Ambivalent egalitarians? Pietists and the pedagogy of the “Pariah” in modern South India during the nineteenth century

Abstract

ABSTRACT The pedagogy of the colonising British in nineteenth-century India was critical of traditional Indian education for various reasons. The proselytising pedagogists who viewed the cultural practice of caste as a major stumbling block to their evangelising mission continued to confront the practice, which appeared to have stood on a footing of social equality based on professional attributes. The colonial and missionary agencies often claimed that traditional Indian education revolved around the notion of social reproduction that emboldened caste-centric professions. Consequently, the colonial pedagogists, who were rooted in the principles of pietism, a Protestant movement in seventeenth-century Germany, introduced a new form of education for mind, heart, and hand. In India, the pietist pedagogy since the eighteenth century sought to replace traditional Indian education with Anglo-vernacular-religious education. It also created a controversial discourse of equality among Pariah, a generic term used to refer to all those who were believed to have been excluded from school education. This article shows how pietist pedagogists, widely known for their sense of religious supremacy and racialised pretensions, blended education and the pietist idea of equality before God to “refine” the subaltern social groups. In this way, the colonial pietist pedagogists acted as ambivalent egalitarians in the field of schooling.