Tagore’s Perspective on Decolonizing Education

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mousumi Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Education Reform ◽  
Adult Life ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Social ◽  
British Colonial

Decolonization is a historic process that picked up momentum in the second half of the 20th century, whereby several countries of the Global South in Asia, Africa, and Latin America successively gained independence from European colonial rule and became sovereign modern nation-states. However, territorial independence from an external ruling power alone could not bring an end to all the social, political, and economic problems ushered in by hundreds of years of imperialism. This fact was realized long before independence from colonial rule by Rabindranath Tagore within the context of British colonial India. Hence, even before territorial and political decolonization, Tagore sought to decolonize the minds of people through education reform by first setting up his own school in 1901 and then establishing Visva-Bharati University in 1921. In fact, Tagore, who is the author of the national anthems of two independent modern South Asian nation-states, never saw independent India. He died in 1941 as a British colonial subject, six years before the independence of India from colonial rule in 1947. While many indigenous intellectuals of his era adopted violent and nonviolent methods to fight against British imperialism, Tagore devoted much of his adult life to the pursuit of freedom through pedagogic reforms. Tagore’s philosophy and practice of pedagogic reform sought to “decolonize education” in British colonial India. Tagore’s own writings on education beginning in 1892 reveal that his philosophy and practice to “decolonize education” was based on the memory and critical reflections on his own experiences as a student in mainstream schools during the British colonial era in India. Tagore’s philosophy of education, institutionalized through his decolonizing pedagogic reform work in his school and university at Bolepur, Shantiniketan, were concrete responses of a highly creative and critical-thinking indigenous intellectual to the problems of the mainstream education system during his time. Hence, studying Tagore’s perspective on “decolonizing education” can provide us with a deeper understanding of the educational problems posed by British imperialism in India, as well as the evolution of these problems in the colonial metropole, which became global in nature through the process of colonialism, as has been argued by a number of academics, including modern British historian Michael Collins and postcolonial Indian academic Sanjukta Dasgupta.

Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India

2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
NAZMUL S. SULTAN
Keyword(s):  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Indian People ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Indefinite Future

This article theorizes the colonial problem of peoplehood that Indian anticolonial thinkers grappled with in their attempts to conceptualize self-rule, or swaraj. British colonial rule drew its legitimacy from a developmentalist conception of the colonized people as backward and disunited. The discourse of “underdeveloped” colonial peoplehood rendered the Indian people “unfit” for self-government, suspending their sovereignty to an indefinite future. The concept of swaraj would be born with the rejection of deferred colonial self-government. Yet the persistence of the developmentalist figuration of the people generated a crisis of sovereign authorization. The pre-Gandhian swaraj theorists would be faced with the not-yet claimable figure of the people at the very moment of disavowing the British claim to rule. Recovering this underappreciated pre-Gandhian history of the concept of swaraj and reinterpreting its Gandhian moment, this article offers a new reading of Gandhi's theory of moral self-rule. In so doing, it demonstrates how the history of swaraj helps trace the colonial career of popular sovereignty.

THE RAJ AND THE PARADOXES OF WILDLIFE CONSERVATION: BRITISH ATTITUDES AND EXPEDIENCIES

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIJAYA RAMADAS MANDALA
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Sensitivity ◽  
Wildlife Conservation ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Game Species ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Infrastructural Development ◽  
Colonial Economy ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Wild Predators

AbstractThis article throws light on how the issue of conservation stood in tension with imperial hunting and exploitation in colonial India. The indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife and the declining numbers of game species in nineteenth-century India gave rise to a need for conservation, but with a caveat. Wildlife conservation, consequently, was aimed at the expansion of colonial economy and infrastructural development. Thus, in colonial India, wild predators that posed a threat to such interests were ruthlessly decimated and those animals that were useful for the smooth functioning of the British colonial rule were overlooked. This, in part, was also necessitated by the British seeking to establish their credentials as rulers, which explains the reason the colonial government's conservation programme was fundamentally selective and guided by expediency. The comparative perspective on elephants and tigers elucidates how the former were protected by the law because of the critical role they played in the colonial economy and administration, whilst the latter were ruthlessly exterminated for the threat they posed to the same. This article especially argues that the reasons for conserving elephants and decimating tigers in colonial India were more practical and economic than a mere reflection of cultural sensitivity on the part of the colonizers.

British Rule and Tribal Revolts in India: The curious case of Bastar

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 (5) ◽  
pp. 1619-1644 ◽  
Author(s):  
AJAY VERGHESE
Keyword(s):  
Colonial Period ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Indian Government ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
British Rule ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Princely State ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Colonial Policies

AbstractBritish colonial rule in India precipitated a period of intense rebellion among the country's indigenous groups. Most tribal conflicts occurred in the British provinces, and many historians have documented how a host of colonial policies gave rise to widespread rural unrest and violence. In the post-independence period, many of the colonial-era policies that had caused revolt were not reformed, and tribal conflict continued in the form of the Naxalite insurgency. This article considers why the princely state of Bastar has continuously been a major centre of tribal conflict in India. Why has this small and remote kingdom, which never came under direct British rule, suffered so much bloodshed? Using extensive archival material, this article highlights two key findings: first, that Bastar experienced high levels of British intervention during the colonial period, which constituted the primary cause of tribal violence in the state; and second, that the post-independence Indian government has not reformed colonial policies in this region, ensuring a continuation and escalation of tribal conflict through the modern Naxalite movement.

Mountstuart Elphinstone in South Asia

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shah Mahmoud Hanifi ◽  
William Dalrymple
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Conducting Research

Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859), Lowland Scottish traveller, East India Company civil servant and educator, was one of the principal intellectual architects of British colonial rule in South Asia. Imbued with liberal views, such that Bombay's wealthy founded Elphinstone College in his memory, he pioneered the scholarly, scientific and administrative foundations of imperialism in India.  Elphinstone's career was launched when he was picked to lead the inaugural British diplomatic mission to the Afghan court. His Account of the Kingdom of Caubul (1815) became the main source of British information about Afghanistan. He is best known for his periods as Resident at Poona and Governor of Bombay in the 1810s and 1820s, when he instituted innovative and lasting policies in administration and education while also conducting research for his extremely influential History of India (1841).  This volume examines Mountstuart Elphinstone's intellectual contributions and administrative career in their own right, in relation to prominent contemporaries including Charles Metcalfe and William Moorcroft, and in the context of later historical study of India, Afghanistan, British imperialism and its imperial frontiers.

Conclusion: Torture in a State of Exception

2021 ◽  
pp. 179-188
Author(s):  
Deana Heath
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
High Profile ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Primary Form

Colonial Terror concludes by exploring how the attempts of the British colonial regime in India, in the decades following the Madras torture commission, to deny the ongoing prevalence of torture in the Indian police began to unravel in the early twentieth century thanks to the emergence of a voluble Indian press and a mass nationalist movement. But it was not until 1909, following the failures of a series of high-profile ‘conspiracy’ trials due to the ongoing reliance of the police on extorted confessions as their primary form of evidence, combined with pressure exerted by yet another group of reformist MPs, that torture once again erupted into scandal. The Indian and British governments were thus forced to act, but although the actions they took exposed the sheer scale of police torture in colonial India, they did little, once again, to attempt to eradicate it, since eradication was impossible thanks to the importance of torture to the maintenance of colonial rule. They endeavoured, instead, to make it disappear by renaming it, as well as to transform India into a fully-fledged state of exception in which police torture could continue to flourish, freed from the constraints placed on it by the rule of law.

Elphinstone and the Afghan-Pathan Elision

2019 ◽  
pp. 299-318
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Leake
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Order ◽  
First Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Northern Pakistan ◽  
Regional Politics ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Great Game

Mountstuart Elphinstone's writings on Afghanistan have had lingering effects throughout the twentieth (and into the twenty-first) century. Even with the end of British colonial rule in 1947, western interest in Afghanistan, and particularly the Pathan borderlands spread across southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, has remained. Both British and American observers have continued to value this region for its strategic locale, even as both have wrestled with the "tribal" nature of the local Pathan population and its longstanding autonomy from neighboring states. While Cold War competition replaced the rivalry of the Great Game, colonial-era understandings of Afghanistan and local and regional politics continued to color western policies towards this region. This chapter reflects on the legacies of Elphinstone's work for western policymakers, particularly in the aftermath of partition and in the emergent Cold War. Using the works of Olaf Caroe and James W. Spain, it considers how Elphinstone's ideas and rhetoric concerning Afghan politics and tribal society and organization have resounded in western conceptualizations of Afghanistan, and neighboring Pakistan. It compares British and American understandings of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and their relative reliance on Elphinstone's ideas. Ultimately it considers the similarities and differences in the ways that British and American officials have perceived and valued Afghanistan's place in a broader world political order.

Islamic Identities in Colonial India

2018 ◽  
pp. 14-53
Author(s):  
Muhammad Qasim Zaman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
British India ◽  
The South ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
The Subject ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter introduces many of the groups that will form the subject of this book and charts their emergence and development in conditions of British colonial rule. It shows that the traditionalist orientations that enjoy great prominence in the South Asian landscape began to take a recognizable shape only in the late nineteenth century, although they drew on older styles of thought and practice. The early modernists, for their part, were rooted in a culture that was not significantly different from the `ulama's. Among the concerns of this chapter is to trace their gradual distancing from each other. The processes involved in it would never be so complete, in either British India or in Pakistan, as to preclude the cooperation of the modernists and their conservative critics at critical moments. Nor, however, were the results of this distancing so superficial as to ever be transcended for good.

Islam and Politics in Malaysia: The Realisation of Islam as a State Religion in Sabah (Islam dan Politik di Malaysia: Realisasi Islam sebagai Agama Negeri di Sabah)

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 254-272
Author(s):  
Sharifah Sara Hasliza Syed Hamid ◽  
Elmira Akhmetova
Keyword(s):  
Religious Education ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
The Political ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Islam And Politics ◽  
State Constitution ◽  
Nation States ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
The Government

This paper analyses the process of independence in Sabah and the consequent Islamisation of its population, which caused the amendment of the State Constitution in 1973. The first part of the paper states that the unification of Sabah with Malaya into the Federation of Malaysia guaranteed its independence from the British colonial rule as well as saved it from the communist threat. The next part of the paper suggests that the Islamisation activities were highly associated with the political needs of the government where the Muslim political leaders strived for increasing the number of their supporters in order to maintain their seats as the ruling government in Sabah. Thus, the paper finds the strong relationship between Islam and politics in modern nation-states, and concludes that the rapid growth of the number of Muslims in Sabah later created the quality problem as their religious education was not seen as the priority by the ruling government. Keywords: Malaysia, Constitution, Islam in Sabah, Independence of Malaya, Islam and Politics, Federation of Malaysia. Abstrak Makalah ini menganalisis sejarah kemerdekaan di Sabah dan proses Islamisasi penduduknya yang menyebabkan pindaan Perlembagaan Negeri pada tahun 1973. Bahagian pertama makalah ini menyatakan bahawa penyatuan Sabah dengan Tanah Melayu ke Persekutuan Malaysia menjaminkan kebebasannya dari penjajahan British serta menyelamatkannya dari ancaman komunis. Bahagian seterusnya menunjukkan bahawa aktiviti pengislaman sangat dikaitkan dengan keperluan politik kerajaan di mana pemimpin politik yang Muslim berusaha meningkatkan jumlah penyokong mereka untuk mengekalkan kerusi mereka sebagai pemerintah di Sabah. Oleh itu, makalah ini mendapati hubungan kuat antara Islam dan politik di negara-negara moden, dan menyimpulkan bahawa pertumbuhan pesat bilangan umat Islam di Sabah kemudiannya menimbulkan masalah kualiti kerana pendidikan agama mereka tidak dilihat sebagai keutamaan oleh kerajaan pemerintah.   Kata Kunci: Malaysia, Perlembagaan, Islam di Sabah, Kemerdekaan Malaya, Islam dan Politik, Persekutuan Malaysia.

Britishness, Clubbability, and the Colonial Public Sphere: The Genealogy of an Imperial Institution in Colonial India

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 489-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mrinalini Sinha
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Social Clubs ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Social Club ◽  
Popular Narrative ◽  
European Culture ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Features

The ubiquity of the European social club in the European empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been widely recognized in both popular and academic writings on European, and particularly British, imperialism. The “European” ascription of imperial social clubs derived from their predominantly whites-only membership policy in which all elite Europeans, whatever their nationalities, were potentially included. Although each individual club often catered to a very different and distinctive clientele among elite Europeans in the empire, the “clubland” as a whole served as a common ground where elite Europeans could meet as members, or as guests of members, of individual clubs. These clubs, it has been argued, represented an oasis of European culture in the colonies, functioning to reproduce the comfort and familiarity of “home” for Europeans living in an alien land. The popular narrative of the club, as is evident from the account by the official historian of the Bengal Club, one of the oldest social clubs in India, easily oscillated between an understanding of the club as a broadly European cultural institution and as a specifically British one. Either way, the cultural values that it represented were understood as transplanted to the colonies: “It is the practice of European peoples to reproduce as far as possible in their settlements and colonies in other continents the characteristic social features of their natural lives …. For more than a century no institution has been more peculiarly British than the social club.”

TRANS-SAHARAN TRADE: THE ROUTES OF ‘AFRICAN SEXUALITY’

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 317-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf P. Gaudio
Keyword(s):  
Slave Trade ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Sexual Stereotypes ◽  
African Nation ◽  
Black Africans ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
National Integration ◽  
Nation States

AbstractThe idea that homosexuality is ‘un-African’ is widely regarded, at least among Western scholars, as a myth concocted during the colonial era. The evidence adduced to support this consensus is largely convincing, but it does not account for all the features of contemporary African leaders’ homophobic discourses. In particular, it does not account for differences between Christian and Muslim rhetorics with respect to a putative ‘African sexuality’. Historical, ethnographic, and literary evidence suggests these differences can be traced in part to the trans-Saharan slave trade, which gave rise to racialized sexual tropes of blacks and Arabs that circulated and continue to circulate on both sides of the Sahara. In Nigeria and perhaps elsewhere, it seems that sexual stereotypes of Arabs and black Africans derived from both the trans-Saharan trade and European colonial rule have been respectively, if unevenly, mapped onto Muslims and Christians, in a way that hinders national integration. This is so even when the leaders of both groups seem to be in agreement, as when they join forces to condemn homosexuality. To ignore such religious, racial, and sexual contradictions is to ignore some of the major cultural faultlines within contemporary African nation-states and the continent overall.

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