The Colonial Indian Self-image

An ancient civilization with amazing wealth of philosophical, literary and scientific treatises and unparalleled continuity of ‘the life of the mind’, India nonetheless was not at its most creative when the colonial scholars started exploring Indian thought towards the end of the eighteenth century. Besides, for a variety of complicated reasons, the creative springs of ideas and imagination current in the bhashas at that time were not found to be of sufficient interest by the colonial English officers. Their focus remained almost entirely on literature and texts in Sanskrit and Persian. Given the context of political domination, even a rather casual compliment from Goethe for the imaginative power of Kalidasa’s play Shakuntalam appeared to the Indian mind as great a victory as, a century later, the Nobel Prize in Literature for Rabindranath Tagore. During that one and a quarter-century—from the founding of the Asiatic Society in the 1780s to the beginning of World War I and the struggle for India’s independence—any compliment from a European scholar was generally hugely over-valued, reflecting India’s complete loss of cultural self-confidence. Hence, the generous praise that Friedrich Max Müller lavished on Indian thought was received by the Brahminical classes with ecstasy. He stated in a lecture to the Indian Civil Service aspirants in London:

If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered over the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention even of those who have studied Plato and Kant, I should point to India. And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life…again I should point to India.

One needs to note here that Max Müller’s superlative adulation of the India of his imagination was not commonly shared in scholarly circles and he was in the minority amongst his European contemporaries and peers. The overwhelming majority of European administrators, scholars and researchers of his time had internalized the idea that British rule was necessary for ‘civilizing India’, a divine duty fallen upon them which they had accepted as a moral burden. These views, whether negative or superlative, inevitably influenced the self-image of Indian thinkers of the time. On the one hand, there was great excitement over and acceptance of ‘English education’ throughout the nineteenth century; on the other hand, a dismissal of Indian forms of knowledge was common among the native literary class in India. The rapidity with which European learning was introduced in Indian colleges and universities through the second half of the nineteenth century led Mahatma Gandhi, during the 1930s, to take a rather uncharacteristic reductive stand in relation to the condition of education in India. In a discussion at Chatham House on 20 October 1931, in London, he commented:

I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully, that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and the beautiful tree perished.

Gandhi himself had no time in his busy public life to authenticate his observation on being challenged to substantiate it. His inability to do so provided historian Dharampal the occasion to pursue the matter and produce his memorable The Beautiful Tree. Gandhi’s narrative of colonial school education in India presented a collapse of judgement on the part of the colonial administrators leading to a complete intellectual disaster:

The village schools were not good enough for the British administrator, so he came out with his programme. Every school must have so much paraphernalia, building, and so forth. Well, there were no such schools at all. There are statistics left by a British administrator which show that, in places where they have carried out a survey, ancient schools have gone by the board, because there was no recognition for these schools, and the schools established after the European pattern were too expensive for the people, and therefore they could not possibly overtake the thing. I defy anybody to fulfil a programme of compulsory primary education of these masses inside of a century.

A century after the Mahatma’s uncharacteristically passionate outburst, if we are to take a relatively more objective view of the colonial impact on India’s knowledge traditions, two significant elements deserve attention. The first of these is that the pervasive cultural amnesia about India’s intellectual failures and accomplishments seems to have hampered our ability to establish organic links between the past and the present. For the last two centuries, Indians have either entirely dismissed all that we had cultivated as ‘knowledge’ in theory as well as a million everyday tasks. Or, we tend to think that ancient India had all-encompassing knowledge in all domains and tend to glorify that imagined past. But unquestioning adulation or complete dismissal is no substitute for a critical perspective.

The second element was the frequently noticed ‘time lag’ between the knowledge in the West and in India and the absence of parity between knowledge production in the global West and the global South. Countries such as Ireland, Canada and Australia too had to fight Western disapproval of knowledge coming from former colonies. But the intensity with which Indian scholars have felt this discriminating attitude has generally been more acute. It would be fair to add that the colonized African countries have had an even greater difficulty in having their forms of knowledge acknowledged as ‘universal’ knowledge. The African reactions too have been far more pointed. As a result a whole cultural movement called ‘Negritude’ sprang up in reaction in many African countries.

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, the most eloquent of the spokespersons for Africa’s selfhood, wrote in his memorable book, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms:

I am suspicious of the uses of the word (the Third World) and the concept of the universal. For very often, this has meant the West generalising its experience of history as the universal experience of the world. What is Western becomes universal and what is Third World becomes local… The Eurocentric basis of seeing the world has often meant marginalising into the periphery that which comes from the rest of the world.

The colonial disruption in India’s self-perception and the uneven cultural relationship emerging out of the context of the West’s intellectual domination of the colonized people continued to prevail well beyond the formal end of colonial rule. The intellectual biography of D. D. Kosambi, one of India’s more original thinkers in the post-Independence decades, brings home poignantly the cultural asymmetry in the field of ‘universal’ sciences.

Reflecting on the response to his fundamental contribution to number theory in mathematics, Kosambi observes that an Indian contribution to a theoretical field of knowledge usually met with suspicion and disregard. When Kosambi proposed that the Poisson distribution would explain the prime number theory, he had to spend several years to get a sympathetic audience among Western mathematicians. He comments in despair:

Every competent judge who saw only this radically new basic result intuitively felt that it was correct as well as of fundamental importance. Unfortunately, the Riemann hypothesis followed as a simple consequence. Could a problem over which the world’s greatest mathematicians have come to grief for over a century thus casually be solved in the jungles of India? Psychologically, it seemed much more probable that the interloper was just another ‘circle-squarer’. Mathematics may be a cold, impersonal science of pure thought; the mathematician can be thoughtless, heatedly acrid, even rabid, over what he dislikes… I had to fight for my results over three long years… There is surely a great deal to be said for the notion that the success of science is fundamentally related to the particular form of society.

In my own work, during my formative years, I have often taken a position that would be akin to Dharampal’s painstaking research, showing how British colonial rule in India destroyed the traditions of education existing during the immediately preceding era. I have also commented in detail on the cultural amnesia that set in as a result of the colonial encounter. Similarly, several eminent thinkers and educationists and various reports on education have pointed out the loss of originality in pedagogic practices and knowledge production in India caused by the imposition of a language that is not one’s mother tongue for the purposes of higher order cognitive transactions. However, though the colonial experience can be justifiably held responsible for India’s disproportionately low contribution to ‘knowledge’ during the last two centuries, focusing on colonialism alone may not yield the complete story of our failure.

It is possible to counterpoise Dharampal’s research with another significant work of research, one that has had equally enormous impact, but quite differently, on our self perception. That work is the text of a lecture that Babasaheb Ambedkar was to deliver at Lahore—but could not—and was published in the form of a book titled Annihilation of Caste in 1936. Ambedkar presents in this work a scathing analysis of the social inequalities prevailing in India for over two millennia and a passionate plea for genuine equality. Dr Ambedkar was probably the most educated of the Indian leaders of his time, with degrees from Columbia University and the London School of Economics. ‘To educate’ the deprived classes to create an equitable society was one of his non-negotiable articles of faith. Ambedkar’s analysis opens up the ‘knowledge’ question in India, taking it beyond the easily available proof of the culpability of colonial domination, and takes it back to the ancient times when various theological schools inscribed discrimination as a social norm in India. My purpose is not to judge Gandhi or Ambedkar. It is common among Indian intellectuals to position Gandhi and Ambedkar as intellectual adversaries and take umbrage on behalf of one or the other. The aim of this section is not to assess either Ambedkar or Gandhi and their views on knowledge or education; the aim here is to look at the question of knowledge and its formally institutionalized means—education. There is no doubt that caste discrimination in the past and in the present, the colonial cultural domination and the continued ‘knowledge imperialism’ of the West have had an effect in reducing ‘knowledge’ in India to pauperization and ‘education’ in India to a savage mockery of the idea of education. To take both these givens into account should benefit any analysis of the condition of education in contemporary India. Yet, as the 650 million Indians born after 1990 look to moving forward into the twenty-first century, with education as their most desired means for that movement and ‘knowledge’ as the driving engine for their very survival, it may be beneficial if an analysis of ‘knowledge’ can be carried out from ‘within’, by looking at itself without unduly shifting the focus to the impact of colonialism or the legacy of caste hegemony. In doing so, I do not intend in the least to deny the primacy of these factors—caste and colonial domination—in any analysis of the condition of education in India.

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Nearly one in every twelve humans is a young Indian for whom meaningful education is of critical importance. A good education will not only help our youth get jobs and build fulfilling careers, it will also lead to the widening of our collective imagination and the shaping of the way we think; for all these reasons it ought to be an important concern of our time. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There is a lack of infrastructure, adequate funding and genuine autonomy within educational institutions, departments within those institutions and individuals who teach in those departments. And this is not all. There is also the question of the nature of knowledge that is relevant to our rapidly modernizing country that needs to be dealt with. If knowledge is the core of education and if education lays the very foundation of a nation, the author argues that it is of critical importance that the plight of educational institutions and the need to generate knowledge appropriate to India are addressed without any delay. Original and profound, this book offers a clear picture of the mistakes that have been committed in the past, confronts the present decline of knowledge and education in the country and offers a vision for the future.