Nineteenth Century Colonial Educational Policy In British India

Résumé: This research examines the British colonial educational policy during the nineteenth century- the technique which, among others, helped the colonizers to be on a firm footing and leave their cultural legacy there till our present time. In India, educational activities started very early. Though it had an extensive, efficient and adequate system of indigenous education, the British showed contempt to it, decided to end and supersede it. Mission education began from the onset of the British presence. The father of modern education in India, Charles Grant, was a zealous reformer and a missionary. Through the missionary channel, education was a desire to evangelize India. When the Company shouldered responsibility for the education of its subjects, it was within the context of building an efficient Indian administration whose agents should be British servants assimilated in the Indian way of life. The policy, thus, was Orientalist in fear of disorder and to win the confidence of native upper classes. Emphasis in this study, however, is given to the nineteenth century that includes the landmarks of educational development- the Charter Act of 1813 and Charles Woods Dispatch of 1854- thanks to which English education grew and prospered resulting in the so-called Bengali Renaissance. The purpose was to create an Indian Westernized class English in taste, ideas and words. Education, in this step, had to mould the Indian character in a way conducive to the British interests, i.e. to make them meek and docile. Education, which is an aim in itself, had been perverted, obscure and dramatized because at each stage it was a means to an end and had a political bias. There was no intention for any intellectual improvement whatsoever. It always and invariably answered the needs of the Empire. Few people were converted, an elite layer was produced as it was class-oriented and built on Macaulay's Downward Filtration Theory, and the masses remained illiterate. Most important, the system was contradictory to the designers themselves.

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