Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India revisits the radical educational transformation that took place in the nineteenth century. It does so by looking at formal, institutional elementary instruction. In a slow and uneven process, the diverse landscape of indigenous knowledge transmission gave way to a colonial-modern education system. This was socially a highly relevant process, and it is not surprising that it became subject to intense political and historiographical debate. While the agents of empire themselves opened a discourse that presented their endeavours as a progressive expansion and a qualitative improvement of education, this was challenged by a nationalist counter-narrative. In the nationalist perspective – exemplified by M.K. Gandhi's above-cited statement – the British cut off the roots of the ‘beautiful tree’ of a culturally meaningful and socially embedded indigenous education. The nationalist hope, however, of ‘reviving’ the pre-colonial institutions – idealized as they appeared in hindsight – was impossible to realize. Even if the colonial state had clearly failed to universalize schooling, there was no reverting to the mode of ‘the old village schoolmaster’. The colonial education system, and the pedagogical culture inscribed within, formed the inevitable basis of any further reform efforts. The building of ‘national education’ for an independent India, designed from the 1890s onwards as an alternative to colonial education, took place within the once-established modern structure.

It is the emergence of this colonial-modern structure that this book explores – a new pedagogical culture, new institutional arrangements, and shifts in the social accessibility of literacy skills.