Between democracy and progress?

At independence, the question of education was not purely academic. Educating India’s masses was tied to the imagination of the young country as a democracy where citizens would responsibly exercise their right to vote. It was also an important element in fostering the changes in agricultural practices that were regarded as essential to feed a hungry nation. This paper surveys adult education more broadly, and then narrows in on two experiments on the use of radio and then television for adult education. With some aid from UNESCO, these new forms of media also promised a novel pedagogy for India’s population. Programmes for the new India delivered what their social scientist designers understood to be ‘new knowledge’ through entertaining programmes. This was not passive education, however, as the programmes were followed by group discussions, designed to spur popular action on a subject. The topics varied from village sanitation, water conservation and new farming methods, to cultivating middle class manners among city dwellers by teaching them how to queue and where to spit. The paper charts the amazement of the social scientists – Indian and western – conducting this experiment, as their expectations about India’s passive, stagnant and homogenous population were upended. It concludes with a discussion of what these experiments reveal about India’s approach to international aid, and to Indian socialism.

This paper looks at some key debates on the nature of medical education in postcolonial India. Particularly, it will look at Nehru’s engagement with the Indian knowledge systems, and the institutional and pedagogic status of non-western medical practices in the postcolonial period. Jawaharlal Nehru was a spokesperson of modern science and technology and saw elements of emancipation in it. For him, scientific method through laboratory work was the only way to validate any systems of knowledge. The massive institutionalization of modern science and technology invited anger from few fellow politicians and leaders as these projects had totally ignored Indian systems of medicines such as Ayurveda and Unani. To become modern the existing knowledge systems were asked to prove their scientificity. Nehru responded to the advocates of Indian systems of knowledge by stating that the Government wouldn’t support non-scientific, religious, and superstitious beliefs and practices. In this presentation, I draw material from my archival research on Nehru’s engagement with the question of scientific method and the institutionalisation of medical education in India, and from my ongoing ethnographic research among the Homeopathic and Unani practitioners in Bhopal. It looks at the initial phase of institutionalisation of medical education in India and the status of non-western medical practices in the postcolonial situation, pedagogically and institutionally.

After independence, India’s state authorities regarded universities as key instruments to boost the country’s economic growth and to strengthen its ‘spiritual unity’. Universities were to provide, in Humayun Kabir’s words, an ‘intellectual articulation’ for India’s ‘synthesis of cultures’, particularly at a time when the memories of partition were still vivid in people’s minds. Within this framework, what role did minority institutions play in the construction of the nation? This presentation will focus on the state’s relations with two public Muslim universities — Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia—, in the early independence period. As state-sponsored universities, established by Muslims, primarily (though not exclusively) for Muslim students, these institutions found themselves at a critical juncture between central state authorities and India’s largest minority. I will argue that for state authorities, they served as privileged intermediaries to speak to the Muslim population, especially in the post-partition context where Nehru and his allies sought to secure Muslims’ sense of belonging to the nation. At the same time, state authorities feared that to put too much emphasis on their denominational character would revive communal divisions, hence their efforts to keep these institutions under state control. By looking at the state’s ambivalences vis-à-vis these universities, this presentation will probe the larger tensions of the government’s attitude towards Muslim citizens. It will also examine, in turn, how university members responded to the state’s policy and sought to participate to nation-building efforts on their own terms, as partners rather than followers.

The presentation focuses on the emergence and successive transformations of the leading concepts and international references when contouring the field of educational planning in India. It focuses on the period between the transfer of competencies over education to Indians and the death of Nehru. It will delineate the intricate discussion related to the main concept of planning and the specifics of education planning as a particular challenge for the worldview of planning. It will elaborate on different circulating transnational models of education planning and its changing references including Western welfare states, the Soviet Union, the UNESCO-approach, and the emergence of an own developmentalist outlook. Not only the problem of the main concepts and references are in focus, but also a panorama of the institutionalization of the field, and the specific role of educators and pedagogues in this endeavour.

During the early decades of independent life in India, material scarcity and expanding enrolment in universities across the country led to student unrest and growing political tensions. Taking forward a long-standing tradition of radical politicization, university students became increasingly critical of the Nehruvian state. Student politics focused on the material and institutional shortcomings of Indian higher education, but also linked with the defence of different conceptions of socialist transformation, Gandhian ideals of autonomy and swaraj, and diverse agendas of anti-Nehruvian opposition. This paper will look at the involvement of Jayaprakash Narayan (1902-1979) with student politics in Early Post-Colonial India. Well known for his crucial leadership role in the student protest movement that led to the declaration of the Emergency in 1974-1975, JP was active in different student agitations throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Having started his political career as a student activist in 1919, during those decades Narayan recurred to student politics as a way of promoting a novel form of lok niti, or people´s politics, and structuring a potent critique of Nehruvian nation-building that blended national, and at times very local, concerns with transregional strands of anti-statist critique of developmental nationalism taking shape across the Third World. His involvement with student politics proved crucial to the emergence of the Indian face of what Robert Altbach described in 1970 as “The International Student Revolution”.

South Asian History, as an academic discipline, for most of its existence has gravitated towards a simple dichotomy: imperialism-colonialism on the one hand, and the growing vigour of anti-colonial attitudes and aspirations of the Indians on the other. This dominant framework under which varieties of Nationalist and Marxist histories were written often occluded many social and cultural histories of religion, caste, gender, and provincialism that were positioned outside it. As an exemplar of the said paradigm, this paper brings to light the lesser-known history of the first attempt to write the ‘Official History’ of the Indian freedom struggle. The trade-offs between professional historians and the Indian state on what would constitute the ‘National History’ with an official emboss has a long bearing on how History is still taught across schools and universities in India. This paper argues how the ‘Official History’, as an unintended consequence, informed the writing of school textbooks and constructed the core of history textbook controversies in independent India. Looking closely at the events of how RC Majumdar (1888-1980) who was initially commissioned to write the ‘Official History’ was dropped from the project, and a more acceptable Tara Chand (1888-1973) was brought in raises a number of questions on the interrelation between historians and the state and the rise of statism in the production of historical knowledge. Using the archives of Ministry of Education, Indian History Congress, National Council of Educational Research and Training, private papers of Majumdar, and contemporary sources, this paper sheds light on the intricate and inconsistent processes of the making of idea(s) of an ‘Official’ India and its various representations in school education.

After India’s independence, education was imagined and mobilised as a vital instrument for decolonisation and building the new independent nation state. Negotiating India’s educational future was not only a domestic affair. As India was perceived as a critical site for the outcome of the evolving Cold War power struggle and for establishing geopolitical stability, India’s educational future attracted attention from the international community in a still overwhelmingly imperial world. State powers and international organisations played an active role in shaping the educational policy debates in India during the 1950s by facilitating and funding the exchange of ideas and people. This paper explores how India’s educational future was discussed and debated in a dense transnational network of politicians, experts, and consultants that included domestic leading educationalists and politicians, like Humayun Kabir, as well as representatives from internationally operating organizations, such as the Ford Foundation and UNESCO. Using materials collected in multi-archival research, this paper aims to highlight the recursive interaction between the “domestic” and “international” domains in the social and political process of formulating new ideas and solutions for educational development. It argues that the educational imaginaries that were produced in this network were not merely replications of Western imaginaries, nor simply the product of a domestic political process, and must be understood as part of a process of post-colonial world-making.

This paper will explore the history of rural literacy in light of the mass literacy campaigns launched by the colonial state in the 1930s and 40s. These campaigns were launched by the Indian political parties that formed local governments in the 1930s. These governments were constituted as part of the self-government initiatives of the colonial government, which was unwilling to give up the power but willing to share it with Indians. The history of mass literacy tells us how a large majority of the Indian countryside was educated in the modern period. I place these initiatives in the light of a global history of rural literacy campaigns, i.e., in Russia, Cuba, etc. The paper focuses on methods, approaches, and networks of literacy campaigns and the challenges of literacy initiatives in colonial society. It allows us to understand the making of a modern democracy which would go under universal franchise in 1947. My paper uses methods of social history to understand reports of mass literacy campaigns.

On October 1937, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and the education ministers of the provinces where the Indian National Congress had established governments decided to decolonise education by replacing the curriculum of primary schools. They constituted a committee consisting of a group of educationists trained in the universities of Europe and the United States. Headed by Zakir Husain, the vice chancellor of Jamia Milia Islamia in Delhi and later president of India, this group formulated a primary school curriculum combining indigenous and colonial subjects. It formulated a curriculum for Spinning and Weaving, Social Studies (Social Sciences), Mathematics, Language (mother tongue), General Science and Drawing for classes 1 to 7. The Committee explicitly stated that the new curriculum aimed to ‘develop a broad human interest in the progress of mankind in general and of India in particular, to develop in the pupil a proper understanding of his social and geographical environment; and to awaken the urge to improve it, to inculcate the love of the motherland, reverence for its past, and a belief in its future destiny as the home of a united co-operative society based on love, truth and justice, to develop a sense of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship’ and ‘finally to develop mutual respect for the world religions a reverential study of the different religions’ was included. Taking into consideration, among others, criticisms advanced by anti-colonial leaders like Lajpat Rai and Aurobindo Ghosh, this presentation will critically analyse how far these objectives were fulfilled through the enactment of this curriculum.

This paper analyses the efforts of Indian women’s organisations to professionalise and institutionalise early childhood care and education (ECCE) from the interwar period to the early postcolonial decades. It argues that the women’s movement played an essential role in the development of ECCE in India. Nationalist women argued that ECCE was the basis for universal education, for the formation of citizens, and hence for the building of the new nation. The male-led national education movement in the 1930s, and the colonial and postcolonial Indian governments in the 1940s all relied on women’s volunteer efforts for establishing a basic infrastructure of ECCE, and for training the personnel to run nursery schools, and rural child welfare centres. This reliance on civil society, and on women’s volunteer labour had a significant impact of the development of ECCE under post-colonial India’s ‘socialism of scarcity.’ As the paper shows, it led to a governmental neglect of ECCE, and a preference of grants-in-aid for volunteer training programs, and limited outreach initiatives.

Women’s education emerges as an important agenda in nationalist literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in India. This presentation will look at early attempts by women to recommend policies for women’s education in the emerging nation-state. It will examine documents from the 1940s, starting with the report commissioned by the National Planning Committee in 1938, on the Women’s Role in the Planned Economy, which was published on the eve of India’s independence. It will also examine the reports of the National Committee on Women’s Education (also referred to as Durgabai Deshmukh Committee, 1959 and Hansa Mehta Committee 1962). The paper will attempt to look at the ways in which these early efforts by women of the nationalist elites envisioned policies to further women’s education in the early post-colonial nation-state. It will examine the multiple and sometimes contradictory stances on the aims of girls’ and women’s education in the democratic nation, in relation to their roles in production and social reproduction and especially in relation to family, childcare, labour and sexuality.

Education played a significant role in the nation-building exercise of several young nation-states of the 20th century. In India, however, education carried the burden of the past of being a ‘contested’ terrain (Bhattacharya 1998) when it comes to the access and nature of education for several diverse social groups like Dalits, lower castes, and women, who faced historical exclusion from the formal educational institutions. When modern educational institutions opened their doors to these excluded groups there was a social unrest among many, as the pre-existing social order was threatened. One response to this was the establishment of several segregated educational spaces based exclusively on caste, religion, and gender. Jenkins (2014) highlights that such segregated institutions have a positive value when it concerns the education of historically oppressed groups, as they do not face the usual discrimination in these spaces. This is however contradictory to the several educational initiatives undertaken by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar who played a pivotal role in building democratic institutions that are foundational to independent India. This paper highlights several historical instances and responses to the education of Dalits in present South India by looking at them through the contemporary larger debates and complexities concerning diversity and inclusion in education. The competing liberal and poststructuralist theoretical perspectives are taken into account when dealing with these complex responses to the education of marginalised groups.

It has often been said that education, and in particular pre-tertiary education, was a neglected aspect of developmental planning in India. The purpose of this paper is to examine the conceptualisation of education in the Indian developmental imagination in order to examine the conceptualisation of how education was supposed to work. Returning to earlier debates in the last years of British rule in India, and formulating how breaks and discontinuities were supposed to operate, but also looking at resource allocation, priorities, and the imagined duties of citizens educated in a secular manner, as well as the formulation of early textbooks and syllabi, I hope to suggest that a top-heavy educational policy was the ill-considered outcome of a developmental imagination in which education was insufficiently thought through, leaving space for non-state actors to intervene in crucial ways in terms of both structure and content.