Editorial

Policy Futures in Education

Indian education at the 2015, Vol. 13(2) 165–170
! Author(s) 2015

crossroads of postcoloniality, Reprints and permissions:

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globalization and the DOI: 10.1177/1478210314568180

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21st century Knowledge

Economy (Part 1)
Mousumi Mukherjee
University of Melbourne, Australia

Indian civilization has a long tradition of education, creativity and innovation. Though there
are debates surrounding the scholarship, Ifrah (1999, 2000) traces the root of the modern
system of numbers to India. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted that, some of the oldest
institutions of higher learning such as Nalanda, Ujjain, (in India), Taxila (now in
Pakistan), dating back to the 5th century BC, were located within the Indian
subcontinent.1 These institutions of higher learning declined and disappeared in modern
times over several thousands of years of history, with waves of military invasions and
internal political conflicts. There was also a rich tradition of free residential education in
Gurukuls (schools) within the household of the Gurus (teachers). Instead of paying school
fees the students would live a humble, celibate life, providing their service within the
household of the Guru, and well-off students would voluntarily pay ‘‘Guru dakshina’’
after completion of their education, in the form of land or cattle etc. as marker of respect
for the teacher.
However, the rich philosophical tradition of the Brahminical Gurukul system degenerated
and became a tool of social class oppression in a society which became divided into the
narrow boundaries of the hierarchical caste system2 in the later Vedic period. Though it
originated from within the indigenous Hindu society, later this caste system of social
hierarchy and discrimination became a distinct phenomenon of Indian society, which later
prevailed even among non-Hindus (Singh, 1977). The Islamic Madrasa system of schooling
became prevalent within the Indian subcontinent with the Persian Mughal rulers settling in
the country from the early 16th century. By the time the British Empire established within
India in the mid-19th century, education was primarily delivered to men belonging to certain
privileged sections of society through these Gurukul and Madrasa systems.
A scholar and authority of Indian culture, history and identity, Amartya Sen (2005) cite in
his book ‘‘The Argumentative Indian’’, instances of scholarly argumentative Indian women
such as Maitryei and Gargi in ancient times, persuasive political characters from the famous

Corresponding author:
Mousumi Mukherjee, University of Melbourne, Australia
Email: m.mukherjee@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au
166 Policy Futures in Education 13(2)

Indian epic Mahabharata such as Draupadi, and historical characters such as Rani of Jhansi
and Sorojini Naidu from recent Indian history of the freedom movement against the
British colonial rulers. However, in spite of these affirmative appraisals, feminist Indian
scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) raised questions of gender discrimination by
asking ‘‘Can the subaltern speak?’’ within the deeply rooted hierarchical patriarchal society.
In fact, Dreze & Sen (2013) and Sen’s (1989, 1990, 1992) work on the ‘‘missing women’’ also
provides evidence for the appalling condition of women in contemporary India, where sex-
selective feticide and infanticide of girls are rampant. It is a proof of the fact that all those
glorious Indian women, about whom Sen (2005) writes, were standing up against many odds
to pursue scholarship, participate in public life and to speak up within a larger context where
women’s voices have been historically marginalized, similar to the situation in Europe until
the 16th century, when formal education was the sole privilege of aristocratic men.
Spivak’s (1988) feminist cultural critique emphasized the role colonialism might have
played in further subjugation of subaltern Indian women without much agency caught
between ‘‘patriarchal subject formation and imperialist object construction’’.3 However,
feminist social scientist Kumari Jayawardena’s (1995) work with regards to the role of
diverse groups of Western women in India during British colonial times is significant
in understanding the historical trajectory of girls’ formal education in modern India.
Going beyond the popular binary of foreign women as ‘‘Devils’’ or ‘‘Goddesses’’ and
beginning with a universalist perspective of the subordinate status of women globally,
Jayawardena (1995) argued that female missionaries, social reformers, theosophists and
orientalists in search of ‘‘black gods’’ considered education as key for the emancipation of
Indian women, and often took key roles in furthering the cause, driven by a sense of ‘‘global
sisterhood’’. Quite interestingly, the first formal girls’ school was set up in British India
on 1 January 1848 by Savitribai Phule, wife of an indigenous Hindu outcaste social
reformer, Jyotirao Govindrao Phule, from the western part of the Indian subcontinent.
Her interest in education and ideas were shaped by the influence of Christian
missionaries, who ignited the interest of this outcaste Indian woman to read and learn
more (Wolf and Andrade, 2008).
Following the advocacy of educated native elites such as Rammohan Roy4 for Western
knowledge to raise questions in the minds of the indigenous population to eradicate
prejudices, superstitions and ritualistic malpractices like ‘‘sutee/sati’’ (widow burning),
modern systems of education were set up in India during British colonial times by the
colonial government and diverse groups of European and American Christian
missionaries. In his historical study, Seth (2007) argued how modern Western knowledge
was received and consumed by the colonized subjects of India during British colonial times
and was transformed in the process. Locating himself within the Western knowledge system,
diasporic Indian historian Seth (2007: 7) takes a Foucauldian approach and writes, ‘‘As a
study of western knowledge in colonial India, this is also a work about subjectivities. It is
about how Western education in India posited and served to create—and sometimes failed to
fully create—certain sorts of subjects.’’ Utilizing interdisciplinary approaches to analyze
historical evidence, Seth’s (2007) study shows how the intervention of Western knowledge
produced diverse kinds of subjectivities within the Indian subcontinent. One of the major
concerns expressed in the study is that many Indians were learning Western knowledge
through rote memorization for the instrumental materialistic purpose of Western
knowledge-systems within colonial India, without acquiring the questioning and critical
faculty such knowledge was supposed to have ignited. Moreover, since Western
Mukherjee 167

epistemologies often contradicted with indigenous ways of knowing, this gave rise to an
anxiety about moral crisis among the population—a concern which was echoed by both
Indian elite nationalists and the British rulers of colonial India.
Nation states are imagined communities, as Benedict Anderson (1983) would say.
However, unlike the major European nation states, there was no Indian Nation prior to
British colonialism. Indian historian Ramachandra Guha (2008) quotes from British
colonialist Sir John Strachey, who stated, ‘‘Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like
Punjab’’ (p. 3) to highlight the diversity of the various linguistic and cultural groups within
India. However, these diverse people of the Indian subcontinent were brought together by
the political activism of the Indian National Congress to form a sense of what Guha (2008)
called, ‘‘unnatural nation’’—unified in its fight against British colonialism. In the
postcolonial era, nation-building through education thus became a key objective for
schooling, along with expansion of access to education. Schools run by government,
missionaries, and the private sector became important institutions to facilitate the process
of national identity formation through ritual recital of the national anthem every day in
school and other ritual activities to reinforce a national identity based on the principle of
‘‘unity in diversity’’. Despite such efforts, since independence in 1947 the modern Indian
Nation State has been struggling to build Indian national identity through schooling as
argued by Yadav (1974), especially since the population of the Indian subcontinent has
been so divided for centuries according to linguistic, ethnic, gender, religious, social class,
and caste groups. Moreover, as Elder (1999: 219) concluded after studying Tamil and Hindi
textbooks, even these vernacular language Indian textbooks transmitted to ‘‘their students
an awareness of a West that is still technologically superior, still to be blamed, still to be
emulated, and still to be sought for approval.’’
Access to education has improved in recent years under the Indian Government’s
Education for All (Srava Sikshya Abhiyan) program. However, even after 3 years of
implementation of the Right to Education Act (2010), universal access to elementary
education is still a far cry from reality. In spite of a comparative increase in access and
improvement in school infrastructural facilities, the school drop-out rate and quality of
education are major problems for the Indian system according to reports published by
UN agencies as well as the Indian Government. Moreover, the Annual Status of
Education (ASER) reports, published by an independent NGO called Pratham from 2005
onwards to the latest in 2014, show evidence of the abysmal state of student learning in
Indian schools, though the 12th 5-year plan of the Government of India (2012–2017) places
learning for all children as the utmost priority for the country. Drawing on data and analysis
from their prior work and several other scholarly sources, Dreze and Sen (2013) argues
about the centrality of education for development in India among several other issues by
quoting early 20th century indigenous education reformer and Indian Nobel Laureate in
Literature, Rabindranath Tagore. They end the book with a chapter entitled ‘‘The Need for
Impatience’’ and quote from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906) to emphasize
that ‘‘patience is a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue’’ and that the Indian masses
have been extraordinarily tolerant towards various kinds of inequalities, stratification, and
social class divisions for too long. Increase in inequality is taking its toll on sustainability of
development globally, and if this indigenous trend of tolerance towards inequality continues
within India, the development goals of the country will remain unachievable. Therefore, they
call for the relatively privileged middle classes of Indian society to raise their voice for social
equity across the population for sustainable future development.
168 Policy Futures in Education 13(2)

Existing research on the contemporary Indian school education system has explored the
issue of exclusion within the system as a major barrier in achieving the goals of universal
elementary education (Govinda, 2011; Nambissan, 2010; Center for Equity Studies, 2014).
Both school education and Higher Education in India are now facing crucial challenges in
terms of rising demand against short supply of education, poor infrastructure, and lack of
well-trained professionals (Agarwal, 2010; Tilak, 2005). Moreover, globalization and
economic liberalization in recent years pose additional challenges for Indian education to
train a globally competitive workforce and empower them as citizens of a modern
democracy as well as citizens of the world. Taking into consideration the fact that it has
one of the largest growing youth population of the world, will the Indian education system
be able to harness its rich tradition and its demographic dividend to meet the needs of its
population in the 21st century knowledge economy, when employment and economic
opportunities have become globally interconnected even as politics has remained nation-
centric? Can Indian schools reconcile the postcolonial mission of nation-building and
national identity formation with the contemporary needs of educating for globally
conscious citizens of the world? This two-part speculative special issue of Policy Futures in
Education has been designed to provide a preliminary investigation of these historical
crossroads—their role and trajectory. Each part contains eight articles for publication.
India Special Issue part 1 begins with Deepanwita Dasgupta’s philosophical article on
scientific reasoning in a peripheral colonial context in India by investigating the work of
Nobel-winning Indian physicist CV Raman’s work, showing how this extraordinary man
educated himself to enhance the epistemological boundaries of scientific knowledge,
receiving the highest achievement award, in spite of all the colonial concerns about moral
corruption and rote memorization. This study highlights the diversity of effects Western
knowledge had on the native population, and challenges universalist assumptions about
the effects of Western education on indigenous population of India. Rashmi Diwan’s
article traces the historical trajectory of ‘‘exclusion’’ and ‘‘inequity’’ within the Indian
context, and also presents contemporary data from the field to argue about the
significance of a rights-based approach towards school education within the Indian
context. Shivali Tukdeo’s article analyzes the various global and local tensions in framing
education policy in contemporary India. Kamlesh Narwana’s case study exemplifies these
tensions within a specific location in India. Erik Byker’s case study in another location in
India portrays a promising future for a separate but ‘‘equal opportunity’’ community school
built by an elite private school to meet the mandate of the recent ‘‘Right to Education Act’’
of educating 25% underprivileged children under clause 12 of the Act, which authorizes a
‘‘public provision private management’’ model of education. However, it still reinforces the
issues of ‘‘exclusion’’ and ‘‘inequity’’ within the Indian system raised by Diwan.
Within the Indian context, where public investment for education is very poor less than
4% of GDP (Srivastava and Noronha 2014; Dreze & Sen 2013, Jha 2008), Madhur
Chandra’s article brings to the forefront the issue of contract teachers within the system,
which is directly related to the delivery of quality education. She argues how poor salary,
poor working conditions, and lack of training affects the motivation, morale, and long-term
commitment of these teachers. Amita Gupta’s article attempts a creative synthesis to
propose a new hybrid postcolonial pedagogic model for the early childhood curriculum
within urban Indian context, and recommends developing a teacher education curriculum
for ‘‘pedagogy of the third space’’. Finally, within the context of increasing global pressure
for higher education policy geared towards preparing Indian students to join the global
Mukherjee 169

workforce of the 21st century knowledge economy, Supriya Baily’s article raises an
important question ‘‘Who gets left behind?’’ in the wake of US–India Higher Education
partnerships. This article once again explores the issues of ‘‘exclusion’’ and ‘‘inequity’’, not
just within the Indian system but within the global hierarchy of higher education.
These articles have been carefully selected from a large pool of submissions to open up
future dialogue on critical issues affecting Indian education in transition. Part 2 of this
special issue will further open up debates on women’s education and empowerment, issues
of quality and inclusion, issues of teachers’ beliefs, teacher professionalism, occupational
choices of students, and issues of building research collaboration among scholars across
borders. The aim of this two-part special issue is not to draw any conclusions about
Indian education, but to encourage further research to deepen scholarly understanding
about issues affecting one of the largest student populations of the world. As a guest
editor, I would like to thank Prof. Michael Peters for providing this opportunity to
compile these special issues, and Prof. Fazal Rizvi for writing a preface to the special
issues based on extensive scholarly research on Indian higher education as well as on elite
schools in India. Finally, I would like to thank all authors for their scholarly contributions
and diligence in working through the review process.

Notes
1. ‘‘India’s ancient University returns to life’’ http://www.bbc.com/news/business-22160989
2. The caste system is a form of social stratification prevalent among people belonging to the Indian
subcontinent. Originally they were professional labels equivalent to medieval European guildsmen.
There were four major caste groups—the Brahman (priests and the learned class), Kshatriyas
(rulers, warriors and property owners), Vaishyas (commercial business class and traders), and
shudras (laborers/workers/farmers). Slowly these caste groups gained hierarchical status, and
those who would do menial jobs such as cleaning and garbage removals were considered outcasts
and untouchables. The untouchables were not allowed in places of worship, schools and many other
public places. Though after independence from British rule legislation was passed to prevent any
form of discrimination towards the untouchables, and it has affected the status of some people.
However, untouchability and social discrimination based on caste is still part of Indian society,
though according to Indic scholars and even recent genetic research there was great fluidity among
the various caste groups in the early Vedic period and castes were probably determined by
profession and not by birth.
3. See Spivak (1999: 235).
4. See Rammohan Roy was a modern intellectual social reformer during 18th and early 19th Century
colonial Bengal. He was one of the pioneers of the Bengal Renaissance movement.

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