India, 1947

It would be an enormous understatement to remark that India in 1947 was chaotic; in fact, the historical record reveals that never before had such chaos reigned, at least from the perspective of the movement of populations. Up to ten million people were on the move from east to west and west to east after the announcement of the poorly conceived, official boundaries of India and Pakistan, an affair which deserves the tremendous scrutiny it has been accorded (Keay 2000: 507-508). Independence and partition have both been thoroughly documented elsewhere, but it is very easy to become desensitized to the facts and figures embedded in historical descriptions. Throughout the past decade, it seems the most

“successful” history books do not offer much in terms of new perspectives; rather, their success seems to be dependent on the extent to which they can adjust upwardly the body counts connected to various catastrophes (wars, famines, “natural disasters”, etc.). The horrors of communal violence and the chaos surrounding the perhaps-foreseeable-yet-seemingly-unforeseen events cannot be faithfully relayed by facts and figures.

The British divestment of its colonial holdings in India was arguably as ignominious as any of its other debacles (famines, massacres, etc.) on the subcontinent. The trauma of colonialism, coupled with the poorly planned and executed decolonization process, did not leave India completely rudderless in late 1947. The concept of Swaraj, after all, did not come out of the blue shortly before independence but can rather be viewed as an historical, political and even institutional rallying point, one which became progressively more manifest, with obvious fits and starts, before being realized in 1947. India, like Pakistan, already had structures of governance in place. What is more, in Gandhi, Nehru, Maulana Azad, Rabindranath Tagore and B.R. Ambedkar, among others, it had some of the 20^th Century’s best political and social minds at its disposal. These leaders, however, could do little to prevent the chaos of partition.

While it would be impossible to reconstruct the fears, hopes and feelings that obtained during the second half of 1947, literature can aid in the process of understanding, something which detached historical accounts are thoroughly incapable of doing. In the case of partition, Khushwant Singh’s (2009) novel, Train to Pakistan, unpacks the complex relations and

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ambiguities of communal identity and village life, the politics of independence and the arbitrariness and brutality of violence during the months after partition. Originally published in 1956, the novel is by no means a social scientific work; that being said, it does capture the chaos of the time and assists in framing the political decisions, or lack thereof, made concerning education in the Republic. Unfortunately, other issues were deemed more pressing than was educational policy.

Independence can rightly be viewed as a complex, challenging and chaotic time, and these adjectives can be extended to Congress’⁴³ attempts to consolidate power and govern, as well. Kaviraj (2002) lays out the fundamental challenge thusly: “Indian nationalism needed a form of identity and ideology that was based on inclusivist and universal unifying principles, instead of the segmentation of traditional society” (151). The replication approach, which must have been appealing for those more inclined to the outright modernization of Indian society via the faithful copying of the pattern laid out by the industrial West, was in general unappealing to Indian nationalists, because adherence to this replication approach would have potentially resulted in the Balkanization of India along linguistic, religious and ethnic lines.

What is more, while the USSR might have offered a kind of model for federation and for incorporating various groups, this would have required an all-powerful central government, something which would not have jived with the democratic spirit of the nascent republic.

It is particularly telling that Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru, three of the most significant Indian nationalists, abhorred the replication approach. Instead, and to varying degrees, each argued in favor of improvisation (Kaviraj 2002: 152-153). The link between this improvisation, which entails responding to particularities of political construction on an ad hoc (i.e. not overtly ideological) basis, and reflexivity appears self-evident, at least insofar as reflexivity/adaptability forms a basis for action. This approach allowed for the adoption of a unique, plural manifestation of Indian nationalism, the novelty of which appears more pronounced, for example, when compared to the case of Pakistan (153).

43 Congress will henceforth be used to refer to the political party, the Indian National Congress.

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This plural, unique form of Indian nationalism, however, prevented the emergence of a strong consensus about education. Congress needed to consolidate power in line with a broad vision of how the country was to be, and there was a consensus within the party that the state should first and foremost be secular and independent. This was the glue which held and theretofore had held Congress together. When it came to visions of education, however, there were myriad ideas regarding which way was the right way. The notion that Gandhi was in favor of a new approach to education and development has been explored already.

Gandhi’s ideas about education provide a stark contrast to those of Nehru, whose focus on modernizing and developing the “commanding heights” seemingly trumped considerations related to the specifics of an indigenous educational policy. J.L. Raina (1993) contends:

Education was thus looked upon by [Nehru] as something much more than mastering this or that kind of knowledge or acquiring competence or proficiency in any particular field of education or research; it was conceived of as a process which trains people to understand their environment so as to establish a desired social order (226).

This training of “people to understand their environment” to create a more advantageous social order is no foreign concept to any student of reform or development policy.⁴⁴

Raina goes on to further elucidate Nehru’s big-picture approach to education, a depiction which will later be somewhat muddled by what can be referred to as “the facts on the ground”: “…to perform the task of shaping an environment which is in tune with the demands of their time, Nehru stressed two basic qualities which education should aim at:

building ‘strength of character’ and ‘the right out-look on life’” (226). To him, it seems education was central to a modified liberal paradigm by and through which India would become a successful and modern state upon independence. It was not without reservations,

44 What is striking, however, is the relationship between Raina’s (1993) interpretation of Nehruvian educational policy and Bruce Braun’s (2000) Foucaultian analysis of late-Victorian Canadian educational policy.

Understanding the environment was a literal task in Braun’s depiction, but both approaches relied upon an initial understanding which in turn needed to be operationalized in order to achieve the desired social and economic ends. Among other things, this suggests that Nehru was a shrewd operator and had a deep and instrumental understanding of the relationship between knowledge and power or, at the very least, “the imbrication of men [sic] and things” (Foucault 1991: 93).

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however, that Nehru adopted wholesale the institutional structure left in place by the erstwhile colonial power. Raina (1993) contends:

Nehru knew that in the India of his day the pattern of education had been devised by the Britishers as a part of their comprehensively thought-out colonial policy, in which they wanted the system to train Indians for administering their empire. This had made it very limited in its objectives and given it an unhealthy rigidity (225).

This “unhealthy rigidity” would persist. When it came to school education, improvisation regrettably meant adhering to the path of least resistance, which in turn meant adhering to the British structures, which in turn persisted as the framework by and through which reforms would unfold.

While it turns out that the Nehruvian educational legacy was represented by a confounding mix of liberalism and conservatism (or anti-progressivism), all this should come as no surprise to anybody in tune with his pre-independence oeuvre. While this topic will be discussed in depth during the discussion of post-secondary education in the next chapter, in his own words, Nehru (2004) stated unequivocally that: “The three fundamental requirements of India, if she is to develop industrially and otherwise, are a heavy engineering industry, scientific research institutes, and electric power” (452). This committed focus on the so-called commanding heights left little room for humanistic, egalitarian commitments to education, commitments which to his mind probably would have sapped resources and energy from the overall goal of turning post-independence India into a regional and global power.

Contrasting the depictions of Nehru’s approach to policy mentioned above with those of his first education minister, Maulana Azad, it becomes clear that there was at least a partial disconnect in their ideas. In a speech delivered on February 18, 1947, Azad commented:

A truly liberal and humanitarian education may transform the outlook of the people and set it on the path of progress and prosperity, while an ill-conceived or unscientific system might destroy all the hopes which have been cherished by generations of pioneers in the cause of national struggle (Azad 1956: 1).

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The specifics of what exactly Azad meant by “liberal” and “humanitarian” are unclear.

India’s approach to education at the time was perhaps liberal, given a narrow understanding of the term, but was not exactly humanitarian. While lip-service was paid to flowering educational concepts, the realities of post-independence India and the ambitions of the government combined to produce an environment in which impulses to reform education from the ground up were sacrificed in favor of the commanding heights.

This is and was not unique to India. Roughly similar circumstances obtained in postwar Germany, and the argument here is that similar sacrifices were made. The sacrifices which were made, however efficient they may have seemed at the time, resulted in too strong a dissonance between the highly problematic institutional antecedents and the hope to construct new societies from the rubble of war and colonialism. In India, it seems, the modernizers won, especially in the educational realm, although the fact that the modernizers won ostensibly led to a kind of conservative approach to education, meaning the system introduced by the British was simply, with some exceptions, adopted and extended. In all likelihood, the chaos of independence and partition precluded more abrupt changes, as the situation demanded improvisation and flexibility. The reluctance to make significant changes in other realms was revealed in Congress’ inability to distance itself, for example, from the Government of India Act of 1935. This reluctance in the face of change, however, has hampered the extension of meaningful and broad educational endeavors mightily.