Historian Meenakshi Jain's Latest Work Reveals How the British Dismantled Bharat's Indigenous Education System R Jagannathan
Jain has established herself as one of the foremost historians of our time, untainted by ideological biases. This volume only confirms her status. The British Makeover of India: Indigenous Education and Languages Downgraded. Meenakshi Jain. Aryan Books. Rs 995. pages 400. Suppose you need to know how systematically the British sabotaged and damaged India’s judicial, educational and indigenous institutions. In that case, two books make for essential reading: historian Meenakshi Jain’s two-volume work on The British Makeover of India. The first volume was released around the middle of 2024, and deals with how the British “upturned” judicial and other indigenous institutions which were delivering inexpensive and quick justice (You can read my review of this volume here). The second volume, focusing on education and the downgrading of Indian languages, has now been released. The two volumes should be read together to understand the inherent malevolence underlying the British makeovers, often led by evangelical forces. We are all familiar with the Macaulay Minute of February 1835, which deemed the entire stock of Indian literature and scientific work as worthless, and prepared the grounds for the Anglicisation of Indian education, a process that continues 78 years after independence. Macaulay was successful beyond his wildest dreams, as an impoverished population took to English education in order to gain access to some jobs and upward mobility. The British taught Indians to hate their culture and institutions, creating a class of self-loathing individuals who continue to be part of the elite even today. But long before Macaulay put his plan into effect, missionaries had prepared the blueprint for the Christianisation and Anglicisation of India, especially one evangelist, Charles Grant, in 1792. As Jain explains in her second volume, the early officials of the East India Company saw merit in indigenous education systems and saw no need to disrupt them. The teaching methods were similar in the presidencies of Madras, Bengal and Bihar. Most schools were “one-teacher schools that catered to a cross-section of society.” They were affordable and funded largely through the local community’s voluntary contributions. Students were rarely charged fees. The communities paid teachers, often through gifts that may also have been paid in kind. But having a functional education system that was taught in the vernacular, and which, at best, may have required the addition of science and modern subjects to improve itself, did not suit British imperial interests as their power grew. Adding to demands for the evisceration of indigenous education were the evangelical groups which wanted to Christianise India, and Anglicisation was the instrument used. Vernacular education did not suit their purpose. Once a people were separated from their cultural roots through the imposition of an alien language, they were less and less resistant to evangelisation. Even some Orientalists were horrified at this cultural assault. Jain quotes HH Wilson as criticising Governor-General William Bentinck and Macaulay of “annihilating native literature by sweeping away all sources of pride and pleasure in their own mental efforts…”. The tragedy is that this effort to deny any pride in heritage institutions continued under the ministrations of the Nehruvian era, with Communist historians helping him erase Indian culture from students’ collective memories. A critical turning point in the rise of colonial education came in 1823 and 1824, when one Indian and a racist Briton criticised the attempt to set up a new Sanskrit college in India. Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the Hindu reformer, criticised the move as something that can “only be expected to load the minds of youth with grammatical niceties and metaphysical distinctions.” He claimed that students would not learn anything beyond what was known 2,000 years ago. The other critic was James Mill, author of The History of British India, who said that the effort should not be “to teach Hindoo learning or Mahomedan learning, but useful learning…”. Despite sparring between those who were sympathetic to Indigenous education and those who wanted to dismantle it, the decision to Anglicise Indian education was finally cast in stone by 1842. Meenakshi Jain’s second volume is divided into four sections of which the first is most important, as it outlines the pulls and pressures of retaining or debunking Indigenous education and teaching in the vernacular. In the end, the British chose Anglicisation as the evangelical lobby was too powerful to resist, and the British administration also needed low-wage peons to run their offices and man the law and order machinery. Section B, or the second section, tells us how the missionaries entered the field of education in order to aid proselytization. Section C details the reports from the provinces which advocated the use of the vernacular in education, but the north-western provinces and Punjab began to show support for Christianisation. Most interesting is Section D, which demonstrates how Urdu was an artificial construct by the Muslim elite in the face of declining political power. The naturally evolving common language of the north was Hindavi, which was an intermingling of Sanskritic and Persian language streams. But around the end of the 17th century, there was a campaign to purge Hindavi of its Sanskrit heritage and stuff it with Persian and Arabic words. The Muslim elite did not want to be seen as part of Indian cultural syncretism. Thus, was language used to create another divide that finally culminated in partition. Jain has established herself as one of the foremost historians of our time, untainted by ideological biases. This volume only confirms her status. KR IRS 19225 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/thatha_patty/CAL5XZoqVZw95bCuDG5DGQqz4OuEtttNUS8_5FexifNPgXb2K9g%40mail.gmail.com.
