Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T20:21:21.817Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

BEYOND BENGAL: GENDER, EDUCATION, AND THE WRITING OF COLONIAL INDIAN HISTORY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2014

Benjamin D. O'Dell*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Extract

Few topics connected to the study of colonial India have produced quite as much scholarship in recent years as the issue of colonial Indian education reform. The past decade alone has witnessed the publication of no fewer than eight English-language books on the subject, as well as a steady stream of journal articles. Part of the appeal of such research is no doubt a result of India's privileged place in the British Empire during the nineteenth century. In 1881, India's first complete census documented the existence of 253,891,821 Indian subjects living under the British Raj – or, to put it another way, a population nearly ten times the size of England and Wales's own population during the same period. For scholars, education offers a particularly fruitful site for understanding British colonial ideology. In addition, it provides an important glimpse into the lives of Indian subjects. An extensive print archive, manifest in sources as diverse as political speeches, bureaucratic files, periodicals, and memoirs, has greatly aided research into the development of colonial education. At the same time, the tendency for research to privilege particular regional focuses has left troublesome gaps in the historical record.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Ali, Syed Ameer. “A Cry from the Indian Mahommedans (1882).” Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader. Ed. Burton, Antoinette. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 185–89.Google Scholar
Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar. Caste, Culture, and Hegemony: Social Dominance in Colonial Bengal. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2004.Google Scholar
Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar. From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern India. New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2004.Google Scholar
Banerjee, Sukayana. Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Arendt, Hannah. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1988.Google Scholar
Bhattacharya, Tithi. The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal, 1848–85. New York: Oxford UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Burton, Antoinette. “Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury's “Black Man” and the Boundaries of Imperial Democracy.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42.3 (2000): 632–61.Google Scholar
Census of England and Wales. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1883.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Chandra, Shefali. “Mimicry, Masculinity, and the Mystique of Indian English: Western India, 1870–1900.” The Journal of Asian Studies 68.1 (2009): 199225.Google Scholar
Chandra, ShefaliThe Sexual Life of English: Languages of Caste and Desire in Colonial India. Durham: Duke UP, 2012.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question.” Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. Ed. Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989. 233–54.Google Scholar
Chaudhary, Latika. “Land Revenues, Schools and Literacy: A Historical Examination of Public and Private Funding of Education.” Indian Economic Social History Review 47.179 (2010): 179204.Google Scholar
Chaudhary, M. A., and Chaudhary, Gautam. The Global Encycylopaedia of Political Geography. New Delhi: Global Vision Publishing House, 2009.Google Scholar
Darwin, John. Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.Google Scholar
Dasgupta, Subrata. Awakening: The Story of the Bengal Renaissance. Noida, UP: Random House India, 2010.Google Scholar
Green, William A., and Deasy, John P. Jr.Unifying Themes in the History of British India, 1757–1857: An Historiographical Analysis.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 17.1 (1985): 1545.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gupta, Charu. “Introduction.” Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism. Ed. Gupta, Charu. New Delhi: Orient Blacksawn, 2012. 137.Google Scholar
“The History of the Institution.” Bethune College, Kolkata. Bethune College, n.d. Web. 21 April 2013.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, “Minute on Education in India (1835).” Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader. Ed. Burton, Antoinette. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 1821.Google Scholar
Mann, Michael. “‘Torchbearers Upon the Path of Progress’: Britain's Ideology of a ‘Moral and Material Progress’ in India. An Introductory Essay.” Colonialism as Civilizing Mission. Ed. Fischer-Tiné, Harald and Mann, Michael. London: Anthem P, 2004. 129.Google Scholar
Martin, John Biddulph. “Electoral Statistics: A Review of the Working of our Representative System from 1832–1881, in view of Prospective Changes Therein.” Journal of the Statistical Society of London 47.1 (1884): 75124.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minault, Gail. “Educated Muslim Women: Real and Ideal.” Gendering Colonial India: Reforms, Print, Caste and Communalism. Ed. Gupta, Charu. New Delhi: Orient Blacksawn, 2012. 109–36.Google Scholar
Minault, Gail. Secluded Scholars: Women's Education and Muslim Social Reform in Colonial India. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Naoroji, Dadhabai. “Speech at the second Indian National Congress, Calcutta (1886).” Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain: A Reader. Ed. Burton, Antoinette. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 190–94.Google Scholar
Nurullah, S., and Naik, J. P.. A History of Education in India. 2nd ed.London: Macmillan, 1951.Google Scholar
Pernau, Margrit, ed. The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State, and Education before 1857. New York: Oxford UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Plotz, John. Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Plowden, W. Chichele. The Indian Empire Census of 1881, Statistics of Population. Vol. 2. Calcutta: Superintendant of Government Printing India, 1883.Google Scholar
Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley: U of California P, 2009.Google Scholar
Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.Google Scholar
Roy, Benoy Bhusan, and Roy, Pranati. Zenana Mission: The Role of Christian Missionaries for the Education of Women in 19th Century Bengal. Delhi: ISPCK, 1998.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Mahua. Visible Histories, Disappearing Women: Producing Muslim Womanhood in Late Colonial Bengal. Durham: Duke UP, 2008.Google Scholar
Sartori, Andrew. Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capital. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Savage, David W.Missionaries and the Development of a Colonial Ideology of Female Education in India.” Gender & History 9.2 (1997): 201–21.Google Scholar
Sen, Krishna. “Lessons in Self-Fashioning: ‘Bamabodhini Patrika’ and the Education of Women in Colonial Bengal.” The Nineteenth-Century Press in India. Ed. Codell, Julie F.. Spec. issue of Victorian Periodicals Review 37.2 (2004): 176–91.Google Scholar
Sengupta, Parna. Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2011.Google Scholar
Seth, Sanjay. Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Whitehead, Clive. Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service, 1858–1983. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003.Google Scholar
Whitehead, Clive. “The historiography of British Imperial education policy, Part I: India.” History of Education 34.3 (2005): 315–29.Google Scholar