Subject Lessons

Subject Lessons
Author: Sanjay Seth
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2007-08-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822390604

Subject Lessons offers a fascinating account of how western knowledge “traveled” to India, changed that which it encountered, and was itself transformed in the process. Beginning in 1835, India’s British rulers funded schools and universities to disseminate modern, western knowledge in the expectation that it would gradually replace indigenous ways of knowing. From the start, western education was endowed with great significance in India, not only by the colonizers but also by the colonized, to the extent that today almost all “serious” knowledge about India—even within India—is based on western epistemologies. In Subject Lessons, Sanjay Seth’s investigation into how western knowledge was received by Indians under colonial rule becomes a broader inquiry into how modern, western epistemology came to be seen not merely as one way of knowing among others but as knowledge itself. Drawing on history, political science, anthropology, and philosophy, Seth interprets the debates and controversies that came to surround western education. Central among these were concerns that Indian students were acquiring western education by rote memorization—and were therefore not acquiring “true knowledge”—and that western education had plunged Indian students into a moral crisis, leaving them torn between modern, western knowledge and traditional Indian beliefs. Seth argues that these concerns, voiced by the British as well as by nationalists, reflected the anxiety that western education was failing to produce the modern subjects it presupposed. This failure suggested that western knowledge was not the universal epistemology it was thought to be. Turning to the production of collective identities, Seth illuminates the nationalists’ position vis-à-vis western education—which they both sought and criticized—through analyses of discussions about the education of Muslims and women.

Secluded Scholars

Secluded Scholars
Author: Gail Minault
Publisher:
Total Pages: 378
Release: 1999
Genre: Education
ISBN:

This volume gives a detailed account of the individuals, organizations, and institutions that were influential in India in the promotion of education for Muslim girls in the colonial period.

Women in Colonial India

Women in Colonial India
Author: Jayasankar Krishnamurty
Publisher:
Total Pages: 268
Release: 1989
Genre: Social Science
ISBN:

This collection of essays on Indian women is an important contribution to both Indian historiography and feminist studies. The book covers such topics as the Hindu Widow's Remarriage act of 1856, female infanticide, property rights, social welfare systems, and the struggle for the right to vote.

Forging the Ideal Educated Girl

Forging the Ideal Educated Girl
Author: Shenila Khoja-Moolji
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520970535

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, Shenila Khoja-Moolji traces the figure of the ‘educated girl’ to examine the evolving politics of educational reform and development campaigns in colonial India and Pakistan. She challenges the prevailing common sense associated with calls for women’s and girls’ education and argues that such advocacy is not simply about access to education but, more crucially, concerned with producing ideal Muslim woman-/girl-subjects with specific relationships to the patriarchal family, paid work, Islam, and the nation-state. Thus, discourses on girls’/ women’s education are sites for the construction of not only gender but also class relations, religion, and the nation.

Women in Colonial India

Women in Colonial India
Author: Geraldine Hancock Forbes
Publisher: Orient Blackswan
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2005
Genre: Women
ISBN: 9788180280177

This Collection Of Essays On Politics, Medicine And Historiography Is About Those India Women Who Began To Be Educated And To Pay Some Role In Public Life.

Dalit Women's Education in Modern India

Dalit Women's Education in Modern India
Author: Shailaja Paik
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 371
Release: 2014-07-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 131767331X

Inspired by egalitarian doctrines, the Dalit communities in India have been fighting for basic human and civic rights since the middle of the nineteenth century. In this book, Shailaja Paik focuses on the struggle of Dalit women in one arena - the realm of formal education – and examines a range of interconnected social, cultural and political questions. What did education mean to women? How did changes in women’s education affect their views of themselves and their domestic work, public employment, marriage, sexuality, and childbearing and rearing? What does the dissonance between the rhetoric and practice of secular education tell us about the deeper historical entanglement with modernity as experienced by Dalit communities? Dalit Women's Education in Modern India is a social and cultural history that challenges the triumphant narrative of modern secular education to analyse the constellation of social, economic, political and historical circumstances that both opened and closed opportunities to many Dalits. By focusing on marginalised Dalit women in modern Maharashtra, who have rarely been at the centre of systematic historical enquiry, Paik breathes life into their ideas, expectations, potentials, fears and frustrations. Addressing two major blind spots in the historiography of India and of the women’s movement, she historicises Dalit women’s experiences and constructs them as historical agents. The book combines archival research with historical fieldwork, and centres on themes including slum life, urban middle classes, social and sexual labour, and family, marriage and children to provide a penetrating portrait of the actions and lives of Dalit women. Elegantly conceived and convincingly argued, Dalit Women's Education in Modern India will be invaluable to students of History, Caste Politics, Women and Gender Studies, Education Studies, Urban Studies and Asian studies.

Connecting Histories of Education

Connecting Histories of Education
Author: Barnita Bagchi
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2014-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1782382674

The history of education in the modern world is a history of transnational and cross-cultural influence. This collection explores those influences in (post) colonial and indigenous education across different geographical contexts. The authors emphasize how local actors constructed their own adaptation of colonialism, identity, and autonomy, creating a multi-centric and entangled history of modern education. In both formal as well as informal aspects, they demonstrate that transnational and cross-cultural exchanges in education have been characterized by appropriation, re-contextualization, and hybridization, thereby rejecting traditional notions of colonial education as an export of pre-existing metropolitan educational systems.

Politics of Education in Colonial India

Politics of Education in Colonial India
Author: Krishna Kumar
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2015-08-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1317325621

In retracting from the popular view that India’s modern educational policy was shaped almost entirely by Macaulay, this incisive work reveals the complex ideological and institutional rubric of the colonial educational system. It examines its wide-ranging and lasting impact on curriculum, pedagogy, textbooks, teachers’ role and status, and indigenous forms of knowledge. Recounting the nationalist response to educational reforms, the book reinforces three major quests: justice as expressed in the demand for equal educational opportunities for the lower castes; self-identity as manifest in the urge to define India’s educational needs from within its own cultural repertoire; and the idea of progress based on industrialization. An exceptional contribution to educational theory, including a nuanced discussion of caste, gender and girls’ education, this book will be invaluable to teachers, scholars and students of education, modern Indian history and sociology of education, and policy makers.