“Native” and “colonial” objects. Changing constellations of affordances and the erosion of inherited teaching roles in colonial India

ABSTRACT

This article asks whether the slow process of divesting Indian native schoolteachers of their traditional authority was only about new concepts and representations of education and knowledge. Following the methodological idea of constellations of affordances, emphasising a relational ontology, the article discusses whether changes in the shape and the relations of objects in Indian classrooms together with the arrival of new objects may have played a silent role in the process of erosion of schoolteachers’ authority. Based on a wide range of official and missionary sources, but also referring to individual native voices, the article reconstructs more pervasive and subtle transformations of native elementary classrooms, focusing on surfaces for writing and on “books”. The article argues that shifts in the materialities of elementary native schooling took place that repositioned old “gurus” in an unfavourable light before the take-off of teacher training institutions would provide for new definitions of their role as schoolmasters.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonialism
• affordance
• native education
• textbooks
• paper

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ Education Commission, Report by the Bengal Provincial Committee; with Evidence Taken Before the Committee, and Memorials Addressed to the Education Commission (Calcutta: printed by the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1884), 294.

² Aarti Mangal, “A Century of Teacher Education in India: 1883–1985”, Espacio, Tiempo y Educación 7, no. 1 (2020): 263–85; Asha Islam Nayeem, “The Quest for Teachers of the ‘Right Stamp’ as Prerequisite to Progress of Female Education in Eastern Bengal: The Partition Interlude”, The Arts Faculty Journal 4 (2010/11): 53–74; and Marcelo Caruso, “The De-Subalternization of the Knowledge of Education? Lecturing Pedagogic Knowledge in Colonial India (approx. 1840–1882)”, Nordic Journal of Educational History 9, no. 2 (2022): 13–37.

³ Indira Viswanathan Peterson, “The Schools of Serfoji II of Tanjore: Education and Princely Modernity in Early Nineteenth-Century India”, in Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia, ed. Michael S. Dodson and Brian A. Hatcher (London: Routledge, 2012), 15–44; Hetukar Jha, “Decay of Village Community and the Decline of Vernacular Educaiton in Bihar and Bengal in the Colonial Era: A Sociologicla Review”, Indian Historical Review 38, no. 1 (2011): 119–37; Kazi Shahidullah, “The Purpose and Impact of Government Policy on Pathshala Gurumohashoys in Nineteenth-Century Bengal”, in The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia. Essays on Education, Religion, History, and Politics, ed. Nigel Crook (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 119–34; and Nonica Datta, “The ‘Subalternity’ of Education: Gurukuls in Rural Southeast Punjab”, in Knowledge, Power & Politics. Educational Institutions in India, ed. Hasan Mushirul (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1998), 27–65.

⁴ Nayeem, “Teachers of the ‘Right Stamp’”; and Caruso, “The De-Subalternization of the Knowledge of Education?”.

⁵ Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2002), 166–8; and Tim Ingold, “Back to the Future with the Theory of Affordances”, Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, no. 1/2 (2018): 27–38.

⁶ Robert Schmidt, Soziologie der Praktiken. Konzeptionelle Studien und empirische Analysen (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2012), 64–8.

⁷ Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

⁸ Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 2004), 162–4.

⁹ Craig Blewett and Wayne Hugo, “Actant Affordances: A Brief History of Affordance Theory and a Latourian Extension for Education Technology Research”, Critical Studies in Teacher & Learning 4, no. 1 (2016): 55–73.

¹⁰ Phil Turner, “Affordance as Context”, Interacting with Computers 17 (2005): 787–800.

¹¹ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

¹² Sumathi Ramaswamy, Terrestrial Lessons. The Conquest of the World as Globe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2017).

¹³ Michael S. Dodson, Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture. India, 1770–1880 (Delhi: CUP, Foundation Books, 2010), 44–6.

¹⁴ Jana Tschurenev, Empire, Civil Society, and the Beginnings of Colonial Education in India (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

¹⁵ Tschurenev, Beginnings of Colonial Education in India, 35. On the dissemination of these send desks and their significance for this system of teaching, see Marcelo Caruso, “Reiz und Gefahr des Ephemeren. Der Sandtisch und die Ordnung der modernen Schule im frühen 19. Jahrhundert”, Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, Beiheft 58: Die Materialität der Erziehung. Kulturelle und soziale Aspekte pädagogischer Objekte, hg. von Karin Priem, Gudrun König und Rita Casale (2012): 136–50.

¹⁶ Anindita Ghosh, “The Many Worlds of the Vernacular Book: Performance, Literacy and Print in Colonial Bengal”, in Book Without Borders. Perspectives from South Asia, ed. Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 37.

¹⁷ Jha, “Decay of Village Community”; Amit K. Suman, “Indigenous Educational Institutions in Upper Gangetic Valley: Curriculum, Structure and Patronage”, Social Scientist 42, no. 3/4 (2014): 45–57; P. Radhakrishnan, “Indigenous Education in British India: A Profile”, Contributions to Indian Sociology 24, no. 1 (1990): 1–27; Dharmapal, The Beautiful Tree. Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (New Delhi: Biblia Impex Private Limited, 1983). New data about these schools are presented in: Parimala V. Rao, Beyond Macaulay. Education in India, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 2020).

¹⁸ Poromesh Acharya, “Indigenous Education and Brahminical Hegemony in Bengal”, in The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia. Essays on Education, Religion, History, and Politics, ed. Nigel Crook (Dehli: Oxford University Press, 1996), 103.

¹⁹ Ahmed Noor Khan, “The Education System in Muslim India: A Historical Perspective”, Paedagogica Historica 23, no. 1 (1983): 67–83.

²⁰ Zahra Shah, “Reordering Languages: Persian and the Colonial State in India, c. 1820–1873”, Paedagogica Historica (2022), https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2022.2105153.

²¹ Joel D. Mlecko, “The Guru in Hindu Tradition”, Numen 20, no. 1 (1982): 33–61; and Ralph Marc Steinmann, Guru-Sisya-Sambandha. Das Meister-Schüler-Verhältnis im traditionellen und modernen Hinduismus (Heidelberg: Steiner Verlag, 1986).

²² Report of the Director of Public Instruction, Bombay, for the year 1858–59 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1860), 274.

²³ See the most important documents about his appointment in British Library, India Office Record (IOR), IOR/F/4/1908/81570 and IOR/F/4/1908/81571.

²⁴ William Adam, Report on the State of Education in Bengal (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1835), 18.

²⁵ Ibid., 20.

²⁶ Lal Behari Dey, Vernacular Education in Bengal. A discourse delivered at the Bethune Society (Calcutta: Printed by J. F. Bellamy, 1854), 8.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ R. V. Parulekar, Survey of Indigenous Education in the Province of Bombay (1820–1830) (Bombay: V. V. Bambardekar at the India Printing Works, 1945), xxix.

²⁹ Behari Dey, Vernacular Education in Bengal, 13. For Marathi-speaking regions, the rod (panmutri) is well documented. See Marathi Schools & School-Masters, 3rd ed. (Bombay: printed and published by Balji K. Raghunathji, Family Printing Press, 1882), 6–7.

³⁰ Adam, Report on the State of Education, 10.

³¹ Henry Stewart Reid, Report on Indigenous Education and Vernacular Schools in Agra, Aligarh, Baerli, Etawah, Farrukhabad, Mainpuri, Mathura, Shahjahanpur, for 1850–51 (Agra: printed at the Secundra Orphan Press, 1852), 20.

³² Adam, Report on the State of Education, 11.

³³ Parulekar, Survey of Indigenous Education, xxx–xxxi.

³⁴ Although this was not part of his first-hand observations on the field, but rather a reconstruction of available reports, see Adam, Report on the State of Education, 62.

³⁵ William Adam, Second Report on the State of Education in Bengal. District of Rajshahi (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1836), 17.

³⁶ Ibid., 17.

³⁷ Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree. Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century (New Delhi: Blblia Imprex Private Limited, 1983), 179.

³⁸ Parulekar, Survey of Indigenous Education, xxxi–xxxii.

³⁹ Reid, Report on Indigenous Education, 66.

⁴⁰ Marathi Schools, 3.

⁴¹ Reid, Report on Indigenous Education, 67.

⁴² In the case of the latter, two methods were in use. First, chalk was dissolved in water with a consistency that allowed for rubbing it onto the plate. After having dried, a hard reed-pen was used. Second, the student wrote on the plate directly with chalk-ink. See William Adam, Third Report on the State of Education in Bengal (Calcutta: G. H. Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1838), 22.

⁴³ Adam, Second Report on the State of Education, 24.

⁴⁴ Reid, Report on Indigenous Education, 68.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 56.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 64.

⁴⁷ Hartmut Scharfe, Education in Ancient India (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 83; and General report on public instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, for 1859–60 (Calcutta: Printed at the Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1861), App. A, 17.

⁴⁸ Report Bombay 1858–59, 274.

⁴⁹ Lewis Rice, Report on Education in Coorg from 1834–1882 (Calcutta: printed by the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1884), 11.

⁵⁰ Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency, for 1866–67 (Madras: Gantz Brothers, 1867), App. 1, 34.

⁵¹ Henry Stewart Reid, Report on the State of Popular Educaiton in the North Western Provinces for the Year 1858/59 (Benares: Medical Hall Press, 1859), 40.

⁵² D. Senthil Babu, “Indigenous Traditions and the Colonial Encounter: A Historical Perspective on Mathematics Education in India”, in Mathematics Education in India: Status and Outlook, ed. R. Ramanujan and K. Subramaniam (Mumbai: Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, 2011), 54.

⁵³ Reid, Report on Indigenous Education, 72.

⁵⁴ M. Bansal and M. Kumar, “Paper Making”, in History of Technologies in India, ed. K. V. Mittal (New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 2001), 714–25.

⁵⁵ Hayden J. A. Bellenoit, The Formation of the Colonial State in India. Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760–1860 (London: Routledge, 2017), 14–15.

⁵⁶ Panchanan Bhoi, “Scribe as Metaphor: Patterns of Processing and Writing Palm Leaf Manuscripts”, Indian Anthropologist 40, no. 1 (2010): 71–92.

⁵⁷ Bellenoit, The Formation of the Colonial State; Indrani Chatterjee, “Pastoral Care, the Reconstitution of Pastoral Power and the Creation of Disobedient Subjects under Colonialism”, in South Asian Governmentalities. Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings, ed. Stephen Legg and Deana Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); and C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information. Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

⁵⁸ The First Report of the Institution for the Encouragement of Native School in India (Serampore: printed at the Mission Press, 1817), 8.

⁵⁹ “Government Education in the Bombay Presidency”, The Bombay Quarterly Review IV (1856): 331; The Educational Destitution in Bengal and Behar and the London Christian Vernacular Education Society for India (Calcutta: printed by J. Thomas, 1858), 32.

⁶⁰ William Ramsay, Journal of a Missionary Tour in India (Philadelphia: J. Whetham, 1836), 27, footnote.

⁶¹ Appendices A and C to Report on Public Instruction in the Madras Presidency, for 1875–76 (Madras: printed by E. Keys, at the Government Press, 1877), clxii.

⁶² General report on public instruction, in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, for 1847–48 (Calcutta: W. Ridsdale, Military Orphan Press, 1848), 181.

⁶³ Short Account of the Official System of Education in Bengal with the Catalogue of the Educational Exhibits in the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–84 (Calcutta: printed at the Bengal Secretariat Press, 1884), 4.

⁶⁴ Short Account, 35.

⁶⁵ J. Willson, General Report on Public Instruction in Assam for the Year 1881–82 (Calcutta: printed by the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1884), 91.

⁶⁶ Some indications in: Mamata Chaudhury, “Writing Materials”, in Histry of Technology in India, ed. A. K. Bag (New Delhi: Indian National Science Academy, 1997).

⁶⁷ General Report on Public Instruction in Bengal, for 1884–85 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1885), 126; General Report on Public Instruction in Bengal, for 1885–86 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1886), 118; General Report on Public Instruction in Bengal, for 1877–78 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1878), 15, 27.

⁶⁸ For plantain-leaves: General Report on Public Instruction in Bengal, for 1873–74 (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat Press, 1874), 13; J. Willson, General Report on Public Instruction in Assam for the Year 1892–93 (Shillong: printed at the Assam Secretariat Printing Office, 1893), 33. For wooden-boards: General report on public instruction in the Lower Provinces of the Bengal Presidency, for 1862–63, with appendixes (Calcutta: printed at the Baptist Mission Press, 1864), App. A, 160.

⁶⁹ A. R. Venkatachalapathy, The Province of the Book. Scholars, Scribes, and Scribblers in Colonial Tamilnadu (Ranikhet: permanent black, 2012); and Ankur Kakkar, “Education, Empire and the Heterogeneity of Investigative Modalities: A Reassessment of Colonial Survey on Indigenous Indian Education”, Paedagogica Historica 53, no. 4 (2017): 381–93.

⁷⁰ Robert Darnton, “Book Production in British India, 1850–1900”, Book History 5 (2002): 239–62; and Anindita Ghosh, “An Uncertain ‘Coming of the Book’. Early Print Cultures in Colonial India”, Book History 6 (2003): 24–55.

⁷¹ The Second Report of the Calcutta School-Book Society’s Proceedings. Second Year, 1818–19 (Calcutta: printed at the School and Mission Press, 1819), 109–12.

⁷² Jana Tschurenev, “Incorporation and Differentiation: Popular Education and the Imperial Civilizing Mission in Early Nineteenth Century India”, in Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia. From Improvement to Development, ed. Carey A. Watt and Michael Mann (London: Anthem Press, 2011), 103–5.

⁷³ As established in the regulations of the Society, The Sixth Report of the Proceedings of the Bombay Native Education Society, 1830 (Bombay: printed for the Society, at the Messenger Press, 1831), 24.

⁷⁴ Behari Dey, Vernacular Education in Bengal, 20.

⁷⁵ R. Thornton, Memoir on the Statistics of Indigenous Education within the North Western Provinces of the Bengal Presidency (Calcutta: printed by J. Thomas, Baptist Mission Press, 1850), 9.

⁷⁶ Ibid., 46.

⁷⁷ Letter from W. Muir, Secretary to the Government of the North-Western Provinces, to G. A. C. Plowden, Secretary to the Government of India in Calcutta, 4 August 1853, in J. Long, Correspondence Relating to Vernacular Educaion in the Lower Provinces of Bengal (Calcutta: “Calcutta Gazette” Press, 1855), 12.

⁷⁸ Reid, Report on Indigenous Education, 105.

⁷⁹ Ibid.

⁸⁰ Thornton, Memoir on the Statistics, 48.

⁸¹ Senthil Babu, “Indigenous Traditions and the Colonial Encounter”, 54.

⁸² Brian Houghton Hodgson, Pre-Eminence of the Vernaculars: Or the Anglicists Answered: Being Four Letters on the Education of the People of India (Serampore: from the Serampore Press, 1837), 9.

⁸³ See Despatch N°86 of 1856, 20 August in: IOR/E/4/838, pp. 397–8.

⁸⁴ Letter from W. Muir, Secretary to the Government of the North-Western Provinces, to G. A. C. Plowden, Secretary to the Government of India in Calcutta, 4 August 1853, in Long, Correspondence, 5.

⁸⁵ Letter from F. J. Mouat, member of the Council of Education, to Cecil Beadon, Secretary to the Government in Bengal, 3 October 1853, in Long, Correspondence, 34.

⁸⁶ Despatch 86 of 1858, 22 June, IOR/E/4/852, p. 629.

⁸⁷ Minute by Baboo Russomoy Dutt, 23 July 1853, in Long, Correspondence, 45.

⁸⁸ Minute by Baboo Ramgopal Ghose, 11 July 1854, in Long, Correspondence, 51.

⁸⁹ Minute by Baboo Ramapersaud Roy, 1 August 1854, in Long, Correspondence, 54.

⁹⁰ Ghosh, “The Many Worlds”, 43.

⁹¹ Ulrike Stark, An Empire of Books. The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India (Ranikhet: permanent black, 2012).

⁹² Long, Correspondence, 4.

⁹³ Krishna Kumar, “Origins of India’s ‘Textbook Culture’”, Comparative Education Review 32, no. 4 (1988): 452–64.

⁹⁴ Anu Kumar, “New Lamps for Old: Colonial Experiments with Vernacular Education, Pre- and Post-1857”, Economic and Political Weekly 42, no. 19 (2007): 1710–16; and Arthur Mayhew, The Education on India. A Study of British Educational Policy in India, 1835–1920, and of its Bearing on National Life and Problems in India to-Day (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926).

⁹⁵ Long, Correspondence, 75.

⁹⁶ Letter from James Long to F. J. Halliday, Member of the Council of Education in Bengal, February 1854. Long, Correspondence, 74–5.

⁹⁷ For maps and pictures with animals, see Reid, Report on Indigenous Education, 102.

⁹⁸ Letter from W. Muir, Secretary to the Government of the North-Western Provinces, to G. A. C. Plowden, Secretary to the Government of India in Calcutta, 4 August 1853, in Long, Correspondence, 9.

⁹⁹ Hodgson, Pre-Eminence of the Vernaculars, 6.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this contribution is part of the Cluster of Excellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script” [EXC 2055, Project-ID: 390715649], funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy.

Notes on contributors

Marcelo Caruso

Marcelo Caruso has studied at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (BA, 1993), at the University in Munich (PhD, 2001), and at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Habilitation, 2008). Professor of History of Education at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin since 2011. Managing Director of the Zeitschrift für Pädagogik (2015-2021). Recent books: Geschichte der Bildung und der Erziehung. Medienentwicklung und Medienwandel (Paderborn, 2019); (ed., together with Daniel Maul), Decolonization(s) and Education. New Men and New Polities (Frankfurt/M., 2020), and El espíritu y la mecánica. El orden de la enseñanza como construcción cultural (Prusia, Dinamarca/Schleswig-Holstein, España, 1800-1870) (Frankfurt, 2021).