Jana Tschurenev’s Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India aims to identify and delineate the broader, global origins of colonial education in India. She largely locates this transformation of Indian educational traditions as a result of the interaction between India and an imperial civil society movement after the 1810s that involved social reformers, European and American missionaries, and Indian intellectuals.
Chapter 1 begins by locating the origins of educational involvement in South India among various missionaries, particularly Alexander Bell’s efforts to introduce the „monitorial system“ of instruction. Tschurenev shows that questions and debates over imparting instruction to Indian students were bound up with European (specifically English and Scottish) debates on remedying pauperism back home, and in India over concerns for the status of Eurasians in Tamil country.
Chapter 2 shifts gears by bringing the focus back to England, analyzing the other innovation brought into imperial educational frameworks: the Lancastrian system. This, Tschurenev demonstrates, envisioned the education of the poor as much a moral as it was a political remedy, guided by perennial fears of social unrest and pauperism. Here, the chapter shows that groups such as the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) became the paradigm for educational activities in India.
Building upon this argument linking the colony and metropole, Chapter 3 proceeds to explore how debates between the Anglican Church, Utilitarians and Evangelicals extended to India. It argues that the quest to use education as a means of disciplining the poor at home translated into a „civilizing mission“ in colonial India. Missionary societies such as the Church Missionary Society (CMS), the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the Danish-German Tamil country missions all documented their efforts to their audiences back home, and this reporting fed back into domestic British debates on pauperism and mass education.
Chapter 4 changes track and hones in more specifically on how missionaries (focusing on the Bombay Educational Society, BES), in imparting education, had to come up with different methods and rationales for different classes: Eurasian poor, women and rural Indian students. The chapter also shows that egalitarian rhetoric was used for domestic fundraising, but such aspirations tended to emphasize social difference in India. This all engendered what Tschurenev cites as a „colonial grammar of difference“ (p. 27).
Shifting the focus to the rural world, Chapter 5 explores how the introduction of missionary schools into a rural Indian setting often provoked conflict, but also led to new adaptations regarding supervision and an emergent „examination culture“. Chapter 6 build expands upon this interactive milieu by detailing how European science, religious instruction and the role of government were intensely debated by educational missionaries, the Bengali bhadralok (middle class) and British officialdom. Within these debates, Tschurenev observes that one main result was that European science entered the lexicon of the Bengal Renaissance, while Christian religious teachings met much stronger resistance.
Chapter 7 shifts geographic focus to educational institution building in Bombay after 1819, demonstrating how Indian educational societies (namely the Parsi School Girls’ Association and the Society for Promoting the Education of Mahar-Mangs) adopted the rhetoric and organizational methods that had been honed back home and in India by missionary societies. She also draws attention to the colonial state’s always fluctuating positions on mass education, examining policy changes between the Wood Dispatch of 1854 and the 1882 („Hunter“) Educational Commission.
Lastly, Chapter 8 tops off Tschurenev’s analysis by focusing on the relationship between the drive for universal education, socio-economic inequality and the eventual nationalist educational agenda of the late nineteenth century. Here, she sheds light upon one main legacy of this „educational experiment“: the exclusion of various castes from these new schools. This, Tschurenev argues, mirrored the emergence of a „differentiated educational“ approach which was adopted early in nineteenth century, in Bombay particularly.
Overall, Tschurenev paints a dynamic, globally-interconnected portrait of how education emerged in the first generation of nineteenth century colonial India. It is an ambitious undertaking, and is convincing in drawing out the interconnectedness of domestic reform and how educational agendas played out in the Indian context. And the book demonstrates just how fractious and contested colonial education in India was. It is also impressively researched, drawing upon multiple archival sources in Europe and India.
Tschurenev does well to outline how the worlds of an „imperial civil society“ and the Indian village schools interacted with each other within a colonial milieu. But this comes at a cost. Because of the book’s vast geographic and chronological scope, it cannot fully account for Indian agency and voices. Indian educational societies are described as integral and that they „appropriated the organizational and publicity repertoire […] to pursue their own, independent social and educational agendas“ (p. 319). But it is very hard to discern Indian voices in her analysis. When we do hear them, they are largely via secondary literature.
The book’s other shortcoming is in how it treats the encounter between European and Indian knowledge systems. Such significant organizational change begs the questions of what the effects of these schools’ new curricula were upon Puranic cosmology, knowledge systems and religious self-understanding. Where Tschurenev does engage how Indians made sense of these „epistemic encounters“, she relies heavily upon David Kopf's rich (but also dated) work on the Bengal Renaissance1 and the excellent work of Brian Hatcher.2 Other studies have demonstrated that these educational encounters were as much about knowledge interaction and contestation as they were about organizational change.3 Another gap has to do with religion. Her work focuses on traditions of learning more associated with Hinduism, but she is silent on the fate of residual Islamicate pedagogical traditions. Maktabs („primary“ schools), for example, were prominent across north India and often had more non-Muslims (usually Kayasthas) than Muslim pupils. Also, how did various madrassahs respond to these new educational efforts and did missionaries engage with them? This is a noticeable gap, especially considering that one of the colonial state’s first and biggest exercises in managing educational patronage was Warren Hasting’s founding of the Calcutta Madrassah (1781).
These points aside, the book is still a valuable and original contribution to our understanding of the interconnected origins of modern Indian educational systems. Tschurenev should be lauded for extensively mining missionary source material, still a largely under-utilized (and under-appreciated) source for Indian cultural, religious and social history, even if one has to read them „against the grain“.
Notes:
1 David Kopf, British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance. The Dynamics of Indian Modernization, 1773-1835, Calcutta 1969.
2 Brian Hatcher, Idioms of Improvement. Vidyasagar and Cultural Encounter in Bengal, Delhi 1996.
3 Hayden Bellenoit, Missionary Education and Empire in late colonial India, 1860-1920, London 2007.