Learning abroad: the colonial educational experiment in India, 1813–1919

Abstract

This paper contributes to the special issue by offering a new framework in time periods that demonstrates the changing nature of the intellectual transfer to and from colonial India and to posit the imperatives that drove these changes. It shows that the nature of educational exchange in India was transformed in elemental ways during the colonial phase. And that this transformation ultimately produced an intellectual separation between East and West; a separation that pre‐empted what was to happen on the broader canvas of Indian national politics in the early twentieth century. For studies such as this one the state remains paradigmatic. The colonial experience in India was highly nuanced as indigenous collaborators, settler societies and ex‐patriots formed networks of exchange that fed into the empire at large. Understanding this complexity is essential groundwork for better analysing broader networks that transcended nation and empire, metropole and colony. Colonial rule valorised particular institutional forms of education, some imported from the “home” country, some from other domains, as part of the uneven process of empire‐building. In reaction to this the nationalist struggle did not construct its own educational idiom, it adapted the one already shaped by experimentation and imposition mostly created by the Empire at Home/Empire Abroad relationship of the colonial era.