Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal
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Pedagogy for Religion: Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal
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| ISBN-13: | 9780520950412 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 08/13/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 222 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Pedagogy for Religion
Missionary Education and the Fashioning of Hindus and Muslims in Bengal
By Parna Sengupta
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95041-2
CHAPTER 1
The Molding of Native Character
The title for this chapter comes from a study done in 1832 by the Unitarian missionary William Adam. Lord Bentinck, the governor-general of Bengal, had asked Adam to conduct a survey on the educational status of Bengal's villages both to determine the level of literacy in the Bengal countryside and to find out how rural schools were funded. Adam's report was relatively comprehensive, detailing the different types of institutions for vernacular education, the levels of literacy, and information on school attendance. Adam had initially come to India as a Baptist missionary in 1818 but, under the influence of the early nineteenth-century Bengali intellectual Ram Mohan Roy, had become a Unitarian and active abolitionist. His growing social radicalism led him to support the educational "uplift" of ordinary villagers through basic education in the vernacular: Bengali or Hindi. He advocated a theory of general rural education based upon the indigenous village school, the pathshala, and in his work he attempted to demonstrate the vitality of the system in Bengal and Bihar. Though he was critical of what he perceived as the lack of moral instruction in indigenous schools, Adam felt that financially backing the existing system of pathshalas offered the East India Company the most effective (though expensive) means to modernize education in colonial Bengal.
Adam's report challenged the Calcutta-centered nature of the educational debate; while Anglicists and Orientalists might differ as to the language in which Bengalis should be educated, there was never any question that its center should be the city. Adam, in contrast, wanted the company to consider their responsibility to all of their colonial subjects. His highly detailed and careful study tried to make a case that any funding set aside for education should be expended for the vernacular schooling of the cultivating classes in villages. For Adam, a pathshala-centered strategy would ensure that children in every part of Bengal, cities, towns, and even small villages, would be able to benefit from enlightened British rule. Adam's report, so important to later historians, was largely ignored, and in 1838 he left India to join the abolitionist movement in the United States and Britain.
The interest and investment in primary schooling should not be confused with any real commitment to mass education. Bengali-language schooling, always in tension with English education, never received enough private or public funding to make it truly expansive. The colonial state remained, until 1854, wholly committed to a policy of elite English schooling. But Adam's report reflected an important facet of nineteenth-century Christian thought and activism. For reform-minded evangelicals like Adam, basic literacy (in the vernacular) was an essential part of the religious and social uplift of society, whether one was speaking of poor parishioners in the East End, Bengali villagers, or slaves in the West Indies.
In this chapter, I trace the paradox at the heart of the evangelical advocacy for primary education. On the one hand, Protestant missionaries like Adam, consistently framed basic education in terms of the eradication of larger social hierarchies—class or caste or slavery. At the same time, the historical experience of Nonconformist Protestants in Britain made them wary of any state involvement in education and prompted them to push for a more decentralized, private school system. Thus, the history of primary education in Bengal demonstrates the tension between these two mid-Victorian values of humanitarianism and voluntarism. The paradox lies in the fact that the privatization of education ensured that it would never be fully funded or supported. At the same time, a largely privatized system meant the active involvement of multiple constituencies in the development of a crucial modern institution—the school.
In Bengal, the conflict between voluntarism in school funding and the potentially socially radical impulses of mass education was most stark. Initially, the East India Company assumed that the small class of Indians they were willing to educate could be convinced to take up the cause of basic education for their peasant brothers. But this remained a chimera; the English-educated Bengali bhadralok were, in Ashok Sen's words, "bound in the nexuses of subordinate activities and wealth of the colonial economy." Thus, they offered little support for the real expansion of vernacular education to the masses, particularly when "it would be encouraged at the cost of their own facilities for English learning, the only means of living and respectability available to them." For missionaries, this resistance was not only economic but also a reflection of the deeply entrenched caste hierarchy at the heart of Hindu culture. The potential for social (and caste) mobility through education was not realized through the bhadralok, but instead got taken up by missionaries and lower-caste Hindu and Muslim communities themselves, who embraced the potential of social transformation through the broadening of educational options.
EVANGELICALISM AND THE GROWTH OF MODERN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLING
The religious revival in Britain began in the mid-eighteenth century in the form of Wesleyan and Calvinist Methodism. It was a popular movement originating from genuine religious impulse and striving toward the creation of a new kind of society. As one historian of missionaries describes it, the idea of being born again in Christ was "the working of inner spiritual experience with a sudden illumination ... coming after the consciousness and repentance of sin."
Initially, Christian revivalism was influenced most by the activities of Nonconformist Protestants, the name commonly given to Protestant Christians who refused to "conform" to the rituals and rules of the Church of England. But anxiety and fears engendered by the French Revolution led the Church of England to become more open to the appeal of evangelicalism in the Anglican Church as well. Victor Kiernan has suggested that the tension within early-nineteenth-century British religious culture was "of religion as the formulary of an established society, its statement of faith in itself; the other as a catastrophic conversion of the individual, a miraculous shaking off of secret burdens." The nineteenth century can be seen as a constant effort to contain the enthusiasm and potential rebellion of the "catastrophic conversion of the individual" in order to ensure the stability of "established society."
Both Established and Nonconformist congregations organized agencies to deal with the pressing humanitarian issues of the period: poverty, education, and slavery. In fact, the very definition of what it meant to be a good Christian became inextricably tied to the notion of doing good works: "in the public mind the word 'philanthropist' became all but synonymous with 'evangelical' and 'philanthropy' was applied to the good works that appealed most to evangelical tastes." Evangelical Christians were involved in a variety of activities that could be variously described as philanthropic or political—the line consciously blurred. But the evangelical project that is most critical in this study is the development and expansion of mass schooling that began with the Nonconformist Sunday schools in Britain and extended to the establishment of a wide network of mission schools in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
British Sunday schools became important institutions not only for expanding the access of the poor and working classes to literacy (and thus to the word of God) but also as a place for popularizing missionary activity and Empire more generally. For example, one of the most popular subjects for the missionary biographies taught in Sunday schools was William Carey, the first Baptist missionary in Bengal. William Carey's life trajectory bears out Hobsbawm's colorful description of Nonconformists as coming from "among those who were about to rise into the new middle class, those about to decline into a new proletariat, and the indiscriminate mass of small independent men in between." Born in Northamptonshire in 1761, Carey's father (a handloom weaver) sent him off to be a shoemaker's apprentice, and it was there that he became an evangelical Baptist. Biographies of Carey make his humble background the center of his greatness; his success and stature as a missionary were not marked by his high status, but by his personal conversion, his love of science (especially botany and geography), and his desire to read other great imperial works, like James Cook's Voyages.
In India, Christian schooling and pedagogic practice were meant to "awaken" the Hindu masses and eventually result in the transformation of native society through conversion but also through an open attack on caste and gender segregation. Evangelical missionaries understood Hinduism, as they did other non-Christian religions, through a literal reading of Genesis. Since Adam's fall, his descendants had moved away from the true teachings, but its traces could still be detected in Hinduism. It was the responsibility of missionaries to bring non-Christians back into the fold. But the equally important role of Christians was to end various religious practices that they argued defined Hinduism: sati (the immolation of widows), female infanticide, and caste.
Caste, in particular, was seen by Protestant missionaries as the main obstacle to Christian conversion since it tied individuals to not only their families but also whole communities and livelihoods. From the early nineteenth century, as Protestant evangelicals began looking toward India to proselytize, they circulated the notion of caste as a form of slavery. The social and ritual hierarchy of caste made Hindus subservient to the machinations of the Hindu priest and the cruelty of the Brahmin. In 1808, for instance, the Christian Observer noted, "A Brahmin may seize without hesitation, if he be in distress for a subsistence, the goods of his Sudra slave, for as that slave can have no property, his master may take his goods." The arbitrary power of the Brahmin seemed analogous to the arbitrary tyranny of the slaveholder.
Protestant missionaries challenged the caste system in a number of different ways: publishing anticaste pamphlets, agitating against Untouchability, and starting schools open to all castes. Even the Church Missionary Society, which was highly invested in promoting class stability in Britain, was openly critical of the stratification of the caste system. For native Christians, a number of whom were from lower-caste and Untouchable communities, the Christian school provided them with their first opportunity to be formally educated. The missionary decision to educate lower-caste communities was a direct challenge to one of the core principles of upper-caste discriminatory practice—retaining the exclusive right of upper-caste men to literacy. Evangelical interest in establishing modern education served two purposes: a genuine effort to proselytize through schools as well as an effort to dismantle caste hierarchy through literacy and mobility. It was this latter project that provided one of the most important distinctions between Christian schools and those run by the colonial state and bhadralok educators. The caste bias of Bengali schools proved quite intractable, and both government and bhadralok-run institutions were dominated by the traditionally higher, literate castes: Brahmins, Kayasths, and Baidyas.
ELEMENTARY SCHOOLING IN BENGAL
In his report, Adam noted the various kinds of indigenous learning systems in Bengal. There were Persian schools catering to Hindu and Muslim students training them for Mughal administrative positions. There were also Hindu religious schools (tol) meant to impart Sanskrit liturgical knowledge. But the most widespread rural education was provided by pathshalas, which taught rudimentary "reading, writing, arithmetic ... zamindari and mahajan accounts." The pathshalas were organized around agricultural work schedules, meeting in the morning and evening so the students could return to the fields during the day. The tols (Hindu liturgical schools) and madrassahs (Muslim religious schools) offered a higher education in grammar, rhetoric, law, literature, philosophy, medicine, and astrology. The tols and madrassahs were more dependent on wealthy benefactors and religious elite than were pathshalas, which were strictly local institutions. Although pathshalas were widespread, they were not truly vehicles for "mass" education. They tended to educate male, Hindu, upper-caste (but non-Brahmin) boys and were not as "democratic" as later nationalist writers would argue.
Missionaries were critical of the native pathshala for both the quality of the education it offered and its exclusive focus on upper-caste and male children. The pathshala lacked many of the outward trappings of modern education (a permanent schoolroom, punctual attendance, etc.) and offered a perfunctory education that did little to mold good character or behavior in students. In contrast, missionaries argued that their educational efforts captured the true spirit of modern pedagogy: the inculcation of moral nature and thus the social transformation of society.
The establishment of vernacular rural education was attempted early on, mainly by Nonconformist Protestants. Well before Adam's report, William Carey, the Baptist missionary, had already begun experimenting with Sunday schools in Serampore. Carey's own conversion history, from a poor cobbler to a highly respected missionary in India, convinced him of the importance of literacy and basic education—in this case, aimed at rural Bengalis. From the early nineteenth century, he and his compatriots, William Ward and Joshua Marshman, focused on establishing printing presses to publish Bengali-language Bibles and schoolbooks, and opened primary schools for native children in Serampore, Chinsura, Burdwan, and Calcutta. As the Serampore missionaries translated the Bible into Bengali, Baptists in Wales were similarly translating and educating the population in Welsh.
Mission educators, unlike company officials, were concerned with the long-term solutions to the problem of vernacular schools in India. They devised a number of alternative plans to extend their model of modern schooling to compete with pathshalas. For instance, Thomas Thomason, the Anglican chaplain for the East India Company, in 1814 devised "the first detailed and comprehensive plan for education in the Bengal Presidency." He suggested opening government high schools to teach English and modern science, a normal school to train teachers, and primary vernacular schools in villages. Although some of Thomason's ideas would be later taken up by the colonial state, there was little money or interest among company officials in extending primary schools.
The relative indifference of the East India Company to questions of elementary schooling, and the fact that the Established Church did not have the same monopoly in India as in Britain, meant Nonconformist missionaries had greater autonomy to experiment with more radical pedagogic techniques. In contrast, in Britain, the Church of England and Parliament were wary of the possibilities that pedagogic radicalism would lead to political radicalism. Particularly in the early nineteenth century, conservative thinkers like Hannah More believed that teaching working-class children to read was acceptable as long as they mainly read Church-sanctioned catechism and were not taught to write. Thus, anxiety over class conflict influenced the degree to which English schools were willing to employ new forms of pedagogy.
Missionaries in India, on the other hand, were able to create a much broader and more liberal curriculum in early-nineteenth-century Bengal because they wanted to "awaken" the masses to Christianity. The Serampore missionaries found that they had complete autonomy in devising their Sunday schools and thus felt no compunction about breaking with English educational systems and turning their attention to Scotland, which had a more innovative pedagogic and institutional system for elementary education. Scottish parish schools, endowed and financed by local landowners in each parish, provided more stable financing and a more standardized educational system than the more haphazard English one.
Not all evangelicals were convinced that investment in vernacular schooling was the best way to proselytize and convert India. In fact, Carey's work in vernacular education was directly challenged by Alexander Duff, a Scottish Presbyterian missionary. For Duff, it was foolhardy for missionaries to ignore the education of the higher classes, leaving them at the mercy of the various "secular" experiments with English college education funded by the company and Parliament. Missionaries needed to make inroads into this class of natives who would one day wield power and influence in the economy and society. Duff argued that while "the soul of the humblest and most illiterate peasant may be as precious, in the sight of God, as the soul of the most powerful," in terms of "the great interests of a realm (say Scotland) one Knox is worth ten thousand illiterate peasants." Duff questioned the purpose of educating large numbers of illiterate peasants, as Carey was doing in the Serampore countryside, since any native Knox (the theologian responsible for the Calvinist reformation in the sixteenth century) would invariably have to come from educated and more elite Bengali society.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,Introduction: Pedagogical Frames and Colonial Difference, 1,
1. The Molding of Native Character, 23,
2. A Curriculum for Religion, 40,
3. An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedagogy, 61,
4. The Schoolteacher as Modern Father, 81,
5. Teaching Gender in the Colony, 102,
6. Mission Schools and Qur'an Schools, 123,
Conclusion: Pedagogy for Tolerance, 150,
Notes, 161,
Bibliography, 189,
Index, 205,