The history of the monitorial movement in Bengal has shown that setting up a public educational infrastructure was impossible without substantial and reliable governmental investment. Most of the elementary schools that were defunded in the wake of the Anglicist policy turn had to close. Schools such as the Benevolent Institution for the Instruction of Indigent Christians and organizations such as the Calcutta School Book Society (CSBS), which received government grants, however, survived for decades. The monitorial movement became entangled in several ways with the development of the colonial educational policy. Most of the original members of the General Committee of Public Instruction (GCPI) in Bengal (1824) had been running the CSBS before; and after 1854, when the government started its efforts towards educational system-building, it incorporated the CSBS's textbook production and dissemination in its institutional set-up.

This chapter shifts the focus to the Bombay Presidency to explore the monitorial movement's impact on educational system-building. It analyses the shifting modes of educational governance and the constant renegotiation of the colonial government's responsibility to provide schools for the Indian population. What was the state's role in ‘the diffusion of education’, as the afore-cited minute by the Governor of Bombay, Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779–1859), put it? What was better left to the ‘spontaneous zeal of individuals’ and voluntary associations? How to deal with missionary initiative?