Subject Lessons: The Western Education Of Colonial India

Beginning in 1835, India's British rulers funded schools and universities to disseminate modern western knowledge in the expectation that is would gradually replace indigenous ways of knowing. From the very start, wiestern education was accorded great significance not only by the colonizers, but also by the colonized , to the extent that today all 'serious' knowledge about India-even within India-is based on western epistemology. Subject Lessons offers a fascinating account of how western knowledge came to be disseminated in India, such that it came to assume its current status as teh obvious and almost the only, mode of knowing India. Sanjay Seth investigates the reception, consumption and trasnforamtion of this knowledge by the colonized and explains why a specifically modern and western conception of knowledge came to be seen not merely as one way of knowing among others, but as knowledge itself.
About Author :
Sanjay Seth is Professor of Politics at Glodsmiths College, University of London.
Contents :
Acknolwedgments Introduction PART I: SUBJECT TO PEDAGOGY Changing the Subject: Western Knowledge and the Questions of Difference Diagnosing Motal 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 Imagnization Epilogue: Knowing Modernity, Being Modern Notes Bibliography Index