The Quest for Education: An Insight into the Educational Theories and Practices of the Colonial Government in Bengal Presidency

Abstract

The present article would try to examine the trajectories of an evolving knowledge system or how it travelled from the West and grafted itself on indigenous institutions reconstituting the one already in existence. Western knowledge arrived in India through the coercive agency of colonialism, the colonial administrators, particularly Macaulay, asserting that this knowledge was true and that the indigenous knowledge system, like the gods of the natives, was false. Knowledge was thus sought to be reconstituted rather than being a product of knowing subject from the outside. Thus, the article offers a preliminary analysis of how colonial authority was established over cultural spaces in India first by establishing indigenous centres of higher learning and then by subverting them by bringing the management under colonial authority based on the ideological undercurrent of the superiority of European civilisation and administrative needs. Hence, there were attempts to replace personalised Indian cultural authority by institutionalising and co-opting Indian forms of authority leading to immense changes in the social matrix of the Indian society and culture.