Book Review

Asia

One of the avowed aims of British colonial education was the modernization and secularization of Indian society. If it resulted in the alienation of Indian youth from the religious and cultural traditions of their forebears, such was the inevitable collateral damage of a project that, in true visionary style, dreamed of lifting India into modernity and so into history.	1
The special virtue of Nita Kumar's useful book is that it challenges the totalizing claims of colonial effects by ethnographically studying educational change in one important setting: Banaras. Far from concluding that English education successfully marginalized indigenous systems of learning, Kumar unravels in fascinating detail the networks of power and hierarchies of domination that left the conflict between two competing hegemonies—British and Banarasi—unresolved and ongoing. In the process, Kumar challenges the dichotomies of elite-subaltern, dominant-dominated, and center-periphery, calling for historical methodologies that take into account the local narratives of change, adaptation, and resistance. Kumar is especially effective in showing how the colonial records on precolonial education tacitly direct modern readers to adopt a viewpoint that implicitly assesses this education as rigid and closed to reform and modification. By examining the evolving practices of Sanskrit learning, from techniques of recitation to the uses of physical space, Kumar offers an alternative viewpoint from which to evaluate change. The standpoint is internal to the culture, and is offered in such a way that it avoids the claims of authenticity that such an insider's perspective sometimes evokes.	2
The author attempts to restore to Sanskrit its cultural density and refuses the polarities that have made Sanskrit the antithesis of English education. In fact, her research shows that Sanskrit's eventual nationalistic aims follow a pattern strikingly similar to the chauvinist trajectory of English education. One enduring myth is that Sanskrit pandits were lost in an otherworldliness that made them indifferent to the social and political processes of their world. However, the gradual shift to an economy of labor in which pandits were paid employees—and not just beneficiaries of an arbitrary patronage system—produced the conditions for the new institutionalization of Sanskrit. Transforming the personalized relations between guru (teacher) and shishya (pupil), the Sanskrit College (which became the Banaras College under the British) reordered the physical spaces and temporal rituals of Sanskrit learning, from school buildings to the academic calendar.	3
Buildings make an especially important contribution to the altered economy of instruction, since the pupil has to adapt to the physical environment in order to maximize the instruction imparted therein. But more important, the building becomes an important focus of a community's interest, physically representing its values and ideals and therefore eliciting its monetary support. The entry of a corporate mentality in Sanskrit education brought merchants and pandits together as members of a new class of people, creating another set of stratifications in the society as well. It is these people who become the new power brokers of Banaras. Similarly, modifications in the pattern of holidays also replicated the corporate world. While the special holidays observed by Sanskrit education were determined by the lunar calendar (for instance, new moon [ammavasya], full moon [purnima], quarter moon [ekadasi]), the colonial state introduced the concept of Sunday as a day off from instruction. With this simple yet profound change, the school was brought in line with the functioning of the state and its bureaucratic work.	. . .