The Molding of Native Character: Missionaries and the education of gender, reason and religion in colonial Bengal

Parna Sengupta

I intend to spend the next year completing a book manuscript entitled The Molding of Native Character: Missionaries and the education of gender, reason and religion in colonial Bengal. On a metaphoric and literal level, colonialism was a pedagogic project: ‘teaching’ natives so that they might one day rule themselves. To those ends, Protestant British missionaries helped create a paradigm of schooling that fundamentally shaped modernity in India and other post-colonial societies. Evangelical pedagogic efforts had significant, though contradictory, long-term effects. On the one hand, missionaries working in Bengal challenged entrenched social hierarchies of gender and caste. But they also popularized the notion of religious based schooling, an idea that led to separate primary schools for Hindu and Muslim children by the early twentieth century. Thus even as ‘modern’ forms of schooling increased the access of lower-caste and female students to literacy, it helped further divide and separate Hindu and Muslim communities, divisions that ultimately led to the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Missionary educators saw their pedagogic efforts as more than merely improving upon native instructional methods. The training of teachers, writing of textbooks, and development of pedagogic theory explicitly paralleled missionary and colonial efforts to modernize native society as a whole. Vernacular primary education became a critical site to educate natives into familial roles based on the nuclear family, ‘modern’ epistemology based on the primacy of reason, and new forms of religious subjectivity. My project is an extended argument about the relevance and salience of ideas created in the classroom for the world outside it. I shift away from the narrow scope of many British and Indian histories of schooling by focusing on the social history and imperial context of modern primary education. Protestant evangelicals in particular always understood themselves as working in an imperial context, routinely referencing Ireland or India in developing educational policy in metropolitan Britain. Unfortunately, historians of British education rarely take that imperial context into consideration in writing of "British" schooling. The literature on Indian education, meanwhile, primarily addresses the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of education, giving a very state-centered perspective on the development of schools. The result has been a highly abstract historiography, where little critical attention is paid to the schoolroom level realities of the educational process. The promise of equality and challenges to hierarchy enshrined in evangelical education worked hand in hand with the narrowing and constricting of cultural possibilities. Missionaries expanded the educational access of those excluded from traditional forms of native schooling, especially women, the lower castes, and tribal groups. At the same time ‘modern’ theories of pedagogy and instruction effectively narrowed the definition of vernacular culture, marginalizing the values and traditions of those very groups. In this way, primary schools reflect the larger contradictory tendencies of modern institutions within the colonial context.

About Parna Sengupta

I am currently an assistant professor of South Asian history at Carleton College. I have just completed my third year and will have the next year off to complete a book manuscript on missionary primary education in colonial Bengal, an interest that is both professional and personal. I was a Spencer fellow in 1999-2000, a fellowship that allowed me to complete my dissertation and Ph.D. in history from the University of Michigan in June 2000. My experience with the Spencer foundation was critical in shaping my continued historical and theoretical interest in education and colonialism. I have recently had an article published in the interdisciplinary journal Comparative Studies in Society and History (January 2003) entitled "An Object Lesson in Colonial Pedagogy." As a historian, I feel particularly committed to demonstrating the constitutive importance of colonialism and imperialism in the development of modern primary education.