Knowledge production and Pedagogy in Colonial India: Missionaries, Orientalists, and Reformers in Institutional Contexts

Knowledge production and Pedagogy in Colonial India: Missionaries, Orientalists, and Reformers in Institutional Contexts

Veranstalter
German Historical Institute London/ School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Veranstaltungsort
GHIL/SOAS
Ort
London
Land
United Kingdom
Vom - Bis
13.11.2008 - 15.11.2008
Website
Von
Dr. Indra Sengupta, German Historical Institute London, Dr. Daud ALi, SOAS, University of London

Recent scholarship on colonial knowledge production has moved beyond the discourse analysis inspired by the work of Edward Said toward a more historically nuanced and richly ‘sourced’ understanding of the subject. The overall effect of this recent research has been to revise our notions of colonial knowledge as a whole—from the coherent and hegemonic instrument of rule advocated by an earlier generation of scholars to a more fractured, dialogically produced, potentially open-ended and socially unstable mass of ideas and practices.

New lines of research have addressed the wider intellectual contextualisation (both in the colony and metropole) of ‘orientalist’ (and to a certain extent missionary) knowledge, as well as a deeper exploration of the careers of colonial scholars and particularly their relations with indigenous ‘informants’ and cultural ‘intermediaries’. In addition, these studies have broadened the field of inquiry to include the contribution of European, mainly German scholarship. This conference will seek to take stock of this revisionist historiography by looking at the interface between ideas and practice—between the diffuse and fractured knowledge produced by Orientalists, missionaries and local interlocutors on the one hand, and the potentially more ‘blunt’ new educational institutions founded under colonial rule on the other. Potential research questions which will be explored at the conference will include the following:
- the degree to which the production of knowledge about India and the generation of policies in education and reform were more or less continuous or at variance with one another across time;
- conceptual, methodological and stylistic differences between various strands of colonial scholarship as they impinged upon the development of pedagogical realities;
- the potentially diverse relations between schools, museums, and centres of higher learning; the importance of Indian elites in the production and pedagogic implementation of this knowledge about India;
- how we might approach the wider dissemination of orientalist pedagogies beyond the realm of colonial institutions.

Programm

Thursday, 13.11.2008 (at GHI London)

14:00 Welcome (Andreas Gestrich, Director GHI London) and Introduction

14:15-16:00 Panel 1: Missionaries, Knowledge and Education [Chair: Avril Powell, SOAS]
Heike Liebau (Centre of Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin), Mission, Company and Government printing presses in 18th century South India
Karen Vallgårda (University of Copenhagen), Adam’s Escape. Danish Missionary Ideology and Power in the Boarding School in Melpattambakkam 1863-1874
Helge Wendt (University of Mannheim), Knowledge Production “on the Spot”: Missionaries and their Educational Programs in Colonial India

16:00-16:30 Tea break

16:30-18:15 Panel 2: Framing words and objects [Chair: Daud Ali, SOAS]
Kate Teltscher (Roehampton University), Hobson-Jobson and the OED
Anne-Julie Etter (Université Denis Diderot/ Paris 7), Antiquarian knowledge, museums and preservation of the Indian monuments at the turn of the 19th century
Geoffrey Oddie (University of Sydney), Missions and Museums: Hindu Gods and Other Abominations

Friday, 14.11.2008 (at GHI London)

9:00-11:20 Panel 3: Producing Space, making History [Chair: Indra Sengupta, GHI London]
Michael S. Dodson (University of Indiana at Bloomington), The Muslim City in Decline: Visions of Jaunpur in the Nineteenth Century
Peter Gottschalk (Wesleyan University), Promoting Scientism: Institutions for Gathering and Disseminating Knowledge in British Bihar
Chitralekha Zutshi (College of William and Mary), Rajatarangini and the Making of Colonial Historical Knowledge in Kashmir
David Lelyveld (William Paterson University), The Qutb Minar in Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Āsār al-Sanādīd

11:20-11:50 Tea break

11:50-13:00 Panel 4: Debates on Knowledge and Pedagogy 1 [Chair: Markus Daechsel, Royal Holloway College]
Catriona Ellis (Edinburgh University), Policeman or creator? A study of pedagogical theories in the Madras Presidency, 1930s
Iqbal Singh Sevea (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Schooling the Muslim: Debates over Muslim education in late colonial India

13:00-14:30 Lunch

14:30-15:40 Panel 5: Debates on Knowledge and Pedagogy 2 [Chair: Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Nottingham Trent University]
Alan M. Guenther (Briercrest College), Syed Mahmood and his History of English Education in India
SA Zaidi (University of Cambridge), Ilm ya taleem? [Knowledge or education?] Contested practices countering zillat: Muslims in north India, c. 1860-1900

15:40-16:10 Tea break

18:00-19:00 Keynote lecture: What’s in a (proper) name? Authorship, nomenclature and individuals in the Linguistic Survey of India, 1894-1928
Javed Majeed (Queen Mary College, University of London)

Saturday, 15.11.2008 (at SOAS, Room 116)

9:00-10:10 Panel 6: Pedagogy in Practice: Schooling sensibilities [Chair: Francis Robinson, Royal Holloway]
Margrit Pernau (Max-Planck-Institute Berlin), Teaching emotions. Victorian values and sharafat in 19th century Delhi
Bhavani Raman (Princeton University), Learning recollection in the Tinnai School in Nineteenth-century South India

10:10-10:40 Tea break

10:40:11:50 Panel 7: Pedagogy in Practice: textbooks and curriculum [Chair: Talat Ahmed, Goldsmiths College London]
Amrita Shodhan (Independent Scholar, London), The understanding of caste and Hinduism in early nineteenth century Gujarat as reflected in judicial practice, reformist writings and school textbooks
Vikas Gupta (University of Delhi), The Paradox of Curricular Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century: Pundits, Molvis, Missionaries and the Raj

11:50-13:00 Panel 8: Reformers and Institutions [Chair: Anshu Malhotra, University of Delhi]
Jeffrey M. Diamond (Charleston College), The Orientalist-Indian Literati Relationship in the Northwest: G.W. Leitner, Muhammad Hussain Azad and the Contestation of Knowledge in Colonial Lahore
Gail Minault (University of Texas at Austin), Aloys Sprenger: German Orientalism’s ‘Gift’ to Delhi College

13:00-13:15 closing remarks

13:15 Lunch

Kontakt

Dr Indra Sengupta, German Historical Institute (isengupta@ghil.ac.uk),
Dr Daud Ali, School of Oriental and African Studies (da7@soas.ac.uk)


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