Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Politics, History, and Culture)

Nakazato for taking the trouble to do so, and for their comments and critiix x Acknowledgments cisms. I am grateful to Julia Adams and Reynolds Smith for editorial feedback and for shepherding this book through the publication process, and to Fred Kameny for his very professional copy editing. Since my graduate student days Dipesh Chakrabarty has been a friend and interlocutor, and he has read, commented upon, and discussed this book with me over the years that it has taken to write it. It gives me pleasure to acknowledge my debt to him, and to thank him. Barry Hindess once again demonstrated that there is no more acute reader of an argument, with a keen eye for flaws and evasions; I hope that there are, thanks to his comments, fewer of these than there might have been. Akeel Bilgrami engaged me in long-distance debates during my year in Tokyo, and his comments have never failed to be stimulating and challenging. Rajyashree Pandey read the chapters through their successive drafts, and offered unconditional encouragement coupled with unconstrained criticism! Many friends offered sustenance and hospitality while I was away from home: in India, Sudhir Chandra, Geetanjali Shree, Atul Joshi, Jayanti Pandey, Sara Rai, and Muhammad Aslam; in England, Terry Shakhanovsky, Robin Archer, Chris Macpherson, Greg Patching, and above all the Hardy family; and in Japan, Sonoe Matsui and her family. A community of friends in Melbourne provided occasions for ongoing addas; my thanks to Deborah Kessler, Pauline Nestor, and my fellow editors of Postcolonial Studies, Amanda Macdonald, Michele Grossman, and-especially-Leela Gandhi and Michael Dutton. I am unusually blessed in that my siblings constitute not only my affective, but also my intellectual, community. I subjected Vanita Seth and Suman Seth to endless drafts of the manuscript, which they read with acuity and humor. It remains a source of great sadness to me that my mother, the person who would have derived the greatest pleasure from seeing this book in print, is not here to see it. My father has been a source of unqualified support and encouragement in this as in other endeavors. I owe him and my mother more than could ever be acknowledged. Finally, and closest to home, Rajyashree and Nishad Pandey have provided me with a world which includes, but also extends well beyond, thinking and writing. I dedicate this to them. 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 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. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Subject to Pedagogy Changing the Subject: Western Knowledge and the Question of Difference Diagnosing Moral Crisis: Western Knowledge and Its Indian Object Which Past? Whose History? Part II: Modern Knowledge, Modern Nation Governmentality and Identity: Constituting the ‘‘Backward but Proud Muslim’’ Gender and the Nation: Debating Female Education Vernacular Modernity: The Nationalist Imagination Epilogue:Knowing Modernity, Being Modern Notes Bibliography Index

A study of how modern, Western knowledge came to be disseminated in India and came to assume its current status as the obvious, and almost the only, mode of knowing about India; further, and more dubiously, the work examines whether this knowledge is in f