Civilising the “Native”, Educating the Nation

This is Chapter 6 of Our Pasts – III. The earlier chapters showed how Company rule affected rulers (hess202), peasants (hess203), tribal people (hess204) and how it was challenged in 1857 (hess205). This chapter turns to students. The British wanted not only territory and revenue but also a cultural mission — to ‘civilise the natives’ and change their customs and values. How should Indians be educated, and into what kind of ‘good subjects’? Officials argued for decades: Orientalists wanted to promote Indian learning, Anglicists wanted English and Western science, missionaries wanted Christian moral education. Meanwhile the old village pathshalas were brought under new rules. Indians, in turn, developed their own ideas of national education — above all Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore.

• Links within this book: hess201 (James Mill’s History of British India and his low view of Indian civilisation); hess202 (Warren Hastings, the Regulating Act and the Company’s courts); hess205 (after 1857 the British grew wary of interfering with religion and custom — the reason given here for not backing mission schools); hess207 (reformers, girls’ schools and the debates over caste — NCERT’s ‘Chapter 8’ reference); hess208 (Swadeshi and the national movement).
• Senior pages to pair with: jess302 and lehs303 (Non-Cooperation, when Gandhi asked students to leave government schools); keps107 (Gandhi and Tagore on nationalism); kesy104 (Macaulay’s Minute as an example of ethnocentrism); jess305 (print culture: Serampore, the press law of 1835); lesy202 (reform, Westernisation and modern education as a channel of social change). This page gives the education story they assume.
• UPSC: Modern Indian history is among the most heavily tested parts of Prelims and GS1. Colonial education policy is a steady Prelims topic: the founder of the Asiatic Society (1984, 1986, 1989), the founders of the Calcutta Madrasa and Benaras Sanskrit College (2018), what led to English education (2018), Wood’s Despatch (1993, 2003, 2018), the chronology of reports and commissions (1990, 1996, 1997), the purpose of colonial education (1988) and Gandhi’s basic education (1980). Mains has asked about Gandhi and Tagore on education (2023) and the impact of Macaulay’s Minute (2026).

• Orientalists: William Jones (Calcutta 1783; Asiatic Society 1784; Asiatick Researches), Colebrooke, Halhed — respect for ancient texts; Calcutta Madrasa 1781 (Hastings), Benaras Sanskrit College 1791.
• Anglicists: James Mill (useful, practical knowledge); Macaulay’s Minute, 2 Feb 1835 (‘a single shelf…’); the 1835 decision — English medium for higher education; English textbooks.
• Wood’s Despatch, 1854 (Charles Wood, Board of Control): European knowledge for trade, morals and trusted officials → education departments; universities of Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, 1857.
• Missionaries: Company opposed until 1813; Serampore (Danish) — press 1800, college 1818; William Carey; after 1857 the government avoided backing mission education.
• Local schools: William Adam (1830s) — over 1 lakh pathshalas, ≤20 pupils each, over 20 lakh children; flexible and suited to harvests → after 1854 government pandits, timetables, textbooks, exams, grants with rules.
• National education: Aurobindo (Bombay speech, 1908); Gandhi — English education ‘enslaved’, Indian languages, handicraft (Source 3); Tagore — Santiniketan 1901, an ‘abode of peace’ in nature.

In 1783 William Jones arrived in Calcutta as a junior judge of the Supreme Court. He was an expert in law and a linguist: he knew Greek, Latin, French and English, had picked up Arabic and learnt Persian. In Calcutta he spent hours each day with pandits learning Sanskrit grammar and poetry, and was soon studying ancient Indian texts on law, philosophy, religion, politics, morality, arithmetic, medicine and the sciences. Other British officials shared his interests — Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Nathaniel Halhed were mastering Indian languages and translating Sanskrit and Persian works into English. Jones founded the Asiatic Society and its journal, Asiatick Researches.

Jones and Colebrooke stood for a particular attitude. They deeply respected ancient cultures, of both India and the West. Indian civilisation, they felt, had reached its glory in the ancient past and then declined; to understand India one had to discover its ancient sacred and legal texts, which alone revealed the ‘real’ ideas and laws of Hindus and Muslims. Translating and publishing these texts would help the British learn from Indian culture and help Indians rediscover their own heritage — and the British would become the guardians of Indian culture as well as its masters. Influenced by these ideas, many Company officials argued for promoting Indian rather than Western learning: Hindus and Muslims should be taught what they already knew and valued, so that alien rulers could win respect. Hence the madrasa in Calcutta (1781) for Arabic, Persian and Islamic law, and the college at Benaras (1791) for ancient Sanskrit texts useful to the administration.

Not all officials agreed with the Orientalists. From the early nineteenth century many criticised them: Eastern knowledge, they said, was full of errors and unscientific thought, and Eastern literature was not serious, so it was wrong to spend so much on Arabic and Sanskrit. James Mill (hess201) argued that the British should not teach what Indians wanted or respected just to please them and ‘win a place in their heart’; the aim of education should be what was useful and practical — Western scientific and technical advances, not the poetry and sacred literature of the East.

By the 1830s the attack sharpened. Thomas Babington Macaulay saw India as an uncivilised country that needed civilising; no branch of Eastern knowledge, he claimed, could compare with England’s, and he famously declared that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. He urged the government to stop spending public money on Oriental learning, which he thought had no practical use, and argued passionately for teaching English, which would let Indians read some of the world’s finest literature and learn Western science and philosophy — a way of changing their tastes, values and culture. Following his Minute, the English Education Act of 1835 (NCERT’s term) made English the medium of instruction for higher education and stopped the promotion of Oriental institutions such as the Calcutta Madrasa and the Benaras Sanskrit College, which were dismissed as ‘temples of darkness’ falling into decay. English textbooks began to be produced for schools.

In 1854 the Court of Directors of the East India Company in London sent an educational despatch to the Governor-General. It was issued by Charles Wood, President of the Board of Control, and is known as Wood’s Despatch. Outlining the policy to be followed in India, it again stressed the practical benefits of European learning over Oriental knowledge. One was economic: European learning would help Indians see the advantages of trade and commerce and of developing the country’s resources, and, by changing their tastes and desires, would create a demand for British goods. Another was moral: it would make Indians truthful and honest, and so supply the Company with civil servants who could be trusted. Eastern literature, it said, was full of grave errors and could not instil a sense of duty, a commitment to work or the skills of administration.

Several measures followed. Education departments were set up to extend government control over all matters of education; a system of university education was established — in 1857, while sepoys rose at Meerut and Delhi (hess205), universities were being founded at Calcutta, Madras and Bombay; and changes were made within school education (section 5).

The argument for practical education was strongly criticised by Christian missionaries, who held that education should improve people’s moral character and that this was possible only through Christian education. Until 1813 the Company opposed missionary activity, fearing it would provoke Indians and make them suspicious of British rule. Unable to work in British territory, missionaries set up a mission at Serampore, under the Danish East India Company; a printing press was set up in 1800 and a college in 1818. Mission schools spread all over India during the nineteenth century, but after 1857 the government was reluctant to support missionary education directly, for fear that any strong attack on local customs, practices and beliefs might enrage Indian opinion (hess205).

In the 1830s William Adam, a Scottish missionary, toured the districts of Bengal and Bihar for the Company to report on the progress of education in vernacular schools. He found over 1 lakh pathshalas — small institutions with no more than 20 students each, but teaching in all over 20 lakh children. They were set up by wealthy people or the local community, or sometimes by a teacher (guru).

The system was flexible. There was no fixed fee, no printed book, no separate building, no benches or blackboards, no separate classes, no roll-call registers, no annual examinations and no regular timetable. Classes met under a banyan tree, in a corner of a village shop or temple, or at the guru’s home. Fees depended on parents’ income — the rich paid more than the poor. Teaching was oral, and the guru decided what to teach according to students’ needs; all sat together, and he worked separately with groups at different levels. Adam found the system suited to local needs: there were no classes at harvest time, when rural children worked in the fields, so even children of peasant families could study.

Until the mid-nineteenth century the Company was concerned mainly with higher education and left the pathshalas largely alone. After 1854 it decided to improve vernacular education by introducing order: routines, rules and regular inspections. It appointed government pandits, each in charge of four to five schools, to visit the pathshalas and raise the standard of teaching. Each guru had to submit periodic reports and teach to a regular timetable; teaching was to be based on textbooks, learning tested by an annual examination; students had to pay a regular fee, attend regularly, sit on fixed seats and obey new rules of discipline.

Pathshalas that accepted the rules received government grants; those that refused got no support, and over time gurus who wanted to keep their independence found it hard to compete. There was another consequence. The new discipline demanded regular attendance even at harvest time, when children of poor families had to work in the fields. Inability to attend came to be seen as indiscipline — as proof that a child did not want to learn.

British officials were not the only ones thinking about education. From the early nineteenth century many Indian thinkers called for a wider spread of education. Some, impressed by developments in Europe, felt Western education would help modernise India and urged the British to open more schools, colleges and universities and spend more on education (NCERT points to its chapter on reformers — hess207). Others reacted against Western education — Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore among them.

‘English education has enslaved us.’ Gandhi argued that colonial education created a sense of inferiority: it made Indians see Western civilisation as superior and destroyed pride in their own culture. In NCERT’s summary of his words, there was ‘poison’ in it; it enslaved Indians and cast an evil spell on them, so that the educated admired British rule. He wanted an education that would help Indians recover their dignity and self-respect, and during the national movement he urged students to leave educational institutions to show they would no longer be enslaved. He held that Indian languages should be the medium of teaching: education in English crippled Indians, cut them off from their surroundings and made them ‘strangers in their own lands’, unable to relate to the masses. Western education, he said, valued reading and writing over oral knowledge and textbooks over lived experience. Education should develop mind and soul; literacy alone was not education. People had to work with their hands, learn a craft and understand how things worked.

Rabindranath Tagore started his institution at Santiniketan in 1901. As a child he had hated school in Calcutta: it felt suffocating, like a prison, and his mind wandered while others listened. He wanted a school where the child was happy, free and creative, able to explore her own thoughts and desires. Childhood, he felt, should be a time of self-learning, outside the rigid discipline of the British school system; teachers had to be imaginative, understand the child and help her curiosity grow, for existing schools killed the child’s natural creativity and sense of wonder. Since creative learning needed a natural environment, he set up his school in a rural setting away from Calcutta — an ‘abode of peace’ (santiniketan) where children could live in harmony with nature.

In many ways Tagore and Gandhi thought alike, but there were differences. Gandhi was highly critical of Western civilisation and its worship of machines and technology; Tagore wanted to combine elements of modern Western civilisation with the best of Indian tradition, and stressed teaching science and technology at Santiniketan along with art, music and dance. More broadly, some Indians wanted to extend the British system to wider sections of people; others wanted alternative systems that would educate people into a truly national culture. But who was to define what was truly national? The debate over ‘national education’ continued after independence.

Two Activity boxes (pages 69 and 72) and the questions the text asks you directly, in order.

‘Let’s recall’ (two), ‘Let’s discuss’ (four), ‘Let’s imagine’ and ‘Let’s do’ (two), pages 76–77.

Numbers

One-liners

• The British saw a cultural mission: to ‘civilise the natives’.
• Orientalists (Jones, Colebrooke) respected ancient Indian texts and wanted to promote Indian learning.
• Jones founded the Asiatic Society (1784) and its journal Asiatick Researches.
• Calcutta Madrasa 1781; Benaras Sanskrit College 1791.
• James Mill wanted useful, practical Western knowledge instead.
• Macaulay’s Minute (1835) argued for English and against funding Oriental learning.
• The 1835 decision made English the medium of higher education.
• Wood’s Despatch (1854) stressed the economic, moral and administrative uses of European learning.
• Universities at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras opened in 1857.
• Missionaries worked from Danish Serampore until the Company admitted them in 1813.
• Adam found over a lakh of flexible village pathshalas in Bengal and Bihar.
• After 1854 pathshalas got pandits, timetables, textbooks, exams and grants with rules.
• Gandhi: colonial education enslaved; teach in Indian languages and through crafts.
• Tagore: Santiniketan (1901), learning freely in nature, East and West combined.

Traps to avoid

• Benaras Sanskrit College (1791, Jonathan Duncan) — not ‘Hindu College’; Hindu College is Calcutta, 1817.
• Calcutta Madrasa: Warren Hastings (1781), not William Jones.
• Asiatic Society: founded by William Jones (1784); Hastings was its patron.
• The first English Gita was by Charles Wilkins (1785), not Jones.
• The ‘English Education Act’ of 1835 was Bentinck’s resolution, not a legislative Act.
• Macaulay’s Minute (Feb 1835) ≠ Bentinck’s resolution (Mar 1835) ≠ Wood’s Despatch (1854).
• Wood’s Despatch: English for higher education, vernaculars at school — not English at all levels.
• Charles Wood was President of the Board of Control; the Governor-General was Dalhousie.
• 1857 universities: Calcutta, Bombay, Madras — not Delhi, Punjab or Allahabad.
• William Carey was English; Serampore was Danish; William Adam was Scottish.
• Fort William College (1800): Richard Wellesley, for British civil servants.
• Santiniketan 1901; Visva-Bharati 1921; Wardha basic education 1937.

Prelims — what UPSC asks

• Orientalist institutions: Asiatic Society — William Jones, 1784 (1984, 1986, 1989); Calcutta Madrasa — Hastings; Benaras Sanskrit College — Jonathan Duncan, not Jones; Fort William College — Richard, not Arthur, Wellesley (2018, key: 2 only).
• How English came in: 1813 Charter grant → 1823 General Committee of Public Instruction → the Orientalist–Anglicist controversy → Macaulay’s Minute and Bentinck’s resolution, 1835 (2018, key: all three).
• Wood’s Despatch: grants-in-aid and universities recommended, English not at all levels (2018, key: 1 and 2 only). It is the conventional ‘foundation of the modern education system’ (1993, key: Wood’s Despatch).
• Chronology: Hindu College 1817 → Adam’s reports 1835–38 → Wood 1854 → Calcutta University 1857 (1996); Macaulay 1835 → Wood 1854 → Hunter 1882 → Sargent 1944 (1997); Wood → Hunter → Raleigh 1902 → Sadler 1917 (1990). Learn the Beyond NCERT table in section 8.
• Answer-key notes (all keys kept): 1988 — ‘chiefly to provide a class of office workers’ is the stored key; the officials’ own stated aims (Mill, Macaulay) were useful science and ‘civilising’, close to option (c), but Wood’s stress on trustworthy civil servants and historians’ readings support (a). 2003 — the aim of Wood’s Despatch is keyed ‘creation of employment opportunities’; the Despatch’s own words (Source 2: diffusion of European knowledge) are close to option (b), ‘spread of Western culture’, so this key is debatable — read both and expect the examiner’s emphasis on employment. 1980 — basic education keyed ‘social relevance’; compulsory elementary education was also a Wardha resolution. 1993 — some writers call Macaulay’s Minute the foundation; the conventional answer is Wood’s Despatch.

Mains — where it appears and how to answer

• Impact of Macaulay’s Minute on administration and education (GS1 2026): English as the language of higher education and government; an English-educated class of clerks, lawyers and teachers; downward filtration and neglect of mass and vernacular schooling; the eclipse of Oriental colleges — then the irony that this class led the national movement. Balance Macaulay’s stated aims with critics (Gandhi; Viswanathan) and with Indians who sought Western science (Rammohun Roy, 1823).
• Gandhi and Tagore on education and nationalism (GS1 2023): common ground — rejection of bookish, alien colonial schooling; education of the whole person; mother tongue. Differences — Gandhi: craft-centred Nai Talim, critique of machines and Western civilisation, boycott of schools; Tagore: freedom and creativity in nature, synthesis of East and West, science with the arts, wariness of narrow nationalism (their 1921 exchange). keps107 adds their views on nationalism.

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