Indian Education System

The historical record about education up to and including the Mughal period is sparse and is generally broken down in relation to vast expanses of time and imperfect geographical boundaries: Vedic education, Brahmanic education, the Buddhist system of education and, finally, Islamic/Medieval education (Sharma and Sharma 2004; Singh and Nath 2007;

Jayapalan 2005; Choudhary 2008). Attempting to identify patterns in education in pre-colonial India is complicated by the fact that, among other difficulties, India represented a web of often-overlapping principalities. Although the histories written about pre-colonial

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education and India often employ religious categories, it should be noted that “secular education” was also featured in the different eras, although to differing extents (Choudhary 2008: 51).

From a meta-perspective, the argument that Indian approaches to education have historically been able to fuse with different “cultural” encounters via a process of hybridization and thus lends some insight into the ways in which education has been defined and redefined throughout history is particular interesting. Barnita Bagchi (2014), for example, argues: “Whether through cultural encounters between the Mughal rulers…or through contact with the British rulers and their culture, Indian education showed resilience, hybridity, and the capacity to combine ‘indigenous’ and ‘external’ influences in education” (8-9). The danger of such an approach, however, is that it works to obscure colonial and imperial power relations, an argument which becomes even more pronounced when one considers the changes wrought by the British, namely the destruction of village life and village-based educational endeavors. According to Dharampal (2000), and naturally and rightly contradicting the British colonial record, the education system in India in the year 1800 was likely both more expansive than in Britain and of higher quality when it came to methods and teachers. What is more, the duration of schooling in the Indian system was longer. On the whole, with the major exception of girls’ education, popular education in India as of the beginning of the 19^th Century was in a better state than in England (Dharampal 2000: 20).

The difficulty in putting together a comprehensive historical narrative about the origins and features of village education networks in India is compounded by the fact that, as Dharampal (2000) points out, the history of education in India since roughly the 15^th Century was and has been written by foreigners, foreigners who were more often than not integral components in a web of domination (7). In the case of the British, for example, the very concept of mass education as practiced at the village level and its connected indigenous village-to-village networks and even funding schemes were entirely foreign, as evidenced by the fact that within Britain itself, the “considerable learning and scholarship were limited to a very select elite” (8). In 1813, the British launched a series of surveys to attempt to comprehend the layout of indigenous education in India. This, as pointed out by Dharampal, served the function of laying the groundwork for educational reform by the British geared toward the “religious and moral improvement” of their Indian subjects (17).

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The point here is that the British, as part of the general demolition of community life in India, obliterated the extant indigenous approach(es) to education. Better yet, as Gandhi (1931) remarked in a speech in London:

…the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and the beautiful tree perished (Gandhi cited in Dharampal 2000: 6).

Exactly what this “beautiful” tree was replaced with and why will be the topic of the following paragraphs. While it would be useful to simply label the approach to education in India prior to the 19^th Century as “mechanical”, such a label would be imprudent. The breadth, depth and even funding of the extant, indigenous system are incongruous with such a simplistic label. What is more, suggesting that Indian society prior to colonialism was strictly mechanistic would be a flagrant untruth; in fact, evidence suggests that Indian society was even more “developed” and advanced by many measures – except for some technology, namely that related to seafaring, weapons production and steel – than was British society at the time. In education, the orientation point for educational conservatism is the British colonial system, if only because the British had so effectively disassembled the extant structures.

That indigenous, community based education was wiped out by the British in order that they could introduce their own system – with their own aims – should be obvious enough at this juncture. What came to replace it, however, requires some explanation. According to R.P. Pathak (2012), education during the British period can be broken down into four periods:

the period up until 1812, which was characterized by indifference, ostensibly because education did not fit into the East India Company’s mandate; 1813-1853, by a freedom of provinces to determine their own educational approaches; 1854-1920, a period of “all-India education policy”; and finally, 1921-1947, “the period of provincial autonomy” (2-3). This is all slightly misleading insofar as it suggests that there was a unified or well-thought-out approach to education in India during colonial rule. This was not the case. The rest of this subsection (5.2.1.) is a brief summation of undertakings aimed at shaping education in India up to 1947.

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Lord Macaulay’s “Minute” of 1835 laid the groundwork for what eventually would become British policy in India. The main features of his “Minute” are as follows: first, he reified the notion that “literature” referred solely to English literature and explicitly not to Sanskrit or Persian letters; second, he contended that an “Indian scholar” referred to a person who was fluent in the Western literary and philosophical tradition; third, he repudiated the value of “orientalism” (in the 19^th Century sense) and argued that it was an obstacle to progress; fourth, he suggested that only the English language could be a worthwhile medium of instruction on account of indigenous languages being “incomplete” (adapted from Sharma and Sharma 2004: 82). It probably is not necessary to say these notions are wrong; what is more relevant to the argument here is that this set the stage for what would eventually become the Crown’s “rational” management of its “crown jewel”. That this rational management was, in fact, oppression writ large is a different matter.

Between 1836 and 1853, many schools and colleges were built across India with the aim of both providing some basic education to the masses and creating a professional class (medical doctors, lawyers, engineers) in service of British interests. Additionally, vernaculars became officially accepted or at least condoned as the media of instruction in primary schools (Jayapalan 2005: 62). “Wood’s Despatch of 1854”, however, represented a slight adjustment to Macaulay’s “Minute” and thenceforth replaced it as the “unofficial” British educational policy in India. It included provisions for the “diffusion of the arts, science and philosophy of Europe”, officially allowed for instruction in the vernacular until the respective pupil’s knowledge of English was deemed sufficient to study in the language, and the discrediting of Macaulay’s “filtration theory”, which posited that only the indigenous elites needed to be educated. Furthermore, it included very modest provisions for female primary education and the creation of institutions of higher learning on the model of London University (Jayapalan 2005: 62-63).

Wood’s Despatch effectively framed education in India into the 20^th Century and thus created the reference point for educational conservatism. As discussed before, Gandhi

“experimented” with his own approaches to education throughout his life. Upon his return to India in 1914, he became particularly critical of the British approach to education during the period of “all-India education” and introduced a scheme for basic education. The criticisms of the British approach to education during this time were manifold, but the most damning criticisms certainly resonate. They include the ideas that the system was fundamentally

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Indian”, it was biased toward city dwellers, it was English-medium and focused too much on texts and, perhaps most significantly, it was “not in accordance with the needs of a secular democratic country” (Pathak 2012: 76). These discontents were allowed to simmer for decades.

The decade leading up to 1947 was particularly interesting in the context of the cementing of principles in Indian education. Much can be gleaned about the interests and approaches of the British from an official report compiled by John Sargent (1947), the then Educational Adviser to the Government of India and one of the major shapers of Indian educational policy, both before and after independence. His review of educational developments in India was framed by a general clause which appeared quite early in the report: “I have yet to be convinced that India’s educational needs or the best ways of satisfying them differ essentially in their wider aspects from those of the rest of the world”

(11). He pointed out, too, that the signatories of the report represented a cross section of India, with each of the major communitarian groups having been represented. The findings, of course, should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism and can rightly be viewed as an exercise in self-congratulatory back patting on the eve of independence. Nonetheless, insofar as diarchy (dual rule) was allowed to at least nominally take hold subsequent to 1919, the structure and ideas behind the education system were faithful representations of the prevailing educational vision, at least to the extent that the colonial report was able to incorporate at least some of the Indian National Congress’ critiques.

While the entire report is interesting to the student of history and education, the most relevant portion of it begins with a description of middle schools. At the time, there were two types of middle schools, one English-medium and the other, vernacular. The vernacular middle school, however, was not envisioned as a transition to high school but rather as a

“complete unit by itself” (Sargent 1947: 79), but by 1947, as English instruction was offered within vernacular middle schools, this distinction was already beginning to blur; nevertheless, it stubbornly persisted. The design of the English-medium middle schools, however, was such that they were to serve as feeders to high schools. In this period, the distinction that was made between English-medium and vernacular middle schools set the stage for sorting, and this conflict – English versus the vernacular – still plays an important and regrettable role in Indian schools.

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With regards to school structure, secondary schools were partitioned into middle and upper, whereby: “the latter stage leads to colleges and universities while the former is designed to be a complete course in itself” (Sargent 1947: 87). While the different provinces had different structures, meaning here different compositions of the high school stage, the division into middle and high was a pan-Indian phenomenon. Although English-medium schools had been championed by missionaries and then officially via Macaulay’s “Minute”, this trend had ostensibly reversed by 1947. Not only had vernacular-medium instruction become entrenched, but the record suggests that it was being actively encouraged, with some overtly stated official misgivings. Sargent contended: “The change-over from English to the mother tongue has created difficulties due to lack of technical and scientific vocabulary and suitable textbooks” (Sargent 1947: 94). This point is unfortunately similar to the one made in 1835, but Sargent goes on to clarify: “It may, however, be said generally…that the difficulties which were considered as serious in the previous Quinquennial Review, 1932-1937, are being gradually overcome” (94).

The history of Indian education prior to independence is perhaps far too broad a topic to be condensed into a few short paragraphs. The point of the above section is to draw attention to the fact that: first, precolonial education in India was comprehensive, although records of this comprehensiveness are few and far between; second, the British were initially highly indifferent to Indian education, although this did not stop them from dismantling extant structures; and third, the system that the British did eventually introduce was geared not toward mass education but was considerably more interested in training the servants of empire. The narrow interests coalesced into a rough structure that would eventually galvanize, expand and persist. The year 1947 represented an opportunity to abandon the norms and ideas lurking behind the British educational policy that had galvanized toward the end of the 19^th Century. The rationalization of colonial educational policy – all-India education – included a need to sort potentially useful future administrators from the masses.

This logic has been allowed remain embedded within Indian educational policy precisely because it was not rooted out upon independence.

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