Connected and entangled histories: writing histories of education in the Indian context

This article examines contestations and recent trend-setting approaches in the
historiography of education in India in the post-1800 period. British colonialism
created a huge rupture in South Asian society as regards the provision of education.
Historians of education have asked what sorts of indigenous educational
institutions and methods were present in pre-colonial India: in this context, the
article discusses the work of historians who researched indigenous Indian village
schools, key to educational transmission until the early nineteenth century. The
educational work of the nationalist leader M.K. Gandhi inflected the work of
such educational historians. The article devotes some attention to ways in which
twentieth-century ‘new education’ reinvented aspects of pre-colonial South
Asian education. Marxist, feminist, Dalit and Subaltern historians of education
have analysed the differential and hierarchised spread of ‘western’ education in
South Asia. Nonetheless, this article shows how the educational agency of Dalits,
women, peasants and working people has been analysed by scholars. The
article then examines recent scholarship which views the origins and growth of
‘western’ education in South Asia in the framework of transcultural transactions.
It ends from the vantage point of connected and entangled histories of education, looking beyond the unit of the nation state.