Disciplined Subjects: Schooling in Colonial India by Sutapa Dutta

Abstract

Reviewed by: Disciplined Subjects: Schooling in Colonial India by Sutapa Dutta Subhadipa Dutta Disciplined Subjects: Schooling in Colonial India. By Sutapa Dutta. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. xii + 254 pp. Cloth $160.00, e-book $44.05. Over the last few decades, a growing body of scholarship has dedicatedly sought ways to understand the history of colonial knowledge formation in India. The history of colonial educational ideologies in the subcontinent has also received extensive scholarly attention in the recent past. The book, Disciplined Subjects by Sutapa Dutta, shows ingenuity in juxtaposing these two historiographical trends in a remarkable fashion. It specifically sheds light on the politics of knowledge structures and their implementation within institutional learning in colonial India. In other words, it explores how the complex mode of construction and subsequent dissemination of knowledge impelled order and molded and directed the psyches of subjected young learners. In doing so, it outlines the production and percolation of knowledge through the center-periphery model—one that acknowledges the journey of specific wisdom from the imperial heartland to the colonial rimland and vice versa. The book situates the procedure of forming the physical, material, and intellectual content of colonial education within a sphere of intercultural encounter between the Britons and the Indians—a sphere where both the local catalysts (such as the colonial authority, missionaries, educationalists, native stakeholders, School Book Society, Fort William College, Serampore Mission Press, and Asiatic Society of Bengal) and the external spurs (such as the British Foreign School Society, Charity Schools, and cottage societies of Great Britain) played crucial roles. Disciplined Subjects consists of three major parts that focus on myriad discourses of educational policies and associated sociocultural changes at the turn of the eighteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth century. The first part outlines three main colonial educational dynamics: the shift of public interest and funds from traditional learning to modern schooling, grants in aid for setting up more seminaries, and emphasis on wider diffusion of knowledge. These new trends ushered in the construction of a body of colonial knowledge—one that drastically affected the very structure within which young pupils were conventionally taught to think. The author reveals that the institutionalization of modern education to reform the colonized was a crucial part of the imperial civilizing mission. This turned out to be a dominant site to establish differences, inequalities, and segregations based on race, class, and gender. From the late [End Page 462] eighteenth century, British middle-class investment in mass education implied an epistemological attempt to mask, rationalize, and legitimize structural social hierarchies and privileges. The pedagogies and curriculum of education for the lower class were designed to instill piety, obedience, and discipline into poor students. The cultivation of such virtues was expected to keep the progenies of the lower class in their place and mold them to become useful for others in the future. In order to generate loyal native subjects, the educational enterprises in colonial India were also guided by such "pedagogic despotism" (47), which in turn formulated a "racial-civilizational location of Indian subjectivity" (45). Within the interactive colonial milieu, Indian elites were neither the unconscious beneficiaries nor hapless victims. The second part of the book underscores the importance of indigenous agency, which variously consented to, resisted, or overlapped with colonial knowledge production. Such complex local responses portrayed a contested terrain of experimentations and conciliations—a terrain within which native children were assumed to be unquestioning consumers who were essentially subjected to the cultural hegemony of the powerful. Through careful examination of a plethora of textbooks produced by colonial agents, the book highlights the epistemological means to control school-going children. It identifies these elementary textbooks as the psychological and cultural instruments that intended to validate the political, cultural, and racial supremacy of the colonizers. Through a comparative analysis of the content and context of study materials used in the imperial metropole and in the colonial periphery, the author further locates the broader impact of the texts: an intercultural negotiation of multiple identities. She argues while the early nineteenth-century textbooks chiefly reflected "the British forging a national identity and the Britishness of their Empire" (223), the late nineteenth...