Caste, Craft and Education in India and Sri Lanka: An Introduction

Abstract

The post-Mandal era has seen the emergence of a special interest in exploring the connection between caste and education. ‘New perspectives’ in the history of education in India depart from earlier preoccupations with macro-level analyses of colonial educational policies and national development, to foreground ‘silent voices’ and ‘Dalit initiatives’ from regional and micro settings.1 Following the methodological provocation of the ‘knowing subject’ where the knower is not ‘disincorporated from the known’,2 each of the papers in this special issue of Review of Development and Change shifts our attention from the ‘enunciated to the enunciation’.3 Taking off from the idea of the heterogenous colonial state in pointing to the significance of provincial, district and local-level interventions in producing very diverse, even contradictory, outcomes,4 this volume focuses on the discursive context of caste and craft that complicated the discourse on education in colonial India and Sri Lanka. Caste was a highly visible trope in reformist discourse on education in the colonial period. An international conference panel exploring the conflation of caste, gender and education in colonial India and Sri Lanka pointed to the paucity of literature dealing with the content, form and pedagogical practices that shaped the course of the debate on education.5 It not only drew attention to new registers in education historiography, i.e. interventions of missionaries and theosophists, but also brought to the fore arguments of hereditary skill, mind and body that entered debates on education and industrial development. It revealed the concrete ways in which caste hierarchies were naturalised and inserted into different agendas such as how, to whom, at what level, and for what purpose technical education