Introduction

In the first three decades of the nineteenth century, public education began to assume a special place within the colonial civilizing mission in India. On the one hand, an important shift occurred in the East India Company's approach towards education and learning, a shift which culminated in the ‘great education debate’. Leaving behind the patronage of ‘the learned natives of India’, the Committee for Public Instruction, which had been installed in 1823, formulated a consciously interventionist educational policy in the frame of a civilizing mission. Instruction in Western sciences in the English language was assigned a special role in winning the consent and cooperation of the Indian middle classes for the colonial project. Thereby, however, the Bengal Committee of Public Instruction – in accordance with the Court of Directors of the Company in London – almost exclusively concentrated its resources on higher education, hoping that knowledge would diffuse ‘downwards’ from there and thus transform Indian society as a whole.

At the same time, crucial developments also happened in the field of elementary, or popular, education, even if this field was frequently neglected and sometimes even discouraged by the Company. The efforts of privately operating educationalists (British as well as Indian), missionaries and voluntary educational associations found entrance in the colonial statistics and are also well known to historians. However, they attracted much less scholarly attention than the ideological (and financial) battles over higher education.