Technical education in colonial India ignored Dalit dreams. It trapped them in labour

The attempt to bring the lowest castes into the fold of education — and at the same time contain them within the labouring fold — is a theme across India’s history.

VANDANA MENON, (Edited by Zoya Bhatti)

New Delhi: At the turn of the 20th century, the principal of Roorkee Technical College — now IIT Roorkee — visited Lucknow on a curious mission.

He was investigating why graduates from the Lucknow Industrial School, established in 1882, were not joining factories. The entire point of these institutions, set up by the British colonial administration in Lucknow and Roorkee, was to train labourers to work in factories like mills and on construction sites for railways and canals. But many graduates from the Lucknow School were choosing not to continue as labourers, and factory enrollments were low in India.

What the Roorkee principal found is that the Dalit and subaltern students — the very student body these schools were training to trap in labour — were not coming to these schools to become skilled labourers.

They were coming because they dared to dream of a better life for themselves.

This was the theme of historian Arun Kumar’s recent talk at New Delhi’s India International Centre. At the discussion titled Silent Rebellions and Labouring Dreams in Colonial India, Kumar addressed a packed room of around 50 academics, students, and IIC regulars — including subaltern studies stalwart Shahid Amin. It revolved around the history of technical education in India, and how it left out an important nuance: the aspirations of workers themselves.

“This is the story of the democratisation of education, but from below,” said Kumar. “The words are mine, but they’re reflecting the labourer’s practices.”

Using an array of archival sources, Kumar presented his thesis on why the Indian working class is looked down upon the way it is today. Due to a lack of 20th century scholarship on their lives and dreams beyond labour, one doesn’t know anything about them, and writes them off as ‘stupid’ and ‘illiterate’.

Students of the Lucknow School became crucial labour during World War One. The school had reopened in 1901 under a new British principal, who, in a bid to boost enrollments, reintroduced a literary component to educate and not just skill labourers. Students from this school produced ammunition for the British Army during the war, but their contributions were completely forgotten by history.

“The colonial myth about the working class has been appropriated by the scholars of today,” said Kumar. “My work tries to move away from this understanding of a worker as a labouring body who doesn’t do anything else. Is there something beyond the life of work that we can find in their working lives?”

Audience members drew a straight line between his thesis on technical education in the past to modern educational practices today. From the emergence of engineering as a specialised field to the debate around merit and the skill drive in India currently, there seems to be a framework to make education more specialised and vocational.

“The real question is: have we come that far from what he’s talking about? Or is this just repackaging of the past?” an audience member remarked.

What history tells us

The attempt to bring the lowest castes into the fold of education — and at the same time contain them within the labouring fold — is a theme across India’s history.

“If education was democratised, the fear was that there will be a social revolution,” said Kumar.

An 1897 editorial from the Kanpur Gazette captured this anxiety. After listing a range of misfortunes and social evils — like poverty — that India is exposed to, the writer continued that he was “of the opinion that these issues are caused by the spread of education to the lower classes…General education is thus the root of all evil.” Workers should therefore “stick to their hereditary positions after their education,” the editorial continued.

The basic conundrum was that society at large believed that certain castes were destined to labour, and shouldn’t rise beyond that. The solution was to create education that would contain them: this led to the creation of industrial and technical education, which was skill-based.

Testimonies from Protestant missionaries also highlight this. According to Kumar, one missionary wrote that he thought Dalits came to missionary schools to emancipate themselves from a tough life of labour.

Kumar went on to quote other sources, such as the chairperson of the Millowners Association, who characterised workers as ‘stupid’ in 1929. “He learns as little as we ensure his pay, and there the improvement ends,” he had declared.

Merit vs potential

Given the abysmally low literacy rates in colonial India, the fact that the working class was enrolling in night schools to learn has completely slipped under the radar of Indian history.

But this, is in fact, what was happening: in Bombay, workers were spending all day on the factory floor and then bathing, dressing, and attending classes at night. The first free night school for millworkers was established in 1874. According to Kumar, between 1886 and 1890, 2,750 workers enrolled in night schools. In 1917, a free working-class library was set up for millworkers and railway workers. By 1919, the chawls of Bombay had around 50 night schools with a daily attendance of 1,200-1,500 students.

“This shows that there is an effort on the part of the working classes to sacrifice their sleep and go to school,” said Kumar, a historian of modern India with an interest in socioeconomic and labour history. He is currently teaching at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom.

Why were workers interested in literacy? Both Kumar and the audience talked about how it was probably because they were citizens of a rapidly changing world. This was the period when cities like Bombay and Lucknow were becoming industrial behemoths, when the railways and postal services were revolutionising India.

Kumar’s guess was based on economic historian Morris D. Morris’ work on India, which noted that the average literacy rates among workers went up from 40 per cent in 1940 to 42 per cent in 1955.

Hem Borker, from the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, Jamia Millia Islamia, moderated the talk and highlighted the vision of how the elite embarked on this educational enterprise to essentially create more labouring bodies.

“The relevance of this talk is that education seems to have come full circle, which is interesting,” said Borker after the lecture.

She pointed out how the modus operandi was to first extricate skills from a certain social status. This meant that certain jobs were kept reserved for the ‘upper’ castes, while technical jobs were left to artisanal classes.

“It’s like what’s happening today. The debate around merit is basically about someone’s cultural capital. But the capital of the lower castes is seen as not worth knowing. So what is worth knowing?”

However, some people were able to use their education to articulate their dreams.

Kumar read out Chaar Shabd, a poem by the famous Marathi worker poet Narayan Surve. Surve was an orphan raised by millworkers who eventually joined the factory floor and made a name for himself as a poet.

“Bread’s my first love, I agree, but I need something more,” wrote Surve in his poem. “I haven’t arrived alone; the epoch’s with me/Beware; this is the beginning of the storm/I’m a worker, a shining sword/Listen, you intellectuals! A crime’s about to happen.”

Courtesy : The Print

Note: This news is originally published in theprint.com and was used solely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes exclusively for Human Rights