppo-
sition’’ we are entitled and even obliged to make, but rather a form of ‘‘tran-
104 Subject to Pedagogy
scendental narcissism,’’ 72 one of the means by which the modernWest creates
and secures the anthropological-humanist theme that Man is the source and
origin of meaning and value—and hence the subject of history. Nonetheless,
inasmuch as this humanism is in fact secured, inasmuch as the West is domi-
nated by a metaphysics of subjectivity, inasmuch as the presupposition that
Man is source and origin of meaning, value, and purpose is found in a wide
range of practices and institutions and intellectual activities, then a histo-
riography founded upon similar premises is an appropriate way for western
societies to conceive of their past and represent it to themselves.73
Whether such premises are also valid for writing the history of western
education in colonial India—the question with which we are concerned—
will depend upon whether the presuppositions found a home in colonial
India. That is, it will depend upon whether the ‘‘transcendental narcissism’’
of the West succeeded in also becoming a narcissism in the East; whether
this ‘‘white mythology,’’ as Derrida terms it,74 also became part of the mythos
of India.
My earlier enquiries help us to answer this question. Western education,
as we saw in chapter 1, did not simply stuff new ideas into existing heads. It
posited a form of subjectivity, with a specific kind of a relation to knowledge.
To gain knowledge was not to come into harmony with an existing order of
meanings, which was now seen as a failure of knowledge (as passive rather
than active learning, as ‘‘mere’’ memory rather than genuine understand-
ing), but was rather to distinguish oneself as active subject from a realm of
objects to be known, with the ‘‘knowing’’ firmly vested on the side of the sub-
ject. We also saw that the discourse of cram and instrumentalism registered
and on occasion thematized the anxiety that this subject neither existed nor
had been produced. In chapter 2 we saw that educated Indians conceived the
world they inhabited as one that came to them alreadyorganized into a mean-
ingful order.This did not render them passive and supine, for it is a conceit of
humanism-anthropology that to fail to be a subject is tantamount to being
an object. They debated and interpreted, exercised agency and choice, and
sought to live ethical lives—but all the while inhabiting a world that came
ordered in ways which the categories of human thought had not created but
of which they had to take cognizance, and all the while without conceiving
their gods as something they ‘‘believed’’ in. As a result, even when what they
learned at school and in university was not consonant with their ways of in-
habiting their world and making sense of it, many did not suffer the sense
of intellectual and moral crisis that was ascribed to them in the discourse of
 Which Past? Whose History? 105
moral decline. Western knowledge was often assimilated by being treated as
a set of competences necessary for the domain of artha, rather than as some-
thing that clashed with and undermined their ways of inhabiting the world.
Their ‘‘traditional’’ Weltanschauung was not challenged and undermined by
a new one, either because they assimilated their new learning to their existing
intellectual landscape (rather as some Hindus made Christ yet another god
in the Hindu pantheon), or because change, where it was effected, was not
from one Weltanschauung or world-picture to another but from not seeing
the world-as-picture to coming to do so.
I have also argued, drawing upon Gadamer and others, that history writ-
ing can serve a hermeneutic function—indeed, that this is its principal func-
tion.There is no such thing as the object ‘‘history,’’ which historiography res-
cues and retells well, while myths, epics, and Puranic ‘‘histories’’ tell it badly;
there are only human pasts that are constructed as objects by the modes
through which they are re-told and re-presented. The code of history is but
one way of representing the past, and a recent one. It is eminently useful even
where anachronistic, because when written in a hermeneutic mode, it can be
a way of engaging, better understanding, and developing and refurbishing
the intellectual tradition(s) to which we belong, and out of which we rea-
son. But this is only true where the code of history is applied to the pasts out
of which this code itself developed; applied to other pasts, neither is it the
‘‘right’’ way of recounting these pasts nor does it illuminate the traditions of
the peoples whose pasts these are.
Traditions are not hermetically sealed, of course. The civilization of medi-
eval and early modern India was itself a palimpsest, born of the meeting
of the culture, knowledges, and institutions to which the subcontinent had
been home, and those that theTurk and Afghan and Persian invaders brought
with them. If we are willing to allow for the existence of a ‘‘western tradition’’
stretching back to a time long before there was any conception of ‘‘Europe’’
or the West, this was a tradition that includes the collapse of Rome and the
fusion of Roman law with barbarian institutions, the later revival of Greek
learning, and the synthesis of Aristotelianism and Christianity effected by St.
Thomas. Moreover, this tradition and those of India never developed in com-
plete isolation from each other; and for some four hundred years now the
ways of the western barbarians have been finding a home in India. A fusion of
traditions may yet occur, and out of this a new tradition may yet be founded.
However, historiography today cannot assume that this has already occurred.
For now, to write history in a western mode with even a modicum of self-
106 Subject to Pedagogy
consciousness is not only to be continually reminded that one is writing from
a historical now which is very different from that of the object of study: it is
also to be reminded that this difference is not the space of a dialogue where
we simultaneously refurbish and reconsider the tradition within which we
are located but that it marks a profound break, the full implications of which
historiography has yet to register, let alone begin to seriously consider.
From all this it does not follow that a history of western education in colo-
nial India in the mode of modern, rationalist historiography is illegitimate.
What does follow is that the presuppositions encoded by such a historiogra-
phy are not in fact transcendental ones, a meta-code equally adequate to all
times and places; rather, these presumptions are parochial ones, themselves
borne of the social and epistemic shifts that gave rise to and characterize the
modern West. Rationalist historiography cannot, in other words, accord to
itself any epistemic privilege. If a history of western knowledge and educa-
tion from within that knowledge is not to be caught in a ‘‘vicious’’ circle, it
must remain alert to the possibility of its inadequacy to its object. In writing
such a history, one does not assume the existence of subjects who endow the
world with meanings, the objectified forms of which (texts, artworks, coins,
monuments) allow us to recreate their world-picture. Instead one charts how
various processes, including the dissemination of western knowledge, served
to constitute these subjects and the world-as-picture, and sometimes failed
to do so. This is what the first part of this book has sought to do.
part ii

Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation

chapter four

Governmentality and Identity

Constituting the ‘‘Backward but Proud Muslim’’

The beginning of the nineteenth century in Europe witnessed a growing vol-

ume of official statistics on agriculture, trade, education, births, and deaths,
as well as the institutionalization of regular national censuses. Ian Hacking
argues that this ‘‘avalanche of numbers’’ did more than just count: ‘‘count-
ing is no mere report of developments. It elaborately, often philanthropically,
creates new ways for people to be.’’ 1 Hacking labels this understanding of
the relation between counting and that which is counted ‘‘dynamic nomi-
nalism,’’ and writes, ‘‘The claim of dynamic nominalism is not that there was
a kind of person who came increasingly to be recognized by bureaucrats or
students of human nature but rather that a kind of person came into being
at the same time that the kind itself was being invented. In some cases, that
is, our classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each
egging the other on.’’ 2
The idea that the enumerative practices have sometimes helped to consti-
tute what they purport to merely count has proved especially fertile in studies
of the nonwestern world. Referring to the censuses which began to be con-
ducted in southeast Asia in the nineteenth century under the aegis of colo-
nialism, Benedict Anderson writes that ‘‘the new demographic topography
put down deep social and institutional roots as the colonial state multiplied
its size and functions. Guided by its imagined map it organized new edu-
cational, juridical, public-health, police and immigration bureaucracies . . .
which in time gave real social life to the state’s earlier fantasies.’’ 3 In an earlier
and seminal essay Bernard Cohn argued that the operation of the census in
colonial India served to ‘‘objectify’’ India’s social structure, thus making it
possible and sometimes necessary for Indians to ‘‘think’’ and relate to their
culture in new ways.4 Since then a growing number of works have elaborated,
amended, and sometimes contested the proposition that colonial sociology
109
110 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
and the enumerative practices of the colonial state have been constitutive of
group identities in India.5
In his contribution to this debate, Arjun Appadurai rightly observes that
the extent to which colonial imaginings actually shaped the self-perceptions
of those enumerated and classified varied greatly, according to their prox-
imity to the colonial state, their gender, class, and so on. In the same cau-
tionary vein he observes that ‘‘while certain components of the colonial state
were active propagators of the discourses of group identity, others, such as
those involved with education, law and moral reform, were implicated in the
creation of what might be called a colonial bourgeois subject, conceived as
an ‘individual.’ ’’ 6 The relation between those knowledges and state practices
that presumed and posited the individual subject, and those presuming and
positing group identities, Appadurai goes on, is ‘‘an important issue that any
interpretation of enumerated communities will eventually have to engage.’’ 7
In this chapter, I engage this question, but I do so by first suggesting that
we need to pose it in a different manner. It is not, as Appadurai suggests, that
education was a site for the creation of individuals, while other institutional
locales and practices were where group identities or enumerated communi-
ties were produced. Education was not only where individual subjects were
posited and sometimes produced (the subject of part I of this book) but was
also an important site where projects for the founding of collective identities
were played out (the subject of part II). Indeed, if part I has shown that west-
ern education frequently did not succeed in producing the modern subjects
presupposed and posited by it, part II will show that this education, and the
debates and desires to which it gave rise, played an important role in pro-
ducing group identities, and in creating new ways for conceiving of existing
collective identities.
Below I argue that a statistically driven debate on education, intimately
connected with the practices characteristic of a ‘‘colonial governmentality,’’
became a key site for the discursive construction of the figure of the ‘‘back-
ward but proud Muslim.’’ This figure was one whose ‘‘Muslim-ness’’ was
imagined such that it presented a new way of thinking, and the possibility
of a new way of being, Muslim.

The ‘‘Backward but Proud Muslim’’

From about the middle of the nineteenth century the concern began to
be voiced in some quarters that Muslims were not being reached by the
 Governmentality and Identity 111
government-sponsored western education introduced in 1835, and were con-
sequently falling behind ‘‘in the race for life,’’ especially as this was measured
by their representation in government employment. In 1852 the annual re-
port on the progress of education in Bengal noted with concern that Muslims
were not participating in higher education to the same degree as Hindus;8
and in 1868, observing that very few of those graduating from Calcutta Uni-
versity were Muslims, the university’s British vice-chancellor warned the
Muslim community that while they had every reason to be proud of having
once been the rulers of India, ‘‘in these days of competition, those who would
not rise must fall; those who do not keep forward will, perhaps, be left behind
altogether in the race.’’ 9
But it was in the 1870s that these observations gained sudden momentum.
In 1871 W. W. Hunter’s The Indian Musalmans was published, which stapled
together three issues: alleged Muslim disaffection with British rule, a de-
cline in the number of Muslims in government employment, and the fail-
ure of Muslims to partake of the government-sponsored system of western
education. According to Hunter, Muslims were the least contented of Her
Majesty’s subjects. Whereas once they had been the rulers of the land, and
even after being supplanted by the British had continued to staff the courts
and fill the ranks of the colonial administration, more recently ‘‘the educated
Muhammadan . . . sees himself practically excluded from the share of power
and of the emoluments of Government which he hitherto had almost mo-
nopolized, and sees all the other advantages of life passed into the hands
of the hated Hindu.’’ 10 Government employ had been delinked from those
skills which Muslims had cultivated as part of their religion and their role as
rulers of India, such as knowledge of Persian. Persian had been supplanted
by the vernaculars and English as the language of the courts in 1837, and after
1844 western education had increasingly become a requirement for secur-
ing government employment.11 However, the secular education imparted in
government and many government-aided schools and colleges through the
medium of English or Indian vernaculars (unknown or despised by Muslims
and transmitted principally by Hindu teachers) was an education which ac-
cording to Hunter was ‘‘opposed to the traditions, unsuited to the require-
ments, and hateful to the religion, of the Musalmans.’’ 12 Not surprisingly,
Muslims had not taken to it readily or in great numbers, whereas the ‘‘pliant
Hindu,’’ who ‘‘knew no scruples’’ 13 and was unperturbed by the nonreligious
character of the education imparted in western schools, took to western edu-
cation with gusto. The result was that Muslims ceased to supply much of the
112 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
personnel for revenue collection, courts, and police, as they had once done:
instead, ‘‘the staff of Clerks attached to the various offices, the responsible
posts in the Courts, and even the higher offices in the Police, are recruited
from the pushing Hindu youth of the Government School.’’ 14
The government immediately gave official endorsement to the idea that
Muslims were falling behind in education.15 Lord Mayo observed in a vice-
regal note, ‘‘There is no doubt that as regards the Muhammadan popula-
tion, our present system of education is, to a great extent, a failure.’’ 16 This
conclusion underpinned a resolution of the Government of India of August
1871, which noted that in most provinces Muslims were not availing them-
selves of educational opportunities in proportion to other communities, and
called upon provincial administrations to suggest ways and means of redress-
ing this imbalance. A decade later the Indian Education Commission, led by
Hunter, endorsed the ‘‘fact that, at all events in many parts of the country,
the Musalmans have fallen behind the rest of the population,’’ 17 and made
seventeen recommendations designed to redress the problem of Muslim re-
luctance to participate in western education.
The idea of the backward Muslim was one that was embraced and articu-
lated, in tandem with the government, by a section of the Muslim élites.Thus
Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who dedicated much of his life’s labors to improving
the status of the Muslim community of India (in addition to serving some
forty years in the British-Indian judicial system, at a time when a western
education was not a requirement for government preferment), responded to
Hunter’s book by denying the idea that Muslims were a perpetually disaf-
fected and potentially disloyal section of the population; but he endorsed the
proposition that Muslims had fallen behind in education and hence in the
‘‘race of life.’’ 18 Indeed, this was to be the central premise underlying his in-
volvement as the moving force behind the Muhammadan Educational Con-
ference (founded in 1886, originally as the Muhammadan Educational Con-
gress) and the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, both of which aimed
at rectifying the situation through the voluntary efforts of the Muslim com-
munity. It was this premise that underlay the Committee for the Better Dif-
fusion and Advancement of Learning Among the Muhammadans of India,
which Sir Sayyid, as he later became, helped to found in 1870, just before
the publication of Hunter’s book; and an essay prize competition which
the committee sponsored in the following year set as its topic the reasons
for the disproportionately small number of Muslim boys receiving a lib-
eral English education, compared to Hindus, and the possible remedies. The
 Governmentality and Identity 113
concern with Muslim backwardness was echoed by other Muslim organiza-
tions. In 1882 the National Muhammadan Association, in Bengal, presented
a memorial to Viceroy Ripon, in which it complained that ‘‘while every com-
munity has thrived and flourished under British rule, the Muhammadans
alone have declined and decayed’’; the replacement of Persian learning by
English education had meant that the advantage formerly enjoyed by élite
Muslims was immediately lost: ‘‘English-educated Hindu youths trained for
the most part in missionary institutions, from which the Mussalmans natu-
rally stand aloof, now poured into every Government office and completely
shut out the Muhammadans.’’ 19 Over thirty years later M. Azizul Huque be-
gan his history of Muslim education in Bengal with the lament that things
had got worse rather than better: ‘‘shut off from all legitimate and noble
vocations of life by force of circumstances and stress of competition, we find
ourselves hopelessly lost in the battle of life,’’ all because of ‘‘want of proper
training and education.’’ 20
If Muslims were ‘‘backward’’ (the main measure of this being their low
numbers in government employ), and if this was because they were backward
in western education in particular, why had Muslims been tardy in embrac-
ing western education? Many explanations were offered, in most of which
great stress was placed on language and the secular nature of governmental
education (themes already sounded by Hunter in The Indian Musalmans). Azi-
zul Huque, quoted above, traced the decline of Muslim fortunes to the intro-
duction of a system of education in which Persian and Arabic no longer had
a privileged place: ‘‘Mahomedans, fresh with the memory of the past, could
not reconcile themselves to the system of liberal education’’; and once having
fallen behind, ‘‘continued to be steeped in ignorance,’’ so that, ‘‘poor in educa-
tion, backward in general advancement and culture, [they] found themselves
hopelessly lost in the battle for life.’’ 21 A ‘‘Memorial of the Central National
Muhammadan Association’’ dated the decline with precision. It began in 1837,
when a colonial government edict replaced Persian with English and the ver-
naculars as the language of law—‘‘The English-educated Hindus . . . poured
forth into every office, and completely edged the Musalmans out year by
year . . . Before they had quite awakened to the necessity of learning English,
they were shut out from Government employment. Thenceforth their politi-
cal influence dwindled.’’ 22 It was also sometimes claimed that vernacular
education disadvantaged Muslims, for whom Urdu was their mother tongue,
though the claim that Urdu was the vernacular of all Muslims was hotly dis-
puted.23
114 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
That the colonial government’s policy of ‘‘religious neutrality,’’ which dis-
allowed religious instruction in government schools and colleges, was a cause
of Muslim antipathy to western education was a claim very widely advanced.
Most of the essayists and almost all the judges in the essay competition spon-
sored by the Select Committee, for instance, agreed that the disassociation
of learning from religion in the government-sponsored system was a major
reason why Muslims stayed away from western education.24 The report of
the Hornell Committee, appointed by the Bengal government to investigate
Muslim educational backwardness in 1914, similarly concluded that one rea-
son why Muslims ‘‘failed to take their proper share in the public life of Ben-
gal’’ was that ‘‘they were at one time afraid that education given through the
medium of English and the Vernaculars would sap the principles of Islam
and for a long time they refused to take any part in the educational system
of Government, thereby failing to profit by the opportunities of which the
Hindus took full advantage.’’ 25 The judgment of the committee was soon en-
dorsed by the Government of Bengal, which found that ‘‘the primary cause
of [Muslim] educational backwardness has been the suspicion with which a
conservative people, anxious to preserve their distinctive beliefs and customs,
have hitherto regarded the general secular schools.’’ 26 Almost twenty years
later the quinquennial report on education for 1927–32 was still attributing
Muslim educational backwardness to ‘‘loyalty to their traditional learning
and religion.’’ 27
The Indian Education [Hunter] Commission Report of 1883 discussed Muslim
educational backwardness at some length, summarized the explanations that
had been advanced for it, and drew upon them to present its own, compre-
hensive explanation:
some held that the absence of instruction in the tenets of their faith,
and still more the injurious effects of English education in creating
a disbelief in religion, were the main obstacles . . . Some contended
that the system of education prevailing in Government Schools and
Colleges corrupted the morals and manners of the pupils, and that for
this reason the better classes would not subject their sons to dangerous
contact. The small proportion of Muhammadan teachers in Govern-
ment institutions; the unwillingness of Government educational offi-
cers to accept the counsel and co-operation of Muhammadans; numer-
ous minor faults in the Departmental system, the comparatively small
progress in real learning . . . the absence of friendly intercourse between
Muhammadans and Englishmen; the unwillingness felt by the better
 Governmentality and Identity 115
born to associate with those lower in the social scale; the poverty nearly
general among Muhammadans; the coldness of Government towards
the race. . . . these and a variety of other causes have been put forward
at different times by members of the Muhammadan community to
account for the scant appreciation which an English education has re-
ceived at their hands . . . but a candid Muhammadan would probably
admit that the most powerful factors are to be found in pride of race, a memory
of bygone superiority, religious fears, and a not unnatural attachment to the
learning of Islam.28 (emphasis added)
The claim that Muslims were ‘‘falling behind,’’ and that this was because
they were underrepresented in the education system, was not universally ac-
cepted.When the Government of India, after the submission of the Memorial
of the National Muhammadan Association, solicited the opinions and sug-
gestions of provincial governments on how to remedy the problem, it found
that the premise of Muslim backwardness was contested. Some provincial
governments declared that the problem, if it existed at all, was confined to
Bengal.29 However, the Bengal government initially responded to the Memo-
rial of the National Muhammadan Association with a point-by-point refu-
tation of its claims, and concluded by declaring that ‘‘as Government service
as well as positions of unofficial emolument and influence are open to pub-
lic competition, it is worse than useless for Muhammadans now to plead
that Government should show any favour to a particular class or section of
the community.’’ 30 The Chief Commissioner for the Central Provinces was
even more blunt: ‘‘The Muhammadans have had the same chances which
others have had . . . He ventures to think that some false sentiment has been
expended for some time past on the Muhammadans, their decadence and
their grievance. It is a pity because it hinders them from exerting themselves,
which is the only way by which they can succeed.’’ 31
However, such denials and qualifications were usually ignored. When a
minority of those who had submitted essays to the Select Committee dis-
puted that Muslims were in fact underrepresented in education, the Select
Committee flatly declared their view to be erroneous.32 Whenever there was
a suggestion that the gap was exaggerated, or alternatively that it was being
closed, this was denied with some vehemence. For example, Syed Mahmood’s
detailed A History of English Education in India, published in 1895, was partly
written to ‘‘expose the great fallacy’’ of the view that Muslims had made sat-
isfactory progress, and that there was ‘‘no further room for anxiety, or need of
any exceptional effort or special encouragement.’’ 33 And at the highest levels
 116 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
of government the ‘‘fact’’ of Muslim educational backwardness was accepted.
Subsequent to the Hunter Commission the Government of India from time
to time reiterated its concern about Muslim backwardness;34 at the provincial
level, special enquiries were established to investigate Muslim educational
backwardness; and a series of measures were adopted at different times and
in different provinces to address the problem.35
‘‘Muslim backwardness’’ was thus to retain its status as a problem need-
ing remedy from the 1870s to Independence. And the Hunter Committee’s
explanation of the reasons for Muslim educational backwardness, with all its
imagery of a ruling race fallen upon hard times, nostalgic for the past, and
reluctant to adapt to the new realities—the idea that ‘‘Muslims were now
laggards, all sulking in their tents, dreaming of lost empires and reciting
decadent poetry’’ 36—was to have a long life. It was to be approvingly cited and
paraphrased in subsequent government enquiries and official writings,37 as
well as in other works. For example, in his India: A Bird’s-Eye View (1924), Lord
Ronaldshay paraphrased the explanation of the Hunter Commission of forty
years earlier; his paraphrase was then quoted in J. M. Sen’s History of Elemen-
tary Education in India (1933).38 In this way the idea of Muslim backwardness
gained a currency far beyond the in-house documents of the bureaucracy, as
the image of the ‘‘backward but proud Muslim’’ was repeatedly reproduced,
paraphrased, and elaborated, taking on a life of its own.

‘‘Seeing’’ Backwardness
Why did the issue of Muslim backwardness come to be foregrounded? The
common answer, first given by nationalists, is that the British policy of ‘‘di-
vide and rule’’ was behind the colonial government’s sudden solicitude for
its Muslim subjects. For a section of the Muslim élites this newfound con-
cern was useful, because the emphasis on religious differences within South
Asia allowed them to pose as leaders of ‘‘their’’ community, and gave them an
importance and influence to which they could not otherwise lay claim. Our
concern is not with the substance of this argument, however, but rather with
a prior, epistemological question: What made it possible for ‘‘backwardness’’
to emerge as an object of knowledge? What were the enabling ‘‘epistemic con-
ditions’’ that made it possible to pose the question of Muslim backwardness,
let alone posit it as a pressing problem in need of solution?
The importance of statistics stands out, since the discourse of the ‘‘back-
ward Muslim’’ was made possible by numbers, conducted through numbers,
 Governmentality and Identity 117
and indeed obsessed with numbers. The issue of Muslim educational back-
wardness first became a public concern around the time of the first all-Indian
census.This concern was in part reflected in how figures were collected,39 and
of course the census made it possible to pursue, and seek to prove or disprove,
the fact of Muslim backwardness. Religion appeared as a fundamental cate-
gory in the census, one that was cross-tabulated against a number of others—
sex, marital status, occupation (after 1881), and education. Numbers on Mus-
lim backwardness proliferated, as concern occasioned by it soon generated
further figures. The Indian Education (Hunter) Commission, confirming the
fact of Muslim backwardness, had recommended that to keep track of this
backwardness, and of the efficaciousness of measures adopted to remedy it,
the annual reports on progress in education should have a section specially
devoted to Muslims. A resolution by the Government of India in July 1885
mandated this, specifying that educational reports must provide informa-
tion on ‘‘the position and advancement of the Muhammadan community,
not merely as a whole, but with reference to local variations, in order that the
Government of India may be kept fully informed as to the state and progress
of this important section of the community.’’ 40 It is perhaps more than a co-
incidence that W. W. Hunter, who was so frequent and important a contribu-
tor to the discourse of Muslim backwardness, was also, as director general of
statistics, the compiler of many of the statistics that he mobilized. It was soon
after completing his labors of compiling the Imperial Gazetteer that Hunter
took on the role of chairman of the Indian Education Commission.
The importance of information, and of figures in particular, was not a fact
recognized only by government. The ‘‘Aims and Objectives’’ of the Muham-
madan Educational Congress, drafted by Sir Sayyid in 1886, observed that
‘‘people in one district . . . know little about the state of education of Mahome-
dans in other districts; they do not know whether their co-religionists outside
their own local circle are going forward or backward, and what are the causes
of the same.’’ It was to enable Muslims from various parts of India to gain an
overall picture of the state of Muslim education, and to allow them to ‘‘meet
together to converse on the subject of national education, and think over the
means by which it may be advanced,’’ that an annual meeting was necessary.
Delegates from districts, Sir Sayyid went on to suggest, should ‘‘read before
the meeting a statistical report of the condition of Musalmans in their dis-
tricts,’’ which among other topics would cover the number of Muslims in the
district, their residence (urban or rural), their general condition, the number
and types of schools and colleges, the kind of education imparted in them,
118 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
and the number of Muslims being educated in them.41 At one point there was
even an attempt at a nongovernmental census. In 1893 Theodore Beck, prin-
cipal of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, launched a ‘‘Mahomedan
Educational Census,’’ seeking to mobilize ‘‘public spirited Mahomedans’’ to
go door to door to collect information from their co-religionists of a type and
at a level of detail not covered by the census. The information collected was
to be used to urge and cajole those Muslims who had not been educating
their sons to begin doing so if they had the means. This was only to be the
first step: ‘‘The work of this Census must take at least ten years’ steady effort.
Money, clerks, statistics, books, pamphlets—the apparatus of this Census will
become in itself a great organization.’’ 42
Beck’s grandiose vision was never realized, but the annual sessions of the
Muhammadan Educational Conference did function, among other things, as
an occasion to hear reports on the educational status of Muslims, sometimes
in mind-numbing detail. The original text of what later became an ample-
sized book on the history of western education in India, and especially on the
education of Muslims, was delivered as a lecture in two parts by Syed Mah-
mood at the eighth and ninth annual sessions at Aligarh, in 1893 and 1894;
each lecture lasted five hours.
Statistics were thus critical to posing the problem of Muslim backward-
ness. However, it is not that statistics allowed the state to finally ‘‘see’’ and
measure what was always there. Historians and philosophers of science have
been at the forefront of cautioning against the variety of epistemological naï-
veté that assumes the objects of new knowledges to have always already been
there, only awaiting the rise of the knowledge that would unveil them and
bring them into view. In fact the discoveries made in the laboratory, for in-
stance, are products of specific technologies; it is usually impossible to distin-
guish whether they are ‘‘discovered’’ or ‘‘produced.’’ 43 Georges Canguilhem
points out that sickness, as experienced and understood by the sick person,
is different from disease, which comes to be known as a statistical deviation
from socially normative, ‘‘average’’ states.44 The latter understanding is not
one naturally and immediately available to ordinary consciousness; it is one
of ‘‘various kinds of cognition that are the historical accomplishments of spe-
cific intellectual technologies,’’ and the cognitions are not available in the
absence of the technologies.45 With regard to Muslim backwardness, statistics
were the ‘‘intellectual technology’’ that enabled the cognition of backward-
ness.
To say that backwardness is a phenomenon produced by rather than
 Governmentality and Identity 119
simply measured by statistics is still, however, not a complete characteriza-
tion of the epistemic conditions which made it possible to ‘‘see’’ the ‘‘fact’’
of Muslim backwardness. We can further pursue this question by means of a
contrast with indigenous education. Many Muslims, we know, received ‘‘in-
struction’’ of different types and in different settings: maktabs, madrassas, pat-
shalas, mosques where they learned to recite quranic verses from a learned
man, and so on. These forms of instruction were a feature of Indian society
up to and after the introduction of modern, western education. It was often,
though not always, an explicit object of this instruction to pass on and re-
produce the values and norms of communities characterized, among other
things, by their adherence to Islam.46 Indeed, if ‘‘Muslim’’ and ‘‘education’’
are to be juxtaposed, they were more meaningfully juxtaposed here than in
the nonreligious education system authorized by the British.
However, the problem of ‘‘Muslim backwardness’’ could not be posed
from within this system of instruction. Why not? Because although the ma-
drassa and the maktab did indeed contain a conception of ‘‘Muslim’’ as tran-
scending the limits of class and region, it did not easily imagine this as a
subset of a wider social field. As we had occasion to observe earlier, ‘‘educa-
tion’’ in colonial India was not predicated upon a conception of society as
a horizontal field, as a population, but rather as a series of segmented and
hierarchically organized domains with correspondingly different needs and
practices. Consequently, ‘‘education’’ was not conceived of as the transmis-
sion of a unitary body of knowledge but rather as different knowledges and
different forms of instruction for different social groups—tols and maktabs
and madrassas, maulvis teaching recitation of Quranic verses in the mosque,
village patshalas providing some very basic skills, specialized patshalas pro-
viding instruction for certain professions and castes, and so on. Within this
learning, the unified social field which makes judgments about backward-
ness and forwardness possible was lacking. This social field became thinkable
only with the emergence of an educational ‘‘system’’ which presupposed the
object, ‘‘population.’’
The intellectual field in which comparisons could be made and backward-
ness discovered—including educational backwardness—was thus provided
by the idea of population. Population in turn becomes available as an object
for cognition, measurement, and regulation from a particular perspective (it
too is not an object for practical consciousness), and the perspective is that of
the state, a state concerned with the health, productivity, and numbers of the
population it governs. ‘‘Backwardness,’’ statistics, and population thus imply
120 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
each other, and they all imply the presence of a state with a particular kind
of relation to its subjects.

Colonial Governmentality
That state is the ‘‘governmentalized’’ state discussed by Michel Foucault. In
his later published works and in his lectures at the Collège de France, Fou-
cault traced a shift from a power coded in the form of sovereignty, operating
through juridical means and having as its ultimate exercise the taking of
life, to a new power that ‘‘gave itself the function of administering life,’’ ‘‘a
power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest
life through and through.’’ 47 This new power was one that sought to safe-
guard and promote the health, productivity, and happiness of the population,
as a way of maximizing the wealth and power of the state. The ‘‘transition
which takes place in the eighteenth century . . . from a regime dominated by
structures of sovereignty to one ruled by techniques of government,’’ Fou-
cault writes, ‘‘turns on the theme of population.’’ 48 Foucault names this new
form of power ‘‘governmentality,’’ a neologism suggesting a particular ratio-
nality which came to underpin the exercise of government. However, this
new rationality of government was distinguished from sovereignty not only
by its solicitude toward the health and productivity and even happiness of its
population (hence the importance of statistics, to produce knowledge of the
population—their numbers, longevity, health and ill health, rates of mor-
tality), but also in that it recognized that it was not possible for the state
to completely regulate the population. If the health of the state depended
upon the well-being of its population, this was best secured by governmental
regulation and by paying scrupulous attention to the development of indi-
vidual capacities for self-regulation. This new power worked upon people as
aggregates, as ‘‘population,’’ but also as individuals; through the regulation
of populations, but also through freedom. Foucault neither denounces this
liberty as an ideological delusion nor accepts the liberal naturalization of it,
but rather seeks to analyze, in the words of one of his interpreters, ‘‘the con-
ditions under which the practice of freedom is possible,’’ 49 conditions which
are shown to be intimately linked with (rather than at odds with) the mod-
ern state.
Part of the explanatory power of the Foucauldian account of governmen-
tality lies precisely in its affording the possibility of understanding a defining
and yet seemingly paradoxical feature of the modern world, namely that an
 Governmentality and Identity 121
immense increase in the reach and intervention of the state has often been
accompanied by the creation of a certain field of individual liberty. The para-
dox dissolves in Foucault’s account, because the two go hand in hand in the
form of a governmental rationality that governs through freedom. Analysis
need not be locked in a sterile antithesis where it constantly counterpoises
individual liberty to governmental regulation, presuming that the advance
of the one must mean the diminution of the other. Liberal and radical ana-
lyses of the development of modern education, Ian Hunter points out, are
usually organized around a similar antithesis, ‘‘organised around an oppo-
sition between a pedagogy ‘imposed’ by social utility or political necessity
and one developed ‘for its own sake’ as part of the self-realisation of ‘man’
or the ‘universal class.’ ’’ 50 Depending upon one’s understanding of the social
system of which education is a part, one can then either conclude that at
some point education was finally freed of its subordination to social utility
and allowed to fulfill its proper function of individual self-development,
or that this is still a task to be completed. Once thought is liberated from
this opposition, Hunter argues, we can recognize that the development of
popular education in nineteenth-century England did not oscillate between
this ‘‘exemplary opposition between the self-realising and the utilitarian,
the self-expressive and the normative’’;51 nineteenth-century educational re-
formers like David Stow and Kay-Shuttleworth explicitly proposed a model
of popular education in which ‘‘moral norms would be realised through self-
expressive techniques . . . [and] forms of self-discovery organised around the
individual would permit the realisation of new social norms at the level of
population.’’ 52 Indeed, the importance attached to education derived from
precisely its status as a site where administering the population and incul-
cating habits and techniques of freedom and self-regulation, by which indi-
vidual members of the population would administer themselves, could be
combined. The educational system that emerged in England was a ‘‘distinc-
tive governmental apparatus formed . . . in an unprecedented investigative
and administrative network which made the ‘moral and physical’ condition
of the population into an object of government. It was in this network that
the old techniques of pastoral surveillance aimed at the individual soul, and
new forms of social discipline aimed at whole populations, could combine to
form the technology of moral training.’’ 53
As has often been noted, there are parallels between the processes de-
scribed by Foucault and developments in colonial India from about the latter
third of the nineteenth century, when the forms and scope of colonial power
122 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
were extensively reorganized. In this period the censuses were begun, the law
codified, bureaucracy reorganized and rationalized, and ‘‘a whole apparatus of
specialized technical services was instituted in order to scientifically survey,
classify, and enumerate the geographical, geological, botanical, zoological,
and meteorological properties of the natural environment and the archaeo-
logical, historical, anthropological, linguistic, economic, demographic and
epidemiological characteristics of the people.’’ 54 However, those who have
noted and drawn attention to these parallels have also insisted that there
are important differences between governmentality in the metropolis and
its operations in the colonies. The ‘‘colonial’’ in ‘‘colonial governmentality’’
needs to be understood as an adjective designating the ways in which the
specificities of colonial rule qualified the functioning and character of gov-
ernmentality.55 How did it do so?
While it is premised upon a technology which seeks to govern through
freedom, liberal governmentality, as Barry Hindess reminds us, has always
also included a large number of people who are governed illiberally: ‘‘If we
were to do a head count of those subjected to liberal rule, we would have to say
that before the middle of the twentieth century, the vast majority consisted
of those who [it was thought] would benefit from being subjected to authori-
tarian rule: the subject peoples of western imperial rule and, throughout the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, substantial groups in western soci-
eties themselves.’’ 56 The central justification for this view was the presump-
tion ‘‘that the capacities required for autonomous conduct and the social con-
ditions that foster and sustain them can be developed in a population only
through compulsion, through the imposition of more or less extended peri-
ods of discipline.’’ 57 This was of course the prime justification for colonialism
in its heyday—the idea that colonial rule was necessary to foster ‘‘moral and
material improvement,’’ and that an extended period of tutelage was neces-
sary in order that one day natives might be capable of autonomous conduct
and self-rule. We could dismiss these justifications of colonial rule as hypoc-
risy and bad faith, which indeed they were; but at the same time we need to
recognize that they had real effects in shaping the character and function-
ing of colonial rule. Colonial governmentality functioned to at once posit the
possibility and desirability of governance through liberty, but always within
a frame where that possibility was deferred, and where autonomous conduct
was not possible—yet.
Education occupied an especially privileged place in this constellation.
We have seen that the knowledge diffused through western education, and
 Governmentality and Identity 123
the practices associated with this diffusion, did posit a subject capable of
making knowledge his own; and that the concern with ‘‘moral development,’’
with the capacity to make judgments and decisions by reference to clear
and rationally derived criteria, was also very much present. The notions of
orderand orderliness which accompany this conception of the self-regulating
subject were also present, as became apparent whenever modern education
was contrasted with ‘‘indigenous education.’’ The latter was denounced for
being autocratic, but at the same time seen as highly disorderly. Lieuten-
ant T. B. Jervis of the Statistical Survey complained that at the indigenous
schools he had observed in the Bombay Presidency, pupils ‘‘sit without order,
or distinction into classes and leave their work when called for to assist their
young companions, thereby occasioning much confusion and hindrance to
others.’’ 58 The secretary to the Bengal Council of Education described his
visit to an indigenous school, where the students ‘‘were squatting upon the
clay floor, without order or regularity,’’ and contrasted it to a government-
established vernacular school across the way, which held its classes ‘‘in a
neat, open, small puckah [permanent] building,’’ and where the activities of
the students displayed ‘‘order, regularity and earnestness.’’ 59 In the modern,
government-funded or government-inspected schools, discipline and order
were thought to go hand in hand with self-regulation, for the discipline in
question was self-discipline; in indigenous schools harsh authoritarianism
and disorder went hand in hand, for an external and coercively imposed au-
thority could only operate intermittently and harshly, and therefore ineffec-
tively.
Colonial governmentality, we might say, functioned to posit the possi-
bility of self-governance and incite the desire for it, while simultaneously de-
claring it unachievable—for now. At the same time, and with perhaps greater
success, it facilitated the emergence of new collective identities.

Being Muslim
Anticolonial nationalism is South Asia succeeded in producing not one but
two nations. Why this should have been so, and how and why the bloodbath
of Partition occurred, have been among the central questions in the histori-
ography of modern South Asia. Education has sometimes been held respon-
sible for having widened the divide between Hindu and Muslim, and there
is a certain plausibility about attributing Hindu-Muslim divisions to edu-
cational and occupational disparities, because these accord neatly with the
124 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
emergence and organizational expression of new interests and voices. One of
the first Muslim organizations of the new and modern (voluntary and asso-
ciational) type to be established, the Muhammadan Educational Conference,
was founded, as we saw, to further the cause of Muslim education; but it
soon came to present itself as the Muslim counterpart and competitor to
the Indian National Congress, founded the year before. The Muslim League,
formed in 1906, was the child of the Muhammadan Educational Conference,
to which it functioned as an adjunct for the first few years of its existence.
Given all this, it is tempting to explain communal separatism as partlyarising
out of educational inequality between the two communities, an inequality
which translated into unequal access to the new sources of status and ad-
vancement, and the attempts to redress which (through organizational forms
such as Muslim associations, and government policies treating Muslims as a
distinct group) only exacerbated the communal divide.
Here I have not joined the historical debate over whether Indian Mus-
lims were ‘‘in fact’’ backward or not,60 nor have I speculated on whether and
how their alleged backwardness contributed to divisions along communal
lines. I have instead sought to explore the epistemic conditions that made
it possible and necessary to cross-tabulate ‘‘Muslim’’ and ‘‘education,’’ and
produce the figure of the backward Muslim. The production of statistics was
clearly a necessary condition, but statistics did not simply enable one to see
the fact of backwardness, and measure it, but embodied a particular per-
spective from which this fact could both be brought into being as a fact and
seen as such. The perspective was that of the governmentalized state, which
governs a population.
But as should be apparent, the ‘‘perspective’’ that made backwardness
visible only did so inasmuch as it also entailed conceiving of ‘‘Muslim’’ in a
new way. The peoples of South Asia, belonging to castes, religious communi-
ties, village communities, and so on, were reconceived once these came to be
seen as subsets of the more inclusive category, ‘‘population.’’ David Lelyveld
writes that
there were many ways to construe group identity among the people of
India. Labels existed on many levels of generality and cut across each
other in complicated ways. Those based on birth might involve a wide
range of identities, from household to property holding group, to lin-
eage, to endogamous group to a far-flung cultural category supposedly
indicating shared status. A person might also be labeled by locality—a
 Governmentality and Identity 125
section of a village, a village, a cluster of villages, an old administra-
tive unit, a large geographic region. Language identification was simi-
larly ambiguous, because most Indians had command of a whole con-
tinuum of linguistic styles and dialects. Religious designations were
often unclear; below the surface of the well-known scriptural religions
one might detect an immense variety of ritual practices and objects
of worship, some purely local, others amalgamating widely different
great traditions. What is more, many of these labels were outsiders’
constructs, unfamiliar to the people they purported to describe.61
Sudipta Kaviraj describes these forms of group belonging as ‘‘fuzzy com-
munities,’’ communities without a strong sense of boundaries, and commu-
nities which did not ask ‘‘how many of them there were in the world.’’ 62 They
were also fuzzy because in them identities were relational and varied accord-
ing to context, whereas colonial categorizations of these identities assumed
so many isolated corporate groups which then entered into relations with one
another. The Muslim was at once member of an ummah, a worldwide com-
munity of the faithful, and someone who belonged to a particular locale, to a
subcommunity, spoke one or more of several possible languages, and (in some
regions of the subcontinent) was a member of the high-status ashraf class or
the plebian ajlaf. Life was lived as a network of dense and complicated hierar-
chical relations that usually made one’s identity relationally determined, and
changing according to context, rather than fixed in the manner presupposed
by enumeration.This was a fact registered, for instance, in the names of Mus-
lim ashraf, which apart from a personal name also had prefixes and suffixes in-
dicating (in lieu of a surname) their ‘‘title,’’ their lineage or local connections,
and sometimes other information, such as the place with which their family
was connected. Biographies and autobiographies are a good guide to this,
for they give the texture of such a complex and shifting range of identity-
positions in a fashion that the social sciences, products of the modern that
seek to grasp the modern, seldom can.63
The discourse of the ‘‘backward Muslim’’ not only brought into being a
backwardness that was not thinkable and seeable in precolonial society, but
in so doing it also and equally abstracted from the differences of region, class,
and culture that characterized the Muslims of South Asia. Thus in reconsti-
tuting the category Muslim the discourse of the backward Muslim—enabled
by statistics, and representing the perspective of the governmental state—
also made it available to practical consciousness, and in doing so made it pos-
126 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
sible for others to think and be Muslim in a different way. As a result edu-
cation figured not only as the site where a ‘‘colonial bourgeois subject’’ was
posited but also as a site where new forms of collective identity were enabled.
Education proved to be transformative, but not, as modernization theory
would have it, because the modern knowledge disseminated through it re-
placed pre-modern superstition with modern Reason, thereby transforming
the ‘‘traditional’’ Muslim into the modern Muslim. Education proved impor-
tant rather because modern, western education, unlike the maktab and the
madrassa, was tied up with the governmental practices of the colonial state,
and thus was a site for elaborating new ways of understanding and governing
the ‘‘population.’’ Through the material changes they effected, these ways of
understanding then became available to sections of that population. It is not
that Muslims were ‘‘transformed’’ or remade into modern subjects (though
no doubt some were), but rather that new ways of being Muslim became pos-
sible. To what extent these possibilities were grasped, and by whom, varied.
In this explanation, unlike in modernization theory, there is no inevitability
about these processes. The caution issued by Appadurai, with which we be-
gan—that whether the self-perceptions of those enumerated and classified
in these ways changed, and how much so, depended upon a range of circum-
stances—is very much to the point. For many it is no doubt true, as Ayesha
Jalal concludes in her study of Muslim conceptions of selfhood in South Asia,
that the meaning given to Muslim identity through colonial schemes of enu-
meration ‘‘remained more of an abstract legal category’’ than a living social
entity.64 Perhaps the greatest proof of this is that Muslim reformers like Sir
Sayyid spent much of their time berating their fellow Muslims for continu-
ing to be mired in petty minutiae and disputes—that is, for failing to discard,
and rise above, the local allegiances and conflicts that gave shape and texture
to their lives as Muslims.
But at the same time, this new way of being Muslim shaped others’ proj-
ects for their own and their community’s future. The idea of the backward
Muslim, which presumed and made possible a new way of thinking ‘‘Mus-
lim,’’ also made it possible to conceive of, and conceive the desire for, the
‘‘forward’’ or modern Muslim. This conception and desire was to animate
a number of diverse projects. Sayyid Ahmad Khan desired a ‘‘new genera-
tion of Muslims who would have the knowledge, skills and values necessary
to qualify them for public leadership,’’ 65 and hoped that the Muhammadan
Anglo-Oriental College would be the crucible in which this new generation
could be forged. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, as Congress nationalist and then
 Governmentality and Identity 127
as education minister of independent India, sought a Muslim identity which
would be securely anchored both in Islam and in Indianness, the two com-
bined in part by being ‘‘modern.’’ Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Qaid-e- Azam or
father of Pakistan, had his own visions of what the Muslim who was not
backward, but master of his own fortunes, needed to be like. Indeed, the
heterogeneity of these desires, and the variety of projects to which they gave
rise, ensured that the figure of the ‘‘backward Muslim,’’ whether he ‘‘in fact’’
existed or not, would have real and lasting historical consequences.
chapter five

Gender and the Nation

Debating Female Education

The debates to which western education gave rise, and the intensity with
which these were debated, bore little relation to the actual numbers of Indi-
ans receiving such education. If this was so of education in general, it was
especially so of female education. In 1882 there were, in all of British India,
six girls in college, just over two thousand in secondary schools, and 124,000
in primary or ‘‘mixed’’ schools, the vast majority of these in the provinces of
Bombay, Madras, and Bengal, leaving a minuscule number of girls receiving
any formal education in the rest of British India.1 Well under 1 percent of girls
of school-going age (narrowly defined) were enrolled in any educational in-
stitution at any level,2 and for every thousand boys enrolled, there were only
forty-six girls.3 By early in the new century there were 160 females in arts col-
leges, but of these 124 were European, Eurasian, Indian Christian, or Parsi,
leaving thirty-six Hindu and Muslim girls attending college. Similarly, of the
thirty thousand girls enrolled in the higher echelons of secondary education
and receiving instruction in English, two-thirds were European or Eurasian.4
Where female education was discussed, the director general of education in
India observed in his quinquennial report for 1902–7, ‘‘In the main . . . it con-
notes primary education, that is to say, the teaching of little girls to read and
write in the vernacular, to do easy sums and a little needlework.’’ 5 Very often
it did not even mean that: many girls attended coeducational schools, which
usually meant boys’ schools with all-male staff that had been encouraged to
enroll girls but where, it was widely observed, girls received little education
and indeed little attention.6 A government statement in 1913 acknowledged,
‘‘The education of girls remains to be organised.’’ 7
Nonetheless, female education was the subject of constant discussion in
colonial India, in staggering disproportion to the number of girls affected.
Why was this so? The obvious answer might be that the depth and intensity
129
130 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
of the discourse bore witness to its controversial and contested character; that
those who urged female education were confronted with those who denied
the need for it, or argued against it. In fact, however, the discourse on female
education was very one-sided: by the latter nineteenth century most of the
many voices heard on the subject accepted its desirability, and urged its im-
portance. Far from being an answer to our question (Why was there so much
said and written about female education despite the small number of girls
receiving it?) this observation only yields a second question: Why so much
discourse, if there was agreement? In other words, why such belaboring of a
point on which a public consensus had seemingly been reached? And given
that the volume of discourse on this subject was not matched by dramatic
increases in the numbers of girls receiving education, yet another question:
What did this discourse on the desirability of educating women signify, if it
did not signal a newfound willingness to educate girls and women?
The discourse on women’s education was tied up with controversies over
‘‘the woman question’’ in colonial India, controversies which, it has often
been noted, had less to do with women than with what women were seen
to signify, or could be made to signify. That is, debates on the woman ques-
tion were connected to differing characterizations and assessments of Indian
(or Hindu) society and tradition, which often emerged and took shape in the
course of polemical exchanges between the colonial ruler and nationalists. To
investigate why female education was so extensively discussed (despite the
lack of opposition), and what the debates signified (if they were not trans-
lated into results), we need to begin with these exchanges and recreate the
discursive contexts in which they took place.

Representation and Backwardness

When confronted by demands from a section of the Indian élites for a greater
degree of self-rule for India, and later by demands for full independence,
the British rulers of India would seek to refute the viability of the claims on
which the demands were based. There were voices within officialdom declar-
ing that the British had conquered India by the sword and had to rule by
the sword, but for the most part the British response mixed repression with
argument. One of the arguments was that India was not a nation but rather
a congeries of castes, religions, and ‘‘races,’’ none of which could legitimately
represent the others. The British would claim that demands for ‘‘home rule’’
or ‘‘independence’’ articulated the sectional and selfish interests of an edu-
 Gender and the Nation 131
cated and urban élite, which was in no way placed to speak for the vast ma-
jority of India’s population; that they purported to speak for them was a cloak
for their own ambitions. Claims for self-rule or independence, if yielded to,
would result in the domination of the untouchable by the Brahmin, of the
Muslim by the Hindu (or else in a fratricidal war between the two), or of
the sturdy, yeoman peasantry (sometimes rendered as the ‘‘martial races’’) by
the effete but cunning Bengali babu.This denial of nationalist claims to speak
for other Indians, on the grounds that there was no ‘‘India’’ but only sec-
tional and competing interests, simultaneously functioned to validate British
claims to rule; the very alienness of India’s foreign rulers was a virtue, because
it meant that they stood above the fray. Not party to any interest of its own,
the colonial government claimed to dispassionately and impartially preside
over India, wisely adjudicating between the contending interests and claims
of the Indian subcontinent’s peoples.
Another argument, and one of the principal justifications of colonial rule,
was that India was too economically and socially backward to join the rank of
self-governing nations. The British claimed to rule India for her own benefit,
in a fashion designed to slowly but steadily result in a ‘‘moral and material
improvement.’’ This claim was usually understood and articulated in his-
toricist and evolutionary terms. Not only was India economically poor and
technologically inferior, but this poverty and inferiority meant that India
belonged to the past, that it was ‘‘medieval’’ rather than modern. Having
proved incapable of progressing to the next rung of the historical, evolution-
ary ladder on its own, India required an extended period of foreign rule to be
transformed or, as it was often put, ‘‘regenerated.’’
To these claims nationalists developed a number of replies. The charge
that there was a gulf separating the western-educated élites from the Indian
peasant was one which nationalism in its earlier, moderate, and constitu-
tional phase would partially concede, but would then turn to its own ac-
count by arguing that this élite ‘‘mediated’’ between its colonial rulers and
the vast mass of the Indian people, and therefore needed to be given more
say in governing the country.8 A later nationalism denied the charge, and
sought to offer a practical and political refutation of it by bridging the divides
of caste, class, religion, and region through mass nationalist mobilizations,
and through efforts to attend to the distinct needs of some sections of the
Indian population, of which the Non-Cooperation-Khilafat movement and
the Poona Pact (or Gandhi-Ambedkar Pact) were instances. At an ideological
level the alleged disunity of India was answered by varied attempts to prove
132 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
that underlying all the diversity of India was a historical and cultural unity,
attempts ranging from sophisticated discursive elaborations such as Nehru’s
The Discovery of India to the metaphorically charged imagery and iconography
of a Mother India crying out to her sons for liberation from alien tutelage.9
Independent nationhood, nationalists came to argue, would consolidate this
unity and give full and free expression to it.
As for the colonizer’s claim that India was backward, and hence ill equipped
to exercise democratic freedoms and self-rule, nationalists would sometimes
concede the sorry state of contemporary India but seek to rescue national
honor by constructing a picture of a once-golden Indian (usually Hindu) past.
India had fallen from greatness, rather than having failed to advance beyond
a ‘‘rude’’ state of development. Later nationalists came to argue that much of
India’s economic and material backwardness was in any case a consequence
of colonial rule and the exploitative economic relations which characterized
it. In the latter nineteenth century Dadabhai Naoroji and others publicized
the idea that British rule brought about a ‘‘drain of wealth’’ from India to
England;10 and in the twentieth century Nehru and others drew upon Marx-
ist ideas to indict British rule for having retarded India’s economic growth
and propped up ‘‘feudal’’ social structures, rather than aiding moderniza-
tion.11 It became a central nationalist plank that Indian poverty and economic
backwardness, far from constituting a justification for continued colonial
rule, could only be adequately addressed and remedied in an independent
India governed by Indians.

The Iconic Woman

The status and condition of India’s women loomed large in these conflicts,
and many of the arguments briefly sketched above were also played out with
specific reference to women. In his immensely influential The History of British
India—‘‘the hegemonic textbook of Indian history’’ in the nineteenth cen-
tury 12—James Mill drew upon the writings of Scottish Enlightenment histo-
rians to claim that the condition of women reflected the degree of civilization
that a people had attained: ‘‘among rude people, the women are generally de-
graded; among civilized people they are exalted.’’ By this test India ranked
low on the civilizational scale, for ‘‘A state of dependence more strict and hu-
miliating than that which is ordained for the weaker sex among the Hindus
cannot easily be conceived.’’ 13 The degraded condition of women, exemplified
in customs like sati, prohibitions against the remarriage of widows, purdah,
 Gender and the Nation 133
child marriage, and so on testified to the ‘‘rude’’ status of Hindu society. For
Mill—as for numerous other colonial officials and missionaries, as well as
many ‘‘maternal imperialists’’ who willingly shouldered the ‘‘white woman’s
burden’’ 14—this was unshakeable proof that India required the benign and
improving rule of a civilized European country.15 At the same time, the ‘‘sen-
sitivity’’ of this question, which touched upon religious observance and the
delicate matter of relations between the sexes, provided the colonial govern-
ment with a reason for doing very little to ameliorate the lot of degraded
Indian womanhood, even while drawing attention to it as one of the prime
instances of the social backwardness of Indian society.
Many Indians concurred that the status of women in India was low, and
that this reflected badly upon their society. An eminent Indian convert to
Christianity, the Reverend K. M. Banerjea, wrote in 1841 that Bengali women
‘‘drag on lives of the utmost wretchedness and degradation, and are regarded
only as servants of the household, and ministers of carnal gratification to
their husbands.’’ 16 Indian students were often required to reflect upon this
aspect of Indian society: the status of women was a popular essay and exam
question, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century. While a stu-
dent in Hindu College, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, later to become one of
Bengal’s greatest poets, wrote in answer to one of these, ‘‘In India, I may say in
all Oriental countries, women are looked upon as created merely to contrib-
ute to the gratification of the animal appetites of men . . . The people of this
country do not know the pleasures of domestic life, and indeed they cannot
know, until civilization shows them the way to attain it.’’ 17
Others expressed resentment at the wholesale and harsh condemnations
of Indian or Hindu customs. When K. M. Banerjea repeated his comments
on the ‘‘wretchedness and degradation’’ of Hindu women in a talk to that re-
markable body, the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge, Peary
Chand Mitra replied with a rebuke: ‘‘There are some persons,’’ Mitra ob-
served, ‘‘who are ready at all times to find fault with everything relating to
the Hindu,’’ and to pass ‘‘sweeping condemnations on our institutions re-
specting females.’’ 18 Mitra went on to observe that the condition of women
in Europe had not always been, nor was it currently, an exalted one; and to
suggest that while the lot of women in contemporary India was indeed a poor
one in many respects, it had not always been so—in the past women in Hindu
India had exercised much greater liberty, had been possessed of civil rights,
and had often been educated. That this rebuke was delivered at the Society
for the Acquisition of General Knowledge made it all the more significant,
134 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
since neither Mitra nor his listeners belonged to the ranks of those ‘‘ortho-
dox’’ who denied that women’s condition was in need of reform, and who a
decade earlier had opposed legislation outlawing sati. On the contrary, this
was a body of the radicals and iconoclasts of the 1830s and 1840s which histo-
riography has often described as the most advanced and rationalist vanguard
of the ‘‘Bengal Renaissance.’’
Mitra’s claim regarding the position of women in earlier times antici-
pated what from the mid-nineteenth century came to assume something of
the status of an orthodoxy, namely that in ancient India women’s condition
had been altogether different, and very much more exalted, than it was in
the present. From pamphlet and in press, in English and in the vernacu-
lars, in prose and poetry, people with otherwise differing views on issues to
do with women regularly cited historical and mythical figures from the an-
cient past such as Maitreyi, Gargi, Damyanti, and others as examples of how
once women in India had been ‘‘learned, free and highly cultured.’’ 19 In an
eponymous poem on Savitri by Toru Dutt (1856–77), the mythical, ideal wife
of Hindu tradition appears as the opposite of the ignorant and superstitious
woman confined in the antahpur:
In those far-off primeval days
Fair India’s daughters were not pent
In closed zenanas. On her ways
Savitri at her pleasure went
Whither she chose,—and hour by hour
With young companions of her age,
She roamed the woods for fruit or flower,
Or loitered in some hermitage,
For to the Munis gray and old
Her presence was as sunshine glad,
They taught her wonders manifold
And gave her of the best they had.20
If reform of the condition of Indian women was required, it could now
be cast as a consequence not of India being insufficiently civilized (with
‘‘Europe’’ standing for civilization), but rather of her lapse from her own tra-
ditions and customs. It was not the ‘‘Hindu religion’’ or ‘‘native customs’’
which were the source and cause of woman’s plight, but their decline: as
Annie Besant put it in the course of urging reform of the practice of child mar-
riage, ‘‘I am pleading . . . for a restoration to women in India of the place that
 Gender and the Nation 135
was theirs when India was greatest.’’ 21 With history reconstructed thus, it fol-
lowed that improving the lot of women required recapturing some essential
Hinduness or Indianness, rather than remaking Indian women in the image
of their western counterparts. Numerous speakers and writers waxed lyrical
on the special qualities of the Indian (or Hindu) woman, whose ‘‘clean inno-
cence . . . simple faith . . . sweetness and geniality of temper . . . [and] natural
courtesy . . . are unsurpassed.’’ 22 Rather than being an object of pity, Indian
womanhood now assumed a privileged status in nationalist discourse.Tanika
Sarkar describes how woman was discursively produced as a potent signifier
in the course of elaborating this discourse: ‘‘An icon was constructed of the
patriotic subject, the good Hindu woman with her simple dress, her ritually
pure conchshell bangles and red vermilion mark, her happy surrender and
self immersion in the sansar [domesticity], and her endless bounty and nur-
ture expressed by cooking and feeding. She was charged with an immense
aesthetic, cultural and religious load in nationalist writings.’’ 23
In part this was an aspect of a more general reassertion of the value
of indigenous culture and tradition, a reassertion which became especially
marked in the 1870s and 1880s. It was also more than this, however. Partha
Chatterjee has illuminatingly argued that anticolonial nationalism in India
divided the world of social institutions and practices into two domains, the
‘‘spiritual’’ and the ‘‘material,’’ which corresponded to a distinction between
that which was integral to national identityand that which was extrinsic to it.
In Chatterjee’s summary of the position that Indian nationalism had arrived
at in the second half of the nineteenth century, ‘‘The material is the domain
of the ‘outside,’ of the economy and of statecraft, of science and technology,
a domain where the West had proved its superiority and the East had suc-
cumbed. In this domain, then, Western superiority had to be acknowledged
and its accomplishments carefully studied and replicated. The spiritual, on
the other hand, is an ‘inner’ domain bearing the ‘essential’ marks of cultural
identity. The greater one’s success in imitating Western skills in the material
domain, therefore, the greater the need to preserve the distinctness of one’s
spiritual culture.’’ 24
From the second half of the nineteenth century, Indian womanhood and
the home which she was seen to embody came to be seen as one of the most
important sites where the ‘‘essential marks of cultural identity’’ were located
and reproduced. The middle-class Indian male had perforce to engage with
the colonial civil sphere to make a living, and the nationalist had to engage
with it to acquire the scientific and technological skills needed if India were to
136 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
liberate herself from foreign rule. In the process cultural compromises were
necessitated. All the more necessary, then, that the Indian woman, through
her religious devotion and her ‘‘traditional’’ dress and demeanor, function as
an emblem and repository of an identity which was pure and unsullied. She
signified an Indianness that had to be retained and preserved, even as the
nation-to-be sought to acquire the material and technological resources nec-
essary to prepare to fight for national Independence, and to build a modern
nation thereafter.
Not only did the Indian woman signify Indianness, but as wife and mis-
tress of the home she provided the anchor that kept her western-educated
husband, immersed in the ‘‘material’’ world of colonial society, from losing
all touch with his national essence. Annie Besant wrote, ‘‘Hinduism needs the
support of educated Hindu women, reproducing in modern days the Brahma
Vadinis of old, and saving English-educated men from the scepticism which
they imbibe from their secularor missionaryeducation.The future of Hindu-
ism depends largely on women.’’ 25 A highly idealized conception of women’s
role, no doubt, but occasionally there were men who testified that this was
the role their wives had played. G. S. Dutt, one of few Indians who gained
entry into an Indian civil service dominated by the British, described how
as a result of his western education and a period spent in England he be-
came almost wholly Anglicized, so much so that he insisted on having his
wife speak to him in English, and take lessons in ballroom dancing. As a tra-
ditional wife she complied with his wishes, but over time it was her deeply
rooted Indian identity and Hindu religiosity which remade him, such that
‘‘she succeeded in making’’ him ‘‘a Bengali again.’’ 26
At the same time, the need for change was not rejected. On the contrary,
strengthening the nation and preparing for the struggles ahead required that
middle-class Indian women also had to change, had to become ‘‘modern’’ and
yet remain quintessentially Indian. As Chatterjee goes on to suggest, nation-
alism did not reject the West or modernity: ‘‘the nationalist paradigm in fact
supplied an ideological principle of selection . . . not a dismissal of modernity
but an attempt to make modernity consistent with the nationalist project.’’ 27
What did follow, if remaking women and domesticity required recapturing
and preserving some essential Hinduness or Indianness rather than using
western counterparts as models, was that this project of preservation-cum-
transformation could only be undertaken by Indians, not by the colonial
state. There thus begins in the nineteenth century what one historian has
termed a project of ‘‘ideological-aesthetic meddlesomeness,’’ 28 with a seg-
 Gender and the Nation 137
ment of the Indian middle class striving to refashion its women. Female edu-
cation was a defining aspect of this project.

Female Education: Virtuous Wives and Modern Mothers

When it was decided in 1813 that the colonial government was to undertake
some responsibility for educating its Indian subjects, and again in 1835 when
it was decided that this education was to be education in western knowl-
edge, the authorities had only their male subjects in mind. The education of
women was not high on the agenda in Britain at the time, and the small re-
sources to be devoted to educating England’s Indian subjects were not to be
wasted on the lower classes or on women. Thus the earliest efforts at provid-
ing formal education for girls came from private agency—from the private
initiatives of colonial officials, and most notably from missionaries.29 It was
not until 1850 that the Indian government declared government support for
female education (though not yet any financial commitment), and then on
the grounds that through their influence as mothers and wives, educated
women would have a disproportionate and beneficial impact on the gen-
eral spread of European knowledge.30 Here, as through much of the colonial
period, the colonial state urged female education not because of its value to
girls but rather because it was thought conducive to the more effective edu-
cation of boys; and conversely, because it was felt that uneducated wives and
mothers ‘‘stand for ideals and modes of thought which are often sharply in
conflict with those which their men have learned to entertain,’’ leading to a
‘‘dualism’’ in the life of the educated Indian,31 and contributing to the ‘‘moral
crisis’’ discussed in chapter 2.
The very circumstance which made it desirable to educate girls—that the
home they represented was different from, even at odds with, the world of
colonial, modern civil society—was also, however, cited as an obstacle to the
spread of girls’ education. The peculiarities which characterized relations be-
tween the sexes and domestic arrangements in Indian society, including the
custom of purdah (the seclusion of women), child marriage, the prejudice
that a woman who learned to read and write would end up as a widow or
become immoral—were widely seen as impediments to female education.
Citing some of these ‘‘peculiar difficulties,’’ the Report of the Indian Education
[Hunter] Commission of 1883 stated, ‘‘For many years to come, the respectable
native community will desire to shelter their daughters from public obser-
vation, and to seclude them from contact with males not belonging to the
138 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
family. The problem is how to reconcile school-life with these popular feel-
ings.’’ 32 The solution to this problem, it concluded, would depend less on gov-
ernment initiatives than on the ‘‘growth of public opinion among the natives
themselves.’’ 33
There were indeed many prejudices against female literacy and education
in most parts of India, including the ones mentioned by the Hunter Com-
mission. Often the most vigorous opposition came from the older women of
the joint family.34 However, by the mid-nineteenth century the idea of female
education was also finding some support among sections of the new middle
class, especially the ‘‘reformed’’ sections of Hindu society such as the Brahmo
Samaj.35 The education envisaged in this early period was mostly at home,
either in the form of husbands educating their wives,36 or zenana education,
in which ‘‘missionary ladies’’ or young members of the Brahmo Samaj would
visit middle-class women in their homes to provide some instruction, usually
more to do with the graces required of the wife of a middle-class gentleman
in government service than with reading or writing.37
By the latter half of the nineteenth century there were growing voices
in favor of female education, including formal schooling,38 mostly from the
new middle classes who occupied a subordinate position in the colonial pub-
lic sphere of offices and law courts. These voices made themselves heard
through a raft of journals and magazines directed at women, which both
presumed literacy among their readers and urged the need for women’s edu-
cation;39 through public debates in newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets,
which urged upon western-educated men the importance of educating their
womenfolk; through didactic pamphlets directed at women and seeking to
persuade them of the merits of education;40 and through native efforts to
establish girls’ schools.

In Vanitabodhini (1898), a dialogue in Hindi between two women—the

dialogue was a favored form in didactic works—Vidavthi seeks to answer
the doubts and objections of her friend Sarala concerning women’s educa-
tion. It is not true, she explains, that the Shastras forbid women’s educa-
tion; pandits who are genuinely learned tell us that on the contrary, they
enjoin it. The custom of educating women was lost, like many other good
Hindu customs, during the oppressive Muslim rule. To Sarala’s fear that edu-
cated women will become widows, Vidavthi replies that this could not pos-
sibly be true, else all memsahibs would be widows. The fear that education
leads women to romantic intrigues and immorality is similarly refuted. Con-
ceding that her fears and objections may be groundless, Sarala nonetheless
 Gender and the Nation 139
asks what, if anything, is gained by education. Vidhavthi answers that cur-
rently men dismiss women’s views as ‘‘women’s talk,’’ and even little boys,
having read one or two books, come to regard their mother’s words as non-
sense.41 Education will therefore lead women to be taken more seriously and
to be better mothers, able to instruct their children. They will also be able to
read the Shastras and thus better understand their dharma; and be less likely
to quarrel (hence men will be more likely to linger at home) and break up
the joint family, since a great deal of female quarrelsomeness derives from
ignorance.42
The two themes which were to dominate the numerous pamphlets, dia-
logues, and newspaperand magazine articles in which the discourse of female
education proliferated are present here. First, for women to receive education
is not contrary to Hindu traditions, but is rather to return to them (here, as
in many but not all writings, the ‘‘Muslim invasions’’ and ‘‘Muslim rule’’ are
the scapegoat for the decline of good customs and the introduction of oppres-
sive ones). This was a theme endlessly elaborated, in humble pamphlets such
as this one and in more elevated settings. Addressing the Indian Social Con-
ference in 1906, the poet and nationalist Sarojini Naidu began by observing
that it was ‘‘a paradox, at once touched with humour and tragedy,’’ to have
to urge female education in India: India of all places, ‘‘which, at the begin-
ning of the first century was already ripe with civilization and . . . examples
of women of the highest genius and widest culture.’’ She urged her (mostly
male) audience: ‘‘restore to your women their ancient rights.’’ 43
The second theme is that female education will modernize and improve
existing domestic arrangements, rather than fundamentally reorder and
transform them. Specifically, it was urged on behalf of female education that
it would make women better wives, especially given the changing public
worlds that their husbands inhabited; make them better mothers; and give
more substance to their piety by making them more moral and virtuous.
The claim that educated women would make better wives was made on
a number of grounds, which are worth distinguishing even if collectively
they all amounted to a call for a reformed and modernized domesticity. One
was the Victorian notion that household management was a serious, even
scientific affair, requiring the sort of knowledge which could not be pro-
vided by the older women of a joint family, who themselves were usually
illiterate. One of the early bhadramahila (genteel, middle-class) contributors
to this discourse, Kundamala Debi, wrote in 1870 that ‘‘an educated woman
can do housework thoughtfully and systematically in a way unknown to an
ignorant, uneducated woman.’’ 44 Another educated Bengali woman, Bama-
140 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
sundari, similarly wrote: ‘‘How to do housework, deal with family members
and domestic servants as well as educate them—these are areas in which
women . . . are singularly ignorant.’’ 45 Another ground was that female edu-
cation was required as an adaptation to the changing nature of middle-class
occupational roles, and the increasing importance of western education for a
small but socially significant group of men. The gap between the worlds of
women and men had always been significant, and was metaphorically and
physically rendered in some parts of India through the distinction between
the antahpur, or ‘‘inside,’’ and the outside world. What was new, and required
adaptation on women’s part, was that this gap was no longer even cut of the
same cultural cloth. As a result, a distance which was once unexceptionable
now loomed for some as one which undermined domestic harmony. An advo-
cate of female education in the Brahmo Public Opinion wrote, ‘‘an educated
Bengali, when he returns home, fagged and wearied by the day’s over-work,
wishes very much to be refreshed either with music, or with pleasant con-
versation on topics familiar to him, and feels very much disappointed when
his hopes are frustrated . . . he very much feels the want of a help-mate.’’ 46
We can see in this statement and others like it the emergence also of a new
desire. Although the English model of domesticity was in general thought
one to be avoided—not least because the practical and emotional economy of
the joint family placed inherent limitations upon the idea of the ‘‘compan-
ionate marriage’’—the idea of a wife who could share her husband’s interests
and understand the cares of his work was one which found appeal in some
quarters.47 Traveling in England in 1870, the Brahmo leader Keshub Chunder
Sen was much impressed by the ‘‘sweet English home’’;48 and Amrita Krishna
Basu urged his listeners at a meeting of the Simla Literary Society to educate
their wives and daughters, because they would ‘‘enjoy better domestic plea-
sures in the company of educated and enlightened wives and daughters.’’ 49
Others saw a danger in the gulf between the nationalist man’s public life,
necessarily immersed in voluntary associations and all the other institutions
and paraphernalia of modern life, and his pre-modern home: ‘‘It is danger-
ous that from a vivid public life, full of interest, full of keen and strenuous
struggle, a man should go back into the women’s quarters of the house, and
find himself carried back over centuries.’’ 50
It was also widely argued that educated women would make better
mothers. A student essay at the Elphinstone institution favored female edu-
cation on the grounds that ‘‘philosophers like Bacon, and linguists like
[William] Jones, who afterwards became so famous for their learning, were
 Gender and the Nation 141
indebted in their early lives to their learned and intelligent mothers, under
whose care their youthful minds were formed.’’ 51 A regular theme in the
discourse of female education was that the educated mother—capable of
instructing her children, running an orderly house, maintaining hygiene,
providing a ‘‘scientifically’’ sanctioned diet, and tempering affection with
discipline—was superior to her uneducated counterpart. As an essayist in the
Calcutta Review wrote, ‘‘Intelligently educated mothers, and sisters, and wives
[are] essential to the training of a race of intelligent and high-spirited sons,
and brothers, and husbands.’’ 52 As this and numerous similar statements tes-
tify, motherhood—in its newly defined, enlightened, and ‘‘modern’’ variety—
was ennobled such that it was not only a domestic duty but also a national
obligation. ‘‘By the turn of the century,’’ Meredith Borthwick writes in her
study of the changing role of Bengali women, ‘‘motherhood had been in-
vested with a new meaning . . . raised from a natural function to an exalted
duty . . . a vocation so complex that only a well-educated woman could man-
age it.’’ 53
The education of women, it was also claimed, would lead to greater virtue
and morality. From the mid-nineteenth century many came to see the con-
fined world of women, represented by the antahpur and zenana, as breeding
grounds for intrigue, quarrelsomeness, and a piety which, while admirable in
the abstract, in the concrete was full of idle superstitions and empty rituals.54
The educated woman would continue to be religious, but in an enlightened
rather than superstitious fashion; she would be at least as moral and chaste
as her uneducated predecessor, and far more virtuous than her female at-
tendants and entertainers from the lower classes, from whom she was to be
sharply distinguished and separated as never before.55
By the late nineteenth century few voices were heard in public argu-
ing against women’s education—divisions between ‘‘advanced’’ and ‘‘ortho-
dox’’ opinion, which did occur around other issues concerning the status of
women, were largely absent from public discussions of female education,
with ‘‘conservatives’’ and ‘‘reformers’’ agreeing that female education was a
desired goal. My examples have principally been drawn from those who ex-
plicitly referred to Hindu women, or who equated ‘‘Hindu women’’ with
‘‘Indian women.’’ But there were parallel and sometimes overlapping debates
among Muslim reformers. Gail Minault writes, ‘‘discussions of women’s edu-
cation and construction of plans to effect it had become an obsession among
many north Indian Muslim men in the late nineteenth century.’’ These men
argued that with education ‘‘women would become better companions to
142 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
their husbands, better mothers to their children, and better homemakers,’’ as
well as ‘‘better Muslims . . . observant of sanctioned, as opposed to ‘‘useless,’’
rituals.’’ 56 And while in both cases there were some debates around the type
and extent of education appropriate for women, and the debates sometimes
generated heat,57 for the most part even these were rather muted, and the
curriculum for girls in government schools was not substantially different
from that for boys.
A great deal of this debate paralleled those in Britain, where the propo-
nents of women’s education similarly argued that it was necessary to produce
a well-regulated domesticity. The Victorian themes of discipline, order, effi-
ciency, organization, regularity, and economy figured large in Indian discus-
sions. The Indian discourse on female education was even marked by a simi-
lar anxiety—those who advocate education for women went to great pains
to make clear what the educated woman should not become, namely disaf-
fected and unfit for domesticity, or competitive and ‘‘mannish.’’ The words
of a speaker championing female education at the Beharee Student’s Confer-
ence of 1907 could have been delivered at any gathering in Britain: ‘‘we do not
want a lady graduate, whose knowledge is replete with calculus, Astronomy
and Metaphysics but who is at the same time quite innocent of the arts of
cookery and domestic hygiene.’’ 58

Desexed and Denationalized

There was, however, a very important difference.59 The anxiety being articu-
lated was not only that the educated woman might be ‘‘desexed,’’ but that she
might be ‘‘denationalized.’’ Indeed, to become desexed was simultaneously
to be denationalized. To the very degree that woman had become an icon,
the symbol and guardian of all that was Indian, for her to lose her feminine
attributes (recall Sarkar’s description of ‘‘her simple dress, her ritually pure
conchshell bangles and red vermilion mark, her happy surrender and self im-
mersion in the sansar’’) would mean that she would no longer signify and
embody Indianness. The middle-class and nationalist project was to educate
women so that they would become modern and yet able to represent Indian-
ness; the anxiety that was the underside of this project was the fear that
Indianness might be effaced by the pursuit of modernity. Some warned that
this was happening, or had happened.The headmaster of a high school wrote,
‘‘The effect of this indiscriminate imparting of high western education to our
girls has had the unfortunate result of unsexing our educated women and of
 Gender and the Nation 143
denationalising them—a result bad enough in the case of boys, but infinitely
worse in the case of future mothers.’’ 60 Annie Besant, who urged female edu-
cation as a patriotic necessity, also warned that it must not denationalize:
‘‘it is bad enough to denationalize your men. It would be a thousand times
worse to denationalize your girls.’’ 61 Why was it ‘‘infinitely’’ or a ‘‘thousand
times’’ worse to denationalize women than men? Because then they could no
longer perform the function which had been assigned to them, as icons and
guardians of national identity—as Besant immediately went on to say, the de-
nationalizing of girls ‘‘would be the death-knell of India.’’ 62 Or as the author
of Bharatlakshmi (1931) bluntly put it, ‘‘If, like the so-called enlightened, west-
ernized Indian man, the Indian woman also takes its western education and
changes her own nature and religion then our subjection would be extended
from the outside to our innermost core.’’ 63
Thus what was also part of the discourse urging female education—often
as part and parcel of writings urging it, at other times from those who warned
of its dangers yet without opposing it—was the figure of the Indian woman
who had become ‘‘westernized’’ by her education, rather than become an icon
of modern Indian femininity. Throughout the nineteenth century the edu-
cated woman who had become Anglicized was a figure of rebuke, dread, and
satire—in discursive and polemical writings, on the stage, and in novels. Nu-
merous Bengali farces, with titles like Miss Bino Bibi B.A., delighted their audi-
ences with depictions of westernized women whom audiences could join in
condemning and ridiculing.64 Similar anxiety and condemnation continued
into the twentieth century, and was by no means confined to the more con-
servative sections of society.65 Munshi Premchand, earliest and one of the
greatest of modern Hindi prose writers, wrote stories which sympathetically
portrayed the lives of peasants, the poor, and of women, and he became a
member of the left-wing Progressive Writers Association. But his stories also
provide portraits of the ‘‘westernized’’ woman which are anything but af-
firming. In Shanti (1920), a western-educated husband encourages his wife to
become modern and western, with disastrous results for the happiness of the
husband and the well-being of the joint family. The husband eventually de-
clares, ‘‘I want to again see you as a woman who is shy, walks with her head
down, reads Ramayan, does household work, spins charkha, is scared of god
and is completely devoted to her husband.’’ 66 The wife complies, and order
and happiness are restored to the household.
A lecturer at Calcutta University told the Calcutta University Commis-
sion, ‘‘we do not want that women in India should continue to labour under
144 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
the darkness of ignorance and superstition . . . But we do not want at the same
time that women in India should be steadily anglicised, importing into our
peaceful homes the evils of suffragetism or the spirit of revolutionary and
rationalistic iconoclasm.’’ 67 Just as modest dress, the sindhur and the bindi,
and other such markers signified Indian femininity, so images of European
ways regularly stood in for the loss of a distinctively Indian feminine identity
and the decline of domestic virtues. A pamphleteer advocating female edu-
cation nonetheless also wrote, ‘‘Your educated wife knows only how to talk
and dress, how to attend visitors in the drawing room . . . She knows also
how to read novels lounging in[sic] the sofa . . . She cannot stand the sight
of the kitchen . . . they disregard their parents, defy their husbands and hate
their children.’’ 68 Balkrishna Bhatt, no admirer of the uneducated and ‘‘igno-
rant’’ Indian woman, contrasted the traditional Indian wife, frugal and self-
sacrificing, with the profligate, nagging, and dominating Englishwoman and
her Indian imitator.69 In 1937 the mayor of Calcutta told the All-India Edu-
cational Conference of ‘‘ominous signs which spell the ruin of our homes’’:
‘‘Our sisters and daughters have begun bobbing their hair, smoking ciga-
rettes, and enjoying themselves in company with their men friends and seem
to be averse to undertaking the duties of a home.’’ 70
We have seen that a public consensus had emerged around the desirability
of female education. This appears to have been reached first in Madras and
Bombay, and by the latter nineteenth century in Bengal; by the beginning of
the twentieth century, even in what were thought to be the ‘‘socially back-
ward’’ Hindi-speaking regions, a nationalist like Purushottam Das Tandon
could assert that the debate over whether women should be educated had
been won, and had given way to discussions of what sort of education they
should receive.71 The consensus was such that it could even be described, as I
have done, as a ‘‘project’’; provided we recognize that an anxiety surrounded
the project, or better yet, was built into it as one of its elements.What dogged
this project—as a critique, but usually produced as part of the same discourse
and thus as an auto-critique, as the alterity which defined and delimited the
identity of this project—was the figure of the Indian woman who had lost her
Indianness and become a brown memsahib. It is this, I suggest, that explains
the heatedness and density of the discourse of female education; it is not that
female education became the site of competing positions, but rather that the
discourse in favor of it was underlain by an anxiety, which it found necessary
to harp on endlessly, as if constantly referring to and warning against the
danger would ward it away.
 Gender and the Nation 145

Who Signifies?
I began this chapter by observing that debates on the woman question in
colonial India were overdetermined by conflicts between nationalists and
India’s British rulers. The British claimed to be improving an India that was
economically but also socially ‘‘backward,’’ as the condition of her peasants,
untouchables, and women indicated. The spokesmen of Indian national-
ism, most of them western-educated, assumed that they were exempt from
this charge and argued that their uniquely privileged position—as mediators
between their rulers, whose modern world they participated in, and their
countrymen, whom they were in the best position to understand—required
that they be given a greater role and say in the governance of India. Later
they came to argue that the British were not an agent of modernity at all but
rather an impediment to achieving it, and that with Independence a mod-
ernizing élite, with the consent and participation of the backward, could lead
India into the modern world.
The character of these debates changed in response to political and other
changes. The isomorphism posited between woman, the untouchable, and
the peasant—all exemplars of backwardness—was challenged by national-
ism as it came to assert that while transforming the peasantry and reform-
ing or uprooting the caste system might have to await the gaining of state
power,72 the remaking of Indian women and of the Indian home was within
its power—and moreover, was its exclusive domain. There thus began the
project of ‘‘ideological-aesthetic meddlesomeness,’’ discussed in the preced-
ing pages, to remake the middle-class Indian woman. She and the home that
she was seen to preside over were to be rendered more modern, but at the
same time were to retain, and were charged with the function of signifying
and preserving, all that was distinctively ‘‘Indian’’ in a project that might
otherwise become nothing more than an attempt to make India resemble
England. Female education was an important part of the project to produce
this woman and this home, but the absence of any serious public opposition
to the project obscured the deep anxiety which was part of it, manifested in
repeated injunctions against letting the educated woman resemble the west-
ern woman.
As with other debates concerning the ‘‘woman question’’ in colonial India,
debates on female education were not about women but rather about what
they signified, or could be made to signify. But also at issue was who was to
make her signify; who could claim to be legitimately authorized to modern-
146 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
ize Indian women. The Indian élites sought to convince others, and perhaps
themselves, that they recognized the need to remake Indian women, and that
they were capable of formulating an agenda mapping out the character of
this transformation. They endlessly elaborated to others, and to each other,
what the iconic woman was to signify, and agonized over the lurking dan-
gers inherent in this project. Actually effecting this transformation mattered
less, since that was not what this elaborate discourse was about. Hence the
curious impression of two parallel discussions going on. One was about the
desirability of women’s education, and those taking part in and observing
this discussion were struck by the unanimity which had been reached on
the issue. The other discussion was among educational officials and others
directly involved in providing education, and those taking part in this discus-
sion were struck by the wretchedly slow progress being made: in the number
of students enrolled, in the level to which they progressed, and in the knowl-
edge and skills gained.Thus at the very time when, according to Purushottam
Das Tandon, the debate over whether to educate girls had been won even in
the Hindi-speaking regions, the director general for education was observ-
ing—as we saw at the beginning of this chapter—that there was very little of
the education in question actually happening, and what there was occurred
mostly at the lower levels of primary education. There is a curious air of un-
reality surrounding the discourse on female education—so many discursive
moves and declarations, so much argument produced to justify the necessity
and urge the importance of it, and yet so little happening ‘‘on the ground.’’ 73
This, I suggest, was because the discourse of female education was less
about effecting change than about staking out a claim: that only Indians
were authorized to act in this domain, and to map out what changes were
required. This claim was made on the grounds that the ability of the middle-
class Indian to speak for and represent his women and his home was not
contestable, in the way that his ability to speak for the peasant was.
However, the very circumstance that made nationalists choose woman as
a signifier and as a site of contestation—that male nationalists could, given
patriarchal assumptions shared by ruler and ruled, plausibly claim the right
to speak for and intervene in the lives of women—also constituted a poten-
tial weakness. To the very degree that ‘‘his’’ home was construed as his sov-
ereign domain and as constitutive of his identity, the middle-class, western-
educated Indian was marked by it, in a way that he was not marked by
the continued backwardness of the Indian peasant. The backwardness of the
peasant signified the backwardness of India; but the backwardness of the
 Gender and the Nation 147
middle-class Indian woman could be seen to testify also to the backwardness
of the middle-class Indian. This much was to become especially clear during the
curious affair of Katherine Mayo’s Mother India; and the ensuing controversy
was also to prove a catalyst for a new urgency in nationalist ranks, which
sought to match discourse to results.

Mother India
In 1925–26 Mayo, an American journalist and author, made a three-month
trip to India with the intention of collecting information for a book. In 1927
Mother India was published in New York and then in London.The idea of India
as a mother had been a common and potent signifier in nationalist iconog-
raphy since the nineteenth century, and Mayo later explained that she had
chosen her title precisely to make ‘‘inescapable the contrast between, on the
one hand, florid talk of devotion and ‘sacrifice’ poured out before an abstract
figure, and, on the other hand, the consideration actually accorded to the
living woman, mother of the race.’’ 74
Her book was thus an ‘‘exposé’’ of the true condition of India, especially
of Indian women, and through this also a critique of nationalist demands
for greater self-rule. Mayo purported to show that Indian society and cus-
tom—for the most part Hindu society and custom—condemned women (and
also the untouchable castes and others) to lives of ignorance, slavery, and ex-
treme degradation; that it had always been thus; and that all talk of a ‘‘Golden
Age’’ of India, when a greater measure of equality and dignity prevailed, was
therefore myth. Whatever improvement there had been in the condition of
women was due to the efforts of India’s British rulers, who had not been as-
sisted and had very often been impeded by their Indian subjects, especially
nationalist politicians and speechmakers. Indians blamed England for woes
that were deeply rooted in their own culture, a fact they were unwilling to
even acknowledge, let alone address. The only prospects for improvement
lay in the hope that the educated classes in India might concede that the
chains that bound them were of their own making, and earnestly help the
British to improve India, rather than engage in nationalist mythmaking and
speechifying. Mayo’s book was presented as the effort of a well-wisher—it
was dedicated to ‘‘the peoples of India’’—undertaking the onerous and poten-
tially thankless task of holding up a mirror to Indian reality so that Indians
could more clearly see themselves, the necessary prelude to their improving
themselves.
148 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
The meat of the book lay in its graphic descriptions of child brides
psychologically and physically damaged by premature intercourse,often with
middle-aged husbands; of child mothers giving birth under the most un-
hygienic and primitive conditions, their reproductive organs irreparably
damaged if they survived at all; of the despair of these same mothers at giving
birth to daughters, who if not killed to relieve the family of future financial
burden were condemned to a future like that of their mothers; and of the
lives of women who lived in the utmost ignorance, imprisoned in purdah,
slaves to husbands whom they were taught from early childhood to regard as
their god. All these practices were rooted in Indian custom and Hindu tradi-
tion, which the mass of the people regarded as immutable, a view in which
their leaders concurred or which they lacked the courage and will to seek to
reform. Mother India documented other horrors as well, including the oppres-
sion of low castes by Brahmins, but it was the depictions of Indian women
in unbearable conditions, and the linking of these conditions to an alleged
Hindu obsession with sex (manifested in practices such as early marriage,
worship of the Siva lingam, and temple prostitution), which excited the most
comment.
And excite comment the book did—more accurately, it provoked a furor.
In England many hailed it as ‘‘independent’’ confirmation of what the British
authorities had been saying all along—the liberal New Statesman, which had
been relatively sympathetic to Indian nationalist claims, carried an unsigned
review by its editor which both captured and endorsed the tone of the book:
‘‘All who know anything of India are aware, of course, of the prime evils of
Hinduism, of the horrors of the child marriage system, of the universality of
sexual vice in its most extravagant forms, of the monstrously absurd brutali-
ties of the caste system, of the filthy personal habits of even the most edu-
cated classes—which, like the degradation of Hindu women, are unequalled
even amongst the most primitive African or Australian savages—of the uni-
versal cruelty to animals, and of the equally universal prevalence of laziness,
untruthfulness, cowardice and personal corruption.’’ Mayo, the review con-
cluded, ‘‘makes the claim for Swaraj seem nonsense and the will to grant it
almost a crime.’’ 75 Some British feminists joined in the condemnations of
India on behalf of their oppressed Indian ‘‘sisters.’’ In America Mother India
sold in huge numbers and shaped public perceptions of India for a long time
to come.76
The biggest reaction was in India, and it was almost unanimously hos-
tile. Within one year of its publication nine books appeared in reply, includ-
 Gender and the Nation 149
ing one by the nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai and another by the indefatiguable
social reformer K. Natarajan; more appeared over the next few years.77 Some
Indian respondents saw Mayo’s condemnation of the alleged Indian obses-
sion with sex as evidence that she was herself ‘‘sex-mad.’’ 78 Most Indian re-
spondents read Mother India as a politically inspired attack upon nationalist
aspirations.79 And almost all condemned the book as an attack upon Indian
women. Thus in Calcutta Foreward characterized the book as a ‘‘Libel against
IndianWomanhood’’ and a headline in Amrita Bazaar Patrika read, ‘‘Gratuitous
Insult, Indian Women Blasphemed’’; and a large protest at the Calcutta Town
Hall was advertised as being held ‘‘to repudiate the scurrilous attacks and
malicious allegations made against the Indian womanhood by Miss Mayo.’’ 80
This was in addition to a host of responses in the press, including ones by
Indian women and by Gandhi and Tagore. Numerous public meetings were
held to denounce the book, and proposals to proscribe it were raised by Indian
members of the Central Legislative Assembly.
The content of Mother India, as noted by contemporaries, Mayo herself,
and many others since, was not new.81 As we have seen, the backward and
barbaric character of Indian or Hindu society, exemplified above all in its
treatment of women, had been a theme of some British writings since the
late eighteenth century, receiving formulaic expression with Mill in the early
nineteenth, and becoming an orthodoxy thereafter. Numerous Indian social
reformers had drawn attention to the social ills which beset India and had
sometimes described them in vivid terms, urging sweeping reforms of Indian
social practices. Yet the book became an event, the subject of a controversy
which, it has been observed, is perhaps only rivaled in recent times by that
surrounding Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
Why was this so? If there was little new in the book, why such a fury of de-
nunciation? Mayo, who in 1931 published a sequel entitled simply Volume Two,
suggested that the response, most of which came from the politically minded
western-educated intelligentsia, was ‘‘simply and solely because the book was
being read in America’’;82 seeking independence from Britain, Indian nation-
alists were cultivating sympathy in America, and Mother India was a serious
setback in that effort. Malicious and self-serving, this explanation was none-
theless not without some truth. Indian nationalists had been publicizing
their cause in America and elsewhere, and after the publication of the book
Sarojini Naidu, with the blessing of the Indian National Congress, went on
a speaking tour of the United States to publicize the nationalist cause and
to undo the damage that Mayo’s book had done. However, this was hardly
150 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
an adequate explanation for the extent of the response in India, nor for the
indignation that the book aroused.
According to Mrinalini Sinha, whose introduction to a recent reprint of
Mayo’s book is the best study of the controversy, the key to the extraordinary
affair of Mother India lay in its timing rather than its content. The book ap-
peared just as a Conservative government in Britain was preparing to appoint
the Indian Statutory (Simon) Commission to examine the workings of the
Government of India Act of 1919. This act had conceded the principle of self-
governing institutions by creating elected assemblies in the provinces, with
control over some governmental functions. The concessions were limited—
the elected provincial governments had control over only local matters, the
British governors of the provinces continued to exercise supervisory control
and veto powers, and the franchise upon which provincial governments were
elected was a very narrow one—but the act had nevertheless been vehemently
opposed by many in Britain and by large sections of colonial officialdom in
India. It was hoped by die-hard imperialists (and feared by nationalists) that
the all-white Simon Commission was designed to check any further conces-
sions. Since the passage of the Government of India Act Indian nationalism
had also been transformed, for the first time becoming genuinely India-wide
during the Non-cooperation Movement of 1921–22, during which the gap
between middle-class nationalism and the peasantry had seemingly been
bridged. The years since the mass upsurge was called off had been a period
of relative quietude, but the transformation of the Indian National Congress
into a mass organization signaled the coming to maturity of the nationalist
cause, reflected in part in the declaration by Congress some months after the
appearance of Mother India that independence was its goal, a radicalization
which was affirmed at the 1929 Congress. A second wave of India-wide mass
protests followed during the Civil Disobedience campaign of 1930–34. Thus
it was ‘‘the changing imperatives of British imperialism and Indian nation-
alism in the 1920s that helped make a book, which was hardly original in
its subject or exceptional in its argument, the centre of an unprecedented
international controversy.’’ 83
Sinha’s explanation of the Mother India controversy thus hinges upon the
context in which the book appeared, and dismisses its content as ‘‘hardly
original or exceptional.’’ The most that could be said about the book’s content
is that it provided one of ‘‘the most systematic elaborations’’ of the ‘‘old im-
perialist theme’’ of India’s backwardness being manifested in the treatment
of Indian women.84 I find this explanation persuasive in part, but incomplete.
 Gender and the Nation 151
What I offer below, through a close reading of Mother India, is a supplemen-
tary reading, one which draws attention to its content and the ‘‘artistry’’ with
which it was presented, and which focuses on a theme in the book which,
while not exactly original, gave it a polemical edge that helps explain why it
fueled so much debate, as well as what was at stake in that debate.

Reading Mother India

The first chapter of Mother India is titled ‘‘The Argument’’ and lays out Mayo’s
reasons for undertaking her trip to India, and what she discovered and con-
cluded after her investigations. The chapter is preceded by an introduction
which functions to set the scene for what is to come, not by outlining what
the book is about—chapter 1 performs that task—but by providing what is
part camera-eye description and part first-person eyewitness account and
travelogue.85 It is the best-written part of a book that is in parts exceedingly
well written—as Gandhi for one conceded.86
This introduction begins with images of Calcutta: ‘‘Calcutta, big, west-
ern modern, with public buildings, monuments, parks, gardens, hospitals,
museums, University, courts of law, hotels, offices, shops, all of which might
belong to a prosperous American city’’; ‘‘Decorous, sophisticated Calcutta,
where decorous and sophisticated people of all creeds, all colors and all cos-
tumes go to Government House Garden Parties, pleasantly to make their
bows to Their Excellencies, and pleasantly to talk good English while they
take their tea and ices and listen to the regimental band.’’ Just outside the
Government House Gardens, obscured by their walls, is a busy street filled
with limousines, cars, taxis, and ‘‘rolling among them now and again, a sort
of Fifth Avenue bus, bearing the big-lettered label, ‘Kali Ghat.’ ’’ The cine-
matic descriptions continue, now through a tracking shot—we follow the
bus as it proceeds past further signs of the modern and the western—‘‘past
the Empire Theater, the various clubs, St. Paul’s Cathedral, past the Bishop’s
House, the General Hospital, the London Missionary Society’s Institution’’—
till it finally reaches its destination.
Kali Ghat or ‘‘the place of Kali,’’ Mayo explains, is the root-word from
which Calcutta gets its name, and the Hindu goddess Kali is the wife of Siva,
the god of destruction and blood and death sacrifice. The description now
shifts from the impersonal eye of the camera to the first person. One of the
Brahmins who owns Kali Ghat, accompanied by a Brahmin friend named
Mr. Haldar (‘‘Mr Haldar might have been taken for a well-groomed northern
152 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
Italian gentleman. His English was polished and his manner entirely agree-
able’’), leads Mayo around it. Cleaving their way through the masses of devo-
tees and the booths where sweets, amulets, and the like are sold, Mayo and
her party arrive inside the shrine of the temple. As they survey the figure
of the goddess (‘‘Black of face . . . with a monstrous lolling tongue, drip-
ping blood’’) there is a shrill bleating, and the party turns the corner to see
two priests sacrificing a young goat: ‘‘A crash of sound, as before the goddess
drums thunder . . . with a single blow of his cutlass [the priest] decapitates
the little creature. The blood gushes forth on the pavement, the drums and
the gongs before the goddess burst out wildly. ‘Kali! Kali! Kali!’ shout all the
priests and the suppliants together . . . Meantime, and instantly, a woman
who waited behind the killers of the goat has rushed forward and fallen on
all fours to lap up the blood with her tongue—in the hope of having a child.’’
Mr Haldar tells her, ‘‘with some pride,’’ that 150–200 kids are killed in this
manner each day.
The members of the party resume their tour, now passing the minor
deities—the little red goddess of smallpox, the five-headed black cobra, the
monkey-god ‘‘to which rich merchants and students of the University pray,
before confronting examinations or risking new ventures in trade,’’ and the
phallic symbol of Siva. They proceed down a lane, where scores of holy men
and mendicants sit, ‘‘mostly fat and hairy’’ (this is one of the few places in
the Introduction where Mayo allows herself to comment, rather than let de-
scriptions and images stand in for the authorial voice). They pass a young
man who is tied by a scarf to the ‘‘tiny wrist’’ of a little girl—a husband and
his new wife, Mr. Haldar informs her, come to the temple to pray for the
birth of a son. There follows a description of the cremation of a ‘‘beautiful
young Indian woman,’’ whose forehead, hands, and feet are painted red, to
indicate that she is blessed and fortunate to have died before her husband,
rather than being left a widow. Some further scenes, before Mayo and the
party find their waiting car and depart, once again past the General Hospital
and the Bishop’s House.
Many of the themes that will figure in the book—child marriage, primi-
tive religious customs, the horror of widowhood which renders death auspi-
cious for a married woman, and so on—are presented here. But they do not
figure as ‘‘themes,’’ for there is no elaboration and condemnation—that will
come later in the book. They are instead introduced as tableaux, a series of
images, discrete and yet related (Kali Ghat, and the Hinduism that it stands
for, provide the context which relates these diverse tableaux and makes them
 Gender and the Nation 153
part of one larger scene). The Introduction does not outline themes that will
be the subject of subsequent repetition, but rather presents a picture of, and
a context for, what is to come. Or rather, two pictures. For what this introduc-
tion artfully does is present a vivid contrast between modern Calcutta and
the Calcutta that cannot be seen through the walls of the Government House
Gardens, the Calcutta of Kali Ghat.
When James Mill penned his famous assessment and criticism of Indian
civilization, it was at a time when the significant distinctions usually made
between various aspects of a complex society were those between religious
communities, between regions, and between urban and rural India. But there
was no need to differentiate between a modern and a nonmodern India,
since there was very little of modern Calcutta or modern India. More than
a hundred years later, the ‘‘old imperialist theme’’ must also account for the
markers of modernity, the hospitals and universities and law courts, and
more especially the men ‘‘of all colours and creeds’’ who are apparently at
ease in these settings, who speak good English and take their ices and listen
to the regimental band. Some of these men now claim that India has begun
the process of becoming a modern country, and that Indians like themselves
are capable of governing India. The Introduction to Mother India draws atten-
tion to modern Calcutta, dwelling on the modern buildings, all the better
to show that this is not the only India—that just outside the walls enclosing
the artificial world within is another India, more numerous, more typical,
more ‘‘real.’’
But it is not just that on the one hand there is a modern India and on the
other a Hindu India of ancient superstitions and barbaric practices, which
is the more representative of the real India. It is also that the two Indias are
connected—the bus that functions as a device to shift scenes from one to the
other also, and more literally, connects them, in that there is a constant traf-
ficking between the two. These are not hermetically sealed worlds but rather
overlapping ones; Kali Ghat is populated not just by ignorant peasants from
the ‘‘old’’ India but also by the urbane Mr. Haldar, and the ‘‘rich merchants
and University students’’ who pray to their monkey-god. And Mayo does not
end her introduction with the image of the party which has toured Kali Ghat
motoring back to the India of hospitals and law courts. It ends instead with
a conversation, in which the events and images of the preceding pages are
summed up—again, not by Mayo but by two interpreters: ‘‘Why did you go
to Kali Ghat? That is not India. Only the lowest and most ignorant of Indi-
ans are Kali worshipers,’’ said an English Theosophist, sadly, next day.’’ Mayo
154 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
repeats the words to ‘‘one of the most learned and distinguished of Bengali
Brahmans,’’ whose response she reports, and with which the Introduction
concludes: ‘‘Your English friend is wrong. It is true that in the lower castes
the percentage of worshipers of Kali is larger . . . But hundreds of thousands
of Brahmans, everywhere, worship Kali, and the devotees at Kali Ghat will in-
clude Hindus of all castes and conditions, among whom are found some of the
most highly educated and important personages of this town and of India.’’
An English Theosophist—the foreignness of this enthusiast for Hinduism is
mentioned twice—is contradicted by ‘‘one of the most learned and distin-
guished of Bengali Brahmans,’’ who testifies that the traffic from the India
of modern buildings and the university includes some of the most highly
educated and distinguished of Indians.

This theme—that whatever the differences, modern, western-educated

India is as much steeped in barbaric practices and superstitious ways as tra-
ditional India—then runs through the book, accompanying its most impor-
tant descriptions. Among the more graphic is one of a child bride (married
to a fifty-year-old ‘‘Hindu gentleman’’) who goes mad from premature sex
and arrives at a hospital ‘‘fouled,’’ her internal wounds ‘‘alive with maggots,’’
and whose husband is suing to recover his marital rights; she is, we are told,
‘‘of well-to-do, educated, city-dwelling stock,’’ but her case ‘‘differed in no
essential’’ from the next one that Mayo recounts, that of a simple village girl
(54–55). In another chapter a ‘‘high-caste orthodox Brahman scholar easily at
home in his European dress’’ tells Mayo that he will marry off his daugh-
ter at the age of five or seven, but in no case later than nine (68). This same
chapter, ‘‘The Earthly God,’’ details how Indian girls, once married, become
servants in their new household, unable to rebel because the Hindu code en-
joins absolute subservience to their in-laws, and teaches them to regard their
husband as their god. She quotes in extenso from an account of life in the
zenana, where a woman’s job is to serve her mother-in-law and please her
husband, and the only source of respect and status is the act of giving birth
to a son, and adds, ‘‘this general characterization of the wife in the zenana
of educated, well-to-do, and prominent Hindus finds its faithful echo . . .
in humbler fields. For the orthodox Hindu woman, whoever she be, will obey
the law of her ancestors and her gods with a pride and integrity unaffected by
her social condition’’ (78, emphasis added). The eponymous chapter on Mother
India, with famous descriptions of the dirty and barbarous practices of child-
birth, cites doctors who declare that the practices are by no means confined
 Gender and the Nation 155
to the lower classes but also common among men with university degrees—
some of them college lecturers. Mayo adds her own voice to those of her in-
formants, ‘‘Evidence is in hand of educated, traveled and well-born Indians,
themselves holders of European university degrees, who permit their wives
to undergo this same inheritance of darkness’’ (101). The chapter on the slow
pace of female education cites testimony presented to the Calcutta Univer-
sity Commission to show that even western-educated Indians are extremely
ambivalent about educating their daughters and wives, and that even where
they loudly proclaim their commitment to reform of women’s condition,
they seldom translate their words into deeds.87
Here and elsewhere, and at almost every point in her indictment of Indian
customs and practices, Mayo is at pains to demonstrate—always by quoting
expert authorities and witnesses, Indian and British, and sometimes by also
interposing her own voice—that her catalogue of horrors is not confined to
the ‘‘old’’ India but is very much a part of the India that includes Govern-
ment House Gardens and the ‘‘western educated, well-to-do Indians’’ who
inhabit this domain. Her claim is not merely that this latter India is only
the tip and that the India of superstition and degraded women is the ice-
berg, but also that they are, as this metaphor suggests, of one piece—that
western-educated Indians are as much part of backward India as their poor
and uneducated countrymen are. Modern Indians clamor for self-rule and
constantly denounce the British, but their claim, and nationalism’s claim, to
be the agency for the modernization of India is negated not only by their
ignorance of the India of poverty and of the villages and their lack of inter-
est in finding out about it, but also and equally, as Mayo endeavors to show,
by their being part of the same religious and mental world: ‘‘Britain, by her
educational effort, has gradually raised up an element before unknown in
India—a middle class. But this middle class—these lawyers and professional
men—are in the main as much dominated today as were their ancestors five
hundred years ago by the law of caste and transmigration—completest denial
of democracy.They talk of ‘the people’ simply because the word bulks large in
the vocabulary of that western-born representative government which they
now essay’’ (295–96).

The Agency of Modernity

Mother India did not simply draw attention, as others had done, to the al-
legedly ‘‘backward’’ practices of the Indian home, and document the bar-
156 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
barities inflicted upon women. It additionally used this backwardness and
these barbarities to suggest that not only was India something less than mod-
ern, but that those who claimed to be in a position to lead her to modernity
were themselves not modern; incapable of transforming their homes, how
could they transform the nation they wished to lead? The very claims that
nationalism made for sovereignty over the Indian home, and thus for exclu-
sive authority over the project of modernizing it, also rendered the project
vulnerable; and it was this that Mother India adroitly tapped into, and why it
aroused such a furor of denunciation.
This is seen not only in the controversy generated by Mother India but
especially in the specific character of the response to it. Among the range of
reactions which Mother India provoked in India, from a purely defensive de-
nial of all its charges to counter-accusations that the West was obsessed with
sex and that its family structures were riddled with oppression and break-
down,88 one was to denounce the book but urge that the best response to it
was to proceed with a reform of women’s condition. Gandhi, in a response
titled ‘‘Drain Inspector’s Report,’’ denounced Mayo’s book but also wrote, ‘‘it
is a book that every Indian can read with profit . . . Overdrawn her picture of
our insanitation, child-marriages etc undoubtedly are. But let them serve as
a spur to much greater effort than we have hitherto put forth in order to rid
society of all causes of reproach . . . Our indignation which we are bound to
express against the slanderous book must not blind us to our obvious limita-
tions.’’ 89 This was the response adopted by the women’s organizations which
had begun to emerge in India in the early twentieth century. At a large protest
meeting called by these organizations in Triplicane in Madras, Jayalakshmi
Kumar declared, ‘‘we want political freedom so that we may compel social
improvement . . . Let us endeavour to change the really bad social customs [in
India] and let that be our protest against all such books’’; a resolution passed
at this meeting denounced the book while urging the need for legislation
against child marriage and enforced widowhood.90 One of the results of this
furor was the passage of the Child Marriage Restraint Bill; thosewho had been
pressing for it long before Mayo’s book appeared now received strong support
from nationalist ranks, and were able to pass it in 1929, over the timidity of the
colonial authorities.91 Mayo’s book proved the catalyst—though not of course
the cause—for a newfound commitment in nationalist ranks to matching
words with deeds.
In the area of female education, similarly, things begin to change in the
late 1920s and 1930s. From this time we see a narrowing of the gap between
 Gender and the Nation 157
the discourse of female education and educational statistics on the numbers
of girls enrolled. The gap remained—the quinquennial survey of education
for 1932–37 found that only 14 percent of girls who enrolled in school pro-
ceeded to even reach the fourth grade, completion of which was convention-
ally defined as the minimal requirement for attaining literacy,92 and on the
eve of Independence there were only 232,000 girls in high schools, compared
to almost two million boys 93—but whereas in an earlier period official re-
ports lamented native resistance to the education of girls, now they began to
note that demand for girls’ education was outstripping supply,94 and that for
the first time the increase in the number of girls enrolled was greater than
the increase in boys.95 That the small amounts of government spending on
education were principally spent on boys now began to be widely lamented,96
and for the first time it was noted that the private initiative of Indians in
setting up girls’ schools was meeting part of this gap,97 as had happened de-
cades earlier for boys’ education. By the 1930s, Francesca Orsini points out,
college girls and even educated working women began to appear in Hindi
writings without any opprobrium being attached to their status, even as the
usual injunctions against ‘‘westernization’’ continued.98
Mother India was not the ‘‘cause’’ of any of this, but it was a catalyst for
nationalists seeking to reform the condition of women with greater vigor
than before. Mrinalini Sinha characterizes the consequences of the debate as
follows: ‘‘The debate on the woman question during the Mother India contro-
versy would become a vehicle for Indian nationalism to stake its claim as the
only truly modernising force in colonial Indian society, wresting that claim
away from the colonial government.’’ 99 I think that is exactly right, but would
add that the controversy over Mother India led nationalists to seek to trans-
late into action a claim which they had begun to make much earlier. As we
have seen, by the latter nineteenth century an emergent nationalism had di-
vided the world into an ‘‘outer,’’ material domain, where western superiority
was conceded and was to be emulated, and an ‘‘inner,’’ spiritual domain, seen
as the repository of essential Indian values. The spiritual domain included
India’s women, over whom nationalism claimed exclusive authority, includ-
ing exclusive authority to ‘‘modernize’’ middle-class women and to modern-
ize Indian domesticity, so that it would keep pace with the changing needs
of a modern nation-to-be while continuing to signify and embody an essen-
tial Indianness. Female education was a part of this project, and the many
voices urging it seemed to indicate that the nationalist élites were both cogni-
zant of and capable of undertaking the necessary task of modernizing India’s
158 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
women and Indian homes. But the discourse on women’s education was also
marked by an anxiety that modernizing India’s women might in fact under-
mine woman’s role as the embodiment and guardian of Indianness. Indeed,
the sheer voluminousness of this discourse made it function as a substitute
for, rather than a prelude to, concerted action.
In claiming to show that the very area over which nationalism claimed ex-
clusive sway was one where ‘‘backwardness’’ and ‘‘medievalism’’ continued to
reign, and thus that those who claimed to lead and remake the nation had not
the will to even remake their women and their homes, Mother India ignited a
debate. The peculiar place and function of the woman question in nationalist
discourse had prepared the grounds for that debate. It was here that national-
ism had staked a special claim to sovereignty, but where it was, consequently,
most vulnerable to the charge that its claims to being the agency of mod-
ernization were belied by a mismatch between rhetoric and results. Mother
India and the controversy that it generated thus proved the catalyst for a claim
staked out much earlier, the claim that nationalism was the only agency with
the authority and ability to modernize Indian women and Indian homes.
chapter six

Vernacular Modernity
The Nationalist Imagination

The British claim that colonial rule was a pedagogic enterprise for the im-
provement of India, and that western education was one of the means toward
this end, was largely accepted by the new élites emerging under British rule.
The members and leaders of the nationalist organizations founded in the
latter part of the nineteenth century—most of them western-educated 1—
often singled out western education as one of the most important and valu-
able instruments through which the British were transforming India. The
annual sessions of the Indian National Congress were frequently the occa-
sion for such effusions: Sankaran Nair told the 1897 Congress session, ‘‘British
rule . . . furnished us with the one element, English education, which was
necessary to rouse us from the torpor of ages’’; at the 1902 Congress Surendra-
nath Banerjea declared, ‘‘The three great boons which we have received from
the British Government are High Education, the gift of a free Press and local
Self-Government . . . but High Education is the most prized, the most deeply
cherished of them all’’; and B. N. Dhar told the 1911 session of the Congress
that ‘‘the educational system which has immortalised the names of Bentinck
and Macaulay is perhaps [Britain’s] greatest gift to the people of India.’’ 2 If
nationalists and educated Indian public opinion more generally had a mis-
giving, it was that the colonial government did not provide enough of this
much-valued western education. By the latter nineteenth century the com-
plaint that the colonial authorities were not doing enough to promote educa-
tion had become ubiquitous; at the same time that notables in Congress were
lauding British rule for having provided India with western education, the
annual sessions of the Congress that they addressed were passing resolutions
urging the British Indian government to provide more of it.3
At the beginning of the new century educational reforms undertaken by
the viceroy, Lord Curzon, were interpreted by educated Indians as an effort to
159
160 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
diminish Indian access to western education and to assert dictatorial govern-
ment control over the educational sector, and were vigorously condemned.
Officialdom and Indian opinion were from this time polarized on the subject
of education,often bitterly so.The British characterized the Indian position as
a selfish one—so eager were the Indian middle classes to obtain the precious
certification regarded as a passport to employment that they cared nothing
about the poor quality of this education, and resisted all attempts to improve
it. ‘‘Multiply senators, multiply colleges, multiply university centres, courses
and faculties—and all will be well,’’ was how one critic of the Indian posi-
tion characterized it.4 Indians conversely saw in every government initiative
a hidden agenda directed at whittling back and controlling the education
sector. Sir Narayan Chandarvarkar, judge in the High Court of Bombay and
one-time vice-chancellor of Bombay University, explained that the educated
classes were not unconcerned about efficiency and quality, but expressed the
fear ‘‘that in the name of ‘efficiency’ of University education the interests of
its diffusion are likely to be sacrificed in India’’;5 and Curzon himself referred
with frustration to the ‘‘suspicion that [the government] encounters among
the educated classes that we really desire to restrict their opportunities and
in some way or other to keep them down.’’ 6
The demand for ‘‘more’’ education did not abate. However, from the last
decade of the nineteenth century demands for more education were joined by
a growing volume of criticism directed not simply at the insufficiency of edu-
cation but at the inadequacies of the existing system.7 By the early decades
of the twentieth century the criticism had become a torrent, commented on
by all observers of the educational scene. Government statements on educa-
tion policy regularly noted the many criticisms of the system of education,8
and at convocation ceremonies it was observed that university education was
being criticized from all quarters, for all manner of sins. In 1938 the Indian
vice-chancellor of Dacca University complained that ‘‘the blame for every evil
from which the country is suffering is laid at the door of the University. The
unemployment problem, the acute economic distress, the physical weakness
of girls and boys, backwardness in trade and industry, absence of a proper
national spirit, lack of reverence for one’s own society and country, the way-
ward conduct of youth, and the irreligious outlook of the present generation
are all supposed to be due to the defective system of University education.’’ 9
An inspector of schools attempted to sum up the indictment: ‘‘The Indian in-
telligentsia has attempted to diagnose the defects of the educational system
 Vernacular Modernity 161
variously: it has made men mercenary and does not build character; its aims
have been secular and leave no room for godliness; it has neglected physical,
moral and religious training; it has made men unpractical and has neglected
vocational education . . . ; it imparts instruction through a foreign tongue
and has made sound education impossible; it has estranged the masses from
the educated classes . . . and lastly, it has utterly ignored India’s past culture,
traditions, philosophy, arts, learning and history and has bred in the youth
no love for their country.’’ 10
This plethora of criticisms fell into two broad categories.The first was that
western education was failing to produce the effects which it had been ex-
pected would follow from its provision. Education was meant to be producing
young men who could think for themselves and were prepared for a variety
of tasks and challenges, but for the most part was producing men who re-
gurgitated information they had crammed in examinations and were fit for
nothing but clerkdom in the government service; was meant to instill a mod-
ern outlook on the world but had instilled intellectual and moral confusion
instead; was meant to reshape lives, but was so far removed from the Indian’s
home life that life at school and life at home never connected.11 In short, edu-
cation was to be the instrument for modernity, and in this it was failing.This
was more than the complaint that there was not enough western education
for it to perform its modernizing role; it was rather the complaint that it was
failing in this role because the vehicle of transformation was itself counter-
feit. Indeed, there was a widespread perception that western education in
India was the name of the thing, rather than the thing itself.We encountered
evidence of this in previous chapters: a pamphleteer in Cuttack lamenting,
‘‘There are hardly any such things as students in the proper sense of the term
in our country’’;12 an eminent Indian convert to Christianity complaining of
the mechanical way in which students studied (‘‘A copying machine could do
the same’’);13 the editor of an important newspaper describing Indian univer-
sities as ‘‘bad imitations’’ of the (already imperfect) English originals,14 and
Indian colleges as ‘‘coaching agencies mis-named colleges.’’ 15 These and other
witnesses decried, time and again, that India had only the shadow of stu-
dents, not the substance; colleges which were really mere coaching agencies;
learning processes which could be performed by copying machines; schools
and universities which had neither real students nor provided real learning,
and which were themselves only the name-of-a-university. The debate on
western education in India, one could say, came to be haunted by the specter
162 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
of nominalism: the fear that the agency of modernity was not the real thing
but merely something bearing the name of the thing, not the genuine article
but a simulacrum.
The second category into which we can group criticisms of education were
laments about the effects that western education was having, rather than
what education was failing to do. Rooted in an alien culture, under the con-
trol of a foreign ruler, not having been adapted to the character of those
subject to it, western education was alienating its products from their own
traditions. Lajpat Rai described the existing system of western education
as ‘‘emasculating and enervating . . . denationalising and degrading.’’ 16 Har
Dayal referred to ‘‘the utter wreck of national self-respect which has followed
the establishment of the British schools and colleges in India.’’ 17 The art his-
torian A. K. Coomaraswamy described the educational system as one ‘‘that
has ignored or despised almost every ideal informing the national culture,’’
the products of which were ‘‘stranger[s] in their own land.’’ 18 The latter obser-
vation—that in becoming alienated from their culture the western-educated
had also become cut off and estranged from theircompatriots—was verycom-
monly made. When first introduced, western education had been widely ex-
pected to produce a class who would function as intermediaries between their
rulers and the masses of their countrymen. This had been one of the justifi-
cations for government patronage of education, and had become part of the
self-understanding of educated Indians. Now it was said, ‘‘Neither trusted by
their masters nor by the masses they form a class by themselves.’’ 19 Rabin-
dranath Tagore described the gulf between the western-educated and other
Indians as ‘‘the worst caste system that prevails at present in the country,’’ 20
and Bipan Chandra Pal similarly adjudged this chasm to be even greater than
that between high castes and untouchables.21
These two broad criticisms—that western education was failing as a ve-
hicle of modernity, and that it was ‘‘denationalizing’’ its products—were not,
on the face of it, logically related. The first criticism was voiced not only
by Indians and Indian nationalists but also often by the colonial authorities
themselves. Below I focus on the second criticism, which was more explicitly
nationalist, and on the various efforts to devise an education that would re-
inforce rather than undermine national identity. It will turn out, however,
that in the nationalist imagination the two criticisms were seen to be closely
connected, and this being so, the various schemes for a ‘‘national’’ education
sought a single solution to both problems.
 Vernacular Modernity 163

National(ist) Education
The criticisms of the new, western education system led to various attempts
at providing alternatives, which would compensate for the perceived short-
comings of the official system. The Arya Samaj, a reformist Hindu move-
ment with its base in Punjab, founded the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (dav) High
School in 1886 and the dav College, Lahore, in 1889. The dav ‘‘movement’’—
the high school and college were soon joined by many schools all over Pun-
jab—sought to provide an education which would combine ‘‘modern’’ and
therefore western knowledge with knowledge of Sanskrit and training in the
‘‘true,’’ Vedic origins of Hinduism, before these were corrupted by evil social
practices and idolatry. The management of the school, and its curriculum,
reflected these goals.22
On a smaller scale, but very much in the public eye, were the educational
experiments of India’s Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore founded
his school at Santiniketan in 1901, the Viswa-Bharati university in 1919,23 and
Sriniketan, his school for ‘‘rural reconstruction,’’ in 1921. All were outside the
official system, which Tagore characterized as mechanical and productive of
imitation rather than originality. ‘‘We had to sit,’’ Tagore wrote, referring to
his own unhappyencounters with schooling as a young boy—‘‘inert, like dead
specimens of some museum, whilst lessons were pelted at us from on high,
like hailstones on flowers.’’ 24 The contrasts that Tagore continually drew in
his writings and speeches—between discipline and freedom, nature and the
natural versus the artificial and mechanical, passive versus active—provided
the background to his own pedagogic mission. At Santiniketan it was recog-
nized that the ‘‘restless wings given them [children] by nature’’ are absolutely
necessary for discovery and growth, and that seeking to discipline this rest-
less enquiry usually killed learning.25 ‘‘In proper schools boys . . . must never
be boisterous, they must not laugh too loud. But boys are born savages and
must pass through the stage of savagedom. I let them run and climb and
swing and when the rain fell, go out and get thoroughly drenched in the
open air.’’ 26 As in the ancient tapavana, or forest school, after which Tagore’s
school was modeled, teachers and pupils lived as a community, freedom con-
quered discipline, play was preferred to work, classes were conducted outside
in the open air, and the aim was to allow the child to develop rather than force
him into a mold. Tagore’s educational endeavors were an always implicit and
often explicit critique—as much on Rousseauan and Pestalozzian grounds as
nationalist ones—of the existing educational system.27
164 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
The Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College (from 1920 the Aligarh Muslim
University) and the Benares Hindu University (1915) were both self-conscious
attempts to provide to religious communities an education that would equip
them with the modern knowledge necessary to face the (colonial) world, as
well as instruction in their cultural and religious tradition.28 Knowledge of
and pride in their ancestral (religious) traditions was to be a hallmark of the
education provided at amu and bhu. The Muhammadan Anglo-Indian Col-
lege played an important role in the development of a new Muslim identity,29
and bhu played an important role in the development of syllabi and text-
books in Hindi, produced a great many Hindi writers and critics, and trained
teachers who would go on to teach in Hindi.30
These various efforts were all nationalist inasmuch as part of what they
stressed and sought to offer to students was some quality of ‘‘Indianness’’
(or Hinduness or Muslimness) felt to be lacking in the official government
system, if not directly undermined by it.Tagore’s schools and university addi-
tionally sought to provide a more creative education than the officially man-
dated one. But one of the persistent problems to plague such alternatives
was that the instrumental advantages of education—recognized certifica-
tion, prestige (especially that associated with knowledge of English), and the
like—all belonged to the official system. Any alternative, ‘‘national’’ or other-
wise, usually sought to retain some of the attractions of the official system,
for fear of losing students;31 and in most cases (with the partial exception of
Tagore’s institutions) they sought to achieve recognition as bona fide institu-
tions from state authorities, and to add to or amend the authorized curricu-
lum rather than altogether replace it.The result, as the editor of the Dawn put
it in 1908, was that institutions established and controlled by Indians tended
to become ‘‘replicas of the Government model, without a separate mission or
nobler reason for existence.’’ 32 Thus it was in one sense a measure of the dav
High School’s achievement that its students sat for the matriculation exam
for entrance to university with great success, and that the school and college
came to be commended by the government; but in the eyes of some support-
ers this also came to be seen as a failing, with some Arya Samajis complaining
that the school ‘‘began to turn out not Gautamas and Kanads, but babus.’’ 33
Disagreements over the direction which education was taking was one of the
reasons behind a split in the Arya Samaj in the early years of the twentieth
century, with the departing members seeking to establish schools which pro-
vided an education fundamentally different from that provided within the
official educational system.34 Tagore’s school ignored the official curriculum,
 Vernacular Modernity 165
and its students took the matriculation exam for entry to Calcutta Univer-
sity as ‘‘private students’’ rather than as pupils of Santiniketan, but late in
his life Tagore was to complain that even his college and school ‘‘are every
day becoming more and more like so many schools and colleges elsewhere in
this country: borrowed cages that treat the students’ minds as captive birds,
whose sole human value is judged according to the mechanical repetition of
lessons, prescribed by an educational dispensation foreign to the soil.’’ 35
There were also more overtly nationalist challenges to the dominant edu-
cation system.The slogan of ‘‘national education’’ was raised during the Swa-
deshi agitation in Bengal (1905–8), which followed upon the announcement
of the colonial government’s decision to partition the province of Bengal. As
part of the general protest the call was raised for students to withdraw from
government schools and colleges. Frantic efforts were then made to estab-
lish alternative educational institutions. The National Council of Education
(nce), established in 1906 to found a ‘‘national’’ education system, sought to
establish a network of schools under Indian control, unfettered by govern-
ment inspections and direction; the aim was to provide an education drawing
upon and emphasizing the richness of Indian traditions, delivered in Indian
languages, with English taught as a second language.36 For a period the nce
met with an enthusiastic response, and it succeeded in raising money and
establishing a network of schools, as well as its flagship, the Bengal National
College and School, in Calcutta. However, the usual problems soon began to
appear, including inadequate funds and the low esteem in which the certi-
fication offered by the alternative schools was held in the marketplace; and
as the Swadeshi agitation itself began to wane, so too did enthusiasm for the
nce system.The historian of the Swadeshi movement, Sumit Sarkar, sums up
the results thus: ‘‘One or two model institutions, at Santiniketan or Calcutta,
surviving as examples of non-political constructive swadeshi; a number of
national schools in East Bengal serving as seminaries and recruiting grounds
for revolutionary terrorism—such were the remnants of national education
in Bengal in the decade succeeding 1910.’’ 37
The call for a ‘‘national’’ education to replace the existing educational sys-
tem was, however, now on the agenda. In 1911 and again in 1916 the annual
session of the Congress passed a resolution declaring that ‘‘the time had ar-
rived for people all over the country to earnestly take up the question of
national education . . . and organize a system of education . . . suited to the re-
quirements of the country, on national lines and under national control’’ 38—
a significant departure from earlier years, when Congress resolutions had
166 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
simply called upon the colonial government to provide more education. The
call to boycott the officially sanctioned education system was raised again
during the Non-cooperation movement of 1920–22, this time nationwide.The
premise behind the mass campaign of ‘‘non-cooperation’’ was that British
rule survived principally because Indians were complicit in it, and conversely,
that it would be morally and politically undermined if they refused to co-
operate. Thus the call for non-cooperation or boycott included education,
and no one raised the clarion call as loudly, nor as emphatically, as Gandhi.
Again, efforts were made to establish an alternative system. Vidyapiths and
other national schools and colleges were established to offer an alternative
to ‘‘cooperating’’ with institutions that maintained the legitimacy of British
rule, institutions which, in Gandhi’s words, made of Indians what they ‘‘were
intended to become—clerks and interpreters.’’ 39
‘‘The aim of national education,’’ Gandhi wrote in Young India, ‘‘is just the
opposite. It is to turn out . . . men determined to end the alien rule.’’ 40 At
times it seemed that national schools were not principally about schooling
at all: ‘‘We did not start the Vidyapith and other institutions connected with
it merely for the sake of education,’’ Gandhi told the students of the Guja-
rat Vidyapith, with which he was closely associated: ‘‘We started the Vidya-
pith as a part of the campaign for non-cooperation . . . [. It is] an associa-
tion for Swaraj.’’ 41 Accordingly, what was important was not simply whether
these institutions remained independent of the government-mandated sys-
tem of grants and inspections, or which textbooks they used or how they
taught history.42 What was most important was whether they furthered the
aims of self-purification which were an essential and defining element of
swaraj, namely spinning, fighting the practice of untouchability, and pro-
moting amity among India’s religious communities. Gandhi told the stu-
dents of the Gujarat Mahavidyalaya that they were not there principally to
learn good English, or even good Sanskrit: ‘‘You are here to learn and acquire
things which you will not get elsewhere and which are far superior to those
enumerated above.These are: the Charkha, removal of untouchability . . . and
the unity of Hindus and Muslims and Parsis . . . It is of no account if you
pass in all other things except these.’’ 43 National schools were less schools
than (as Gandhi told the annual session of the Indian National Congress at
Belgaum in 1924) ‘‘factories where the first instruments of our freedom are
forged.’’ 44 At other times, however, Gandhi would emphasize pedagogic and
not simply political differences. Hewould declare: ‘‘[There is] a world of differ-
ence between our method of teaching and theirs.’’ 45 And indeed, in national
 Vernacular Modernity 167
schools all teaching was done in the mother tongue of the region; history
and economics were taught from an Indian, patriotic point of view; even in
the teaching of math, the examples used sought to relate to Indian life; and
manual training, a favourite theme of Gandhi’s, received great emphasis.46
Gandhi, Tagore, the Arya Samaj, and various other proponents of national
education all adjudged the existing education system to be disastrously
flawed. It disseminated knowledge alien to the history and traditions of
India, through institutions and practices which were foreign imports. It was
thus necessary to substitute an education that was ‘‘national.’’ But what, pre-
cisely, was ‘‘national’’ about national education? The nationalist, education-
alist, and Arya Samaj leader Lajpat Rai put the question with his customary
directness: ‘‘What do we mean by national education? Is it the language which
is the medium of instruction, which makes it national, or the agency through
which it is imparted, or the agency which controls and regulates it, or the
books which are taught or the standards or ideals which underlie it?’’ 47
As we have seen, the answers varied, from the Arya Samaji stress on San-
skrit and reformist Hinduism, to Tagore’s mix of Pestalozzian pedagogy and
Bengali romanticism, to Gandhi’s ferocious championing of the self-reform
of Hindu society. The variety of answers is testimony to the richness of the
nationalist imagination. However, no one seriously proposed what might
seem the most obvious answer of all: that national education purvey the tra-
ditional or indigenous knowledges of India.

Tradition and Indigeneity

In October 1931, while in London to attend the ‘‘Round Table’’ conference
occasioned by the civil disobedience movement against British rule, M. K.
Gandhi gave a lengthy speech at the Royal Institute of International Affairs,
in the course of which he declared that the British had come to India with
little understanding or respect for Indian institutions, and with an arrogant
conviction of their superiority. Everywhere, ‘‘instead of taking hold of things
as they were, [they] began to root them out,’’ replacing the tried and true with
elaborate schemes and programs. In the field of education, ‘‘ancient schools
have gone by the board, because there was no recognition for these schools,
and the schools [newly] established after the European pattern were too ex-
pensive for the people.’’ ‘‘I say without fear of my figures being challenged
successfully,’’ Gandhi continued, that as a result ‘‘today India is more illiterate
than it was fifty or a hundred years ago.’’ 48
168 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
Gandhi’s figures were in fact challenged at the meeting and subsequently
by Sir Philip Hartog, who had played an important role in educational af-
fairs in Britain and India.49 Pressed by Hartog, Gandhi declared that if he
were shown to have erred in reasoning or facts, he would publicly acknowl-
edge as much. With all the tenacity of the proverbial British bulldog, Hartog
hounded Gandhi over the next eight years with census data and other figures
which he claimed proved Gandhi wrong, and pressed Gandhi to either refute
the figures or else keep his promise and publicly retract. Gandhi offered what
statistical evidence he could and stuck to his guns, though with characteris-
tic courtesy he did not discontinue the correspondence, even after the British
Indian government had placed him in Yeravda Central jail.50
Gandhi’s was not the only voice at this time to raise the specter of a once-
flourishing system of indigenous education and its sad decline. A spate of
articles and books attested to the existence of an extensive system of instruc-
tion throughout pre-British India, and indeed stretching back to ancient
times. The first scholarly book of this kind was by a European, F. E. Keay’s
Ancient Indian Education (1918), and it noted that the subject matter was ‘‘un-
explored’’; in the next decade it was extensively explored, such that by 1930
a contributor to the growing literature on ancient Indian education could
refer to it as a ‘‘branch of Indology.’’ 51 Scholarly books were supplemented by
numerous articles and essays in the press which sought to show that Indians
were not barbarians, but rather had valued and cultivated learning for cen-
turies before the advent of the British—enough that Edward Thompson and
his co-author G. T. Garrat remarked in irritation, ‘‘The state of education in
India before the British occupation is, unfortunately, a favourite subject for
political dissertations.’’ 52
The idea that India had had a rich tradition of learning was useful for
promoting national pride. The charge sometimes made, as by Gandhi—that
the British had destroyed a well-functioning indigenous system of educa-
tion, and had thereby made Indians illiterate—was a useful stick with which
to beat the British. But for all this, very few nationalists suggested a return to
the ‘‘nonscientific’’ learning of the tol or the madrassa; few disputed that the
day of nonmodern knowledges was long gone. There were some exceptions.
According to Har Dayal, British political conquest had been supplemented
and reinforced by the ‘‘social conquest’’ of the Hindus, and western education
had been the prime instrument for effecting it. The knowledges of which the
Brahmin had been custodian had been replaced by the western knowledge
dispensed by the Englishman, with the result that ‘‘the respect and influence
 Vernacular Modernity 169
which he used to command . . . is resigned by the Brahman and occupied
by the Briton.’’ 53 The implication, though not clearly spelled out, seemed to
be that Indians needed to turn their back on western learning and western
institutions, since these functioned to place the colonizer in the position of
teacher, with the Indian as pupil. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, one of the teachers
at the Bengal National College, argued that the traditional ‘‘pedagogy of the
Hindu’’ needed to be revived not only for the sake of Hindu but to guide
a West that had lost its way.54 Pramatha Nath Bose, one of the first Indians
to obtain a B.Sc. from England, in his old age declared himself an opponent
of ‘‘progress’’ and modern civilization, and expressed skepticism toward the
various attempts to leaven western knowledge with doses of Indian identity;
instead he advocated a return to the ‘‘traditional’’ or indigenous system of
learning that had served India well through many centuries.55
But even such voices were not always consistent,56 and in any case they
were very much in the minority. Nationalists typically sought to harness and
synthesize western knowledge with some quality of Indianness, to forge a
‘‘national education’’ that would equip the nation with science and mod-
ern knowledge while making the recipients of this knowledge more, rather
than less, conscious of and proud of their Indian identity. Thus Lajpat Rai de-
clared that while there were things to admire in the indigenous system, ‘‘any
widespread revival of the ancient or medieval systems of education is un-
thinkable,’’ 57 because that would mark national regress rather than progress.
Of those few who did advocate a return to the older systems, the outspoken
Lajpat Rai wrote, ‘‘I do not know whether they are idiots or traitors.’’ 58
When proposals were made for a revival of Oriental learning, they were
usually rejected by those for whom they were intended. In the 1870s, after
the establishment of Punjab University College, the Anjuman-i-Punjab and
its European president, Dr. G. W. Leitner (principal of Lahore Government
College) campaigned for a full-fledged university run along ‘‘Oriental’’ lines.
This was met with a shower of criticism, and the Tribune, an Indian-owned
newspaper in Punjab, led a determined campaign against it.59 A growing band
of critics pointed out that the proposal was an official creation, dressed up
to look like a ‘‘spontaneous’’ demand from élite Indian opinion. The Indian
members of the Anjuman, it was pointed out, were dignitaries dependent
upon official goodwill for their prestige—the Tribune wryly observed, ‘‘if to-
day the Government is to decide that education is to be imparted through
the Hebrew language, to-morrow our big wigs will come forward with their
money to help their new scheme.’’ 60 Critics claimed that the proposal to
170 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
establish a university in Punjab different from those earlier established in
Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta was driven by political and not pedagogi-
cal imperatives. The real agenda of government, these critics alleged, was to
protect Punjab from the criticism and ‘‘sedition’’ which colonial officialdom
thought was a consequence of creating a class of English-educated babus in
Bengal. But this attitude of colonial officials, critics argued, overlooked pre-
cisely one of the main virtues of a western education in English, which was
valuable not only for the knowledge it imparted but because it was ‘‘produc-
ing a great revolution in the character of the people of this country . . . greater
courage, greater resolution, and greater firmness are being installed into the
minds of young India by English education.’’ 61
A return to indigenous knowledges was thus never part of the national-
ist agenda, which sought instead the wider diffusion of western education,
albeit with a strong leavening of ‘‘national’’ content. Indigenous knowledges
were not cast aside. They continued to be studied and cultivated, sometimes
with encouragement and support from government. However, in these cases
the knowledges themselves underwent a transformation and ceased to be the
repositories of a living intellectual tradition. The fate of Sanskrit learning is
a good example, worth considering at some length.

From Living Tradition to ‘‘Critical Knowledge’’

Even before the British made provision for government funding of indige-
nous instruction in 1813, individual Englishmen had established, or induced
the colonial government to establish and patronize, institutions devoted
to cultivating and teaching Oriental knowledges. Governor General Warren
Hastings established the Calcutta Madrassa in 1780, initially out of his own
pocket. In 1791 Jonathon Duncan, British resident in Benares, established
Benares Sanskrit College and sought government support for his move, on
the grounds that patronage of traditional Hindu learning would endear the
British government to the Hindus, and also because the college would pro-
duce natives qualified to assist European judges in administering Hindu
law.62 Self-interested calculations played a role in colonial patronage of Orien-
tal knowledge, but so too did the enthusiasm aroused by the first translations
of Sanskrit works, and by William Jones’s discovery of the common linguistic
roots of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek. By the late eighteenth century and into the
early decades of the nineteenth, there was an enthusiasm throughout Europe
for the language and literatures of Sanskrit, an enthusiasm that has even been
 Vernacular Modernity 171
characterized as an ‘‘Oriental renaissance.’’ 63 Thus when the colonial authori-
ties began to provide money for education, it was indigenous education that
they funded; the founding of Benares Sanskrit College was followed in the
1820s by the founding of similar colleges in Calcutta and Pune.
Benares Sanskrit College, for instance, employed Indian pandits and vaids
as teachers, and initially they were free to determine the curriculum. How-
ever, classes occurred in an institutional setting, and the relation between
guru and shishya [pupil] was replaced by a system in which teachers were paid
by the government—as indeed were their students, who were in receipt of
government stipends. In the 1820s examinations, prizes, and public debates
were introduced, marking a significant mutation of ‘‘indigenous learning.’’
For as we observed in chapter 1, in Indian traditions of learning the form in
which knowledge was transmitted was inextricable from the content of the
learning; the relationship between guru and shishya, for instance, was not
an incidental form for transmitting a knowledge which existed and could be
conceived independently of the modes of its transmission. If, as shown in
chapter 1, ‘‘old’’ methods of learning ‘‘infected’’ the ‘‘new’’ learning, leading
to rote learning of the new curriculum, then in this case it was the new form
in which traditional learning was disseminated that effected a mutation in
its content. Bernard Cohn sums up the results as follows: ‘‘The British con-
ceived of education taking place in institutions . . . There were to be fixed
positions of professors, teachers and assistants, who taught regular classes
in subjects. The students’ progress had to be regularly examined to measure
their acquisition of fixed bodies of knowledge. The end of the process was
marked by prizes and certification . . . Even with the undoubted good will
and best intentions . . . a British metalogic of regularity, uniformity, and . . .
fiscal responsibility could not help but participate in the erosion and trans-
formation of what the British wanted to preserve, that is, Hindu and Muslim
learning.’’ 64
Soon even the ‘‘goodwill’’ began to evaporate. The orientalists and colonial
officials who entertained some admiration for Indian knowledges and tradi-
tions were soon vigorously challenged by evangelicals and utilitarians, who
saw in Indian knowledges only the sources of religious errors and economic
and social backwardness. Colonial rule increasingly came to be premised on
the idea that the British were in India to educate and improve their subjects,
and had nothing to learn from them. The victory in 1835 of the ‘‘Anglicist’’
party, which advocated spending government funds upon western learning
rather than the cultivation of indigenous knowledge, was at once a mark of
172 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
this mode of conceiving colonialism as a form of pedagogy and a milestone
in its advance.
The institutions of indigenous learning earlier established by the British
were continued, but in most cases also ‘‘reformed.’’ Poona Sanskrit College,
established in 1821, soon had an English school added to it, and in 1851 the
English School and the Sanskrit College were combined to form an institu-
tion now renamed Poona College. The Bombay Board of Education explained
the reasoning behind its decision: ‘‘By this amalgamation, the undue encour-
agement which . . . is at present given by the existence of a Sanskrit College,
to the almost exclusive cultivation of a dead language and very ancient lit-
erature, would cease; while, at the same time, sufficient support would exist
for the acquirement of sufficient Sanskrit for all philological purposes.’’ 65 The
Sanskrit College in Calcutta was reformed along similar lines, and much later
the Indian Education (Hunter) Commission observed with satisfaction that
the institution began to perform a useful function after the reforms, when
‘‘abandoning the idea of employing Sanskrit as a medium of instruction . . .
it confined its study of that language to points literary and philological.’’ 66
Similarly, in Benares Sanskrit College an English department was introduced,
so that the college no longer exclusively taught nonwestern knowledges. In
1843 John Muir, a civil servant with the East India Company, was appointed
to conduct an enquiry into the college. Muir was an accomplished Oriental-
ist and a devout Christian who had engaged in polemics seeking to discredit
Hinduism and prove the superiority of Christianity. Indeed, his two passions
had come together only a few years earlier, in 1839, when he published Mata-
pariksa (An Examination of Religions), a Christian polemic against Hinduism,
in Sanskrit. Not surprisingly, Muir’s report into the college recommended
that the Hindu schools of philosophy or darsanas, ‘‘notoriously characterised
by grave errors,’’ 67 be downgraded in the curriculum, a recommendation that
he proceeded to implement when he was appointed in the following year to
reorganize the college. His successor as principal of the college, J. R. Ballan-
tyne, was similarly critical of aspects of ‘‘traditional’’ learning, and continued
the process of downgrading indigenous knowledges.
The introduction of western education did not, however, have the effect
of simply effacing knowledge of Sanskrit. There were institutional and cur-
ricular reasons why this was not so.Under the educational system introduced
by the British, Sanskrit was offered as a subject in high school—compulsory
in some regions, optional in others. The universities of Calcutta and Bom-
bay, though they did not require study of a modern Indian language, re-
 Vernacular Modernity 173
quired a second language for the entrance or intermediate exam, and for
most students this was Sanskrit.68 Perhaps more important, knowledge of
India’s ancient literature in Sanskrit did not disappear during the colonial
period—on the contrary, it is sometimes said that the researches of Euro-
pean orientalists are what ‘‘gave back to India its forgotten past.’’ 69 Far from
seeing Sanskrit disappear, the years of British rule were a time when Orien-
talism and the discipline of Indology were established and flourished, just
when Sanskrit and many of the knowledges connected with it were ceasing
to be a living tradition. The paradox is captured in the frequent lamenta-
tions of Indologists at the decline of a particular kind of Sanskrit learning,
such as Franz Kielhorn’s comment in 1874 that ‘‘It is sad to see the num-
ber of sastris, distinguished no less for their humility and modesty than
for their learning and intelligence, diminish year after year, and to feel that
with them there is dying away more and more of that traditional learning
which we can so ill dispense with in the interpretation of the enigmatic
works of Hindu antiquity.’’ 70 Kielhorn was a professor of Sanskrit at Dec-
can College; his contributions, as of others like him, were made possible by
and presupposed the new colonial dispensation, and the new methods of
scholarship. But the colonial order and the new forms of scholarship that it
brought into being also foreshadowed the decline of another mode of engag-
ing with Sanskrit. This was one in which ancient texts and authors were not
simply objects of study but also interlocutors, living disputants. This mode
or tradition had by no means exhausted its vitality at the advent of colo-
nialism. The two centuries immediately before the consolidation of colonial-
ism around 1750, Sheldon Pollock tells us, ‘‘witnessed an explosion of schol-
arly production unprecedented for its quality and quantity,’’ 71 constituting
‘‘one of the most innovative epochs of Sanskrit systematic thought (in lan-
guage analysis, logic, hermeneutics [and] moral-legal philosophy).’’ 72 Many
of the contributors to this intellectual efflorescence identified themselves as
navya, or ‘‘new’’ scholars; they were not blindly repeating and transmitting
an ossified tradition but producing new and innovative scholarship. Yet at
the same time they were also heirs to a tradition going back two millennia,
and the long-dead members of this tradition remained their ‘‘partners in
argument.’’ 73
Colonial rule did not bring the study of Sanskrit to an end, but it funda-
mentally changed the manner in which, and the purposes for which, Sanskrit
was studied. The character of this change can be discerned from an exchange
in 1884, when the director of public instruction solicited views on how best
174 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
to develop the study of Sanskrit at Benares Sanskrit College. In his response
George Thibault, the principal of the college, advocated
gradually improving the methods on which the study of Sanskrit is at
present carried on in the Benares Sanskrit College and of converting
Pandits of the old school into accomplished Sanskrit scholars, in the
European sense of the word. I do not by any means wish to under-rate
the Sanskrit learning possessed by the [Indian] Professors and many of
the students of our Sanskrit College. Their deep and extensive reading,
their most accurate knowledge of the technicalities of the Sanskrit Sha-
stras, and their command of the Sanskrit language may well raise the
envy of European scholars. On the other hand, not even the best of
our Pandits can be said to possess a critical knowledge of the Sanskrit
literature and language. They know nothing of the history of their lan-
guage and the place it occupies among cognate languages. They have
no idea of the gradual growth of their literature and the fact that it
mirrors different phases of national and religious life. They are quite
unable to discuss intelligently historical and chronological questions.
They proceed most uncritically in editing texts etc etc. . . . in institu-
tions maintained by a European Government some efforts should be
made to render the study of Sanskrit more critical and—viewing the
matter from a European point of view—more fertile than hitherto.74
The other respondent was Babu Pramadadas Mitra, a member of a well-to-
do Bengali family steeped in the ‘‘old’’ knowledge but also versed in the new
western learning, who had previously been a member of the faculty in the
Sanskrit department. In his response to Thibault’s suggestions Mitra did not
dispute that ‘‘Pandits of the old school’’ lacked a historical and critical sense.
What he contested was that a living tradition of enquiry should be regarded
as only so many ‘‘materials’’ for critical editions and historical reconstruc-
tion: ‘‘the great authors of India have not laboured only to furnish materials
for a conjectured history of the rise and growth of a national and religious
life.’’ There were, he averred, ‘‘higher objects to be aimed for by a Sanskrit
scholar’’; the poetry and ethics and philosophy and theology of ancient India,
the works of Valmiki and Vyasa and Sankara and Abhinavagupta, could also
be studied ‘‘for intellectual delight and moral elevation, the culture and wis-
dom that they afford.’’ The ‘‘old’’ learning of the pandits was not redundant
as long as that which they studied was an ongoing tradition, rather than so
many sources for the re-creation of a lost and dead past. In the name of ‘‘that
learning which has from remote antiquity had its most celebrated seat in this
 Vernacular Modernity 175
city [Benares],’’ Mitra protested against any scheme that ‘‘may eventually lead
the Pandits to turn their backs upon the old ways and lines of study . . . ways
and lines of study which I may say have produced the very literature that
has engaged and still engages the earnest and admiring attention of many
a liberal-minded European scholar.’’ 75 Such an outcome was to be avoided at
all cost, lest it bring about ‘‘that day of universal lamentation for India when
her glorious past shall be divorced, irrevocably torn off from the present.’’ 76
In fact, the study of Sanskrit in the ensuing decades did increasingly be-
come ‘‘critical’’ and ‘‘historical’’ and ‘‘comparative’’ and ‘‘philological’’; the
study of Sanskrit did not decline, but the type of study undertaken by the
pandit was devalued, and decayed. A government statement on educational
policy in 1913 declared that the Government of India attached great impor-
tance to Oriental studies, but ‘‘through the medium of western methods of
research and in relation to modern ideas.’’; and it approvingly paraphrased
the observation of a conference of Orientalists held at Simla two years earlier
that ‘‘the world of scholarship . . . would suffer irreparable loss if the old
type of pandit and maulvi were to die out before their profound knowledge of
their subjects had been made available to the world.’’ 77 The bearers of ‘‘tra-
ditional’’ learning should not die out—at least not until their lore had been
extracted, put through the sieve of western ‘‘critical’’ methods, and processed
into knowledge. Just as the intellectual traditions once embodied in Sanskrit
were now so many source materials, so the pandit had become the hand-
maiden of the Indologist.
Soon Indian Indologists emerged, fully trained in the new methods, some-
times displaying a similar mix of admiration and condescension toward the
learning of the pandit. Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar (1837–1925), one of
many of Kielhorn’s students to achieve eminence as a Sanskritist,78 was the
first ‘‘modern’’ Indian professor of Sanskrit, one who did not come from a
background as a pandit but rather learned Sanskrit in western educational
institutions. In his presidential address to the All-India Oriental Conference,
he distinguished between those scholars who employed the ‘‘historical, com-
parative and the critical method’’ and ‘‘the pandits of the old school who have
spent long years in studying, in the traditional way, the authoritative Sanskrit
learning such as Vyakarana and Nyaya,’’ whose studies, while ‘‘no doubt, deep
and sound . . . are lacking in historical, comparative and critical outlook.’’ 79

In the course of his polemics against government patronage of indige-

nous knowledges in the 1830s, Macaulay had protested that to teach in San-
skrit and Arabic would be to use state revenues to encourage men ‘‘to waste
176 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an
Ass, or what texts of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing
a goat.’’ 80 But even as Macaulay wrote, and certainly in the decades after, what
was for him a ‘‘problem’’ ceased to exist, as the languages which had once been
the bearers of intellectual traditions increasingly became disassociated from
these traditions.To quote Pollock once again, ‘‘In the face of European moder-
nity, Indian systems of thought, or rather Sanskrit systems, simply vanished
as a significant force in Indian history.’’ 81 It was not that the Sanskrit lan-
guage was no longer studied, or even that ‘‘Indian systems of thought’’ were
consigned to the dust heap, but rather that one could now study the Vedas,
or Bhatrihari or Panini, less for obtaining guidance on how to live or con-
tinuing a conversation of considerable antiquity than for producing critical
editions, or engaging in historical reconstructions and philological investi-
gations. It became possible to study Sanskrit and Arabic ‘‘critically’’—that is,
without reference to the traditions of knowledge with which they were im-
bricated. The paradox was that Indology advanced in direct proportion to the
slow demise of once-living Sanskrit intellectual traditions.
These knowledges, and the practices associated with them, never en-
tirely died out. But they did not occupy a place of importance in nationalist
thought. By no means were all nationalists ignorant of these traditions—
some were learned in them, and bore titles indicating their learning, like
acharya or pandit or maulana, including the nationalist leader who went on
to become independent India’s first minister for education, Maulana Abul
Kalam Azad. But while nationalism took pride in such learning as evidence of
the ‘‘glorious traditions’’ of ancient India, it did not ascribe to these indige-
nous knowledges an important role in the future of the independent nation-
to-be. Why was this so?

Vernacular Modernity
In India as elsewhere, anticolonial nationalism embodied the desire to be
‘‘modern but different’’—to acquire the characteristics that made the colonial
power strong, but to do so in the name of an irreducible difference that was
conceived in national terms, and for which nationalism purported to speak.
As Lajpat Rai put it, ‘‘We do not want to be English or German or Ameri-
can or Japanese . . . we want to be Indians, but modern, up-to-date, progres-
sive Indians.’’ 82 It was not enough to imitate the colonizer: if the project was
simply to become a mirror image of the original, there could be no ratio-
 Vernacular Modernity 177
nale for the nationalist project. Chakrabarty writes that ‘‘the colonial experi-
ence of becoming modern is haunted by the fear of looking unoriginal . . .
Nationalist writings therefore subsume the question of difference within a
search for essences, origins, authenticities, which, however, have to be ame-
nable to global-European constructions of modernity so that the quintessen-
tially nationalist claim of being ‘different but modern’ can be validated.’’ 83
Partha Chatterjee, as we saw in chapter 5, argues that one of the means by
which nationalism sought to reconcile the search for national difference with
the pursuit of modernity was by dividing the world of social institutions
and practices into two domains, a ‘‘material’’ domain where ‘‘Western su-
periority had to be acknowledged and its accomplishments carefully studied
and replicated,’’ and a ‘‘spiritual’’ or ‘‘inner’’ domain, where national identity
was located, and which had to be safeguarded and preserved.84 In Chatter-
jee’s account, education was part of the ‘‘inner,’’ spiritual domain rather than
the ‘‘outside’’ of ‘‘economy and statecraft, science and technology.’’ Hence
‘‘nationalism sought to bring this area under its jurisdiction’’ by starting sec-
ondary schools and seeking to assert control over the universities.85
Here it seems to me that Chatterjee’s very fruitful distinction between
‘‘inside’’ and ‘‘outside’’ threatens to become coterminous with the more con-
ventional distinction between civil society and state, yielding the conclusion
that nationalism engaged in a Gramscian war of position, seeking to exert
control over civil society before the decisive struggle for state power. Such an
account would not be wrong, but it would be less insightful than the origi-
nal distinction between inside and outside, between that which is modern-
universal and must be imitated and acquired, and that where the ‘‘essential
marks’’ of identity are located, and which therefore must be protected and
secured. Education, I submit, was both important to and problematic for
nationalism, because it straddled this distinction. On the one hand, education
was where the knowledges, skills, and techniques of the modern, which the
nation-to-be had to acquire, were disseminated. That is why one could not
reject education, for to do so would be to give up on the aspiration to be mod-
ern. Herein lies the answer to the question I posed, namely the question of
why nationalism never sought to revive the study of indigenous knowledges,
such as a long and rich intellectual tradition in Sanskrit, as an alternative
to the dissemination of western knowledge. It did not do so because these
knowledges and traditions were not seen as conducive to modernity; however
plausible they were as assertions of difference, they were not ‘‘amenable to
global-European constructions of modernity.’’ But neither was colonial edu-
178 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
cation (unlike, say, the railway system) simply a site where the skills of the
modern could be acquired, because it was also a site where identities were
produced and secured. As a project to be modern, nationalism sought more
western education, which was seen as necessary to becoming modern; but as
a project to be ‘‘modern but different,’’ it also sought an education that would
preserve difference, even bring it to self-consciousness, rather than efface it.
In the words of Lajpat Rai, quoted earlier, it was necessary to become ‘‘mod-
ern, up-to-date [and] progressive,’’ but more specifically to become ‘‘modern,
up-to-date [and] progressive Indians’’ (emphasis added).
Hence the nationalist project to found a ‘‘national’’ education, an educa-
tion that would be modern without ceasing to be Indian. We saw that the
question of what was to count as ‘‘national’’ about national education was
one to which there were varied answers, rather than a single one. But—and it
is not the same thing as a common answer—across the spectrum of national-
ist opinion, and amid the diversity of types of ‘‘national’’ education on offer,
there was one element held in common: whatever else made this education
national, it had to be in the ‘‘vernaculars,’’ that is, in the languages of India.
Gandhi and Tagore, who despite great mutual regard disagreed on many
issues (including the desirability of boycotting government schools and col-
leges during the Non-cooperation Movement), spoke as one on this issue.
In an article in Young India titled ‘‘Evil Wrought by the English Medium,’’
Gandhi wrote, ‘‘No country can become a nation by producing a race of imi-
tators.’’ 86 As long as Indians gained knowledge through a language alien to
them, learned with great difficulty and only ever imperfectly acquired, they
would be condemned to being imitators, a nation ‘‘in itself ’’ (a mere coun-
try) but not yet a nation for itself. A metaphor invoked again and again by
Gandhi was that of blotting paper; because Indian education occurred in
English, ‘‘we have become blind imitators of European civilization—mere
blotting papers.’’ 87 The point was not whether Indians should acquire west-
ern knowledge. Gandhi would often (though not always) concede that knowl-
edge of western science and literature might be a good thing, but only as
long as it was acquired in the vernaculars. On this Gandhi was consistent
and emphatic, from his early pronouncements to his later ones. Gandhi’s
scheme for a Basic National Education, announced in 1937, proposed compul-
sory and free education for all children from seven to fourteen, with the edu-
cation in the vernacular tongue of the region where the school was located,
a strong focus on handicraft production, and the goal of using the handi-
crafts and productive work to eventually make these schools economically
 Vernacular Modernity 179
self-supporting. This plan, intended for an independent India, was a very
radical departure from both the colonial education system and indigenous
traditions, not least because the centrality it accorded to manual, handicraft
labor had no precedent in either.88 After this plan had been adopted by Con-
gress (with the modification that schools were expected to become only partly
self-supporting, and that too over time),89 Gandhi declared, ‘‘the medium of
instruction should be altered at once and at any cost, the provincial languages
being given their rightful place. I would prefer temporary chaos in higher
education to the criminal waste that is daily accumulating.’’ 90
More than Gandhi,Tagore would emphasize the richness of European cul-
ture and acknowledge that India had much to learn from Europe. The idea
behind his ‘‘East West’’ university was precisely that the East and West could
meet, and enrich each other. But all instruction had to be in the vernacu-
lar. The importance of the mother tongue was the main subject of Tagore’s
address to the convocation of Calcutta University in 1937, the first time the
convocation had been addressed in Bengali.91 Where Gandhi employed the
metaphor of blotting paper,Tagore favored the image of a parasite: ‘‘our mod-
ern school and college education . . . has from its inception been parasitic on
a foreign tongue . . . Accustomed to live by borrowing, it has come to measure
attainment by largeness of debt’’ (115). There was nothing wrong with bor-
rowing per se—Tagore rejected the criticism of those who decried everything
western as foreign, for ‘‘What if the seeds came from foreign parts, did they
not fall and sprout on our own soil? That which can grow and flourish in the
country no longer remains foreign’’ (119). Thus there was no question of re-
jecting the West, or the English language, or modernity. The issue was rather
one of recognizing that under the official system students had been ‘‘brought
up to absorb the thoughts of others . . . and their own faculty of thought . . .
their creative inspiration, have all been enfeebled’’ (116). ‘‘Those who receive
such education,’’ Tagore told his audience, ‘‘cannot produce what they con-
sume’’ (115–16). For Indians to become producers and not simply consumers
of modernity, it was necessary for them to assimilate ‘‘the subject-matter of
education through one’s own language, just as, in order to incorporate food-
stuffs into the body, they have to be chewed with one’s own teeth, saturated
with one’s own digestive juices’’ (116).
But this answer also met the other major criticism of these years, namely
that the existing education system was simply inefficacious, that it was fail-
ing to make Indians modern. Tagore told the Calcutta convocation: ‘‘On be-
half of writers in Bengali, and for myself, I would claim that we have been
180 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
engaged in the work of implanting modern culture in the heart of our coun-
try’’; indeed, writers in Bengali had been doing so with greater success than
the university had done, because they implanted this modernity in the lan-
guage of the people, so that it could take root (122). Even Gandhi, sometime
critic of modern civilization, could write, ‘‘Under my scheme there will be
more and better libraries, more and better laboratories, more and better re-
search institutes. Under it we should have an army of chemists, engineers
and other experts,’’ with the important difference that ‘‘all these experts will
speak, not a foreign language, but the language of the people.’’ 92
To champion vernacular education was therefore not to choose Indian-
ness over modernity; it was a means of reconciling national difference with a
global modernity, making it possible to be both modern and Indian. Not only
could one be Indian and modern at the same time, but it seemed that the one
presupposed the other. The nationalist resolution of the ‘‘problem’’ of educa-
tion thus provided two seemingly unconnected problems with one solution:
vernacular education was a critical element in making education ‘‘national,’’
and also in making it an effective vehicle for modernity. For India, declared
her nationalists, the Indian modern had to come in the form of vernacular
modernity.

Education in the Nationalist Imagination

On the day in question, Gaur Mohan, leaving Ramtanu in the sweetmeat shop,
went to Mr Hare and asked him to take the boy as a free student. The gentleman
was not then in a mood to confer the favour. He had received too many applications
of the kind . . . But the pandit . . . told Ramtanu for a few days continually to run
with the sahib’s palanquin, and to repeat in his ears the prayers of being taken in
as a free pupil . . . Two months passed in this way, Ramtanu being the pursuer, and
David Hare the pursued, after which the latter, being convinced that the boy was
really anxious to learn English . . . promised him a free education.93

This story of a young Ramtanu Lahiri importuning the Scottish watch-

maker and philanthropist David Hare for admission to the English school
that Hare had helped to establish could almost stand as a metaphor for the
reaction of the urban middle classes in India to the introduction of English
education. After the victory of the Anglicists in 1835, the middle classes in
the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras began to flock to
the newly established government schools teaching western knowledge in
 Vernacular Modernity 181
English. Western education became an important feature defining the lives
of the emerging urban middle class in the nineteenth century, and indeed
became a new source of status differentiation in colonial India, demarcating
a ‘‘new’’ middle class from older ones. Soon, especially in Bengal, privately
established schools began to make up for the shortfall between rapidly grow-
ing demand and scanty, government-provided supply.
Indian nationalists would sometimes describe western education as a
‘‘gift’’ of British rule, or even as its ‘‘greatest gift.’’ Until the latter part of the
nineteenth century their chief complaint about education was principally
that their rulers did not provide enough of it. By the end of the nineteenth
century, as we have seen, education was also becoming the subject of increas-
ing criticism, and not just because of its insufficiency. As a more assertive
and ‘‘extremist’’ strand of nationalism began to compete with its ‘‘moderate’’
and constitutionalist predecessor, such nationalists claimed that the existing
system, introduced and controlled by the British, had made little attempt to
adapt itself to its Indian surrounds. At best, the system remained ‘‘foreign’’ to
the sensibilities and culture of many who subjected themselves to it; at worst,
it had the effect of ‘‘denationalizing’’ students, of alienating them from their
own culture and traditions, and thus from their countrymen. By the early
years of the twentieth century the Congress was calling for the educational
system that had been introduced and controlled by the colonial power to
be replaced by a national system. Nationalists, as well as others, also com-
plained that western education was proving inefficacious as the vehicle for
modernity.
Faced with these problems, nationalists advocated a variety of solutions.
The alternatives to the existing system that they advanced, and sometimes
sought to implement, varied quite considerably—nationalism was not a
monolith—but almost all had two elements in common.The knowledge that
they proposed to disseminate was modern, western knowledge—a revival
of traditional, indigenous knowledge was not seriously contemplated. And
teaching in the languages of India was a central element in virtually all the
alternative schemes, howsoever else they may have differed. In the nation-
alist imagination, providing modern knowledge in indigenous languages,
through a curriculum rooted in and emphasizing Indian traditions, would
solve the two glaring deficiencies of the existing system in one stroke. It
would press the imprint of Indianness on the knowledge and at the same
time ensure that this knowledge was effectively disseminated, fulfilling its
transformative, modernizing potential. Indians could then finally become
182 Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation
producers of modernity rather than passive recipients—‘‘blotting paper’’ or
‘‘parasites,’’ in the descriptions of Gandhi and Tagore.
After independence Abul Kalam Azad, independent India’s first minister
for education, told an audience at Patna University, ‘‘Our educational sys-
tem was not introduced by us. It was founded and controlled by foreigners.
Whatever they decided to teach us was right, but their method of imparting
education was wrong.’’ 94 What was ‘‘wrong’’ about it—Azad went on to tell
his audience in an address delivered in Hindustani rather than English—was
that the language of instruction was English rather than the Indian vernacu-
lars, a fault urgently in need of remedy.
In postcolonial India, it is what ‘‘foreigners decided to teach us’’ that has
continued to be disseminated, and that too, as far as the higher levels of the
educational ladder are concerned, mostly in English. Other knowledges have
not disappeared, but they have been for the most part marginalized to the
quotidian, where they are frequently the subject of strictures from the mod-
ernizing postcolonial state, condemned as markers of an ‘‘ignorance’’ or even
‘‘superstition’’ yet to be overcome. What such admonishments reveal is that
in addition to reigning supreme, modern western knowledge is not seen as
‘‘western’’ at all, as a particular mode of knowledge; it is knowledge as such,
everywhere and for everyone. Today all ‘‘serious’’ knowledge that is produced
in India, whether the site for this production is the academy, the state bu-
reaucracy, or any other, is produced according to the canons and protocols of
the knowledge that emerged and was systematized in the West in the early
modern period. And this outcome, or ‘‘gift,’’ if such it be, is as much the fruit
of nationalist strivings as it is of colonial imposition.
Epilogue
Knowing Modernity, Being Modern

I concluded chapter 6 by observing that almost all ‘‘serious’’ knowledge about

the nonwestern world, whether produced in the West or in the non-West,
shares the presumptions and guiding categories of a conception of knowl-
edge that began to emerge in Europe in the early modern period. A knowl-
edge born in the modern West has thus become global. It is global precisely
because, notwithstanding its European origins, it is seen as universal rather
than parochial.
This knowledge is seen as ‘‘modern’’ not just in the sense that it is his-
torically recent, but also because it is seen as part and parcel of modernity.
Scientific, rational knowledge is seen as the knowledge which comes with
the transformations that mark entry to the modern; just as the steam en-
gine replaces horsepower, the powerloom the handloom, so another mark
and measure of a society’s passage into the modern is that premodern ways of
knowing come to be replaced by modern, rational knowledge. Conversely, the
adoption of such knowledge is seen as necessary in making the transition to
the modern; embracing modern ways of thinking and the ‘‘modern outlook’’
are necessary for those who would wish to be modern. Modern knowledge is
thus at once a cause, a consequence, and an emblem of modernity.
Those working with this knowledge display a keen awareness of its histo-
ricity. Its chroniclers are all agreed that one can locate a time and place where
it first made its entry into the world, even if they may disagree on precisely
when and where that was. Yet almost miraculously, an acknowledgment of
this historicity in no way circumscribes its claims: although it is recognized
that this knowledge emerges in the course of the recent history of the West, it
is bounded neither by time (its core presumptions can be used to analyze pre-
moderns) nor by place (it can be used to understand all societies). Indeed, an
acknowledgment of its historicity seems to enable, rather than diminish, the
183
184 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern
extravagance of the claims that can be made for it. What makes this miracle
possible?
The answer lies in an account or understanding that emerges in the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries, according to which modern knowledge is
the self-consciousness of modernity. Just as social and technological changes
are the ‘‘material’’ face of modernity, modern knowledge is what underlies
these changes. It is seen both as a force in the emergence of the modernity, and
as that which enables us to understand the changes that brought the modern
world into being. Indeed, it is in part because modern knowledge is regarded
as important in the making of the modern world that the same knowledge is
treated as the privileged means by which to know that modern world. At the
same time, modernity itself is regarded as a privileged historical moment and
a privileged site, one where the facts and processes that have always governed
the natural world and human history finally became discernable. In this nar-
rative modern knowledge is doubly privileged: it is the privileged means by
which to know the modern, which is itself the privileged vantage point from
which all of human history finally becomes explicable.
When in the early nineteenth century Burckhardt wrote that the ‘‘veil’’
which made man ‘‘conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people,
party, family or corporation’’ finally lifted in Renaissance Italy, enabling him
to recognize himself as a ‘‘spiritual individual,’’ he was contributing to this
narrative.1 So too were Marx and Engels when, in characterizing the revolu-
tionary effects of capitalist production, they wrote: ‘‘All that is solid melts into
air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober
senses, his real conditions of life’’ 2 (emphasis added). Marx’s work provided a
distinctively Marxist version of this account or understanding; according to
this account, only when production becomes determinate or clarified, differ-
entiating itself from ritual and gift—as it does in modern, capitalist society,
where generalized commodity production is the norm—is it apparent that
production is and has always been the basis of all human societies. And when
Weber wrote that disenchantment was what allowed men to recognize the
melancholy fact that the world had never been imbued with purpose and
meaning, he too was making the claim that only at a certain point in the his-
tory of humankind could certain truths finally be discerned, truths which,
however, had retrospective validity.
It is this that makes the claims to universality on behalf of western knowl-
edge so novel and efficacious. This account, far from being yet another set of
parochial assumptions claiming universal validity, like a proselytising reli-
 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern 185
gion, purports to explain both why we humans were once bound to get things
wrong and how it became possible to get them right. The core presump-
tions of western knowledge are homologous with modernity—it is only in the
modern era that they can be recognized or unveiled—but they are not lim-
ited to the modern. That we are free individuals; that being determines con-
sciousness, and production determines being; and that values and purposes
are human products rather than features of the cosmos—these, according to
this understanding, are universal truths, and not just truths for our modern
world. Moreover, while this knowledge originated in the modern West, it is
not inherently western. That is precisely why nationalists and others could
seek to embrace it—this knowledgewas universal and could make us modern,
without our having to ‘‘become’’ European.
The perceived close connection between modern western knowledge and
modernity is no doubt the reason why debates about this knowledge can
generate passion. The critiques of Enlightenment Reason that are a feature
of contemporary intellectual life generate charges of irrationalism and are
sometimes seen as attacks on the project—whether finished or unfinished—
of modernity. These debates have been conducted impassionedly in India,
with the additional complication that the knowledge in question, and moder-
nity itself, are not home-grown but products of the colonial encounter. Some
Indian intellectuals have argued that critiques of the Enlightenment and
modernity are reactionary, or at any rate run the risk of unwittingly play-
ing into the hands of reactionary forces. Their opponents sometimes reply
that such criticisms only reveal the degree to which their proponents remain
intellectually colonized, long after their colonial masters have departed.
I have avoided engaging in such polemics, treating the arrival of west-
ern knowledge in India neither as the triumph of Reason over ignorance or
unreason nor as an insidious form of intellectual and cultural colonization.
I have ‘‘bracketed’’ questions of this nature, instead addressing myself to a
study of how modern western knowledge was disseminated through western
education, the effects that it had, the debates to which it gave rise, and how
we might interpret these effects and these debates. Or rather, I have not so
much bracketed the question of the ‘‘truth’’ of western knowledge as I have
sought to recast it. I suggested in part I that knowledges, western knowledge
included, are not forms of cognizing a world external to them but rather are
constitutive of this world. As modern western knowledge ‘‘traveled’’ to India,
various agents of change (not least the dissemination of this new form of
knowledge) succeeded in reconstituting that locale (not least by transforming
186 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern
the Indian into a subject). But I have also suggested that this knowledge only
partly constituted what it purported merely to explain. Chapter 1 showed
that Indian students often engaged with western knowledge in instrumental
ways, and ‘‘acquired’’ it through rote learning. The knowledge disseminated
in the new schools and universities presumed that knowledge resided in a
subject, who confronted a world of objects; but this knowledge did not always
succeed in producing subjects who conceived of knowledge in these terms.
As I showed in chapter 2, the explanation that Indian students were in dan-
ger of being plunged into a mental and moral crisis through their encounter
with western education was mistaken, because their morality was not, as this
explanation presumed, a matter of ‘‘beliefs’’ held in the ‘‘mind.’’ Thus to the
degree that modern western knowledge did not remake Indians, it never be-
came fully adequate to knowing India. This conclusion, I have been careful to
insist, is one that we reach not because we are somehow able to step outside of
western knowledge to assess its truth, but rather because it can be seen in the
discourses that came to surround its diffusion through western education.
Read carefully, these discourses can be seen to register, however dimly, a rec-
ognition that what I have called the ‘‘core presumptions’’ and ‘‘background
assumptions’’ of this knowledge were in fact absent, or contravened, and that
in this specific sense, western knowledge was not adequate to knowing India.
This recognition makes writing a history of western education a problematic
exercise, as argued in chapter 3. One cannot assume, as modern historiogra-
phy does, that all human pasts consist of subjects who endow the world with
meanings, the objectified forms of which allow us to recreate their world. In
writing such a history, one must remain alert to the possibility of its inade-
quacy to its object.
In the highly polemical context of some current debates, even what I see as
the ‘‘agnosticism’’ of this position—neither embracing what we have learned
to call Reason, nor denouncing it as merely the colonizer’s Reason—will be
seen by some as taking sides, and will no doubt lead to charges of irrational-
ism, nativism, and relativism. But I take the vigor with which these argu-
ments are sometimes advanced as confirming my own, that what is at stake
is not principally Truth or Reason, but a will toward a certain way of life,
with which this Reason is identified. That way of life is usually glossed as
‘‘modernity,’’ and the desire for western knowledge in colonial India, as part II
sought to show, was indissolubly connected with the desire and the project
for a national-modern. Or rather, it was indissolubly connected with heter-
ogenous desires and projects for the national-modern—for the ‘‘advanced’’
 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern 187
and thus modern Muslim, for the Indian woman who would at once safe-
guard and embodyan essential Indian identityand yet be thewife and mother
of modern men, and for a citizen whose particularity as an Indian could be
reconciled with ‘‘global-European constructions of modernity,’’ and who had
been equipped to participate in building a modern and independent nation
through western knowledge acquired, for the most part, in his native tongue.

But if modern western knowledge was not ‘‘adequate’’ to India, in the

specific sense indicated above, is this because India was, or is, premodern?
Is it the implication of the arguments mounted in this book that modern
knowledge is a fruitful means for knowing the modern world that it helped
to bring into being, but for this very reason, not a useful medium by which
to ‘‘think’’ premoderns?
If these were the implications of my arguments, I would then have pro-
vided an amended and more complicated version of what is, however, a very
familiar narrative. This is one in which the site and image of modernity is
Europe, and the recent history of India is read as a history of lack and in-
completeness. The phenomena I have discussed, as well as many others that
differentiate India from European modernity, would then be interpreted and
explained as signs and consequences of a transition to modernity that has
begun but not yet been completed. In this narrative (or narratives, because
there are different versions of it) the knowledge which allows us to recognize
incompleteness is not called into question; the ‘‘incompleteness’’ or ‘‘lack’’ is
not of our categories but rather that of the real. What I have offered can thus
be seen as an argument which differs in that the knowledge by which we
judge absence and incompleteness is itself problematized. The incomplete-
ness of our Indian modernity is demonstrated not by the serene assurance
of the categories through which we know it but by the difficulties encoun-
tered when these categories traveled to India. In the first case, our confidence
in the ability of our intellectual categories to understand and identify the
modern enables us to recognize that India is premodern, or only partly mod-
ern. In the second case, it is the discourses which western education gave rise
to, read as indicating that the core assumptions of modern thought could
not be assumed in India, that allow us therefore to see that India must be
premodern.
If this was indeed where my arguments led, the results would not, I think,
be inconsequential.We would be obliged to regard knowledge not as a form of
knowing a world external to it but as one of the ways in which worlds are con-
188 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern
stituted. With a more reflexive understanding of our knowledge, we would
have gained a better sense of its possibilities and limits. And with a sense of
its limits, we might be less disposed to regard other knowledges as simply
‘‘wrong,’’ and more open to recognizing them as different ways of being in
the world. However, in closing I will outline why I reject the possible con-
clusions briefly sketched above, to draw out more fully what I think are the
intellectual and ethical possibilities that flow from preceding arguments.

Being Modern
Characterizing some of our contemporaries as premodern, and in this sense
as belonging to the past even as they inhabit the present, should now be ethi-
cally unsustainable. There is an enormous condescension in such a ‘‘denial
of coevalness’’ 3 and the social engineering that often springs from it—the
attempts to gift peoples with modernity, by force if necessary—has been dis-
astrous. It is also intellectually unsustainable. The peasants in the Bolivian
tin mines who worshiped the god Tio were nonetheless part of a world capi-
talist market.4 The aboriginal peoples who have survived dispossession and
genocide are not a ‘‘survival’’ of an ancient past but are very much imbricated
in the modern-present.5 Indian peasants who do not display the ‘‘modern
outlook’’ participate in the world capitalist market, and since 1947, as citi-
zens, they have been participants in India’s parliamentary democracy. And
the motley figures encountered in this book—crammers and dowry seekers,
vice-chancellors who consulted astrologers, Brahmin clerks and industrial-
ists, ‘‘proud Muslims,’’ nationalists, modern housewives and mothers—all
engaged with and negotiated modern institutions, ideas, and practices. What
could it possibly mean to characterize them as premodern? Or depict them
as caught in a no-man’s land, stranded between the banks of a premodern
that they have left behind, borne along by various currents to the shores of
a modernity not yet reached? As one historian (also rejecting this all-too-
familiar narrative) plaintively asks, ‘‘Why should modernity still await us in
India, more than two hundred years after its career was launched in India
by European imperialism? How long does it take for an Indian to become
modern?’’ 6
A similar dissatisfaction with the narrative of an incomplete transition to
modernity has led some to suggest that we should cease to privilege the pro-
cess and the form in which modernity first arrived in Europe, such that all
other regions of the world appear to have only an imperfect or incomplete
 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern 189
version of this original. It has been proposed that we allow for alternative
modernities, or multiple modernities, so that we can think of India, China,
and areas elsewhere as also part of the modern, even though their modernity
does not look like modernity in the West. But if this is to be more than just
a matter of tinkering with definitions, it requires a fundamental rethinking
of our understanding of modernity.
Recognizing this, Charles Taylor rejects the narrative which privileges the
European experience, and which treats it as what all societies must undergo
if they are to be classed as modern. He characterizes this narrative or theory
as one in which ‘‘modernity is conceived as a set of transformations which
any and every culture can go through . . . Modernity in this kind of theory
is understood as issuing from a rational or social operation which is culture-
neutral . . . a general operation that can take any specific culture as its in-
put.’’ 7 In this theory, the specificities that distinguish ‘‘premodern’’ cultures
do not matter, not because they are all seen to be alike but because the
culture-neutral processes of modernization run steamroller-like over all such
specificities. That is why modernity is always singular, why India and China,
when they become modern, will look like Europe, minor differences aside.
But modernity is more than just a set of economic and institutional arrange-
ments: it is also the practices, beliefs, and background assumptions that en-
able these economic and institutional arrangements to function. Why does
this account assume that the background assumptions and practices of the
modern will not even be inflected in any major way by the traditions they
encounter—and replace? Because what is implicit and often explicit in this
account is theview that the presumptions connected with modernity,or what
Taylor calls the ‘‘culture of modernity,’’ are not on a par with other cultures.
It is not simply one more way of construing and constructing human iden-
tity and its place in the world: ‘‘At the heart of this explanation is the view
that modernity involves our ‘coming to see’ certain kernel truths about the
human condition,’’ 8 such as instrumental rationality, and the assumption
that the individual is somehow more basic and more real than any collective.9
What Taylor is referring to is precisely the narrative discussed above, a nar-
rative in which the core presumptions of modern thought are unjustifiably
accorded privilege, because they are regarded not as just one possible way of
construing the world but as the right way, finally uncovered.
Taylor rightly rejects this account of modernity, and the accompanying
narrative telling us that the culture of modernity is the privileged bearer of
certain universal and trans-historical truths. He offers instead a way of con-
190 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern
ceiving modernity in which the cultures of regions that become modern leave
a lasting imprint on that modernity: ‘‘If the transition to modernity is like
the rise of a new culture [then] the starting point will leave its impress on the
end product . . . transitions to what we might recognize as modernity, taking
place in different civilizations, will produce different results that reflect their
divergent starting points . . . new differences will emerge from the old. Thus,
instead of speaking of modernity in the singular, we should better speak of
‘alternative modernities.’ ’’ 10 And just as our usual understanding rests upon
the presumption that the culture of modernity becomes universalized be-
cause it ‘‘unveils’’ the truth that has been there all along, so too the plural-
ization of modernities can only proceed by rejecting this idea, including with
reference to the West: ‘‘It is not that we [modern Westerners] sloughed off a
whole lot of unjustified beliefs, leaving an implicit self-understanding that
had always been there to operate at last untrammelled. Rather, one constel-
lation of implicit understandings of our relation to God, the cosmos, other
humans, and time was replaced by another in a multifaceted mutation.’’ 11
Disputing the account which claims that modern thought uncovers uni-
versal truths opens the way to recognizing that societies can be part of the
modern without having their peoples become individuals, live in a disen-
chanted world, or embrace instrumental rationality. This account confuses
products with processes—it wrongly assumes that bureaucratic rationality
presupposes rational bureaucrats, that the production of universal science
requires universalist scientists, and that capitalism requires maximizing in-
dividuals.12 The account might only be adequate to characterizing and under-
standing western modernity—if that. I say ‘‘if that’’ because Taylor’s argu-
ment has a double implication.The reason why we have thought of modernity
as singular is not that we arrogantly generalized from the experience of the
West. It is rather that in this understanding, premodern or ‘‘traditional’’ cul-
tures—including those of the West—are assumed to have had representations
and enchantments and metaphysics and cosmologies, whereas we moderns
have come to grasp (or been forced to see) the bedrock truths that under-
pinned these various constructions all along. If that is mistaken—if moder-
nity does not mean the replacement of ‘‘mere’’ representations and mis-
understandings by truth, but rather the replacement of what Taylor calls
one ‘‘social imaginary’’ by another, a fact obscured or even repressed by the
knowledge through which we grasp the modern—then there is an impor-
tant sense in which this explanation is simply mistaken, and not mistaken
only inasmuch as it is unjustifiably generalized to account for the nonwest-
 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern 191
ern world. If modernity need not imply disenchantment, individualism, and
instrumental reasoning, and yet modern knowledge is often conceived as the
fruit of that disenchantment, then that modern knowledge cannot be moder-
nity grasped in thought.

Knowing Modernity
Taylor makes some bold intellectual moves, with radical implications. Reject-
ing the idea that the presumptions and the knowledge produced by moder-
nity are the unveiling of universal truths, he suggests instead that what
marks modernity is the shift from one constellation of background presump-
tions to another. But there is one move that he is reluctant to make, one ele-
ment that he explicitly exempts from his argument—science. Although, as
we have seen, Taylor rejects the idea that modernity involves our ‘‘coming to
see’’ certain truths, and writes that ‘‘facets of what we identify as modern,
such as the tendency to try to split fact from value or the decline of religious
practice, are far from reposing on incontestable truths which have finally
been discovered,’’ he also immediately adds that this is a claim that can be
made for modern physics.13 ‘‘There is some justification,’’ Taylor writes, ‘‘for
talking of our ‘‘coming to see’’ the truth when we consider the revolution of
natural science which began in the seventeenth century.’’ 14 Taylor is here not
just saying that science and technology are among the stuff of any modernity,
a claim that is unexceptionable if the term modernity is not to be emptied
of all meaning. The problem with the conventional account of modernity,
he is saying, is its tendency to lump together those truths that we do ‘‘come
to see’’ (science) with those presumptions (instrumental reason, individual-
ism, etc.) that are part of the social imaginary accompanying and produced
by western modernity, but that are not universal truths finally uncovered.
The reason for this exclusion is presumably that to extend the argument to
include science might be tantamount to declaring that just as individual-
ism and instrumental rationality are a social imaginary like any other, and
cannot lay any claim to being the truth revealed, so too modern science and
nonmodern cosmologies are just, and equally, parts of different social imagi-
naries. This is not a conclusion that Taylor is willing to embrace, and if these
are the choices,which is how matters are often presented—one thinks of older
debates on whether Azande witchcraft is as good as modern science—there
are few willing to embrace it.
But these are not the only choices, and Taylor’s exclusion of science from
192 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern
the general thrust of his argument derives from his having insufficiently
emancipated himself from the explanation that he criticizes. At the heart of
Taylor’s exclusion is the idea that while cultures produce the world they then
inhabit, there is also a nature, which is outside culture, though different cul-
tures regard and explain it in different ways. Once we accept an ontology that
declares the world to be divided thus, it follows naturally that knowledge of
the world should also be divided thus. All that remains to be determined is
where the line is to be drawn: over which territory the ‘‘human sciences’’ can
claim sovereignty, and how far the writ of ‘‘natural sciences’’ runs. The most
aggressive champions of Nature have sometimes come close to claiming that
even culture can be explained by neurons and evolution. The diviners of cul-
ture, by contrast, have for the most part accepted the duality, and with great
humility have sought only to point out that causes did not always explain
meanings, that the world man created was different from the one he found,
and so on—in short, that culture had its own domain. In more recent times,
in the wake of aggressively ‘‘constructivist’’ arguments, they have ventured
to claim more than that. And so we continually redraw the lines and thereby
seek to annex territory, through extravagant claims for nature and science on
the one hand and an increasingly solipsistic ‘‘culturalism’’ on the other;15 or
rather, the majority in each camp happily till their own fields, leaving their
generals, the theoreticians, to dispute the no-man’s land in between.
For a long time we have assumed that this division is real—indeed, we be-
gan to do so at the beginnings of the modern age, when Bacon, Descartes,
Hobbes, Hume, and many others rejected and sometimes mocked the idea
that ‘‘natural philosophy’’ could use concepts of ‘‘final causes’’ and ‘‘purpose’’
in explanation. The conventional way in which we understand this history
is to regard these moderns as having ‘‘come to see’’ that Nature did not em-
body meanings or ‘‘have’’ ends, and thus as reassigning purpose and meaning
to Culture. But the modern idea of nature is not the Greek physis with ‘‘pur-
pose’’ eliminated from it, and neither was it constituted by simply reshuffling
and reassigning the medieval and early modern categories of the supernatu-
ral, preternatural, artificial, and unnatural into already available categories
of culture or nature. ‘‘To reconstruct the meanings and resonances of early
modern nature,’’ Lorraine Daston writes, ‘‘requires setting aside the mod-
ern opposition of nature versus culture,’’ for ‘‘the very categories of nature
and culture, conceived in yin-yang complementarity, are of relatively recent
provenance.’’ 16 Historians of science like Daston, and Shapin and Schaffer,17
and philosophers like Latour, have in recent times offered the beginnings of
 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern 193
an alternative account, one that has us see modernity as that which invents
the idea or artefact of nature, and does so at the same time as it invents society
and culture.
What characterizes modernity, Latour argues, is not its discovery that
‘‘Nature’’ was disenchanted, but its creation of Nature on the one hand and
society and culture on the other. Meanings and values belonged by defini-
tion to the societal and cultural pole, and thus the very idea of Nature had
disenchantment ‘‘built into it’’: in modern self-understandings ‘‘becoming’’
modern ‘‘consists in continually exiting from an obscure age that mingled the
needs of society with scientific truth, in order to enter into a new age that will
finally distinguish clearly what belongs to atemporal nature and what comes
from humans, what depends on things and what depends on signs.’’ 18 Latour
calls this—the separation of humans from nonhumans, of Nature from cul-
ture, of that which has no meaning but can be known from that which is
nothing but meanings and values—the ‘‘Great Divide.’’ He argues that it ex-
plains the other great divide, that between us moderns and the premoderns.
As Michael Adas shows, some of the initial ways in which Europeans con-
ceived of their superiority to non-Europeans (such as the notion that they
had true religion, while others had false gods) increasingly yielded to expla-
nations emphasizing the superiority of European science and technology, a
superiority seen as attesting that ‘‘European modes of thought and social
organization corresponded much more closely to the underlying realities of
the universe than did those of any other people or society, past or present.’’ 19
Or in Latour’s words, since the time that we created Nature and Culture as
opposites, and organized our knowledge around their opposition, we have
with great self-satisfaction regarded ourselves as ‘‘the only ones who differ-
entiate absolutely between Nature and Culture, between Science and Society,
whereas in our eyes all the others—whether they are Chinese or Amerindian,
Azande or Barouya—cannot really separate what is knowledge from what is
Society, what is sign from what is thing, what comes from Nature as it is from
what their cultures require.’’ 20
In arguments such as this science is not privileged, as it is forTaylor.That is
because the object to which it corresponds—the nonhuman, Nature in oppo-
sition to society and culture—is not regarded as the surplus or residue once
we have pushed to the limit the argument that knowledge is a way of orga-
nizing and being in the world, and not simply a way of knowing it. Weber
was wrong to see disenchanted nature as a ‘‘discovery,’’ as an unveiling of
a truth, but right to see it as a defining feature of how western moderns
194 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern
thought, and how they constituted their world. It is what, in the view of west-
ern moderns, most clearly distinguishes them from all the premoderns—but
that view needs to be reconsidered. The rethinking need not take the form of
concluding that moderns also project their cultural categories onto nature,
while pretending otherwise—it need not lead us to declare that nature too is
part of culture, and that nuclear physics is as constructed as water divining
(and no more true). It can more fruitfully lead to questioning and problema-
tizing the distinction between nature and culture. Daston does so through
a historical enquiry which demonstrates the contingency of our organizing
categories. Latour’s way of doing so is to argue that we moderns, and others,
are all ‘‘nature-cultures.’’ 21 According to Latour, as this becomes increasingly
apparent (for a variety of reasons), we can recognize that the way we thought
and constituted ourselves as modern is deeply misleading. Historically, draw-
ing a distinction between Nature and Culture was constitutive of modernity,
but for that very reason it is not thereby the best medium for comprehending
it. On the contrary; it is an impediment to understanding modernity. When
we come to recognize that the world is not ontologically divided into nature
on the one hand and culture on the other—the distinction that we thought
we alone had grasped, and that constituted the dividing line between us mod-
erns and the premoderns—then we also come to realize, as Latour signals in
the provocative title of his book, that We Have Never Been Modern.
While the separation between Nature and Culture is undoubtedly essen-
tial to our sense of ourselves as modern, it is not the sole or defining feature
of that sense. There are other sources and features of modernity, and the idea
of modernity cannot be conjured away by showing Nature to be an idea that
moderns need(ed), rather than a fact that they unearthed. Modernity is real,
even if it is not what we thought it was. What I find most stimulating in
Latour’s book is not, however, its details, but rather the attempt to show that
while modern thought has played an important role in constituting moder-
nity, it is not thereby a privileged medium for comprehending it. In Latour’s
argument, more sharply than in Taylor’s, modern thought is not the mod-
ern grasped reflexively; indeed, it is in important ways a bad guide to the
modern, even if it is the only one we have. The arguments of Latour, Tay-
lor, and others—including those critics of Reason who draw their inspiration
from Nietzsche and Heidegger, and who have provided the intellectual back-
ground to this project, even though I have referred to them sparingly in the
preceding pages—help me to clarify the implications of my own arguments
in this book.
 Knowing Modernity, Being Modern 195
Our knowledge is not the privileged bearer of universal insights. Knowl-
edge is not necessarily a relation between a knowing subject and an object
known; we are not even all subjects; the world is not disenchanted. These are
not truths that are finally grasped by modern knowledge, but rather what
it has helped to bring into being. Yet from this it does not follow that mod-
ern knowledge is homologous with modernity, or even (a more modest claim)
with the western variant thereof. Thought can be out of alignment with the
world that it purports to describe, and that it has brought into being. This
is not something we can know by stepping outside modern knowledge and
gaining unmediated access to the real, since we would still have to explain
how we are able to gain such access, and would in any case still be trapped
within the representational epistemology that I have sought to render prob-
lematic. But it is something we can seek to explore by other means.
I have sought to do this by examining how knowledge traveled. West-
ern knowledge arrived in India through the coercive agency of colonialism.
We were told, most forthrightly by Macaulay, that this knowledge was true
and that our own knowledges, like our gods, were false. I have read the dis-
courses that western education generated as perturbations on the surface of
this knowledge, half-acknowledgments that the ‘‘foundational assumptions’’
underpinning and enabling modern knowledge could not in fact be assumed.
Nonetheless, that knowledge has now become global. There is no easy point
outside it, no escape from it other than by engaging with and through it; thus
I write as one of Macaulay’s misbegotten offspring, working with this knowl-
edge to contribute to the self-questioning that renews intellectual traditions
and keeps them alive. There are myriad ways of doing so, and I do not claim
any privilege for the tack I have taken. But if those who were once ‘‘subject to
pedagogy’’ can, long after they are gone, be studied in a fashion that subjects
modern western knowledge to critical scrutiny, there is a pleasing irony in
the thought that Macaulay’s bastard children will have contributed to the
critical appropriation of a knowledge that was once imposed upon them.
 Notes

Introduction
1. Minute recorded by Macaulay, law member of the Governor-General’s Coun-
cil, 2 February 1835, reprinted in Zastoupil and Moir, eds., The Great Indian Education
Debate, 166.
2. Despatch from the Court of Directors of the East India Company to the Gov-
ernor General of India, 19 July 1854, section 7, reprinted in Richey, ed., Selections from
Educational Records, 366. The reasoning behind this, the Court of Directors went on
to explain, was that ‘‘the systems of science and philosophy which form the learning
of the East abound with grave errors, and eastern literature is at best very deficient
as regards all modern discovery and improvements’’ (section 8, 366).
3. The universities of Punjab and Allahabad were established in 1882 and 1887,
and by 1929 thirteen further universities had been established.
4. Lee-Warner, The Citizen of India, 1897.
5. Report of the [Young] Committee on Educational Hygiene, 6.
6. The Maitland Prize Essay at Cambridge in 1886 distinguished between ‘‘educa-
tion in its widest sense,’’ namely ‘‘all that tends to revolutionize thought in India, and
to make it conform to the developments of Western civilization,’’ and ‘‘the system
of education’’ instituted by the colonial government. Haines, Education and Missions
in India and Elsewhere, 32. Sir Richard Temple, recalling his career as a senior colonial
official in India, distinguished between that education imparted through ‘‘contem-
plation of the example set by the British Government in India in its wise legislation’’
and that imparted through ‘‘definite instruction.’’ Men and Events of My Time in India,
494. Sir Narayan G. Chandarvarkar, the distinguished vice chancellor of Bombay Uni-
versity, told a conference that ‘‘the very presence of the British with their traditions
of liberty . . . [was] an education to the people,’’ one fortunately supplemented by
the decision in 1835 to provide western education to Britain’s Indian subjects. Sir
Narayan G. Chandarvarkar, ‘‘Presidential Address,’’ Report on the First Bombay Educa-
tional Conference, ed. Jamnadas M. Mehta (Bombay, 1917), 12.
7. The system of education was top-heavy, with a disproportionate emphasis on
colleges and universities. But the numbers involved at this level of the educational
system, as a proportion of the total population, were of course minuscule. At the
primary level enrollment figures remained abysmal: fewer than one-fifth of boys
eligible to attend classes 1–4 of elementary school were enrolled in an educational

197
198 Notes
institution by the turn of the century. Lord Curzon in India, 331; by 1921–22 that pro-
portion had increased to 31.5 percent and by 1936–37 had just passed the halfway
mark. Sargent, Progress of Education in India, 1932–37, 125, table lvi. However, even
these figures are highly misleading.The percentages were calculated on the assump-
tion that 15 percent of the population was of elementary school–going age, the figure
widely used in Europe; but in India, as was often pointed out, the true figure was
certainly much higher than this. Officialdom in the princely state of Travancore
estimated that 25 percent was a more likely figure (Report of the Administration for
Travancore for 1915–16, quoted in ‘‘Percentage of Persons of School-Going Age,’’ Modern
Review, December 1917, 626–27). The Government of India continued to use 15 per-
cent, which made the numbers enrolled appear artificially high, but in-house official
correspondence acknowledged that the figure was misleading (Letter from Govern-
ment of India to Government of United Provinces, 4 January 1907, Home Education,
January 1907, 13(A), National Archives of India). Moreover, the figures on numbers
actually enrolled did not convey much information—they did not reveal how many
of those enrolled in educational institutions actually attended them regularly; and
‘‘wastage rates’’ were extremely high, meaning that a large number of those who en-
rolled in elementary school did not proceed as far as the fourth grade, conventionally
calculated as the minimum level of schooling necessary to achieve literacy.
8. Trevelyan, On the Education of the People of India, 13.
9. Pioneer, 10 January 1888.
10. Mahmood, A History of English Education in India, 1.
11. K.V.A., ‘‘Calcutta University Reform,’’ 10.
12. Among them Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe; Mignolo, The Darker Side of
the Renaissance; Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt; and Nandy, The Intimate Enemy.
13. Foucault, ‘‘About the Beginnings of a Hermeneutics of the Self,’’ 223 n. 4.
14. ‘‘The fate of an epoch which has eaten of the tree of knowledge,’’ Weber wrote,
‘‘is that it must know that we cannot learn the meaning of the world from the re-
sults of its analysis, be it ever so perfect; it must rather be in a position to create this
meaning itself.’’ ‘‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,’’ 57.
15. Taylor, Hegel, 5.
16. He writes, ‘‘the transcendental presupposition of any cultural science lies in the
fact that we are cultural beings, endowed with the capacity and the will to take a delib-
erate attitude towards the world and to lend it significance.’’ Weber, ‘‘Objectivity in
Social Science and Social Policy,’’ 81. I will consider this passage and the claim made
in it in much greater detail in chapter 3.
17. ‘‘The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a mod-
ern one, but rather the fact that theworld becomes picture at all is what distinguishes
the essence of the modern age.’’ Heidegger, ‘‘The Age of the World Picture,’’ 130.
18. Heidegger, Nietzsche, 17.
19. Heidegger was aware that drawing attention to what is different about the
modern situation can lend itself to historicist readings. His insistence that man be-
 Notes 199
comes subject only with modernity ‘‘might give rise,’’ he writes, ‘‘to the notion that
the innermost history of metaphysics and of the change in its basic positions is
simply a history of the alteration in man’s self-conception.This opinion would corre-
spond completely to contemporary anthropological modes of thought. But it would
be an erroneous notion . . . in fact it would be the one error it is necessary to overcome.’’
Nietzsche, 138, emphasis added.
20. Poovey, ‘‘The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social,’’ 130.
21. The classic account and critique of this conception is Rorty, Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature.
22. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, chapter 6.

Chapter 1: Changing the Subject

1. Report of the General Committee of Public Instruction for the Presidency of Fort William
in Bengal for 1838–39, 7, 8, 9.
2. General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for
1844–45, ccviii.
3. ‘‘On the Disadvantage of an Education Exclusively in English,’’ essay reprinted
in ‘‘Annual Report of the Elphinstone Institution for theYear 1850,’’ appendix to Report
of the Bombay Board of Education from January 1, 1850, to April 30, 1851, 265.
4. Essays and Discourses by Professor Prafulla Chandra Ray, 203.
5. ‘‘Address to Convocation of Delhi University, 1927,’’ Indian Problems: Speeches by
Lord Irwin, 184.
6. General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for
1856–57, appendix A, 123 [each appendix separately paginated].
7. Quoted in Chaturvedi, The History of Rural Education in the United Provinces of
Agra and Oudh, 178 (my translation).
8. General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for
1856–57, appendix A, 123 (inspector of schools for South Bengal) and 153 (inspector of
schools for northeast Bengal and Assam); see similar remarks by other officials at 40,
74; and in General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of Bengal for 1857–
58, appendix A, 43. For similar remarks for Bombay see Report of the [Bombay] Board
of Education for the Year 1849, 18; and Report of the Director for Public Instruction, Bombay,
for the Year 1863–64, 22. The Despatch of 1859 (acknowledging that according to the
reports from its officers in Bengal as well as Bombay the grant-in-aid policy was not
proving at all effective in promoting the establishment of vernacular schools) was
compelled to authorize local authorities to look into imposing a land tax or rate to
fund the creation of vernacular schools in rural areas. Despatch of 1859, sections 37,
50–53 (reprinted in Richey, ed., Selections from Educational Records, 426–50).
9. ‘‘Education in Bengal,’’ Calcutta Review, reproduced (as appendix E) in Leth-
bridge, High Education in India, 199, 200. According to an inspector of schools for East
Bengal, in Anglo-Vernacular schools—schools where English was taught as a lan-
200 Notes
guage but was not to be used as the medium of instruction—this requirement was
widely flouted, for parents wished their sons ‘‘to speak English as much as possible,
and they grudge every hour in which instruction is imparted in the Vernacular lan-
guage.’’ At least one Anglo-Vernacular school had a sign up in class warning boys that
they would be caned if they spoke any language other than English. General Report
on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of Bengal for 1860–61, appendix A, 31–32 [each
appendix separately paginated].
10. General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for
1856–57, appendix A, 122. See also General Report on Public Instruction in Bengal, 30 Sep-
tember 1852–27 January 1855, lii.
11. As was often observed—see for instance Subrahmanyam, ‘‘National Educa-
tion: Literary or Technical?,’’ 15; Cornelius, A Study of Tagore’s Experiment in the Indian-
ization of Education in the Light of India’s History, pt 2, 117; Mayo, Mother India, 186.
When marriage advertisements began to appear in the newspapers, for a long while
‘‘matriculation failed’’ was something worthy of mention, among the prospective
groom’s other assets.
12. Short Essays and Reviews on the Educational Policy of the Government of India, 88.
13. Report of the [Bombay] Board of Education for the Year 1846, 5. In another story
a group of students admitted that they only believed what they had been taught,
namely that the earth went round the sun, ‘‘as long as we are in the class-room.’’
Archer, India and the Future, 240 n. In a variant of this story a schoolteacher states in
response to a query from a government official that he teaches that the earth goes
round the sun, but adds, ‘‘I believe that the sun goes round the earth.’’ Sharp, Rural
Schools in the Central Provinces, 101.
14. When the Sapru Commission came to investigate the issue, it complained
that no reliable statistics had been collected by either government or educational
institutions, making it difficult to estimate how many Indians did in fact end up in
government employ. However it did conclude, ‘‘Upon the evidence before us, the vast
majority of the products of our universities—and their parents share the feeling—
aim at securing some appointment or other in the Government service.’’ Report of the
Unemployment [Sapru] Committee, 92. An attempt was made in 1882 to compute where
graduates of the University of Calcutta had gone in the twenty-odd years since the
first graduation. It found that for those whose subsequent steps could be tracked, 528
were in government service, 547 self-employed (but almost all of these were pleaders,
or else attorneys or articled clerks), 187 in private service (but a large number of these
were teachers in private schools), and 88 still studying. That is, almost all graduates
were in government service or the law, or were teachers in private schools. Roy, High
Education and the Present Position of Graduates in Arts and Law of the Calcutta University. In
Madras the director of public instruction estimated that of the thousand or so gradu-
ates in the previous decade, probably 350 joined the government service, over half of
these in the educational service. Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency for
1881–82, 183.
 Notes 201
15. The Native Review compared Indians to the Russians, for whom ‘‘all occupa-
tions not immediately connected with the State are comparatively mean and despi-
cable.’’ ‘‘Loyalty and Disloyalty,’’ 355. See also Constitution of India under the British Rule
(Montagu-Chelmsford Report, 1918), section 181, which summarizes some of the expla-
nations commonly given for the premium that students and parents placed upon
government employment.
16. In the educational system introduced by the British, wrote Sasadhar Sinha,
‘‘utility was, as it still continues to be, its chief test and justification. Education . . .
in so far as it leads to knowledge for its own sake has been sacrificed to fruitbear-
ing at its lowest level-administrative employment.’’ ‘‘The Past, Present and Future of
Indian Education,’’ 58.
17. Mehta, The Problem of Our Young Men After Leaving Schools and Colleges, 12.
18. Holmes, ‘‘University Education in Bengal,’’ 256. ‘‘A Native Philomath’’ con-
firmed that graduates ‘‘sell more dearly in the marriage market.’’ High Education in
Bengal and the University of Calcutta, 13.
19. Quoted in ‘‘Watchman,’’ Higher Education and Control [i].
20. Examples include The Bombay University Convocation Address of 1894; Ghosh,
Higher Education in Bengal Under British Rule, 151; and Wood, Selected Articles on National
Education, 50.
21. An Address by S. C. Roy, 4.
22. Proceedings of the Punjab Educational Conference and Exhibition, 13–14. An inspec-
tor of schools in Bihar similarly reported that neither parents nor pupils had much
regard for what they were being taught, ‘‘but they consider the acquisition of our
language as necessary for the advancement of their children in this life, and there-
fore overcome their suspicions as to what may be the effect of this mode of Educa-
tion upon their prospects in the next.’’ General Report on Public Instruction in the Lower
Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for 1855–56, appendix A, 122.
23. Presidential Address at 26th Annual Session of the All India Muhammadan Educa-
tional Conference, 25.
24. Convocation Address, Madras University, 1873, Convocation Addresses of the Uni-
versities of Bombay and Madras, ed. Rao, 88.
25. Calcutta University Commission Report, vol. 2, 154.
26. Lord Curzon in India, 485. ‘‘Memory,’’ Curzon declared in an address delivered
the year before, ‘‘is not mind, though it is a faculty of the mind.’’ Lord Curzon in
India, 317.
27. ‘‘A Native Philomath,’’ High Education in Bengal and the University of Calcutta, 18.
28. On other matters to do with education, there were differences between the
princely states and British India, some of which are explored in Bhagavan, Sovereign
Spheres.
29. Indian Universities [Raleigh] Commission Report, vol. 2: Abstract of Evidence [un-
paginated].
30. See for instance C. B. Rama Row, ‘‘Condition of Public Examinations,’’ Re-
202 Notes
port of the Madras Educational Conference, 24. The system of payment by results came
under criticism in Britain also, as did external examinations: the ‘‘Report of the Con-
sultative Committee of the Board of Education on the Subject of Examinations in
Secondary Schools in Great Britain’’ (1911) advised against allowing a ‘‘proliferation’’
of external exams—extracts in Maclure, ed., Educational Documents, 164–66.
31. Premchand, ‘‘Gorakhpur me Shiksha Sammelan,’’ 212.
32. Indian Educational Policy . . . 1904, sections 11–12.
33. Indian Educational Policy . . . 1913, section 26.
34. Day, ‘‘Recollections of My School-Days,’’ Bengal Peasant Life, Folktales of Bengal,
Recollections of My School-Days, 510.
35. Welinkar, Our Young Men.
36. Calcutta University Commission Report, vol. 2, 224–25.
37. Mukerjee, An Examination into Present System of University Education in India and
A Scheme of Reform, 11.
38. ‘‘1908 Convocation Address,’’ University of Calcutta Convocation Addresses, 2nd
edn, vol. 4, 1105. The Raleigh Commission similarly pronounced: ‘‘It is beyond doubt
that the greatest evil from which the system of university education suffers in India
is that teaching is subordinated to examination, not examination to teaching.’’ Indian
Universities [Raleigh] Commission Report, vol. 1, section 156 [p. 43].
39. Sarkar, ‘‘Confessions of a History Teacher,’’ 663.
40. Rama Row, ‘‘Condition of Public Examinations,’’ Report of the Madras Educa-
tional Conference, 24.
41. Shrivastava, ‘‘Some Aspects of our Present Educational System,’’ 580.
42. ‘‘It was found that the abolition of texts obviated cramming methods in one
direction, [but] it tended to make the examinations, and hence the teaching, centre
upon grammatical niceties and to lead to the neglect of all reading, and thus con-
duced to cramming of another kind’’ (director of public instruction, Madras, quoted
in Orange, Progress of Education in India, 1902–1907, 72). See also the testimony of C. A.
Patterson, registrar of Madras University, reporting that the Madras University Sen-
ate had voted to reintroduce a textbook for English after the failure of the experi-
ment in abolishing it. Indian Universities [Raleigh] Commission Report, vol. 2, Abstract of
Evidence [unpaginated].
43. Reminiscences, Speeches and Writings of Sir Gooroo Dass Banerjee, 193. However, the
proposal was adopted, and thus Calcutta University abolished a textbook for English
at the very time Madras University reintroduced it.That thirty years later the Ander-
son Committee was still lamenting the effects of textbooks gives some indication of
how ineffective such measures were; see Punjab University Enquiry [Anderson] Committee
Report, 23.
44. J. R. Barrow, officiating principal of Presidency College, in Calcutta University
Commission Report, vol. 10, 122. An unsuccessful product of this system even went so
far as to say that university examinations were held ‘‘to patronise the key-makers.’’
Chowdhury, A Humble Appeal of a Humble Heart, 10–11.
 Notes 203
45. Calcutta University Commission Report, vol. 10, 197.
46. It was widely felt that European college teachers were those who could not
achieve any distinction in their own country. An unsigned essay on ‘‘The Public Ser-
vices Commission and the Educational Service,’’ for instance, calculated that the
forty-six Europeans appointed to the Indian Educational Service between 1912 and
1914 had an average academic achievement of only a Third Class Oxford Honours de-
gree. Modern Review, August 1917, 181.Yet they were virtually assured of higher income
than their Indian colleagues, because the Indian Educational Service was reserved
mostly for Europeans and the second-rung Provincial Education Service for Indians,
in fact if not in name. This inequality was compounded when the Public Services
Commission added distinctions of rank and nomenclature to the existing racially
based inequalities of income.
47. This did not make for easy interaction with their Indian students. Rabindra-
nath Tagore wrote, ‘‘every European teacher carries about with him on his person the
emblems of sovereign power, and so the throne takes the place of the guru’s seat . . .
the European professor does not look upon his vocation simply as that of teacher. He
feels himself also to be a king of the country. He is a European and a Professor of an
Imperial service to boot—a fragment of royalty. Often, also, he suffers from the con-
viction that he has come out to ‘do us some good.’ ’’ ‘‘Indian Students and Western
Teachers,’’ 418.
48. L. C. Williams, ‘‘Status of Primary Teachers,’’ Report of the Madras Educational
Conference, 2.
49. The schoolteacher, wrote R. Rangaswami Aiyar, is ‘‘held in contempt . . . the
butt of social ridicule.’’ ‘‘Is the Teaching Profession Calculated to Attract the Best
Type of Men?,’’ 403. Schoolteaching was respectively described as ‘‘one of the least
respected professions in society,’’ ‘‘the last refuge of the incompetent and the de-
spairing,’’ and an occupation which ‘‘may be truly regarded as the forlorn hope of
a hungry humanity’’ by Miss N. Ghose [Head Mistress of the Victoria Institution],
‘‘How to Make the Teaching Profession Attractive,’’ Report of the Bengal Women’s Educa-
tional Conference, 64; C. H. Barry, principal of Aitchison College in a radio talk (?1945),
typescript in Barry Papers, 2: and Day, Primary Education in Bengal, 10.
50. ‘‘Report of the Committee of the Central Advisory Board Appointed to Con-
sider the Question of Training, Recruitment and Conditions of Service of Teachers,’’
Bureau of Education, Reports of the Committees Appointed by the Central Advisory Board of
Education in India, 99. The Educational Record, a monthly issued from Madras, carried
regular reports from officials of teacher’s associations, documenting the appalling
rates of pay and conditions.
51. Until the eve of Independence, having passed the Vernacular Final Exam—
that is, having completed eight years of education—constituted a qualification for
teaching at primary level. Only 54 percent of primary teachers in the public school
sector had received any teacher training.The Report of the [More] Committee on theTrain-
ing of Primary Teachers, from which these figures are drawn, concluded that ‘‘half the
204 Notes
teachers charged with the responsible task of imparting primary education are those
who have had inadequate general training and no [teacher] training at all, and the re-
maining, though trained, have had unsatisfactory general education and a [teacher]
training of an intermittent character’’ (18).
52. Answers of Hariprasad Ghosal to questions of the Hartog Committee [type-
script] in Hartog Papers, mss Eur. 221/45b, pp. 10, 11, India Office Library and Records,
British Library.
53. Address to Calcutta Convocation, 1866, in University of Calcutta Convocation Ad-
dresses, vol. 1, 148.
54. Setalvad, Indian University Commission, vi.
55. Curzon, Principles and Methods of University Reform, 116.
56. Thus ‘‘A Native Philomath’’ described cramming as ‘‘the most serious intel-
lectual malady of the present age throughout the civilised world,’’ but added that
‘‘no where is it more dangerous than in Bengal.’’ High Education in Bengal and the
University of Calcutta, 18. Similarly, Lord Curzon acknowledged that cramming was a
‘‘universal’’ problem, but added that it appeared in its worst form in India and China.
Opening Address to Educational Conference, Simla, September 1901, Lord Curzon in
India, 317.
57. H. Dippie, ‘‘Principles of Education and Class Teaching,’’ Instruction in Indian
Primary Schools, 5.
58. Prasad, Teaching the Teacher, 6.
59. I refer of course to ‘‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment.’’ See
also Kant’s essay ‘‘What Does Orientation in Thinking Mean?’’ (1786) and also Anthro-
pology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Victor Dowdell, S 42 [pp. 91–92], in which
Kant contrasts memory with genuine ‘‘understanding.’’
60. Quoted in John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology, 72.
61. Reminiscences, Speeches and Writings of Sir Gooroo Dass Banerjee, 155, 171.
62. Pal, Memories of My Life and Times, 21.
63. Verma, Shiksha-Samhar, 1921.
64. Fisher, India’s Silent Revolution, 148.
65. Dippie, ‘‘Principles of Education and Class Teaching,’’ 7.
66. Lord Curzon in India, 485.
67. Chanda, ‘‘Future of Education in Bengal,’’ 316.
68. Quoted in Chaturvedi, The History of Rural Education in the United Provinces of
Agra and Oudh, 174.
69. Calcutta University Commission Report, vol. 2, 150.
70. Report of the [Bombay] Board of Education for the Year 1845, 15–16.
71. Saiyidain, ‘‘Experiments in Education,’’ 617. Twenty-five years later again, it
was still being argued that ‘‘the indigenous systems of education helped to fix the
character which was to be assumed by western education in India.’’ Sinha, Problem of
Education in Bengal, 103.
72. Brown, States of Injury, 22.
 Notes 205
73. William Adam provided a revealing snapshot of the diversity of learning prac-
tices even in a single administrative unit, the thana of Nattore in Rajshahi district.
See Reports on the State of Education in Bengal, second report and third report, 221 pas-
sim.
74. The discussion of svadhyaya in this paragraph draws upon Muller, Lectures on
the Origin and Growth of Religion (especially the postscript to the third lecture); Staal,
Nambudiri Veda Recitation; and Staal, Ritual and Mantras.
75. In his scholarlyand nationalist work Education in Ancient India (which appeared
first in the 1930s and then in subsequent editions) A. S. Altekar acknowledged that
many pandits did not know the meaning of what they recited, but explained this as
a consequence of a division of labor initiated when the number of texts became too
large for any one body of persons to both commit them to memory and to under-
stand and interpret them. At this point, he speculates, some pandits were assigned
the task of interpreting, while others were required to ‘‘devote their energies to the
mechanical memorizing of this extensive literature with a view to prevent its loss,’’
an arrangement which ‘‘no doubt exposed some Brahmanas to the taunt of being
mere parrot-like reciters of the Vedic hymns.’’ ‘‘It is gratifying to find,’’ Altekar goes
on to observe, ‘‘that they did not mind it in the wider interests of the preservation of
the national literature and culture’’ (150).
76. Staal, Nambudiri Veda Recitation, 16.
77. On the importance accorded to memory learning see inter alia Muller, Lectures
on the Origin and Growth of Religion; Altekar, Education in Ancient India; Achyuthan, Edu-
cational Practices in Manu, Panini and Kautilya; Ghurye, Preservation of Learned Tradition
in India; Venkateswara, Indian Culture through the Ages; Michaels, ed., The Pandit.
78. Carruthers, The Book of Memory.
79. Carruthers, The Book of Memory. See also Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth.
80. Sharp, Rural Schools in the Central Provinces, 69–70. Another European observer
commented: ‘‘A large number of these naked little children would astound our most
practised city clerks by running on with the multiplication table up to one hun-
dred times one hundred.’’ Fredrick Pincot, quoted in Chaturvedi, The History of Rural
Education in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, 60.
81. ‘‘Education in Bengal,’’ reproduced in Lethbridge, High Education in India, 194.
82. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, 85.
83. Report of the Indian Education [Hunter] Commission, vol. 1, 72, 66.
84. Williams, ‘‘Status of Primary Teachers,’’ Report of the Madras Educational Con-
ference, 3.
85. M. G. Ranade observed in 1882 that ‘‘the grown-up men of this generation
have all been taught in their young days by indigenous school masters.’’ ‘‘Primary
Education and Indigenous Schools’’ (1882), The MiscellaneousWritings of the Late Hon’ble
Mr. Justice M. G. Ranade, 265. For the reminiscences of some elderly men on the in-
digenous education which they had received around the turn of the century in Kerala
see Wood, Knowledge before Printing and After.
206 Notes
86. Chaturvedi, The History of Rural Education. My summary of Chaturvedi’s ac-
count of his school days is drawn from pp. 40–66.
87. Chaturvedi, The History of Rural Education, 41.
88. Chaturvedi, The History of Rural Education, 61.
89. Chaturvedi, The History of Rural Education, 64–65.
90. Chaturvedi, The History of Rural Education, 66.
91. The very richness of the Greek idea of freedom, it has been argued, is inti-
mately connected to the absolute subjection implied by slavery in ancient Greece;
see for instance Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 23.

Chapter 2: Diagnosing Moral Crisis

1. Bengal Government Resolution establishing the General Committee of Pub-
lic Instruction, 17 July 1823, reprinted in Zastoupil and Moir, eds., The Great Indian
Education Debate, 108 (emphasis added).
2. Indian Educational Policy . . . 1913, section 5.
3. Ratcliffe, ‘‘The Teaching of Morals and Religion,’’ 456.
4. Reddy, An Address to Students, 8.
5. Though they were partially mollified by the Despatch of 1854, which intro-
duced a system of grant-in-aid for private schools, including missionary schools, as
long as they provided instruction in secular subjects and submitted to government
inspection and regulation.
6. Quoted in Clive, Macaulay, 411. Similarly, Charles Trevelyan told a Select Com-
mittee of the House of Lords that conversions ‘‘will take place at last wholesale . . .
The country will have Christian instruction infused into it in every way by direct
missionary education, and indirectly through books of various kinds, through the
public papers, through conversations with Europeans, and in all the conceivable
ways in which knowledge is communicated. Then at last, when society is completely
saturated with Christian knowledge, and public opinion has taken a decided turn
that way, they will come over by thousands.’’ Quoted in Smith, The Life of Alexander
Duff, vol. 2, 244–45. See similarly Richter, A History of Missions in India, 367; Elphin-
stone, Selections from the Minutes and the Official Writings of the Honourable Mountstuart
Elphinstone, Governorof Bombay, 185–86; and a communication from the Madras Coun-
cil of Education to the Board of Control, 29 July 1847, in ‘‘Papers Relating to Public
Instruction,’’ cclvi.
7. On missionary involvement in education see Laird, Missionaries and Education
in Bengal; Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest, chapter 2; and Seth, ‘‘Which Good Book?’’
8. Duff, India and India Missions, 560.
9. Duff, India and India Missions, 563.
10. The alarm this raised was genuine, but ‘‘Young Bengal’’ soon assumed almost
mythical status as a warning-to-hand of the evils of freethinking. Lal Behari Day, a
student and success story of Duff ’s educational endeavours—he converted and be-
 Notes 207
came a Christian minister—wrote of ‘‘the revolution’’ which the intellectual youth
of Calcutta were undergoing as a result of their contact with western education,
and of the ‘‘wildness of their views; the reckless innovations they were introduc-
ing; the infidel character of their religious sentiments; and the spirit of unbounded
liberty, or rather of lawless licentiousness, which characterised their speculations.’’
Day, Bengal Peasant Life, Folktales of Bengal, Recollections of My School-Days, 472. Ad-
dressing the Muhammadan Educational Conference, Abdul Karim gave expression
to what had become a sort of commonplace: ‘‘Not being grounded in their an-
cestral theology and traditions these men were infected with scepticism; and the
morals of educated Bengalis suffered in consequence. Indeed the Hindu society
of the time presented the appearance of chaos.’’ Karim, Muhammedan Education in
Bengal, 4.
11. Letter, 15 October 1830, Church of Scotland Foreign Mission Papers, ms 7530,
National Library of Scotland.
12. Duff, Missionary Addresses, 88. Duff himself acknowledged the ‘‘service’’ that
Hindu College had rendered his cause when he rhetorically asked, ‘‘Have all the
efforts of the missionaries given a tithe of that shock to the superstitions of the
people which has been given by the Hindu College?’’ New Era of English Language and
English Literature in India, 39.
13. Bryce, The Schoolmaster and the Missionary in India, 8.
14. Bryce, The Schoolmaster and the Missionary in India, 9.
15. See Jordens, ‘‘Reconversion to Hinduism’’; and Oddie, ‘‘Anti-missionary Feel-
ing and Hindu Revivalism in Madras.’’ With this self-assertion also came a new self-
confidence. In 1932 Lajpat Rai could declare that while missionaries would make
some converts, India would always remain Hindu, because it had developed many
defensive ramparts, including the Brahmo Samaj, the Arya Samaj, the Theosophists,
and the Vivekenanda mission. Rai, The Arya Samaj, 308.
16. Keane, A Letter to the Late Honourable J. E. D. Bethune, Esq., 10, 12.
17. Sherring, The History of Protestant Missions in India, 114. The Duke of Marlbor-
ough, inveighing against the exclusion of the Bible from government schools in the
House of Lords, warned that the corrosive effects of secular learning left the native
student ‘‘a man without a creed, and without a faith.’’ Speech of the Duke of Marlbor-
ough upon the Exclusion of the Bible from Government Schools, 12. The indefatigable John
Murdoch, speaking in one of his many avatars as the bringer of light to the natives
(this time as secretary to the Madras branch of the Christian Vernacular Education
Society), warned that ‘‘the natives are in great danger of passing from superstition
to scepticism.’’ ‘‘Papers Relating to Discipline and Moral Training in Schools and
Colleges of India,’’ 64.
18. Report of the Indian Education [Hunter] Commission, vol. 1, 303–7.
19. ‘‘Letter from the Government of India to all Local Governments and Admin-
istrations,’’ Calcutta, 31 December 1887, ‘‘Papers Relating to Discipline and Moral
Training in Schools and Colleges of India,’’ 11, 18.
208 Notes
20. The minutes of the discussions held in Simla are in Home Education, Novem-
ber 1901, 47–61(A), National Archives of India.
21. Indian Educational Policy . . . 1904, para. 25.
22. Chirol, Indian Unrest, 207.
23. Chirol, Indian Unrest, 239.
24. Chirol, Indian Unrest, 240–41.
25. ‘‘Papers Regarding the Educational Conference, Allahabad, February 1911,’’ 86.
26. Report of the Proceedings of a Conference on Moral, Civic and Sanitary Instruction, 2.
27. As was noted by the director general for education in 1910. Education Depart-
ment, September 1911, 74–76(A), 10, National Archives of India.
28. It was observed that these textbooks were often used by schools to provide
reading lessons, rather than for their moral content; see ‘‘Papers Regarding the Edu-
cational Conference, Allahabad, February 1911,’’ 87. And Curzon observed, ‘‘If people
can cram Euclid, there is nothing to prevent them from cramming ethics.’’ Lord Cur-
zon in India, 337. Scepticism was also expressed about the quality of the textbooks;
for instance, J. L. Jenkins, Home Member of the Government of India, commented,
‘‘All the moral text-books I have seen are either dreadfully dull or intolerably mawk-
ish and priggish. To a boy of sound healthy mind they would only afford matter for
scoffing.’’ Education Department, September 1911, 74–76(A), 11, National Archives of
India. An inspector of schools wrote, ‘‘It is a question whether some of the moral
stories now read by school children do not tend to make moral instruction ridicu-
lous.’’ Quoted in Orange, Progress of Education in India, 1902–1907, 81. See also Ghosh,
National Education, 7.
29. Quoted in Kumar, ‘‘Religion and Ritual in Indian Schools,’’ 139.
30. Education Department, September 1911, 74–76(A), National Archives of India.
31. Education Department, September 1911, 74–76(A), National Archives of India.
32. A resolution was drafted on the question of religious and moral education
and sent to the secretary of state in December 1919; the draft and the introductory
comments of the education member are in Education Department, December 1919,
18(A), National Archives of India.
33. ‘‘Papers Relating to Discipline and Moral Training in Schools and Colleges of
India,’’ 107.
34. ‘‘Papers Relating to Discipline and Moral Training in Schools and Colleges of
India,’’ 73.
35. Quoted in Satthianadhan, History of Education in the Madras Presidency, 89.
36. See for instance the convocation address in 1874 of E. C. Bayley, vice-chancellor
of Calcutta University, in University of Calcutta Convocation Addresses, vol. 1; the ad-
dress in 1898 of the lieutenant-governor of Punjab, Sir William Mackworth Young,
to the Punjab University in Thapar, ed., Convocation Addresses of the University of the
Punjab; and the convocation address in 1893 of the chancellor of Allahabad Univer-
sity, Sir Charles Crosthwaite, in Thapar, ed., Convocation Addresses of the Universities of
Allahabad and Punjab.
 Notes 209
37. ‘‘Minute recorded by Kashinath Telang,’’ Report of the Indian Education [Hunter]
Commission, vol. 1, 606–19.
38. Gupta, Addresses on Educational Matters, 3.
39. Calcutta University Commission Report, vol. 12, 60.
40. Calcutta University Commission Report, vol. 12, 65.
41. An Appeal to the British Nation for the Promotion of Education in India, 5, 4.
42. Sen, Letters on Educational Measures to Lord Northbrook, 40. These open letters to
the viceroy of India were first published in the Indian Mirror in 1872.
43. Quoted in Murdoch, India’s Greatest Educational Need, 3.
44. In his estimation, ‘‘The vast majority of the newly-educated classes were con-
demned to live in an agonising mental and moral conflict . . . not a few of them [were
driven] to an openly irreligious and immoral life.’’ Pal, Memories of My Life and Times,
400. Pal was not writing as a propagandist for the Brahmo cause, however. He went
on to argue that Hindu revivalism was another way out of this dilemma, for it al-
lowed Hindus to make their peace with their traditions, reject British critiques of
them, and yet pursue modernizing agendas upon other fronts.
45. Malaviya, The Hindu University of Benares, 29. Similarly, Lala Hansraj (head of
the Arya Samaj’s Dayanand Anglo-Vedic College in Lahore) denounced the ‘‘godless
education of Government Schools and Colleges’’ for cutting educated Hindus off
from their spiritual and moral moorings, consequences only preventable by an edu-
cation which reinforced their religious and spiritual values; cited in Rai, The Arya
Samaj, 283–85.
46. The Hindu University, 9. The movement to establish a Hindu university was
successful. When in 1915 Sir Harcourt Butler, education member of the Government
of India, introduced a bill to establish a Hindu university to the Imperial Legislative
Council, he acknowledged that ten years previously such a bill would not have been
supported by the government. One reason for acting now was the perceived need for
religious instruction. Reflecting upon the colonial government’s newfound enthu-
siasm for instruction even in the tenets of Hinduism, he told another audience, ‘‘I
would far rather see religious instruction conveyed in a faith alien and even hostile
to my own than to see children brought up on non-religious instruction.’’ Butler,
Collection of Speeches, 4–5, 23.
47. Home Education, November 1905, 80–81(A), National Archives of India. The
government responded by assuring the memorialists that it was conscious of the
‘‘supreme importance’’ of the issue, and that it was ‘‘strenuously’’ exerting itself with
the hope that in time ‘‘a progressive elevation of the character and conduct of the
race’’ would become apparent.
48. Home Education, August 1920, 1–3(A), National Archives of India. See also
Ratcliffe, ‘‘The Teaching of Morals and Religion.’’
49. Fuller, The Empire of India, 179.
50. Fuller, The Empire of India, 179.
51. Archer, India and the Future, 240.
210 Notes
52. K.V.A., ‘‘Calcutta University Reform,’’ 10–11.
53. The Pioneer, 10 January 1888, 2.
54. Banerji, ‘‘Discipline,’’ 37.
55. Ghosh, Higher Education in Bengal under British Rule, 161.
56. Response of VD Ghate to questionnaire of Hartog Commission, 29 Sept 1928,
in Hartog Collection, mss Eur E221/406, unpaginated, Indian Office Library and
Records.
57. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 174.
58. Quoted in Godlove, Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief, 40.
59. Harrison, ‘‘Religion’’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment, 2. See also
Asad, Genealogies of Religion; Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough; Byrne,
Natural Religion and the Nature of Religion; Pailin, Attitudes to Other Religions; Needham,
Belief, Language, and Experience; Balagangadhara, ‘‘The Heathen in His Blindness . . .’’;
and Puillon, ‘‘Remarks on the Verb ‘To Believe.’ ’’ Wilfred Cantwell Smith argues that
unlike most other religions Christianity has required a ‘‘belief ’’ in certain things as
evidence of faith. He also traces the etymology of the word ‘‘believe,’’ showing that
‘‘a shift has taken place from the verb’s designating an interpersonal relation to its
naming a theoretical judgment . . . Between believing a person, in the sense of trust-
ing him or her, having faith in him or her . . . and believing a proposition.’’ Faith and
Belief, 118.
60. King, Orientalism and Religion, 40.
61. John Hick, Foreword vii. Jonathan Z. Smith goes further, suggesting that
‘‘man has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of interaction
with them. But man, more precisely western man, has had only the last few centuries
in which to imagine religion . . . Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study.
It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison
and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.’’
Imagining Religion, xi.
62. Marshall, Introduction, The British Dictionary of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury, 43.
63. Marshall, Introduction, The British Dictionary of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Cen-
tury, 20.
64. L. S. S. O’Malley, for instance, writes, ‘‘The higher and the lower forms of
religion still coexist side by side. At one end of the scale, therefore, is the cultured
monotheist or the eclectic pantheist for whom no mysticism is too subtle . . . At the
bottom of the scale is a great multitude of people in a low scale of religious develop-
ment, some of whom have scarcely risen above mere fetishism.’’ Popular Hinduism, 2.
See similarly Henry Whitehead, The Village Gods of South India, 12.
65. For instance, Lawrence Babb, author of an ethnographic study of popular
Hinduism in Central India, finds: ‘‘There is practically nothing to be gained in ques-
tioning Chattisgarhi informants about what they believe, for this is simply not the
 Notes 211
primary context in which religious matters are understood.’’ The Divine Hierarchy, 31.
See similarly Balagangadhara, ‘‘The Heathen in his Blindness . . . ,’’ 16.
66. Muller, Anthropological Religion, 155.
67. Quoted in Jones, ‘‘The Concept of Belief in The Elementary Forms,’’ 55.
68. Nandy, ‘‘A Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods and Goddesses in
South Asia,’’ 126.
69. Fuller, The Camphor Flame, 31. Similarly, Nandy writes, ‘‘the human inferiority
to gods is not absolute; no wide chasm separates the goals and motivations of gods
and humans . . . There is continuity between the divine and the earthly.’’ Nandy, ‘‘A
Report on the Present State of Health of the Gods and Goddesses in South Asia,’’ 130.
70. Luke Scrafton, Reflections on the Government etc of Indostan; and a Short Sketch of
the History of Bengal, from the Year 1739 to 1756 (1761), quoted in Trautmann, Aryans and
British India, 65. O’Malley similarly writes that ‘‘cultured and enlightened’’ Hindus,
for whom the many gods are all faces of one God, sanctioned idolatry as ‘‘permissible
or even expedient for those who are incapable of transcendental thought and require
external aids to worship.’’ Popular Hinduism, 23.
71. Quoted in Freedberg, The Power of Images, 162.
72. Richard Davis marks the difference in the following terms: ‘‘Medieval Chris-
tian images . . . are instrumental and representational. Aquinas and Bonaventure
locate them within a semiotic aesthetics, where the image is seen as conveying a
message separate from the image itself.’’ By contrast, ‘‘Vaisnava and Saiva theologians
locate their holy icons within an aesthetics of presence. As an instantiation of the
godhead, the image is ultimately the message.’’ Lives of Indian Images, 32, 33.
73. On these see among others Davis, Lives of Indian Images, esp. chapter 1; and
the essays in Waghorne and Cutler, eds., Gods of Flesh, Gods of Stone. Such consecra-
tion ceremonies, preparing statues to come to ‘‘life,’’ were common in ancient Egypt,
Babylonia, Sumer, and Assyria; see Freedberg, The Power of Images, 84–87.
74. Eck, Darsan, 38. See also the essays in Waghorne and Cutler, eds., Gods of Flesh,
Gods of Stone.
75. On this see my ‘‘Reason or Reasoning? Clio or Siva?’’
76. Fuller, The Camphor Flame.
77. McDougall, Lamps in the Wind, 79.
78. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 289. In a similar vein Hegel refers
to the ‘‘shocking inconsistency’’ of a religion which has a concept of totality, of a sin-
gular god, but which at the same time particularizes that Oneness into numerous
gods, ‘‘a wild particularity in which there is no system . . . no understandable totality
or systematization, much less a rational one’’ (272).
79. Fuller, for instance, whose study of popular Hinduism I draw upon above,
writes, ‘‘This fluidity—which means that one deity can become many and many
deities can become one—is a supremely important characteristic of Hindu poly-
theism.’’ The Camphor Flame, 30.
212 Notes
80. ‘‘It is at a later stage of social evolution that what we call a natural phenome-
non tends to become the sole content of perception to the exclusion of other ele-
ments, which then assume the aspect of beliefs, and finally appear as superstitions.’’
Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 44–45.
81. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 68.
82. Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, 363.
83. Needham, Belief, Language, and Experience, 183.
84. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, 61.
85. Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt, 60. Extracts from Bourdieu’s original essay are re-
printed in English as ‘‘The Berber House’’ in Douglas, ed., Rules and Meaning.
86. The idea that there is a different logic at work—a ‘‘Hindu’’ way of thinking,
for instance, in which ‘‘inconsistency’’ does not appear as a problem—is one that has
been speculated upon by anthropologists and others. A. K. Ramanujan adapts the
linguistic concept of ‘‘context sensitivity’’ to explain the reasons for Indian inconsis-
tency in ‘‘Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?,’’ 44. In a somewhat similar fashion,
Sheryl Daniel has explained inconsistency in terms of the ‘‘tool box’’ approach of the
Tamil, whose culture, she explains, ‘‘enjoins a certain relativistic and consequently
an inconsistent pattern of choosing among the various options available within the
culture. It legitimizes a ‘‘contextualized’’ approach to decision making and discour-
ages trans-contextual, consistent preferences.’’ Daniel, ‘‘TheTool Box Approach of the
Tamil to the Issues of Moral Responsibility and Human Destiny.’’ Bernard Cohn has
wondered aloud whether the question itself might not be misplaced—whether the
presumption that consistency is the norm and inconsistency something in need of
explanation might simply reflect a modern prejudice. Cohn, ‘‘The Pasts of an Indian
Village,’’ An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, 98.
87. See for instance Mohanty, Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought, esp. 198.
88. On this see Collins, Selfless Persons.
89. Marriot, ‘‘Hindu Transactions,’’ 111. See also Strathern, The Gender of the Gift.
90. Marriot, ‘‘Hindu Transactions,’’ 109–10.
91. Thus Valentine Daniel titles his study Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way.
92. Quoted in Winch, The Idea of a Social Science.
93. Here I am of course drawing upon Ricoeur’s well-known characterization of
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as masters of a ‘‘hermeneutics of suspicion.’’ See Freud
and Philosophy.
94. Singer’s study is a product of a time when ‘‘tradition’’ and ‘‘modernity’’ were
the two poles around which many studies of the nonwestern world were organized,
and his argument seeks to problematize the antithetical nature of these two organiz-
ing categories by showing that the ‘‘transition’’ from one to another is not a complete
effacement of tradition by modernity. As he puts it, his study is an argument against
‘‘the tendency to misinterpret this relationship as a temporal succession of mutually
incompatible types of society.’’ Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 365.
95. Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 343.
 Notes 213
96. Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 321.
97. Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 348.
98. Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 385.
99. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 22; the discussion of kk is from 218–23.
100. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 220.
101. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 221.
102. Žižek, ‘‘Is There a Cause of the Subject?,’’ 102.
103. See for instance Sarkar, ‘‘ ‘Kaliyuga,’ ‘Chakri’ and ‘Bhakti.’ ’’

Chapter 3: Which Past? Whose History?

1. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 193.
2. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 195.
3. For discussions of the early historical writings by Indians see Chatterjee, The
Nation and Its Fragments, chapters 4–5; Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness, chapter 4;
Nandy, The Intimate Enemy; Guha, Dominance without Hegemony; Mallick, ‘‘Modern
Historical Writing in Bengali’’; and Majumdar, ‘‘Nationalist Historians.’’ There was
at least one ‘‘history’’ written in this period in the ‘‘Puranic’’ mode: MrityunjayVidya-
lankar’s Rajabali (1808), which spans a period from the kings of the Mahabharata to
early colonial times.
4. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, 259.
5. ‘‘An Introduction to the Study of the Human Sciences,’’ Dilthey, Selected Writ-
ings, 159.
6. ‘‘Understanding ranges from the apprehension of scientific patter to under-
standing Hamlet or the Critique of Pure Reason. The same human spirit speaks to us
from stone, marble, musical compositions, gestures, words and writings, from ac-
tions, economic arrangements and constitutions, and has to be interpreted.’’ ‘‘The
Development of Hermeneutics,’’ Dilthey, Selected Writings, 248.
7. ‘‘The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences,’’ Dilthey,
Selected Writings, 221.
8. ‘‘An Introduction to the Study of the Human Sciences,’’ Dilthey, Selected Writ-
ings, 162.
9. ‘‘The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences,’’ Dilthey,
Selected Writings, 207.
10. ‘‘Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason,’’ Dilthey, Selected Writings, 207.
11. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 204.
12. ‘‘The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Sciences,’’ Dilthey,
Selected Writings, 193. Thus Dilthey ‘‘demotes’’ art, religion, and philosophy to the
position of objective mind rather than absolute mind.
13. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 204.
14. Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism, 181. Or as Gadamer
puts it, ‘‘Dilthey ultimately conceives the investigation of the historical past as a de-
214 Notes
ciphering and not as an historical experience . . . epistemological Cartesianism domi-
nated . . . so that in Dilthey the historicity of historical experience did not become a
truly determining element.’’ Truth and Method, 213.
15. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 339.
16. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 245.
17. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 245.
18. Gadamer writes, ‘‘Even the most genuine and solid tradition does not per-
sist by nature because of the inertia of what once existed. It needs to be affirmed,
embraced, cultivated. It is, essentially, preservation . . . But preservation is an act of
reason, though an inconspicuous one . . . preservation is as much a freely-chosen
action as revolution and renewal.’’ Truth and Method, 250.
19. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 246.
20. Indeed, it is precisely through an encounter with an object from the past that
our prejudices can be ‘‘stimulated’’ and thus recognized as prejudices that have to be
reexamined afresh. Truth and Method, 266.
21. Warnke, Gadamer, 103.
22. Ricoeur, ‘‘The Task of Hermeneutics,’’ 150. Or as Gadamer himself puts it,
‘‘only the vivid thematization of human existence as ‘being-in-the-world’ discloses
the full implications of Verstehen as an existential possibility and structure.’’ ‘‘The
Problem of Historical Consciousness,’’ 84.
23. Heidegger, ‘‘Annotations,’’ quoted in Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem
of Historical Meaning, 143.
24. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 232.
25. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 264.
26. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 261.
27. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 268.
28. Palmer, ed. and trans., Gadamer in Conversation, 46.
29. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 80.
30. Heidegger, Being and Time, s72 [pp. 427–28].
31. Heidegger, Being and Time, s74 [p. 434].
32. Heidegger, Being and Time, s74 [p. 438].
33. Heidegger writes, ‘‘I can very well admit that if, in a certain way, one takes
the analysis of Dasein in Being and Time as an investigation of people, and then asks
the question how, on the basis of this understanding of people, it might be possible
to understand culture and the realms of culture; that when one asks this question
in such a way, it is impossible to say something from what is given here.’’ Quoted in
Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning, 225 n. 29.
34. Ricoeur, ‘‘The Task of Hermeneutics,’’ 156.
35. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 79. See similarly Carr, Time, Narrative and
History.
36. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 241.
37. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 247.
 Notes 215
38. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, 248.
39. Heidegger, Being and Time, esp. s76 [pp. 446–47]. On this see also Hoy, ‘‘History,
Historicity, and Historiography in Being and Time,’’ 345–46.
40. Veyne, Writing History, 80.
41. Veyne, Writing History, 72. See also Michael Oakeshott, ‘‘Three Essays on His-
tory,’’ On History and Other Essays.
42. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 258.
43. Constantine Fasolt provides an admirably lucid description of the ‘‘basic prin-
ciples’’ that the practice of history encodes: ‘‘That the past is gone; that it can none-
theless be turned into an object of scholarly examination by means of evidence; that
the evidence was produced by some specific agent at some specific time and place
for a specific purpose; that scholarly examination can take advantage of the agent’s
responsibility for the evidence to reconstruct its meaning; that evidence must there-
fore be interpreted in the context of its time and place; and above all, that things do
have a time and place that may be called their own.’’ The Limits of History, 222.
44. Koselleck, Futures Past, 200.
45. On which see Baker, ‘‘Enlightenment and the Institution of Society’’; Polanyi,
The Great Transformation, esp. chapter 10; and Joyce, ed., The Social in Question.
46. Koselleck, Futures Past, 296.
47. Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future,’’ The Fiery
Brook, 177 [para./aphorism 1].
48. James Clifford, ‘‘On Ethnographic Authority,’’ The Predicament of Culture, 39–
40. See also Asad, ‘‘The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthro-
pology,’’ 155.
49. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 26.
50. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, 55.
51. In Oakeshott’s elegant formulation, ‘‘a record never lies; even if it does not
mean what it says it may be made to say what it means.’’ ‘‘Three Essays on History,’’
On History and Other Essays, 52.
52. Weber, ‘‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,’’ 81. Earlier in the same
essay Weber makes clear that what he defines as the cultural sciences encompass
what are traditionally defined as social sciences (67).
53. Weber, ‘‘Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,’’ 57.
54. Kolb, The Critique of Pure Modernity, 9–10.
55. From The Will to Power, quoted in Heidegger, Nietzsche, 81.
56. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘The Age of the World Picture,’’ 133.
57. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 12.
58. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 14.
59. Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 262.
60. Certeau, The Writing of History, 138. The two paragraphs quoted here appear in
the reverse order in the original, but the emphasis is in the original.
61. Certeau, The Writing of History, 138.
216 Notes
62. Certeau, The Writing of History, 36.
63. Certeau, The Writing of History, 36.
64. This book was published under Conring’s name, possibly by one of his stu-
dents (it is the text of a ‘‘dissertation’’ submitted by one of Conring’s students to the
University of Helmstedt, in 1841), a practice not unusual at the time; Conring dis-
owned the work, but Fasolt suggests that the ideas in it are Conring’s, for they are a
reprise of a work he had written earlier.
65. Fasolt, The Limits of History, 199.
66. Fasolt, The Limits of History, 218.
67. Fasolt, The Limits of History, 223. In Fasolt’s presentation this form of under-
standing was promoted by the Renaissance humanists for a particular purpose: to
invalidate the claims to authority of the Holy Roman Emperor and the church, and
thereby to secure and legitimate the claims of the emergent sovereign, territorial
states. What was a novel mode of argumentation congealed into common sense once
that mode of reasoning and the political cause that it served had triumphed: ‘‘His-
tory was no longer recognized as the tool that a particular party had deployed in
order to advance its cause. History was thought to be no tool at all but an impartial
form of understanding, capable of encompassing all forms of humanity . . . History
seemed no longer humanist but human’’ (27).
68. Arguably he overstates this incommensurability—see the interesting review
essay by Hunter, ‘‘The State of History and the Empire of Metaphysics.’’
69. Fasolt, The Limits of History, 213.
70. As Walter Mignolo observes, ‘‘The understanding of ‘our’ tradition, in which
the foundation of philosophical discursive hermeneutics rests, implies that the tra-
dition to be understood and the understanding subject are one and the same.’’ The
Darker Side of the Renaissance, 11. This presumption does not obtain in the colonies,
and Mignolo, who labels it a ‘‘monotopic’’ understanding of hermeneutics, goes on
to advocate and practice ‘‘plurotopic hermeneutics.’’
71. For a brief but illuminating comment on this see Guha, ‘‘The Authority of
Vernacular Pasts.’’
72. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 203.
73. In much the same way, the free, equal, and autonomous individual presumed
by liberalism is a historical product, not a ‘‘natural’’ premise. But this does not dis-
qualify this premise; to posit and presume such an individual may be a useful way
of analyzing liberal societies, and of engaging in debates within them.
74. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,’’
Margins of Philosophy.

Chapter 4: Governmentality and Identity

1. Hacking, ‘‘Making Up People,’’ 223.
2. Hacking, ‘‘Making Up People,’’ 228.
 Notes 217
3. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 169. See also his ‘‘Nationalism, Identity, and
the Logic of Seriality’’ in The Specter of Comparisons.
4. Bernard Cohn, ‘‘The Census, Social Structure and Subjectification in South
Asia,’’ An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays.
5. On this see the essays in Barrier, ed., The Census in British India; Pandey, The Con-
struction of Communalism in Colonial North India; Bernard Cohn, ‘‘Notes on the History
of the Study of Indian Society and Culture’’ and ‘‘The Census, Social Structure and
Objectification in South Asia,’’ both in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other
Essays; Smith, ‘‘Rule-by-Records and Rule-by-Reports’’; Pant, ‘‘The Cognitive Status
of Caste in Colonial Ethnography’’; Dirks, Castes of Mind; Nigam, ‘‘Disciplining and
Policing the ‘Criminals by Birth.’ ’’ Accounts which contest or seek to radically qualify
this proposition include Peabody, ‘‘Cents, Sense, Census’’; and Guha, ‘‘The Politics of
Identity and Enumeration in India.’’
6. Appadurai, ‘‘Number in the Colonial Imagination,’’ 335.
7. Appadurai, ‘‘Number in the Colonial Imagination,’’ 335.
8. General Report on Public Instruction in Bengal, 1851–52, xliv. See also General Report
on Public Instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency for 1844–45, appendix 5.
9. W. S. Seton-Karr in University of Calcutta Convocation Addresses, vol. 1, 18.
10. Hunter is here quoting E. C. Bayley, secretary to the government of India.
Hunter, The Indian Musalmans, 112.
11. A resolution issued by Governor-General Hardinge in October 1844 declared
that preference should be given in government employment to those who had been
educated in institutions established by the government. However, it was to be many
years before western education in fact became necessary for government employ,
occasioning persistent complaint by those who had urged the resolution—see for ex-
ample Kerr, A Review of Public Instruction in the Bengal Presidency from 1835 to 1851, pt I,
chapter xv.
12. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans, 132.
13. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans, 137. What is implicit here—the suggestion that
the ‘‘conservatism’’ of Muslims, responsible for their tardy embrace of western edu-
cation, nonetheless reflected to their credit—was sometimes made explicit. A senior
civil servant and formerdirectorof public instruction in Bengal declared that Muslim
students were much superior in character to Hindus, precisely because their parents
insisted that the education of their sons include religious instruction.This insistence
had proved a barrier to Muslim participation in western education, and Muslims
had suffered ‘‘in that they have not secured the loaves and fishes’’ which followed
upon western education; but ‘‘their staunchness has been worthy of the greatest ad-
miration.’’ Note by A. Earle, 28 August 1910, Education Department 74–76(A), 1911,
National Archives of India.
14. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans, 124–25.
15. In fact the evolution of government policy and the publication of Hunter’s
book were not entirely unconnected. Viceroy Mayo had asked Hunter to write a book
218 Notes
on the question of whether Muslims were likely to rebel against British rule, and
the book was written at the same time that government policy on the issue was
evolving—see Hardy, The Muslims of British India, 85, 88.
16. Quoted in Hunter, A Life of the Earl of Mayo, 307.
17. Report of the Indian Education [Hunter] Commission, vol. 1, 505.
18. In his review of Hunter’s The Indian Musalmans, reprinted in abridged form in
Mohammad, ed., Writings and Speeches of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, 65–82.
19. ‘‘Correspondence on the Subject of the Education of the Muhammadan Com-
munity in British India and Their Employment in the Public Service Generally,’’
237, 239.
20. Huque, History and Problems of Moslem Education in Bengal, 2–3.
21. Huque, History and Problems of Moslem Education in Bengal, 25, 26.
22. ‘‘Memorial of the Central National Muhammadan Association,’’ 2.
23. For instance, the claim that Muslims in the Bombay presidency were more
likely to attend school if Urdu was the language of instruction was repeatedly dis-
puted—see Report of the Director of Public Instruction in the Bombay Presidency for the Year
1872–73, appendixes A3–A4; The Problem of Urdu Teaching in the Bombay Presidency; and
Education Department, July 1917, 12–13(A), National Archives of India.
24. ‘‘Report of the Members of the Select Committee for the Better Diffusion and
Advancement of Learning among the Muhammadans of India,’’ Muhammad, ed.,
The Aligarh Movement, 340–43. This report is discussed at some length in Lelyveld, Ali-
garh’s First Generation, esp. 121–30, and also Malik, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Muslim
Modernization in India and Pakistan, 126–36.
25. Report of the Committee Appointed by the Bengal Government to Consider Questions
Connected with Muhammadan Education, 3. The authorities in the princely state of
Travancore also concluded that ‘‘the question of the provision of religious educa-
tion had stood in the way of an extension of education for Muslims.’’ Report of the
Travancore Education Reforms Committee, 283.
26. Government of Bengal Resolution, 3 August 1916, reprinted in Muslim Educa-
tion, with Special Reference to the Madrasa-i-Azam, 9. A few years later the Calcutta Uni-
versity Commission drew a similar conclusion: Calcutta University Commission Report,
vol. 1, 37.
27. Anderson, Progress of Education in India, 1927–32, vol. 1, 242.
28. Report of the Indian Education [Hunter] Commission, vol. 1, 483.
29. H. N. B. Erskine, commissioner for Sind, declared, ‘‘so far as Sind is con-
cerned . . . Mahomedans have no ground for complaining that they do not get a fair
share of valuable appointments.’’ ‘‘Correspondence on the Subject of the Education
of the Muhammadan Community in British India and Their Employment in the
Public Service Generally,’’ 264.
30. ‘‘Correspondence on the Subject of the Education of the Muhammadan Com-
munity in British India and Their Employment in the Public Service Generally,’’
264, 280.
 Notes 219
31. ‘‘Correspondence on the Subject of the Education of the Muhammadan Com-
munity in British India and Their Employment in the Public Service Generally,’’ 373.
32. ‘‘Report of the Members of the Select Committee for the Better Diffusion and
Advancement of Learning among the Muhammadans of India.’’
33. Mahmood, A Historyof English Education in India, iv.The eighth annual meeting
of the Muhammadan Educational Conference, held in 1893 after some two decades
of government efforts to address the problem, passed a resolution declaring: ‘‘The
Conference is of the opinion that whatever has been done up to this time for the
education and instruction of the Mussalmans is entirely insufficient . . . As long as
united exertions are not made to impart to them the highest education and culture,
we must despair of the advancement of the Mussalmans, either in education or in
their general condition.’’ Report by the Bombay Gazette on the Eighth Muhammadan
Educational Conference, 1893, reprinted in Muhammad, ed., The Aligarh Movement,
vol. 3, 837.
34. For instance, a circular from the Government of India to local governments,
dated 3 April 1913, observed that while there had been considerable improvement in
the proportion of Muslims enrolled at the lower rungs of the educational ladder,
they continued to be underrepresented at the higher rungs. The circular attributed
this fact to the poverty of the community, the special linguistic needs of Muslims,
the absence of religious instruction in government high schools and colleges, and
the underrepresentation of Muslims on educational bodies. Provincial governments
were asked to appoint committees to enquire into the problem and make recommen-
dations for alleviating it. Education Department, May 1913, 106(3), National Archives
of India.
35. These included scholarships specifically for Muslim students, separate insti-
tutions for Muslims (such as Islamia colleges and secondary schools, and maktabs
and madrassas adapted to combine ‘‘traditional’’ and western learning), the appoint-
ment of special inspectors in education departments to oversee and encourage Mus-
lim education, a requirement that educational appointments include a minimum
number of Muslims, and after 1911 a relaxation of the rule that no religious instruc-
tion should take place in government schools. For a more complete list see Basu, The
Growth of Education and Political Development in India, 156–61.
36. Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation, 86.
37. A senior educational official was to echo the Hunter Commission some twenty
years after its report: ‘‘the most powerful factors which have up to now held them
back will probably be found in their pride of race, memory of by-gone superiority,
religious fears, a deep-rooted attachment to the religion of Islam, and the question
of language . . . When the control of the country passed from the Muhammadan
conquerors to the British . . . [Muslims] sat apart, wrapped in the memory of their
traditions and in the contemplation of their ancient literature and bygone systems
of science.’’ H. Sharp, quoted in Orange, Progress of Education in India, 1902–1907, 295.
See also the Calcutta University Commission Report, vol. 1, chapter 6.
220 Notes
38. Ronaldshay, India, 235; Sen, History of Elementary Education in India.
39. For instance, in the Madras census of 1871 the tables on education and literacy
lumped together Hindus, Jains, and Christians, to allow a comparison of how Mus-
lims were faring vis-à-vis ‘‘the rest.’’ Conlon, ‘‘The Census of India as a Source for the
Historical Study of Religion and Caste,’’ 106.
40. Quoted in Mahmood, History of English Education, 175.
41. ‘‘The Mahomedan Educational Congress: Aims and Objectives,’’ reprinted in
Muhammad, ed., The Aligarh Movement, vol. 3, 767–69.
42. Beck reported on the results of this to the 1893 session of the conference; this
‘‘Report of the Muhammadan Educational Census’’ is reprinted in Muhammad, ed.,
The Aligarh Movement, vol. 3, 842–45.
43. See for instance Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life.
44. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, esp. 76, 89.
45. Hunter, Rethinking the School, 45.
46. For an interesting study of the relation between ‘‘traditional’’ education and
Islam in a very different setting see Eickelman, Knowledge and Power in Morocco.
47. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 138, 139.
48. Foucault, ‘‘Governmentality,’’ 101.
49. Barry, Osborne, and Rose, Introduction, Foucault and Political Reason, 8.
50. Hunter, Culture and Government, 38.
51. Hunter, Culture and Government, 38.
52. Hunter, Culture and Government, 39.
53. Hunter, Culture and Government, 266.
54. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 19–20.
55. See for instance Prakash, Another Reason, chapter 5, and Chatterjee, The Nation
and Its Fragments, chapter 2.
56. Hindess, ‘‘The Liberal Government of Unfreedom,’’ 101.
57. Hindess, ‘‘The Liberal Government of Unfreedom,’’ 101.
58. Report dated 8 September 1824 in Parulekar, ed., Survey of Indigenous Education
in the Province of Bombay, 9, 7.
59. From a report dated June 1853 in ‘‘Correspondence Relating to Education in
the Lower Provinces of Bengal,’’ 9–10.
60. A debate that continues to the present—Rafiuddin Ahmed, for instance, ac-
cepts the claim that Muslims were educationally backward in his The Bengal Muslims,
132–40. By contrast, Aparna Basu argues that Muslim educational backwardness was
a ‘‘myth’’; a phenomenon true principally for Bengal was illegitimately generalized
because it ‘‘suited the Muslims as well as the government after the 1870s.’’ The Growth
of Education and Political Development in India, 155. For a recent, careful assessment of
the evidence see Murshid, The Sacred and the Secular, 54–88.
61. Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation, 7.
62. Kaviraj, ‘‘The Imaginary Institution of India,’’ 26.
63. See for instance Lelyveld’s finely drawn picture of Sayyid Khan’s life, and the
 Notes 221
life of north Indian ashraf more generally, in Aligarh’s First Generation, chapter 2. See
also Russell and Islam, Ghalib, which provides a richly textured account of the social
and cultural mileu of the great nineteenth-century poet.
64. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, 142.
65. Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation, 317–18.

Chapter 5: Gender and the Nation

1. Report of the Indian Education [Hunter] Commission, vol. 1, 530.
2. Report of the Indian Education [Hunter] Commission, vol. 1, 530.
3. Report of the National Committee on Women’s Education, 17.
4. Orange, Progress of Education in India, 1902–1907, 254.
5. Orange, Progress of Education in India, 1902–1907, 255.
6. Anderson, Progress of Education in India, 1927–32, vol. 1, 172; Report of the [Piggot]
Committee on Primary Education, 23.
7. Indian Educational Policy . . . 1913, section 16 [p. 15].
8. On which see my ‘‘Rewriting Histories of Nationalism.’’
9. I address the ways a modernizing nationalism like Nehru’s sought to construct
the ‘‘unity of India’’—as well as the difficulties it encountered—in ‘‘Nationalism,
National Identity and ‘History.’ ’’ On the charged imagery of India as Mother see
Bagchi, ‘‘Representing Nationalism.’’
10. For accounts of Naoroji’s position and its implications see Ganguli, Dadabhai
Naoroji and the Drain Theory, and Chandra, The Rise and Growth of Economic National-
ism in India. Sudhir Chandra has shown that ‘‘economic nationalism’’ is too narrow a
description of this strand of nationalism in ‘‘The Cultural Component of Economic
Nationalism.’’
11. Nehru would write, for instance, ‘‘The British take credit for having first
opened India’s window to the West and brought her . . . Western industrialization
and science. But having done so they throttled the further industrial growth of the
country . . . They prevented our industrial growth and thus delayed our political
growth, and preserved all the out-of-date feudal and other relics they could find in
the country.’’ Towards Freedom, 276.
12. Inden, Imagining India, 45.
13. Mill, The History of British India, vol. 1, 280, 281. John Millar had argued that as
societies progressed ‘‘from ignorance to knowledge, and from rude to civilized man-
ners,’’ the position of women improved accordingly, from being virtual slaves of men
to being their ‘‘friends and companions.’’ Millar’s contrasts were not, however, orga-
nized around an East-West axis: his examples of societies where the lot of women
was a degraded one were drawn principally from Greece, Rome, and Africa. See The
Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, chapter 1.
14. See Ramusack, ‘‘Cultural Missonaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies’’;
Jayawardena, The White Woman’s Other Burden; and Burton, Burdens of History.
222 Notes
15. For some further examples see Forbes, Women in Modern India, 13–14.
16. Banerjea, A Prize Essay on Native Female Education, 41–42.
17. Reproduced as appendix K to General Report on Public Instruction in the Bengal
Presidency for 1842–43, xcvi.
18. Mittra, ‘‘A Few Desultory Remarks,’’ 294.
19. Chakravarti, ‘‘Whatever Happened to theVedic Dasi?,’’ 46.This is an important
essay in a collection of essays (Sangari and Vaid, eds., Recasting Women) which have
shaped much of the subsequent writing on the woman question in colonial India.
20. Quoted in Tharu, ‘‘Tracing Savitri’s Pedigree,’’ 259.
21. Besant, Wake Up, India, 54.
22. Banerji, The Ideal of Swaraj in Education and Government, 29.
23. Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, 120.
24. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 6.
25. Quoted in Raman, Getting Girls to School, 170.
26. Dutt, A Woman of India, 48.
27. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 121.
28. Banerji, ‘‘Attired in Virtue,’’ 71.
29. On missionary efforts in Bengal see Laird, Missionaries and Education in Bengal,
chapter 5; and Bagal, Women’s Education in Eastern India.
30. Letter from Government of India to the Government of Bengal in Richey, ed.,
Selections from the Educational Records, 58–60. The Despatch of 1854 finally allowed for
some public funding of girl’s schools.
31. Calcutta University Commission Report, vol. 2, 1–2.
32. Report of the Indian Education [Hunter] Commission, vol. 1, 542.
33. Report of the Indian Education [Hunter] Commission, vol. 1, 521.
34. Women’s autobiographies sometimes tell of strong opposition from older
women in the family, even where the men were keen to educate their wives; see
Ghosh, ‘‘ ‘Birds in a Cage,’ ’’ 88.
35. Perhaps the first pamphlet urging female education was Gourmohan Vidya-
lanker’s Bengali text Strisiksha bidhayak (1822), which cited precedents from ancient
times to argue that female education was not foreign to the Hindu tradition, and
suggested that its benefits included a mother’s being able to instruct her children,
and a wife’s being able to better manage household accounts and correspond with
an absent husband; see Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 62–64. This
pamphlet was soon translated into Hindi: there is a Hindi (khari boli) version in the
British Library (Strisikshavidhayaka) dated 1823, along with subsequent Hindi versions.
36. In western India the circles around the reformist Prarthana Samaj, for in-
stance, all sought to educate their child wives; and in Bengal, small but growing
numbers of bhadralok similarly began to educate their child wives from the 1840s.
See O’Hanlon, Introduction, 15; Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 120;
and Murshid, Reluctant Debutante, 36–40.There were of course exceptions, such as the
 Notes 223
remarkable Rashsundari Debi, who secretly taught herself how to read and later to
write, and who went on to write the first autobiography in Bengali; see Sarkar, Words
to Win.
37. See Forbes, ‘‘In Search of the ‘Pure Heathen’ ’’; and Chakraborty, Condition of
Bengali Women around the 2nd Half of the 19th Century, chapters 3 and 4.
38. Borthwick writes that ‘‘by 1900 attending a public school had become an ac-
cepted part of a [middle-class or bhadralok] girl’s life’’; The Changing Role of Women in
Bengal, 108. Gail Minault finds that by the beginning of the twentieth century the
same was true for Muslim girls of the respectable classes; Secluded Scholars, 215.
39. There is a growing literature which explores and draws on these women’s
magazines, including Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal; Banerji,
‘‘Fashioning a Self ’’; Shukla, ‘‘Cultivating Minds’’; Talwar, ‘‘Women’s Journals in
Hindi’’; Ramakrishna, ‘‘Women’s Journals in Andhra during the Nineteenth Cen-
tury’’; and Minault, Secluded Scholars, chapter 3.
40. For a study focused on two of these ‘‘advice for women’’ texts see Walsh, ‘‘The
Virtuous Wife and the Well-Ordered Home.’’
41. The claim that women had their views disregarded because they were unedu-
cated was a common one.The male author of a work addressed to women, advocating
female education, writes, ‘‘my dear sisters . . . What disrespect and unhappiness you
have had to suffer because of your ignorance! Wewomen receive no respect.’’ Vankelal,
Nari Sudasha Pravartak, pt 4, p. 5.
42. [Pannalala of Sujangarh,] Vanitabodhini; the author’s name does not appear on
the pamphlet but is identified in the catalogue of the British Library, where this item
was consulted.
43. Reproduced in Sharma and Sharma, eds., Women [sic] Education in British India,
80, 81–82.
44. Quoted in Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 129.
45. Quoted in Karlekar, Voices from Within, 96. As Karlekar notes and documents,
educated women ‘‘were active agents in the construction of the new femininity’’ (68).
46. Quoted in Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 116. See also Cha-
krabarti, ‘‘Changing Notions of Conjugal Relations in Nineteenth Century Bengal.’’
47. For a small number of élite men, having a wife who could take part in public
society, such as by hosting her husband’s British superiors, was a career asset; in 1901
one of the leading women’s magazines in Bengal published a series of articles on the
lives of (European) women who had helped their husband’s careers. See Borthwick,
The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 122–24.
48. During this trip he appealed to Englishwomen to come out to India and pro-
vide their Indian sisters with an education ‘‘calculated to make Indian women good
wives, mothers, sisters and daughters’’; quoted in Karlekar, Voices from Within, 84.
49. Basu, The Introduction of English and its Effects on Bengalee Society, 14–15.
50. Besant, Wake Up, India, 228.
224 Notes
51. The essay is reproduced in the appendix to the Report of the [Bombay] Board of
Education from January 1 1850, to April 30, 1851, 267.
52. Quoted in Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 65.
53. Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 184.
54. See Karlekar, Voices from Within, chapter 1; and Minault, ‘‘Other Voices, Other
Rooms.’’
55. On which see Sumanta Banerjee’s essay ‘‘Marginalization of Women’s Popular
Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal.’’
56. Minault, Secluded Scholars, 55. See similarly Amin, The World of Muslim Women
in Colonial Bengal, 210.
57. Especially in the ranks of the Brahmo Samaj—see Karlekar, ‘‘Kadambani and
the Bhadralok.’’
58. Dayal, Female Education, 4.
59. Over and above the difference already noted—namely, that the champions of
female education were at great pains to insist that the educated woman would not
only be a better wife but also a better daughter-in-law, and thus that this new femi-
ninity would not in any way undermine the joint family. For example, see Walsh,
‘‘The Virtuous Wife and the Well-Ordered Home,’’ and for an important discussion
see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 224–32.
60. Haridas Goswamy, headmaster of East India Railway High School, Asanol, in
Calcutta University Commission Report, vol. 12, 426.
61. Besant, Wake Up, India, 219.
62. Besant, Wake Up, India, 219.
63. Quoted in Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation, 265.
64. See Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 121–24.
65. Though of course it also emanated from these quarters: a self-described ‘‘old
man’’ expressing ‘‘the views of the old section of the Brahmin community’’ wrote,
‘‘If our females also betake themselves to the habit of taking early morning tea or
coffee with bread and butter, of spending the morning in reading English books and
newspapers, the afternoon in attending to games, lectures, clubs, and the evening
in visits to friends and drives or walks for fresh air and exercise, then adieu to the
peace and economy of the house and the comfort and solvency of the household.’’
Anuntharow, Female Education, 22c.
66. Quoted in Gupta, ‘‘Portrayal of Women in Premchand’s Stories.’’ See also Pan-
dey, ‘‘How Equal?’’
67. Rabindra Mohan Datta in Calcutta University Commission Report, vol. 12, 422.
68. Datta, What English Education Has Made of Us, 58, 62.
69. Bhatt, ‘‘Striyan,’’ 25.
70. Sanat Kumar Roy Choudhuri in Report of the All-India Educational Conference, 12.
71. Cited in Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 253–54 (Tandon made this remark
in 1916).
 Notes 225
72. These other areas were never entirely left to be addressed in the future. Part
of the significance of Gandhism is precisely Gandhi’s insistence that successful re-
form of social evils was the moral and political precondition for Independence, and
hence his campaigns against untouchability and for ‘‘constructive programmes’’ of
village reform. However, while the nationalist leadership deferred to Gandhi’s moral
authority on such issues, the dominant strand of nationalism saw these as matters
which could only be effectively addressed through state action, presupposing the
nationalist seizure of state power.
73. Francesca Orsini notes: ‘‘The contrast between the large number of articles in
favour of women’s education . . . and the small number of pupils shows that girls’
education was far from being an accepted or widespread practice.’’ Orsini, The Hindi
Public Sphere, 254.
74. Mayo, Slaves of the Gods, 211–12.
75. Quoted in Editor’s Introduction to Mayo, Selections from Mother India, 25.
76. On this see Singer, When a Great Tradition Modernizes, 11–38; Rosenthal, ‘‘Mother
India Thirty Years Later’’; and William Emilsen, ‘‘Gandhi and Mayo’s Mother India,’’
an article useful for information but painfully poor in analysis.
77. These are listed in Harry Field’s After Mother India, 10–11. Some additional book-
length responses are listed in Sinha, Editor’s Introduction, 34, 43.
78. World-Citizen, Sister India, 104. The author describes Mayo as ‘‘an old maiden
of 49, [who] has all along, been absorbed in the attempt to understand the mystery
of sex. If she was a married lady, she would have easily understood what the mystery
was’’ (103–4). Natarajan described Mayo as ‘‘a shameless woman, herself too obviously
suffering from the sex-complex’’; Miss Mayo’s Mother India, 80.
79. And Mayo did in fact receive active, though covert, support and guidance from
British officialdom, a fact widely suspected at the time, denied by Mayo and the colo-
nial authorities, but since definitively proved through the researches of Manoranjan
Jha in his Katherine Mayo and India.
80. See Field, After Mother India, 9.
81. See Mayo, Volume Two, 198–99.
82. See Mayo, Volume Two, 200.
83. Sinha, Editor’s Introduction, 36–39.
84. Sinha, Editor’s Introduction, 33.
85. This is some seven pages in length; all references in the following discussion
are from this introduction to Mother India (NewYork: Greenwood, 1969),without page
reference. All other references to Mother India give the page reference in brackets in
the text.
86. In his famous response, ‘‘Drain Inspector’s Report.’’
87. What little progress had occurred was the result of the efforts of the British
government and dedicated missionaries, and of Indian converts to Christianity (fre-
quently of the despised low castes), who provided the vast majority of teachers at
226 Notes
female schools. The chapter concludes: ‘‘one beholds a curious spectacle: the daugh-
ters of rich landlords; of haughty Brahman plutocrats; of militant nationalist poli-
ticians, ferocious denouncers of the white man and all his works, fed and lodged by
the dimes and sixpences of dear old ladies in Illinois and Derbyshire, and taught the
a-b-c of responsible living by despised Christians and outcaste apostates’’ (140–41).
88. Most notably Kanhaya Lal Gauba’s Uncle Sham (reviewed by the New Yorker as
‘‘the best comic volume of the year’’), written, according to the author, so that ‘‘the
truth about American life be made known as fearlessly and as fully as Miss Mayo has
made known what she only believed to be the truth about India’’ (ix). See also Iyer,
Father India.
89. Gandhi, ‘‘Drain Inspector’s Report,’’ 310–11. Gandhi even went so far as to de-
clare that the agitation against her book was ‘‘in danger of being overdone’’ (311).
90. Sinha, Editor’s Introduction.
91. ‘‘What the earlier abolition of sati represented for the project of a colonialist
modernity, the Child Marriage Restraint Act now represented for the project of a
nationalist modernity in late colonial India,’’ Mrinalini Sinha concludes. For ‘‘If the
abolishing of sati allowed the colonial state to stake the claims of British colonial-
ism as the modernizers of indigenous patriarchy in India, then the Child Marriage
Restraint Act of 1929 wrested that claim away from colonialism for modern Indian
nationalism.’’ ‘‘The Lineage of the ‘Indian’ Modern,’’ 207.
92. Sargent, Progress of Education in India, 1932–37, vol. 1, 158. ‘‘Wastage rates,’’ as
the dropout rate between grades was termed, were in general extraordinarily high:
the corresponding figure for boys was 27.7 percent (for statistical tables on wastage
rates in boys’ education see 131). A detailed survey of an educational district in the
United Provinces found that only 4 percent of girls enrolled continued to complete
the fourth grade. Chaturvedi, An Educational Survey of a District, 213. By the eve of In-
dependence wastage rates had improved but continued to be extremely high: only 27
percent of girls and 39 percent of boys who enrolled in class 1 (first grade) continued
to class 4 (fourth grade). Sargent, Progress of Education in India, 1937–47, vol. 1, table 5
[p. 61].
93. Sargent, Progress of Education in India, 1937–47, vol. 1, table 18 [p. 89]. If one
includes middle schools, the (total) figure for girls enrolled in secondary education
becomes 600,000. Report of the National Committee on Women’s Education, 26.
94. See for instance Anderson, Progress of Education in India, 1927–32, vol. 1, 170, 173;
Sargent, Progress of Education in India, 1932–37, vol. 1, 150ff.
95. Anderson, Progress of Education in India, 1927–32, vol. 1, 165.
96. Sargent, Progress of Education in India, 1932–37, vol. 1, 154; Bureau of Education,
Education in India in 1935–36, 56.
97. Anderson, Progress of Education in India, 1927–32, vol. 1, 170.
98. Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 259–60.
99. Sinha, Editor’s Introduction, 38.
 Notes 227

Chapter 6: Vernacular Modernity

1. For a socioeconomic profile of the leaders of what proved to be the most impor-
tant and long-lived of these organizations, the Indian National Congress, see McLane,
Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress, chapter 2.
2. ‘‘1897 Presidential Address,’’ Zaidi, ed., Congress Presidential Addresses, vol. 1, 366–
67; ‘‘1902 Presidential Address,’’ Zaidi, ed., Congress Presidential Addresses, vol. 2, 366;
‘‘1911 Presidential Address,’’ Zaidi, ed., Congress Presidential Addresses, vol. 2, 464.
3. The fourth annual session of the congress in 1888 declared that ‘‘it is the first
duty of the British government in India to foster and encourage education,’’ and went
on to ‘‘respectfully’’ urge upon the government ‘‘the extreme importance of increas-
ing, or at any rate not decreasing, the present expenditure on education.’’ Resolution
of Fourth [Allahabad] Session of the Congress, December 1888, Zaidi and Zaidi, eds.,
The Encyclopaedia of the Indian National Congress, vol. 1, 310. Four years later the con-
gress was no longer ‘‘respectfully’’ urging but rather ‘‘affirm[ed] in the most emphatic
manner, the importance of increasing the public expenditure on all branches of Edu-
cation.’’ Resolution of the Eighth [Allahabad] Session of the Congress, December 1892,
Zaidi and Zaidi, eds., The Encyclopaedia of the Indian National Congress, vol. 2, 233.
4. ‘‘Watchman,’’ Higher Education and Popular Control, 27.
5. ‘‘Presidential Address,’’ Report of the First Bombay Educational Conference, 23.
6. ‘‘Address to a Conference of Directors of Public Instruction’’ (Simla, 1905), Lord
Curzon in India, 355. Some thirty years later the Report of the Unemployment [Sapru] Com-
mittee was still noting that Indians regarded every proposal for educational reform
as ‘‘calculated to retard the political or educational progress of the country’’ (186).
7. Of course there was always something contradictory about demanding more
education, and yet at the same time denouncing it for being denationalizing. The
ambiguity surfaced sharply when the history of western education was written from
a nationalist point of view. In Basu’s The History of Education in India under the Rule of
the East India Company the British are accused of selfishly neglecting the education
of India, but also of introducing education merely to equip themselves with cheap
native civil servants. Bentinck, the governor-general who introduced the ‘‘Anglicist’’
policy, is accused of wanting to anglicize Indians and thus preventing the formation
of a national consciousness, at the same time as Raja Rammohan Roy is described
as the ‘‘prophet of his race’’ for the very same thing—that is, for petitioning the
government to provide modern, scientific education in English rather than Orien-
tal education. The Anglicists are accused of deliberately neglecting education in the
vernaculars for fear that it might be detrimental to continued British dominance,
but only after the Orientalists have been denounced for seeking to deny Indians the
dignity that goes with English education.
8. See for instance Indian Educational Policy . . . 1904, section 8.
9. R. C. Majumdar, vice-chancellor’s speech at the Convocation of Dacca Univer-
sity (1938), Dacca University Convocation Speeches, 1929–46, 11 [each speech separately
228 Notes
paginated]. Similarly, in 1936 the principal of Central Hindu College of Benares
Hindu University noted that ‘‘almost every glaring evil of the day has been ascribed
to our Universities.’’ K. V. Rangaswami Aiyangar, Foreword, Tandon, ed., Messages to
Indian Students, ii.
10. Wanchoo, Studies in Indian Education, 21–22. The 1938 session of the Congress,
held in Haripura, declared: ‘‘The existing system of education in India is admitted to
have failed. Its objectives have been anti-national and anti-social, its methods have
been antiquated, and it has been confined to a small number of people and has left
the vast majority of our people illiterate.’’ Zaidi and Zaidi, eds., The Encyclopaedia of
the Indian National Congress, vol. 11, 431.
11. As Tagore put it, ‘‘trams ply between our homes and our schools but the mind
refuses to travel the distance.’’ ‘‘The Diffusion of Education,’’ 28. Less poetically, Jadu-
nath Sarkar adjudged: ‘‘The chasm between the (English) school and the (Oriental)
home remains unbridged.’’ ‘‘The Vernacular Medium,’’ 2.
12. An Address by S. C. Roy, 4.
13. Lal Behari Day, ‘‘Recollections of My School-Days’’ (1873), Bengal Peasant Life,
Folktales of Bengal, Recollections of My School-Days, 510.
14. Satishchandra Mukherjee in Dawn, September 1898, quoted in Mukherjee and
Mukherjee, The Origins of the National Education Movement, 10.
15. Mukherjee, An Examination into the Present System of University Education in India
and a Scheme of Reform, 11.
16. Lajpat Rai, Introduction, i.
17. Dayal, ‘‘The Social Conquest of the Hindu Race,’’ 247.
18. Coomaraswamy, ‘‘Education in India,’’ 42, 43.
19. Ahmad, Present Day Problems of Indian Education, 33.
20. Tagore, ‘‘The Diffusion of Education,’’ 28.
21. Pal, Memories of My Life and Times, 88.
22. See Jones, Arya Dharm, esp. chapter 3.There were other experiments seeking to
combine western knowledge with Hindu traditions, including Annie Besant’s Cen-
tral Hindu College (founded 1898), and the Arya Mahila School (founded 1926); on
these see Kumar, ‘‘Religion and Ritual in Indian Schools.’’
23. Established to ‘‘bring into more intimate relation with one another, through
patient study and research, the different cultures of the East on the basis of their
underlying unity,’’ and to ‘‘approach the West from the standpoint of such a unity of
the life and thought of Asia.’’ ‘‘Visva-Bharati Memorandum of Association: Objects,’’
reproduced as an appendix in Sinha, Social Thinking of Rabindranath Tagore, 157.
24. Tagore, ‘‘My School,’’ 501.
25. Tagore, ‘‘The Schoolmaster,’’ 370. This thought was developed allegorically in
Tagore’s story ‘‘The Parrot’s Training,’’ in which a Raja decides to have his pretty but
‘‘ignorant’’ parrot educated. The ‘‘educational authorities’’ confine the parrot in a
gilded cage, and subject it to textbooks and lessons. All are impressed and pleased at
 Notes 229
the thoroughness and professionalism of the venture, except the bird, which ends
up—dead.
26. Tagore, ‘‘To the Child,’’ 500.
27. For a detailed study of Tagore’s educational ideas and practices see Mukherjee,
Education for Fulness.
28. On Aligarh Muslim University see Minault and Lelyveld, ‘‘The Campaign for
a Muslim University.’’ On Benares Hindu University see the collection of documents
in Sundaram, ed., Benares Hindu University.
29. See Lelyveld, Aligarh’s First Generation.
30. See Kumar, Political Agenda of Education.
31. Missionary institutions suffered from the same constraints—the principal of
the Women’s Christian College, Madras, ruefully observed, ‘‘There can be no doubt
that any Missionary College which wishes to attract students must give them what
they ask for—the ordinary University course.’’ McDougall, Women’s Christian College,
Madras, 2.
32. Quoted in Mukherjee and Mukherjee, The Origins of the National Education
Movement, 421.
33. Quoted in Jones, Arya Dharm, 220.
34. On this see Fischer-Tine, ‘‘The Only Hope for Fallen India’’; and Datta, ‘‘The
‘Subalternity’ of Education.’’
35. Letter dated 19 December 1937 in Elmhirst, Rabindranath Tagore, 37–38.
36. Gooroo Dass Banerjee, speech at a meeting to inaugurate the National Coun-
cil of Education, 15 August 1906, in Banerjee, Reminiscences, Speeches and Writings of Sir
Gooroo Dass Banerjee. For a history of these educational endeavors see Mukkerjee and
Mukherjee, The Origins of the National Education Movement.
37. Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 181.
38. Quoted in Basu, ‘‘National Education in Bengal,’’ 65.
39. Tagore, ‘‘The Poet’s Anxiety,’’ Young India, 1 June 1921, reprinted in R. K. Prabhu
and R. Kelekar, eds., Truth Called Them Differently (Tagore-Gandhi Controversy), 38.
40. Gandhi, ‘‘The Function of National Schools and Colleges,’’ Young India, 10 Octo-
ber 1929, reprinted in Gandhi, The Problem of Education, 182.
41. ‘‘An Account of our Works,’’ Navajivan, 3 August 1924, reprinted in Gandhi, The
Problem of Education, 91.
42. ‘‘The Non-Cooperating Students,’’ Navajivan, 21 December 1924, reprinted in
Gandhi, The Problem of Education, 36.
43. ‘‘Essentials of National Education,’’ Navajivan, 10 August 1924, reprinted in
Gandhi, The Problem of Education, 105.
44. ‘‘The Non-Cooperating Students,’’ Navajivan, 21 December 1924, reprinted in
Gandhi, The Problem of Education, 33.
45. ‘‘Address to MahaVidyalaya,’’ Navajivan, 21 June 1928, reprinted in Gandhi, The
Problem of Education, 145.
230 Notes
46. ‘‘Address to Maha Vidyalaya,’’ Navajivan, 21 June 1928, reprinted in Gandhi,
The Problem of Education, 145.
47. Rai, The Problem of National Education in India, 75–76.
48. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 48, 199–200.
49. Hartog had been academic registrar of the University of London for over a
decade, before serving as a member of the Calcutta University (Sadler) Commission,
then as first vice-chancellor of Dacca University, and then as chairman of the Auxil-
iary Committee on Education of the Indian Statutory (Simon) Commission.
50. The correspondence is reprinted in Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree, 355–90.
51. Das, The Educational System of the Ancient Hindus, 1. By the time of the second
edition of his book in 1938, Keay noted that there had been a good deal of research
and a number of books published on the subject by ‘‘competent Indian scholars.’’
Keay, Indian Education in Ancient and Later Times, ix (the book changed its title between
the first and second editions).
52. Thompson and Garrat, Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India, 312.
53. Dayal, ‘‘The Social Conquest of the Hindu Race,’’ 244. See also his Thoughts on
Education.
54. Sarkar, The Pedagogy of the Hindu, 36–45.
55. Bose, National Education and Modern Progress.
56. Only a few years later the unpredictable Har Dayal was castigating the pro-
ponents of a Hindu University, asking: ‘‘are the future leaders of India to chew the
cud of old Hindu thought for all time without daring to think for themselves?’’
Dayal, ‘‘Some Phases of Contemporary Thought in India,’’ 473. For biographies of
this remarkable if unstable personality see Brown, Har Dayal, and (though it is more
hagiography than biography) Dharmavira, Lala Har Dayal and Revolutionary Move-
ments of His Times. Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s advocacy of a specifically Hindu pedagogy
was nonetheless one which included instruction in science and technology.
57. Rai, The Problem of National Education in India, 55.
58. Rai, The Problem of National Education in India, 80.
59. Reproduced in Papers Connected with the Punjab University Question, 37–91.
60. Papers Connected with the Punjab University Question, 27.
61. ‘‘The Brahmo Public Opinion’’ (21 July 1881), Papers Connected with the Punjab
University Question, 29. For a history of this episode see Perrill, ‘‘Punjab Orientalism.’’
62. These reasons are set out in Duncan’s letter to the governor-general, dated
1 January 1792, reproduced in Zastoupil and Moir, eds., The Great Indian Education
Debate, 77–80.
63. Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance.
64. Bernard Cohn, ‘‘The Command of Language and the Language of Command,’’
Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, 48. See also Kumar, Lessons from Schools, chapter 2.
65. Report of the [Bombay] Board of Education from May 1, 1851, to April 30, 1852, 119.
66. Report of the Indian Education [Hunter] Commission, vol. 1, 259.
67. Quoted in Young, Resistant Hinduism, 53.
 Notes 231
68. To be sure, the standard on offer was not very high, the medium of instruc-
tion was English, and in the judgment of one scholar, the education provided was
‘‘devoid of the main and basic ideals of . . . [the] traditional Sanskrit system.’’ Sharma,
Linguistic and Educational Aspirations under a Colonial System, 192.
69. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India’s Past, 232. A re-
cent, uncritical study goes so far as to say, ‘‘The widespread movement of Western
education which was apparently a curse for the traditional education proved a boon
in disguise for Sanskrit. Sanskrit was rid of its obsolete, antiquated character and
came to be included in the main stream of Indian education.’’ Bhate, ‘‘Position of
Sanskrit in Public Education and Scientific Research in Modern India,’’ 389.
70. Quoted in Deshpande ‘‘Pandit and Professor,’’ 142.
71. Pollock, ‘‘New Intellectuals in Seventeenth-Century India,’’ 5.
72. Pollock, ‘‘The Death of Sanskrit,’’ 393.
73. Pollock, ‘‘New Intellectuals in Seventeenth-Century India,’’ 3.
74. Quoted in Dalmia, ‘‘Sanskrit Scholars and Pandits of the Old School,’’ 328–29.
I draw upon this essay for its material as well as some of its analyses.
75. Quoted in ‘‘Politicus,’’ ‘‘A Peep into the History of Sanskrit Education in British
India,’’ 173.
76. Quoted in Dalmia, ‘‘Sanskrit Scholars and Pandits of the Old School,’’ 330–31.
77. Indian Educational Policy . . . 1913, sections 58–59.
78. The most important contemporary institute for the study of Sanskrit in India
bears his name: the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, established in 1917.
79. Quoted in Deshpande, ‘‘Pandit and Professor,’’ 134. Pandits in turn sometimes
were (and are) dismissive of the ‘‘superficial’’ learning of ‘‘Indologists,’’ as Deshpande
notes (139–40).
80. Minute recorded by Macaulay, law member of the governor-general’s coun-
cil, 2 February 1835, reprinted in Zastoupil and Moir, eds., The Great Indian Education
Debate, 170.
81. Pollock, ‘‘New Intellectuals in Seventeenth-Century India,’’ 24.
82. Rai, The Problem of National Education in India, 75.
83. Chakrabarty, ‘‘The Difference-Deferral of a Colonial Modernity,’’ 50–51.
84. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 5.
85. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 9.
86. ‘‘Evil Wrought by English Education,’’ Young India, 27 April 1921, reprinted in
Prabhu and Kelekar, eds., Truth Called Them Differently, 24.
87. Navajivan, 30 December 1920, reprinted in Gandhi, The Problem of Education, 20.
88. Gandhi declared, ‘‘my plan to impart Primary Education through the medium
of village handicrafts . . . [is] conceived of as the spearhead of a silent social revolution
fraught with the most far-reaching consequences.’’ Harijan, 9 October 1937, reprinted
in Gandhi, The Problem of Education, 275. For a highly suggestive interpretation of the
social and educational implications of the Wardha Scheme see Kumar, Political Agenda
of Education, 167–77.
232 Notes
89. The Haripura Congress of 1938 adopted a resolution to this effect; see Zaidi
and Zaidi, eds., The Encyclopaedia of the Indian National Congress, vol. 11, 431–32.
90. ‘‘Higher Education,’’ Harijan, 9 July 1938, reprinted in Gandhi, The Problem of
Education, 59.
91. Reprinted in Engl. trans. in University of Calcutta Convocation Addresses, vol. 7, as
appendix A [pp. 113–30]. Page references given in text.
92. ‘‘Higher Education,’’ Harijan, 9 July 1938, reprinted in Gandhi, The Problem of
Education, 59–60.
93. The incident is recounted in Sastri, A History of the Renaissance in Bengal, 31–32.
94. The Selected Works of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, ed. Kumar, vol. 3, 98–99.

Epilogue: Knowing Modernity, Being Modern

1. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 121.
2. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 36.
3. I borrow this phrase from Fabian, Time and the Other.
4. See Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.
5. See Muecke, Ancient and Modern.
6. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, 28.
7. Taylor, ‘‘Two Theories of Modernity,’’ 154.
8. Taylor, ‘‘Two Theories of Modernity,’’ 170.
9. Taylor writes: ‘‘when the old metaphysical and religious beliefs crumble, we
find as a matter of neutral fact that we are instrumental individuals, and we need to
draw from elsewhere our values and acceptable grounds for association with others.’’
‘‘Two Theories of Modernity,’’ 173. This could serve as a summary of Weber’s posi-
tion, though in fact Taylor is offering a summary of what is entailed by the acultural
theory of modernity.
10. Taylor, ‘‘Two Theories of Modernity,’’ 161–62.
11. Taylor, ‘‘Two Theories of Modernity,’’ 171.
12. Here I am paraphrasing Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 115–16.
13. Taylor, ‘‘Two Theories of Modernity,’’ 159.
14. Taylor, ‘‘Two Theories of Modernity,’’ 170.
15. As Brian Massumi points out, ‘‘Social constructivism easily leads to a cultural
solipsism . . . In this worst case solipsist scenario, nature appears as immanent to
culture (as its construct). At best, when the status of nature is deemed unworthy of
attention, it is simply shunted aside . . . Theoretical moves at ending Man end up
making human culture the measure and meaning of all things, in a kind of unfet-
tered anthropomorphism.’’ ‘‘The Autonomy of Affect,’’ 231.
16. Daston, ‘‘The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,’’ 154. Daston shows
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 Notes 233
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Index

Adas, Michael, 193 Borthwick, Meredith, 141

‘‘Age of the World Picture, The’’ (Heideg- Bose, Pramatha Nath, 169
ger), 6 Bourdieu, Pierre, 27
Ancient Indian Education (Keay), 168 Brahmin, 72–74
Anderson, Benedict, 109 Brahmo Public Opinion, 140
‘‘Anglicists,’’ 1, 17, 171, 180 Brahmo Samaj, 51, 55–56, 63, 138
Appadurai, Arjun, 110, 126 Brown, Wendy, 32–33
Aquinas, Thomas, 36, 64 Burckhardt, Jacob, 184
Archer, William, 57
Arithmetic, 38–39 Calcutta: Brahmin in, 72–74; Hindu Col-
Arya Samaj, 51, 63, 164, 167 lege in, 50–51; in Mother India, 151–53;
Azad, Maulana Abul Kalam, 126–27, 182 western education in, 181
Calcutta Madrassa, 170–71
Backwardness, 130–32, 146–47; indigenous Calcutta Review, 19, 141; on arithmetic, 38
traditions as source of, 171; Muslim, Calcutta University, 28–29
110–20; of women in Mother India, 149, Calcutta University Commission, 24–25, 143;
154–56 report of, 32
Bandyopadhyaya, Bhabanicharan, 72–73 Canguilhelm, Georges, 118
Banerjea, K. M., 133 Capital (Marx), 60
Banerjea, Surendranath, 56, 159 Carruthers, Mary, 36
Banerjee, Gooroo Dass, 28–29 Caste, 37–38
Bartolus of Sassoferrato, 100–102 Censuses and statistics, 109–10, 122; Muslim
Beck, Theodore, 118 ‘‘backwardness’’ and, 116–20, 124–26;
Being and Time (Heidegger), 86, 88–89 self-perception and, 109–10
Benares Hindu College, 164 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 72–74, 177
Benares Sanskrit College, 170–71, 173–74; Chatterjee, Partha, 135–36, 177
reforms to, 172 Chaturvedi, S.N., 41–42
Bengal, 79; Muslim education in, 112–15; Child brides, 148, 154, 156
national education movement in, 165; Child Marriage Restraint Bill, 156
Swadeshi agitation in, 52, 165; western Chirol, Valentine, 52–53
education in, 17–22, 181 Christian missionaries, 47–51
‘‘Bengali Brain and Its Misuse, The’’ (Ray), 17 Clarke, George, 53, 58
Besant, Annie, 134, 136, 143 Clifford, James, 93
Bhandarkar, Ramakrishna Gopal, 175 Cohn, Bernard, 109, 171
Bhatt, Balkrishna, 144 Colonialism: ‘‘backwardness’’ of India and,
Bishop Corries Grammar School, 51–52 130–32; censuses and statistics during,
Bloch, Marc, 93 109–10; claims of rule of, 130–32; female
Bombay: university established in, 2, 24; education discourse during, 129–30, 145–
western education in, 2, 181 47; governmentality and, 120–23; Indian
Book of Memory, The (Carruthers), 36 élites and, 130–31; as pedagogic enter-

259
260 Index
Colonialism (continued ) Fasolt, Constantine, 100–102
prise, 1–3, 5, 137, 159–60, 172; schools Female education, 137–42; anxiety about,
established during, 2; women’s status 142–44; better wife and mother dis-
under, 132–33 courses and, 139–42, 144; in Britain, 142;
Conring, Hermann, 100–102 colonial discourses on, 129–30, 145–47;
Coomaraswamy, A. K., 162 debate in newspapers and magazines
Cramming discourses, 22–28, 31–33, 42–45, on, 138–39; ‘‘denationalizing’’ fear and,
104; English and, 24–25; importance of 142–44; ‘‘desexing’’ fear and, 142–44;
exams and, 23; teachers and, 25 domesticity and, 139–41; Hinduism and,
Curzon, Lord, 22–26, 29–30, 52, 159–60 138–39, 141, 157; impediments to, 137–38;
middle-class support for, 138; missionar-
Daniel, E. Valentine, 69 ies and, 137–38; morality and, 141; Mother
Daston, Lorraine, 192, 194 India and, 154–55, 157; Muslims and, 141–
Dayal, Har, 162 42; numbers enrolled in, 129, 156–57;
Dayanand Anglo-Vedic High School (dav), prejudices against, 137–38; as return to
163–65 Hindu traditions, 139; Vanitabodhini and,
Debi, Kundamala, 139 138; ‘‘westernization’’ and, 143–45, 157;
de Certeau, Michel, 97–99 zenana education and, 138, 141, 154. See
Derozio, Henry, 50 also Women
Derrida, Jacques, 36 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 92
Dhar, B. N., 159 Foucault, Michel, 97, 120–21
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 82–86 Freud, Sigmund, 70; Wolf Man analyzed by,
Discovery of India, The (Nehru), 132 76–77
‘‘Disenchantment,’’ 4, 6, 94–95, 193, 195 Fuller, Bampfylde, 57
Dow, Alexander, 79 Fuller, C. J., 64–65
Dowries, 21–22 ‘‘Fuzzy communities,’’ 124–25
‘‘Drafts for a Critique of Historical Reason’’
(Dilthey), 83 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 80, 83–90, 99
‘‘Drain Inspector’s Report’’ (Gandhi), 156 Gandhi, Mahatma, 156; on English language
Duff, Alexander, 49–51, 75 in education, 178–80, 182; response to
Duncan, Jonathon, 170 Mother India from, 156; at ‘‘Round Table’’
Durkheim, Émile, 60–61, 67, 69–70 conference, 167–68; western education
Dutt, G. S., 136 boycotted by, 166–67
Dutt, Toru, 134 General Committee for Public Instruction,
17
Eck, Diana, 65 Governmentality, 120–23
Education of the People of India, The (Tre- Government of India Act (1919), 150
velyan), 2 Government of India Resolution on Indian
Engels, Friedrich, 184 Educational Policy (1904), 52
English language, 1, 19, 24, 111, 113; cram- Government service, 18–20
ming for exams and, 24–25; Gandhi on Guha, Ranajit, 79
use in education of, 178–80, 182; Tagore
on use in education of, 178–80, 182; ver- Hacking, Ian, 109
nacular languages in education vs., 19, Hailey, William Malcolm, 21–22
24–25, 31, 165, 178–82 Hare, David, 180
‘‘Evil Wrought by the English Medium’’ Harrison, Peter, 62
(Gandhi), 178 Hartog, Philip, 168
Examination of Religions, An (Muir), 172 Hartog Commission, 71
Exams, 22–27. See also Cramming Hastings, Warren, 170
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 82–83
 Index 261
Heidegger, Martin, 6–7, 96–97; on history, 116–17; on female education, 137–42; on
86–90 Sanskrit, 172
Hindess, Barry, 122 Indian Musalmans, The (Hunter), 111
Hindi language, 164 Indian National Congress, 149–50, 159; de-
Hindu College, 50–51 mands for western education and, 159;
Hindus, Hinduism, 62–68, 71–72, 172; national education and, 165–66
alternatives to western education and, Indian Unrest (Chirol), 52–53
163–64; call for revived pedagogy of, 169; Indigenous knowledge, indigenous educa-
concept of selfhood in, 68–69; female tion, 18, 32–33, 123, 167–76; arithmetic
education and, 138–39, 141, 157; mod- in, 38–39; as basis of national educa-
ern and Christian interpretations of, tion, 166–70; British funding of, 170–72;
62–63; in Mother India, 153–54; Mus- British reforms to, 172–73; calls for
lim participation in education vs., 113, revival of, 167–70; caste and, 37–38;
123–24; plans for Hindu University, 56; Chaturvedi’s experience of, 41–42; cram-
reinterpretation of, 63; western educa- ming and, 22–28, 31–33, 42–45; English
tion and, 48–51, 53–59, 75, 111; women vs. vernacular languages in, 31, 178–
and, 132–36 82; Gandhi’s plan for, 178–79; Gandhi’s
Historical Sketches of the South of India (Wilks), speech at ‘‘Round Table’’ conference
79 on, 167–68; Hinduism and, 169, 172;
History, 99; as ‘‘code,’’ 81, 90–94, 97, 101–2; memorization and, 32–36, 38; modern
Dilthey on, 82–86; ‘‘effective,’’ 87–88; western knowledge vs., 1, 34; Muslims
Gadamer on, 83–90, 99; Heidegger on, and, 119; Patshala and pyal schools of,
86–90; hermeneutics of, 79–84, 105; 38–40; Punjab University College and,
humanism-anthropologic presumption 169–70; reassertion of value of, 135, 167–
in, 6–7, 45, 81, 91–97, 103–4; knowledge of 89; resistance to western education
human sciences and, 82–83; Nietzsche by Indian students, 32–33; respect for
on, 95–97; objectivist presumption in, teachers and, 36–37, 39–40; rote learning
80–88, 90, 93, 186; primary sources and, and, 32–33, 42, 171; Sanskrit and, 172–76;
93, 99, 101–2; Roman Empire and, 100; as source of Indian backwardness, 171;
temporal mode of human being and, status and, 37, 39–40; Vedas and, 34–35;
86–91; textbooks of, 79; transcendental western curriculums and pedagogies vs.,
presupposition of Weber and, 94–97, 103– 34–42
4; writing, 5–8, 79–80, 102–6; writing Interdenominational Women’s Christian
Indian, 79–81, 102–3 College, 66
History of British India, The (Mill), 132
History of English Education in India, A (Mah- Jalal, Ayesha, 126
mood), 115
History of Hindostan, The (Dow), 79 Kali Ghat, 151–53
History of Rural Education in the United Prov- Kalikata kamalalya, 72–75
inces of Agra and Oudh, The (Chaturvedi), Kant, Immanuel, 28, 61, 83–84
41 Kaviraj, Sudipta, 124–25
Hunter, Ian, 121 Keay, F. E., 168
Hunter, W. W., 111–12, 117 Khan, Sayyid Ahmad, 112, 117, 126
Hunter Commission. See Indian Education Kielhorn, Franz, 173
Commission Knowledge. See Indigenous knowledge,
Huque, M. Azizul, 113 indigenous education; Medieval knowl-
edge; Modern, western knowledge;
India: A Bird’s-Eye View (Ronaldshay), 116 Premodern knowledge
India and Indian Missions (Duff ), 49 Kolb, David, 95
Indian Education Commission, 112, 114, Koselleck, Reinhardt, 91
262 Index
Lahiri, Ramtanu, 180 tion in history of, 80–88, 90, 93, 186;
Latour, Bruno, 192–94 premodern knowledge vs., 3–4, 188–91,
Lelyveld, David, 124–25 194; religion and, 60–62; sciences and,
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 91, 97 82–83, 191–93; sense of ‘‘exoticism’’ of,
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 66–68 2–3; unitariness of, 33
Limits of History, The (Fasolt), 100 Modern Review, 57–58
London University, 24 Moral crisis, moral character: Christian mis-
sionaries and, 47–51; denials by educated
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 1, 5, 39, 49, 75, Indians of, 55; diagnosing, 57–62; female
176, 195 education and, 141; in Hindus, 58–59;
Madras: Bishop Corries Grammar School, humanism-anthropologic presumption
51–52; industrial leaders in, 71–72; and, 60–61; inconsistency in educated
university established in, 2, 26 Indians and, 57–60, 77; Indian teachers’
Madras Educational Conference (1898), 25, concern over, 56; lack in Madras indus-
39–40 trialists of, 71–72; mismatched modern
Madrassas, 119; in Calcutta, 170–71 categories’ role in, 60–62, 69–78, 186;
Mahmood, Syed, 3, 115 Report of the Indian Education Commission
Maine, Henry, 26 and, 52, 55; textbooks for instruction in,
Malaviya, Madan Mohan, 56 54; western education and, 47–62
Marriot, McKim, 68 Mother India (Mayo), 147–55; Calcutta in, 151–
Marx, Karl, 60, 184 53; child brides in, 154, 156; controversy
Matapariksa (Muir), 172 over, 148–51, 156–58; female education
Mayo, Katherine, 147–55 in, 154–55, 157; Gandhi’s response to,
Mayo, Lord, 112 156; Kali Ghat in, 151–53; nationalists’
Medieval knowledge, 36 reaction to, 149–50, 156–58; themes of
Memorization, 22–24, 28–30, 32, 35–36, 38 Indian backwardness in, 152–56; Volume
Mill, James, 132–33, 153 Two as sequel to, 149
Minault, Gail, 141 Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, 164
Missionaries: female education and, 137–38; Muhammadan Educational Conference,
godless education criticized by, 47–51 117–18, 124
Mitchell, Tim, 39, 67–68 Muir, John, 172
Mitra, Babu Pramadadas, 174–75 Muslim League, 124
Mitra, Peary Chand, 133–34 Muslims: educational ‘‘backwardness’’
Modern, western knowledge, 1; categories of, 110–17, 124; female education and,
of, 8; critique of dominant status of, 141–42; Hindus vs., 113; indigenous
3, 42–45, 60–61, 182, 186–95; diagnos- education of, 119; Muhammadan Anglo-
ing moral crisis and, 60–62, 69–78, 186; Oriental College and, 164; new ways
‘‘disenchantment’’ and, 4, 6, 94–95, 193, of being and, 123–27, 164; religious in-
195; education as disseminator of, 1, 80, struction and, 19, 114; statistical basis of
119, 122–23, 170, 185–86; foundational as- ‘‘backwardness’’ discourse and, 116–20
sumptions of, 8–9, 60–61; globalization
of, 3, 182–84, 195; history texts and, 79; Naidu, Sarojini, 139, 149
humanism-anthropologic presump- Nair, Sankaran, 159
tion in, 6–7, 45, 60–61, 81, 91–97, 103–4; Nandy, Ashis, 64
Indian nationalism and, 135–36, 176– National Council of Education (nce), 165
82; indigenous knowledges vs., 1, 34–42, Nationalism, nationalists, 123, 130–32; criti-
49; knowing subject and separate ob- cisms of western education and, 160–69,
ject created by, 3–4, 6–7, 60–61, 186, 195; 181–82; female education and, 142–46;
modernity and, 183–95; nature-culture material vs. spiritual domains and, 135–
divide in, 192–95; objectivist presump- 36, 157, 177; modern, western knowledge
 Index 263
and, 135–36, 176–82; Mother India and, Sarkar, Sumit, 165
149–50, 156–58; ‘‘national education’’ Sarkar, Tanika, 135
and, 56, 164–67, 169–70, 178, 180–81; on Sati, 132, 134
revival of indigenous knowledge and Savitri, 134
education, 167–78, 181; on vernacu- Sen, Keshab Chunder, 71
lar education, 180–82; women’s iconic Shanti (Premchand), 143
status for, 130, 134–37, 142–46, 157–58 Sherring, M. A., 52
National Muhammadan Association, 113, 115 Singer, Milton, 71–75
Needham, Rodney, 67 Sinha, Mrinalini, 150, 157
Nehru, Jawaharlal, 132 Society for the Acquisition of General
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 95–97 Knowledge, 133
Non-cooperation movement, 131, 150, 166 Speech, writing vs., 36
Staal, Frits, 35
O’Malley, L. S. S., 63 Subcontinent knowledges. See Indigenous
Orsini, Francesca, 157 knowledge and education
Our Young Men (pamphlet), 24 Subjectivity, 18, 27, 42–45, 104
Swadeshi agitation (Bengal), 52, 165
Pal, Bipan Chandra, 29, 162
Patshala and pyal schools, 38–40 Tagore, Rabindranath, 162; on English in
Persian language, 111, 113 education, 178–80, 182; school estab-
Pioneer (newspaper), 2–3 lished by, 163–65, 167
Poona Sanskrit college, 172 Taylor, Charles, 4, 189–94
Population, 119–22, 124, 126 Teachers: cramming and, 25; moral crisis
Potter, W. A., 22 and, 56; respect and devotion for, 36–37,
Premchand, 143 39–40
Premodern knowledge, 3–4, 188–91, 194 Telang, Justice, 55
Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty), 72 Textbooks, 25; history, 79; on moral charac-
Punjab, 169–70 ter, 54
Punjab University College, 169–70 Thibault, George, 174
Time and Narrative (Ricoeur), 89
Rai, Lajpat, 162, 167, 169, 176 Trevelyan, Charles, 2, 49
Ray, Prafulla Chandra, 17
Religion, 62, 97–98; western interpretations Universities, 2, 26
of, 60–62 University of Calcutta, 19–22, 24
Religion of the Masses, The (O’Malley), 63 University of Oxford, 24; cramming at, 26
Religious instruction, 19, 47–56; Hindi Urdu language, 113
textbooks for, 54; Muslims and, 19, 114,
164 Vanitabodhini, 138
Report of the Indian Education Commission Vedas, 34–35
(1883), 52, 55 Veyne, Paul, 91
Ricoeur, Paul, 86, 88–90 Viswa-Bharati University, 163
Ronaldshay, Lord, 116 Voltaire, 92
Volume Two (Mayo), 149. See also Mother India
Sanskrit language, 34–35, 103, 163, 172–76;
Benares Sanskrit College, 170–74; dav Warnke, Georgia, 85
high school and, 163–65; European en- Weber, Max, 4, 6–7; transcendental pre-
thusiasm for, 170–71; Indian Education supposition of, 94–97, 103–4
Commission on, 172; Poona Sanskrit Weltanschauung, 6, 96, 105
college, 172 Western education, 1–2, 122–23; alternatives
Santiniketan, 163–65 to, 56, 163–70; Anglicists and, 1, 17, 171,
264 Index
Western education (continued ) 80, 119, 122–23, 170, 185–86; moral decline
180; anxiety of cram and, 18, 22–28, 32– from, 47–62, 186; Muslims and, 19, 110–
33, 42–45, 104; ‘‘backward’’ Muslims 17, 124, 126, 164; ‘‘national education’’ as
and, 110–17, 124; in Bengal, 17–22; col- alternative to, 163–67, 169–70; nation-
lective identities and, 110, 126; colonial alism and, 56, 159–69, 176–78, 181–82;
governmentality and, 120–23; colonial religious instruction and, 19, 47–56, 114,
origins of, 1–3; criticisms of, 21, 160–69, 164; resistance by Indian students to,
181–82; Lord Curzon’s speech on, 29– 32–33; rote learning and, 22, 29–30, 186;
30; dav High School movement and, Sanskrit and, 163, 172–76; sense of ‘‘exoti-
163–65; demands for more of, 159–60; cism’’ of, 2–3; socialization and, 36–37;
denationalizing of subjects by, 160–62, status and, 180–81; Tagore’s alternatives
181; English vernacular languages in, 19, to, 163–65; urban middle classes and,
165, 178–82; exams in, 22–27; failure as 180–81; writing history of, 79–80. See also
vehicle of modernity of, 160–62, 181–82; Female education
failure to create knowing subjects of, 18, When A Great Tradition Modernizes (Singer),
26–33, 42–43, 106, 186; Gandhi on, 166–68, 71–72
178–79; government employment and, Wilks, Mark, 79
18–20; Hindu vs. Muslim participation Women: Child Marriage Restraint Bill and,
in, 111, 113; Hinduism and, 48–59, 75, 156; declining condition of, 132–35, 149;
111, 163–64; Indian National Congress iconic status in nationalist discourse of,
and, 159; Indian students’ distortion 130, 134–37, 142–46, 157–58; Mother India
of, 31–39; indigenous curriculums and and, 147–55; poem by Dutt on, 134. See
pedagogies vs., 34–42; instrumentalism also Female education
complaint and, 17–28, 31, 33, 42–45, 74, Writing, speech vs., 36
104, 186; marriage prospects and, 20–22;
memorization and, 28–29, 32; missionar- Young India (Gandhi), 166
ies’ critique of ‘‘godlessness’’ and, 47–51;
modern knowledge disseminated by, 1, Žižek, Slavoj, 76–77
Sanjay Seth is a reader in politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is
also a professor of politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Seth, Sanjay, 1961–
Subject lessons : the Western education of colonial India / Sanjay Seth.
p. cm. — (Politics, history, and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-4086-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-4105-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Education—India—Western influences—History—19th century. 2. Education
and state—India—History—19th century. 3. Nationalism and education—India—
History—20th century. I. Title.
la1151.s4115 2007
379.54'09034—dc22
2007004104