In her latest book Beyond Macaulay: Education in India Prof Parimala Rao challenges many of the accepted assumptions about colonial education in India between 1780 and 1860. With her characteristic attention to the detail of the colonial archives; her fearless contempt for prevailing scholarly orthodoxies and her deep-seated commitment to secular, modern education as key to addressing inequality, Rao deconstructs the categories of Orientalist and Anglicist and plots an alternative history of educational exchange in early nineteenth century India. In broad terms the Anglicist group promoted Western learning through the medium of English language, while the Orientalists favoured a more classical Indian education centred round Sanskrit and Persian texts. In a discipline where Thomas Babington Macaulay has become a byword for colonial arrogance and his Minute of 1835 is viewed as the essence of patronising colonial approaches to education, Rao takes on the formidable task of rehabilitating his reputation, showing that this is an overly ideological and decontextualized reading of the sources.1 By engaging with a close reading of all 41 colonial educational minutes as well as records from individual schools and colonial reports on education, Rao shifts our understanding of Macaulay’s position in the long-term trajectory of Indian educational change. She argues that his opponents, and later historians, have wilfully misrepresented his commitment to good quality education and equality of access and that it was the Orientalist side, which supported high caste education in classical languages, who were responsible for limiting educational expansion.

Rao argues that the desire for English medium education and a modern curriculum was driven not by the colonisers but by Indians themselves and critiques the assumption that English language education contributed to the cultural and political conquest of India. Based on the data produced by colonial officials in the Madras, Bombay and Bengal Presidencies she begins by providing a background to pre-colonial education, detailing the ways in which the local vernacular schools were incorporated into a more formal system of primary education under the British. Importantly she argues that these schools were semi-formal, had curriculums focused on literacy and numeracy, and were open to students from all castes, regardless of economic status. There is no evidence provided for Dalit participation in these schools and no reference to female education, which Rao argues was only significant after 1860.

Chapter 3 highlights the expansion of educational initiatives driven by traders, missionaries and a few liberal East India Company (EIC) Officers in tandem with local Indians. This work considerably nuances our understanding of these early encounters, showing the consistent disregard of the English political and religious establishment for the education of Indians, as opposed to the small-scale ventures of missionaries and lower ranking officials particularly from dissenting and Scottish backgrounds. She attributes this to their personal experiences of the more egalitarian Scottish educational system, with its emphasis on literacy and scientific knowledge. Rao argues that modern education transmitted in both the vernacular and English was favoured by local communities not only for the material opportunities it provided, but because it was accessible to all and prioritised ‘intellectual curiosity’ rather than a direct proselytising agenda.

Rao then traces a number of educational schemes in the Bengal, Bombay and Madras Presidencies (Chapters 4, 5, 6), again highlighting the popularity of modern education taught in English and the vernacular, the interest in radical Enlightenment ideas and the emphasis on subjects such as the Arts and elementary science. She contrasts this with the EIC leaders and Orientalist experts, arguing that the policy of education in Sanskrit, Arabic and classical Indian languages with an emphasis on Indian traditions was implemented despite, rather than as a result of, popular pressure. Instead, Rao argues that it was based on racialized assumptions about Indian intellectual inferiority and inability to adequately learn two languages and a desire to restrict educational access to the upper castes and landowning classes. In particular she highlights Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay’s, belief that the ‘light must touch the top of the mountains’ first, as justification for the perpetuation of social hierarchy, modelled on the class system these aristocrats had benefitted from in Britain. This resulted in consistent and deliberate underfunding of educational establishments offering English language modern education and a consistent policy of removing Indians from the educational decision-making structure.

The lynchpin of the book is Chapters 7 and 8 which consider Macaulay himself, demonstrating the personal influences on his life and his commitment to social reform, to progress through modern secular education and to equality of educational opportunity. This combined with his desire to appoint Indians to positions of responsibility, which he recognised required fluency in English and an understanding of modern administration, and which would promote dialogue between different Indian communities and spread modern learning to the rural areas. Rao argues that it was Macaulay and his Anglicist colleagues who were in touch with popular opinion, while by contrast the Orientalist side was not so much in favour of Indian language education as opposed to modern education, driven not by a desire to preserve Indian tradition but to prevent Indian progress and to reaffirm the position of the rich and powerful Indian elites.

The final chapters focus on the last ten years of company rule, particularly the increased demand for English language teaching, the expansion in lower caste education under radical social reformers such as Jyotirao Phule and the dawning recognition that the wealthy landowning classes had little interest in colonial education. This was encapsulated in Wood’s Despatch of 1854 which advocated mass modern education in the vernacular and sought to reform the funding structures, although Rao points out that this failed to have much impact due to the obstruction by EIC officials. As a result she argues that the long-held, and comfortingly fashionable, presumption that the uprising of 1857 was a result of missionary encroachment and English language education was a wilful misrepresentation by the English elite. Rather Rao argues that even in areas at the epicentre of the Uprising popular hostility was directed to the government-sponsored indigenous schools and not English-language schools and that there was more anger about the ways in which the British were strengthening caste hierarchies and preventing educational opportunities for all but a small minority.

Rao concludes that the East India Company officials had no intention of modernising India through education and indeed, rather than attempting social reform, were instrumental in reifying and even in promoting rigid social hierarchies. This was largely based on racial arrogance, on class prejudice and a fear that the ability to think critically would lead to wider opposition, while any limited introduction of modern, English medium education was driven by Indian demand and by the pioneering work of Scots, in defiance the overarching imperial agenda. This clear argument is both a strength and a weakness. Rao’s reliance on the colonial archive causes her to underplay some of the more nuanced contemporary debates regarding funding, the curriculum, the gendered nature of some missionary provision, the role of missionaries and the variety of pre-colonial educational approaches.2 Her robust rebuttal of the historiography targets traditional schools of thought (colonial, nationalist, postmodern) which are already regarded as outdated and her lack of engagement with the work of other historians of education, for example on pedagogy, on mixed race children, on transnational information exchange, means that she fails to engage with the complexity of the current historiographical debates.3 We trace this, for example, in the over-simplistic categorisation of missionaries as English or Scottish, ignoring the wide social and denominational variety within these groups and also the impact of other European and American mission societies, her frequent elision of caste and class or blurring of the boundaries between primary and secondary education. Very few contemporary scholars still engage within the binaries of Orientalist and Anglicist, and she is more prepared to overlook the foibles of her heroes (such as Macaulay) than their opponents. That said, while at times Rao overstates her case, she contributes significantly to the history of education in India by unsettling received wisdom about colonial priorities and motivations and evidences the brahmanisation of education in very generative ways.

Notes:
1 For example Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest. Literary Study and English Rule in India, London 1989.
2 Examples: Tim Allender, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, 1820–1932, Manchester 2016; Latika Chaudhary, Land Revenues, Schools and Literacy. A Historical Examination of Public and Private Funding of Education, in: The Indian Economic & Social History Review 47 (2010), pp. 179–204; Nita Kumar, Lessons from Schools. The History of Education in Banaras, New Delhi 2000; Parna Sengupta, Pedagogy for Religion. Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal, California 2011.
3 Jana Tschurenev, Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India, Cambridge 2019.