Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Faculty Publications and Research CMC Faculty Scholarship 1-1-2007 The cholS ar and Her Servants: Further Thoughts on Postcolonialism and Education Nita Kumar Claremont McKenna College Recommended Citation Kumar, Nita. "The choS lar and Her Servants: Further Thoughts on Postcolonialism and Education." The oP litics of Gender, Community and Modernities: Essays on Education in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the CMC Faculty Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in CMC Faculty Publications and Research by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Chapter 12 The Scholar and her Servants: further thoughts on Postcolonialism and Education The hypothesis of the paper is twofold. By juxtaposing the two subject-positions of mistress and servant, moving between one and the other to highlight how each is largely constructed by the interaction, we illuminate the questions of margin and centre, silence and voice, and can ponder on how to do anthropology better. But secondly, to the work of several scholars who propose various approaches to these questions, I add the particular insight offered by the perspective of education. Because one of the subject-positions is that of ‘the scholar’, someone professionally engaged in knowledge production, the new question I want to consider is regarding the formation of this authoritative knowledge, its seemingly autonomous history, and the existing and potential intersections of that history with the history of the ‘non-scholar’. If I study India the question is how the history of India impinges on the history of the subjects involved in the study.