| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Tithi Bhattacharya. The Sentinels of Culture: Class, Education, and the Colonial Intellectual in Bengal (1848–85). New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 272. $35.00.

There is an excitement to this book. It is about education, and education, Tithi Bhattacharya believes (as do I), was the biggest concern of colonizer and colonized alike in nineteenth-century India. "Education and its handmaiden, reform, could make or break, the known universe" (p. 2). The palette is exciting—Calcutta bhadralok, or new middle-class society—and the author's ambition is large, too: to provide an "explanatory framework" for the "obsessive importance" (p. 3) given to education by this class. But in the first pages confusion arises. We are told that "education and culture" form the two explanatory axes of identity for this burgeoning class (p. 2). Culture? If not treated as an opaque term beyond usefulness, should it not at least be accepted by the author as a complex one? Bhattacharya moves on to argue, without irony or qualification, about how "the world of culture" (p. 2) works, how culture was related to social and economic power (p. 3), and how the world of culture is not to be taken as a "natural attribute of the bhadralok as a social group" (p. 3).

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