Abstract:
Recently, education in colonial India has generated considerable and varied academic interest. Bayly’s seminal work on knowledge and information gathering extended the discussion on knowledge systems in India beyond the cabinet and classroom while Viswanathan’s‘Masks of Conquest’ analysed the use of literature to advance imperial political and religious aims. Other scholars like Minault, Kumar, Allender, Whitehead and Seth critically engaged with female education and social reform, the political economy of education, the role of missionaries and the social and political historiography of education respectively. A critical lacuna that remains, however, is a searching look at the indigenous system of education in the subcontinent and its fate at the hands of colonialism. This paper attempts to fill the gap by evoking a description of the system using colonial sources and describes the unfortunate impact of colonialism on it. Simultaneously, the disappointment and disillusionment that met British efforts to achieve mass literacy are also charted and lessons for educational policy and reform today are then drawn from this historical episode. For a more focussed discussion, attention is restricted to the province of Punjab, at that time one of the largest provinces of British India, spanning territory from Delhi to Peshawar.
