A Critique of the History of Higher Education in India

The main argument of this paper rests upon the assumption that while the post-colonial education policy has emphasised the need for a truly national goal of education, arguing for a departure from the British racist system of education, its critique of the British system, however, does not reflect an awareness even of the methodological concerns, let alone far deeper epistemological break which resulted in the formation of the colonialist system of knowledge. Ironically the nationalist education policy seeks to derive legitimacy from those very hegemonic processes aiming at a manufactured consensus in public life which were set in motion during the period of Orientalist education, and were further sustained by the Anglicist policy makers. Most histories of Indian higher education thus typically fall into a fairly predictable pattern, written as history of acts and resolutions whose interest lies in their presumed effect on the existing social and cultural system. From these histories it is apparent that educational historians have concerned themselves far less with what processes are involved into the making of an education policy – the discourses and institutions that led to its formulation and the experience context in which the event occurred – than with the outcome such an education policy aimed at with regard to the targeted population. In order to develop a comprehensive critique of the history of higher education, it would be imperative to re-work a genealogy of structures of significations and their affiliations with the civil and administrative machinery that have constituted the field of education in India since late eighteenth century. The ‘field’ thus constituted can be discussed as three discrete moments along a continuum of policies. These ‘moments’, which draw upon the archival material of specific periods, can also be interpreted as indicators of the quality of philosophical as well as administrative investments that went into the making of contemporary higher education in India.