View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Dokumenten-Publikationsserver der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Südasien-Chronik - South Asia Chronicle 6/2016, S. 229-255 © Südasien-Seminar der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin ISBN: 978-3-86004-324-0 Textbooks for History and Urdu in Punjab: Transiting from the Colonial to the Post-Colonial Period1 ALI USMAN QASMI
[email protected] Background to Colonial India’s 'Textbook Culture' The focus of numerous studies on the development of education in colonial India has primarily been on the policy instruments inter- mittently issued by the British government from the first quarter of the nineteenth century onwards. The important landmarks in this timeline are the debates about government’s responsibility towards the pro- 229 motion of education and contestations among Orientalists, Anglicists and Missionary groups about the content and scope of such education. There has been a lot of discussion about the influence of policy statements such as Macaulay’s minute on education of 1835 and Wood’s dispatch of 1854. However, comparatively little emphasis has been placed on the ideological basis of these educational policies―especially through the medium of textbooks.2 Some notable exceptions are the works of Gauri Viswanathan (1998), Sanjay Seth (2007) and Krishna Kumar (2005). Vish- wanathan’s seminal work has shown how the reading of English liter- ary texts in schools was meant to promote a certain rational worldview conducive to the acceptance of Christian values and benevolence of British rule. Seth’s nuanced study aims at showing the pedagogical processes of colonial education as a site of colonial governmentality and disciplinary regime aimed at producing desirable subjectivities.