Knowledge and Governance: Political Socialization of the Indian Child within Colonial Schooling and Nationalist Contestations in India (1870-1925).

Abstract

This dissertation examines two sites of knowledge production in colonial India between 1870 and 1925 that specifically targeted the Indian child. The first site was the colonial school and curriculum, specifically, textbooks and physical education. The second site that I explore lay outside the school-walls in the form of the nationalist pedagogy of Bengali children's magazines. I highlight the political significance of the Indian child in the cultural projects of colonialism and nation building. This dissertation orbits around four major themes: the colonial child; colonial school curriculum; body as a political site; and education as contestation.

By late nineteenth-century as Indian nationalism developed, the native child increasingly became a political being and his/her politicization considered a sign of progress. Against this background the British colonial state devised methods to extend greater control over processes of curriculum selection and proscription to combat its anxieties over aedition and generate loyal imperial subjects. I highlight the corporeality of British colonialism by uncovering the child's body as a site of colonial control through exploring physical education. The colonial school was involved in the project of corporeal re-construction by teaching habits of discipline and cleanliness to children-- integral to the Raj's social reform agenda. Physical education was crucial to de-politicize seditious native bodies. I contend that the child's body was also a site of nation-building. For the nationalists the child embodied a political space where they contested colonial cultural projects and undertook their projects of remasculinizing the youth through renewed emphasis on physical culture and revival of indigenous martial sports.

Education was not confined to classroom pedagogical relationships alone but also shaped by its social contexts. I problematize colonial knowledge production by emphasizing it as a contested terrain since the late nineteenth-century. I study contestations at two levels. Firstly, through the creation of parallel sites of knowledge production, specifically Bengali children's literature as nationalist projects that interrogated school curriculum and contested ideologies defining colonial educational practices. Secondly, I examine the challenge students and teachers posed to colonial authority in the Bombay Presidency in the 1890s and in Bengal as part of the Swadeshi movement (1905-1908).