Duties of a ‘good citizen’: colonial secondary school textbook policies in late nineteenth-century India

Abstract

The late nineteenth century, which was marked by the earliest instances of students’ participation in anti-colonial political agitations in the Bengal and Bombay Presidencies, witnessed significant shifts in the British colonial education policies in India. This article highlights the political significance of the Indian child in the British colonial project by investigating a key locus of knowledge production and dissemination – the colonial school, specifically the school curriculum. Against the background of an emerging politicized child, the British colonial state intervened in school curriculum and aimed to thwart the spread of ‘sedition’ among students. The colonial state devised methods to extend greater control over the processes of curriculum selection to combat its anxieties over ‘seditious’ deviant youth and to generate loyal imperial subjects. Textbooks of ‘aggressive character’ were censored and substituted by those imparting lessons on ‘state feeling’ and duties of a ‘good citizen’. I examine colonial school curriculum policies, particularly controversies surrounding a school textbook titled The Citizen of India (1897) written primarily to inculcate ‘state feeling’ and familiarize children to a ‘simple sketch of the duties of a good citizen’. I argue that these curriculum changes were undertaken by the British colonial state with the conscious agenda of re-moulding ‘seditious’ Indian children and youth into governable subject-citizens. To interrogate colonial education as not simply confined to classroom pedagogical relationships but also shaped by its social contexts, I examine the political contestations generated within the Indian public sphere over state-sponsored school textbooks and government policies on school curriculum.