Skill, its agencies and institutions: the formation of human capital in nineteenth-century western India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article advances an explanation for the dynamics of agencies and institutions responsible for the formation of skills in nineteenth-century western India. It shows that multiple agencies – artisanal apprenticeship, indigenous schools, new bazar schools, modern vernacular and English schools, and institutes for technical, industrial and practical instructions – played a limited but responsive role in skill-and-knowledge development. These establishments sought to attend to the conundrum of shortage and obsolescence of and access to industrial and commercial skills in the context of modernisation and incipient industrialisation. Indeed, inherited crafts apprenticeship remained the vital agency of skill formation, despite some of the institutional experiments in and discourses of promotion and modernisation of skills. New agencies together, however, generated less than one-tenth literates in the total population, less than one-third (elementary) enrolment ratio, and less than one year of average schooling. They churned out a small but increasing number of skilled working-persons, thereby contributing over time to a slow spread of skills amongst non-artisanal communities and a small fall in skill premiums. This article modifies the narrative that has posited static, dichotomous images of indigenous and modern agencies of skill-and-knowledge development, and reframes the narrative of emergence and development of vocational/practical education.