Schooling ‘Truant’ Tribes

Abstract

British colonial education in India, promoted under the policy frame of ‘filteration’, barely reached the remote recesses of the empire. Permeation was sluggish and growth uneven. A case in point would be the tribal hinterland of Chhotanagpur in Bengal province. This article shows that while parts of Bengal led colonial India in educational growth, places like Chhotanagpur, in stark contrast to centres such as Calcutta, remained largely untouched. This, despite the fact, that the system was introduced as early as 1839 (as a local project at the behest of the concerned official) in Chhotanagpur. Not only that, the system so introduced also received considerable impetus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from the colonial agenda of ‘civilizing’ the ‘barbarians’. For this task, the government usually relied upon the services of missionaries. The efforts of the missionaries, their humanitarian attitude toward the tribals notwithstanding, were ineluctably marred by the constraints of their mission field and prejudiced missionary paradigm. Owing to which, the missionaries were unable to devise a pro-tribal educational policy, thus leading to the tribals receiving the faulty system on their own terms. While the tribals valorized certain aspects of the system, they were, unlike elsewhere, unable to further develop the system through indigenous initiative.