Decolonization(s) and Education. Daniel Maul

⁵³ Beyond this, the masses did not require education.

      Tilak started the Indian Home Rule League, modelled after the Irish Home Rule League in 1916 to intensify his agitation against colonial rule. Home Rule aimed at the transfer of India’s internal administration into Indian hands while India continued to be part of the British Empire. The justification he gave for Home Rule was that chaturvarna had declined under the influence of modern education and India needed Home Rule to protect varnashrama dharma – the caste system.⁵⁴ Tilak argued that “the colonial education discouraged students from learning anything from their elders about the actual surroundings […] only in the national schools independent of government control, adequate education in making good citizen can be given.”⁵⁵ In these schools the children should be taught “the theory of karma and the existence of god,” and the pedagogy “is found in our Puranas” (Hindu Mythological stories).⁵⁶ The theory of karma in the Hindu religion provides justification for a person’s low or high birth, and the Puranas upheld these justifications linking it up with the will of god. The instruction given to boys was mostly oral.⁵⁷ So, the aim of national education was to make children accept their caste and economic status in the society and not question them.

      Two important issues can be deducted from these developments. Firstly, Tilak did not advocate the abolition of modern schools, colleges and universities. Secondly, the national education advocated by Tilak and comprised of religious and vocational education was essentially for the lower caste and lower class Indians. This meant that the affluent upper-caste Brahmins would have access to modern education and thereby control important positions of power, while the poor from the upper caste and the lower castes would be taught to accept the social and economic hierarchy. This was not based on the pre-colonial Indian education system but certainly derived from the class-based education system of the imperial rulers.

      Tilak’s national education could not be dismissed off as rhetoric produced during the time of anti-colonial struggle to cater to popular demand or to seek ←55 | 56→the support of the more conservative sections of the society. His supporters controlled ten out of eleven municipalities in the Marathi speaking areas of the Bombay Presidency where they refused to expand educational infrastructure or support the admission of lower caste boys, let alone the education of girls.⁵⁸ They also refused to implement compulsory education even after the provincial Bill was passed in 1918.⁵⁹ Tilak, however, died on 1 August 1920, and the leadership passed on into the hands of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

      Spiritualising an imperial idea

      If Tilak successfully nationalised the imperial idea of keeping the poor, girls and the lower castes from getting any meaningful education and emphasise religious instruction as real national education, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi went a step ahead and spiritualised it. Gandhi was born into privilege; his father was a prime minister of the princely states of Porbandar and Rajkot. By his own admission, Gandhi was an average student and barely managed to pass the examinations,⁶⁰ yet he was sent to England for higher education. Later he went to South Africa in 1893 to represent a legal case of an Indian trader and spent the next 14 years there experimenting with and refining his social and political ideas. When the First World War broke out in 1914, he recruited volunteers for ambulance corps for the British. He returned to India in 1915. At that time the Indian National Congress was losing its liberal leaders one by one. The death of A. O. Hume (1912), Gokhale (1915), Dadabhai Naoroji (1917), William Wedderburn (1918) left the party virtually leaderless. Consequently, Tilak dominated the political arena. Gandhi supported the Home Rule agitation, but also engaged in the recruitment of young Indians as soldiers for the British army during the First World War, arguing that “we should become partners in the empire.”⁶¹ In 1919, the colonial government wanted to remove English as a medium of instruction in high schools, while retaining it in the universities. If implemented, ←56 | 57→this measure virtually would have prevented thousands of high school students from entering the universities, and only Indian landed gentry who studied in exclusive schools alone would have been in a position to enter the universities. The landed gentry was known by various names like Talukdar, Inamdar, Jagirdar institutions, which denoted various demarcations within the landholders and Chiefs Colleges and Rajkumar Institutions where the sons of the Indian royal families studied. There was a widespread opposition, which was led by members of the Indian elite like Srinivasair, the advocate general of Madras, Krishna Nair, the Diwan (prime minister) of Travancore, or Sitanath Roy – one of the biggest landlords of Bengal. The colonial state could get support only from Gandhi, and the Lord Bishop of Madras, an Anglican Bishop, which is used to substantiate its final decision. The Bishop argued that “English is an intolerable burden on the students; foreign languages impose crushing weight upon the whole educational system of India. English has created cleavages between English educated and the mass of the population.”⁶² This was virtually a verbatim representation of ideas that Gandhi held regarding modern education. The British government, however, could not implement it immediately as the political agitation intensified.

      Gandhi attacked modern education as early as 1908 in his book Hind Swaraj – Indian Home Rule. He denounced modern education as godless claiming that “India will never be godless, rank atheism cannot flourish in this land.”⁶³ He attacked the modern curriculum by stating that:

      A study of geography, astronomy, algebra, geometry is false education and it is not for the millions. To give millions knowledge of English is to enslave them. Our ancient school system is enough. Character building has the first place in it, and that is primary education.⁶⁴

      Gandhi went on to argue as governor-general Auckland and Tilak had done before him, “do you wish to make a peasant discontented with his cottage or his lot?” He also declared that “our ancient school system is enough.” Gandhi criticised the supporters of compulsory education as “those carried away by the flood of western thought.”⁶⁵ Like Tilak, Gandhi too argued that modern education is “calculated to wean the masses from their traditional culture. They are never taught to have any pride in their surroundings, and the government ←57 | 58→schools had entirely denationalized the masses.”⁶⁶ During the compulsory education debate, Gopal Krishna Gokhale had suggested using eight annas (half a rupee) salt tax to fund compulsory education. Gandhi claimed that Gokhale was his political guru, but did not support Gokhale’s Bill and later famously made his opposition to salt tax central to his anti-colonial struggle during 1930–1931.

      Extraordinary political developments took place in India during 1919–1920. The post-war political reform earlier promised by the British did not lead to Home Rule. This frustrated the rank and file of the Indian National Congress. At the same time, the government passed the Rowlett Act under which anyone suspected of anti-British activities could be imprisoned for two years without trial. There was widespread protest against this law, and in one such peaceful meeting at Jallianwallah Bagh in Punjab, a British police officer opened fire, killing and injuring more than 1,000 unarmed persons. Around the same time, the Muslims in India began Khilafat – a pan-Islamic movement against the British, which added to widespread discontent among all sections of the society against the colonial rule.⁶⁷

      When Gandhi began his non-cooperation movement in 1919, as a part of the larger programme of boycotting the government offices and courts, he asked the students to boycott the schools and colleges. He and his supporters established national schools. These schools rejected the modern curriculum as well as the English language. Gandhi emphatically declared