Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India * Edited by INDRA SENGUPTA and DAUD ALI.

Abstract

Using the term ‘colonial knowledge’ as an analytical category, the ten essays in Knowledge Production address the related questions of how coherent colonial knowledge was; how it was produced; and how it was related to and replicated by specific institutions. While adding to longstanding debates in South Asian history that developed in the 1980s, the volume is chiefly interesting for its third question, leading its contributors to look at schools, libraries, publishing projects and museums to trace the links between the sites of production, dissemination and reception of colonial knowledge. As used here, the category of colonial knowledge brings together an array of materials ranging from linguistics, science and antiquarianism to archaeology, education and ethics. Recognizing this miscellany, the editors state that ‘no single theory of colonial knowledge is possible and that knowledge had diverse uses and receptions in India’s colonial past’ (p. 1), later adding that ‘colonial knowledge could have radically different conditions of production, levels of internal coherence, and alignments with policy’ (p. 11). Since in principle such admissions weaken the case for the conceptual unity of ‘colonial knowledge’, the editors draw on the concept’s historiographical ascendance in the influential work of Bernard Cohn, Nicholas Dirks and others. Rather than challenge these earlier formulations outright, the book promises ‘to probe and to extend the existing questions’, chiefly through the charge to ‘understand knowledge not only in its discursive sense… but also as institutionalized practices’ (p. 7). In so doing, the aim is to open ‘more dynamic lines of historical enquiry that envision colonial knowledge as a process rather than a finished artifact’ (p. 7).