After the British defeated the Peshwas in 1818, Mountstuart Elphinstone, the new governor, recognized the importance of existing educational networks- and state patronization of education - in the Company’s newly annexed domains.
Noting the “present abundance of people in education,” Elphinstone worried that “unless some exertion is made by the Government, the country will certainly be in a worse state under our rule than it under the Peishwa’s.”
From this position, the governor sketched out a policy for supporting existing vernacular-medium schools throughout the presidency, publishing school books in local languages, and also pursuing a limited program in English language education for Indian school children.
Thus, compared to the ‘anglicist vs. orientalist’ controversy in contemporary Bengal, Elphinstone’s education policies were shaped much more by immediate political realities than by ideological considerations.

Source: Minutes of Elphinstone, dated Dec 13, 1823.
In Bombay, Naoroji's mother enrolled him into one of those Gujarati indigenous schools that were known for producing students remarkably adept in mathematics. Naoroji didn't prove an exception, making his Mehta (teacher) exhibit his mathematical prowess "amid the loud wawas".
It was Bal Gangadhar Shastri Jambhekar who selected Naoroji for admission into the Elphinstone College, overruling a British teacher who had ranked him near the bottom.

What is the reason for our colleges not producing teachers like Jambhekar these days? Image

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More from @Anuraag_Shukla

25 Dec
Just finished reading this.

This book, by Steven Patterson, tries to systematically trace the idea of honor circulated in the Raj and how it was strategically deployed to sustain the imperial mission. Image
The dominant ethos of British India after 1857, argues the author, was set by the upper-middle classes (instead of viceroys & governors) who came to dominate the ICS, claiming that their professional training as disinterested civil servants made them the fittest rulers of India.
If viceroys came and went, members of the ICS spent entire careers in India, and their views were often decidedly different from those of the highest elite. These ICS officers transformed themselves into autocrats in India who ostensibly ruled as 'enlightened despots'.
Read 16 tweets
24 Dec
"Any true morality is the diametric opposite of self-righteousness - the very thing that so often masquerades for morality. What think often as our morality is indeed a “monstrous perversion” of our ego.”

themarginalian.org/2016/12/05/joa…
Didion on Hollywood liberals;

“The public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth.” Image
Joan Didion on Self-Respect:

"the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent."
Read 7 tweets
20 Dec
In the 1925 text, The Culture of the Abdomen, author Fredrick Hornibrook states that medical authorities of the time were outspoken about the flawed new sitting toilet/commode designs that were launched just decades earlier. (1/4)
Sitting toilets or commodes were designed by cabinet-maker Joseph Bramah and plumber Thomas Crapper. There was no consultation with medical authorities at all, despite them raising the issues of faulty designs and suspected health consequences. (2/4)

in pic (Thomas Crapper)
But the sitting toilets were convenient for the dresses of Europe, with their pockets and tight fittings. Also, the chair toilet spoke to the European love of monarchy; Henry VIII had a sitting toilet constructed for him after he had become obese. (3/4)
Read 5 tweets
20 Dec
McKim Marriot’s anthology India through Hindu Categories (1990) is an important work that necessitates an intellectual recapitulation and explains why there are no equivalent western categories for many Indian conceptions and realities. (1/5)
Indian thinking, he argues, does not distinguish between the material & ideological, or between nature & culture. One does not find mutually exclusive, oppositional binaries as material vs. spiritual, body vs. soul, true vs. false, fact vs. fiction, sacred vs. profane, etc. (2/5)
Thus, a person is thought to be made of koshas (sheaths) which interpenetrate- annamaya (food-filled), manomaya (mind-filled), pranamaya (breath/life filled), vijnanamaya (wisdom/science-filled), and anandamaya (blissfilled). (3/5)
Read 5 tweets
11 Dec
By reading Indian History through multiple sources, it can be argued that the entry of Gandhi into Indian politics by the mid-1910s actually delayed the efforts for gaining swaraj from the British for another 20 years (instead of augmenting it).
The moderates had lost significant ground (both morally and intellectually) to the extremists. Even long-term moderates like SN Banarjee and Ghokhle had given into the demands of young political leaders. The passing away of many moderate stalwarts also created a political vacuum.
Moderates were being attacked left and right, and there was a consensus emerging among young leaders that the functioning of the congress sessions had become merely performative, where leaders met annually to only pass some meaningless resolutions.
Read 7 tweets
5 Dec
Reading about MN Roy makes me wonder how he could not achieve the same revered status Marx & Lenin have among Indian communists?

In 1915, he scoured South East Asia for ammunition & funds as a lieutenant in one of the most powerful anti-colonial insurgency networks of Bengal.
By 1920, he had reached Moscow as a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International. His 1920 ‘supplementary theses on the colonial question’ are included in official communist publications as an addendum to Lenin’s own official writings on the subject.
Roy helped found the Mexican Communist Party and was a leading Comintern envoy to the revolutionary attempts in Germany in 1923 and China in 1926–27. He was briefly a member of the Frankfurt School, collaborated with Max Horkheimer in 1930.
Read 7 tweets

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