In this chapter, the interesting case of the Subaltern as constructed by education will be discussed. The focus is largely on the failure of mass education and how this produces and reproduces a vast class of citizens who do not have access to the democratic rights that could be theirs through an educational system that was equally good for the masses and the elites. This discussion will be divided into three parts that are thematic as well as roughly chronological: in the colonial period, the failure of missionary, state, indigenous and nationalist education; and in the post-colonial period, the failure of independent India's education to fulfil its democratic mission.

Two concepts that are being used in the analysis are that of ‘the construction of colonial knowledge’ and ‘discourse’. The first is taken from the work of Bernard Cohn at the University of Chicago, who emphasized how the meaning of ‘Indian culture’ had been constructed in colonial times by the visions and needs of the colonizers. His colleague, McKim Marriott, showed that South Asian peoples had sciences and epistemologies that were as complex and sophisticated as the European ones. These, too, comprised a discourse that, amazingly, paid little attention to Europe and reproduced itself with vigour (Cohn, 1996; Marriott, 1992).

The entire notion of the world as consisting of two spheres, East and West, or Europe/Occident and Asia/Orient, or metropolis and colony, was discussed by the Palestinian American scholar, Edward Said, as based on the gaze of the Europeans.