Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Post Colonial Education

262 Pages·2014·1.202 MB·English

by  Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs, Kate Rousmaniere

Connecting Histories of Education

C H
ONNECTING ISTORIES
E
OF DUCATION
Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges
in (Post-)Colonial Education
Y
Edited by
Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere
berghahn
N E W Y O R K (cid:127) O X F O R D
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Published in 2014 by
Berghahn Books
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© 2014 Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Connecting histories of education : transnational and cross-cultural exchanges in
(post)colonial education / edited by Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate
Rousmaniere.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-78238-266-9 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-78238-267-6 (ebook)
1. Education—Philosophy. 2. Transnational education. 3. Postcolonialism.
4. Globalization. I. Bagchi, Barnita.
LB14.7.C66 2013
378'.0162—dc23
2013023298
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Printed on acid-free paper
ISBN: 978-1-78238-266-9 hardback
ISBN: 978-1-78238-267-6 ebook
Contents
Y
Introduction. Connecting Histories of Education: Transnational
and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in (Post-)Colonial Education 1
Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere
Part I. Historiographical Refl ections
Chapter 1. History of Education beyond the Nation? Trends in
Historical and Educational Scholarship 11
Eckhardt Fuchs
Chapter 2. Towards a Global History of Education: Alternative
Strategies 27
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya
Chapter 3. Writing Histories of Congolese Colonial and
Post-Colonial Education: A Historiographical View from Belgium 41
Marc Depaepe
Chapter 4. Range and Limits of the Countryside Schooling
Historiography in Latin America (Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries): Some Refl ections 61
Alicia Civera
Part II. Travelling Concepts
Chapter 5. A Transcultural Transaction: William Carey’s Baptist
Mission, the Monitorial Method and the Bengali Renaissance 85
Mary Hilton
Chapter 6. A Colonial Experiment in Education: Madras,
1789–1796 105
Jana Tschurenev
v
vi Contents
Part III: Indigenous Education and Resistance
Chapter 7. A New Education for ‘Young India’: Exploring
Nai Talim from the Perspective of a Connected History 123
Simone Holzwarth
Chapter 8. Colonial Education and Saami Resistance in Early
Modern Sweden 140
Daniel Lindmark
Chapter 9. Constructive Orientalism: Debates on Languages
and Educational Policies in Colonial India, 1830–1880 156
Hakim Ikhlef
Part IV. Women’s Education
Chapter 10. Raden Ajeng Kartini and Cultural Nationalism
in Java 175
Joost Coté
Chapter 11. Women’s Education through Women’s Eyes:
Literary Articulations in Colonial Western India 198
Meera Kosambi
Chapter 12. Connecting Literature and History of Education:
Analysing the Educative Fiction of Jean Webster and Lila
Majumdar Transculturally and Connotatively 213
Barnita Bagchi
Chapter 13. Transcending the Centre-Periphery Paradigm:
Loreto Teaching in India, 1842–2010 227
Tim Allender
Notes on Contributors 244
Index 247
Introduction
Connecting Histories of Education
Transnational and Cross-Cultural Exchanges
in (Post-)Colonial Education
Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere
Y
Connecting Histories of Education bears a double meaning. The volume con-
nects historians of education from South Asia and other parts of the world
to enhance a comparative perspective and create a wider research network
beyond the Euro-Western world. In addition, it presents local, regional, na-
tional and transnational research, with the goal of highlighting the intercon-
nectedness of histories of education in the modern world. The volume thus
upholds a commitment to the transnational history of education located in
a non-Eurocentric framework, with encounters taking place between South
Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia and the Americas.
Our argument for a volume on transnational exchanges and cross-cultural
transfers in the history of education is that globalization processes require
new research that goes beyond the traditional historical narratives based
on the nation state. However provocative an approach, the ‘transnational
turn’, often addressed in the historical, educational and political sciences,
has with few exceptions attracted little attention in the fi eld of history of
education, which still tends to a national orientation geared to the mod-
ern period. Only gradually are historians of education taking small steps
towards transnational and global concepts and approaches that have been
developed in other disciplines.
Therefore, this volume aims at widening the arena of history of edu-
cation by analysing transnational exchanges and cross-cultural transfers in
1
2 Barnita Bagchi, Eckhardt Fuchs and Kate Rousmaniere
the fi eld of education between the Euro-Western world and Asia from the
eighteenth century onwards. In doing so, it considers research trends in the
historical scholarship of the past decade or so. Using various case studies,
the authors explore educational transfers in different cultural settings, focus-
ing on local-level transformations and reinventions of the meanings and forms
of colonialism. Although the regional focus on South Asia means the major-
ity of chapters focus on colonial issues, this is not a volume on the history
of colonial education. Rather, the work as a volume emphasizes the ways in
which a transnational perspective deepens and complicates our understand-
ing of colonialism, the nation state and the responses of local communities,
institutions and individuals. In this respect the colonial context is a particu-
larly appropriate theme, as it allows scholars to highlight a variety of trans-
national and cross-cultural transfers.
The volume is divided into four parts. The fi rst introduces main concepts
of world and transnational history (Eckhardt Fuchs) and generally discusses
the colonial and national discourse on education (Sabyasachi Bhattacha-
rya), but it also reviews historiographical developments using the concrete
examples of the Belgian Congo (Marc Depaepe) and Latin America (Alicia
Civera). The following case studies focus on cross-cultural transfers within
the context of colonial education (part II), varieties of indigenous education
and educational resistance (part III), and the unique role of women’s educa-
tion and expression (part IV).
Part I, Historiographical Refl ections, starts with a summary of current
research trends within the historical profession that aim at transcending na-
tional borders. As Eckhardt Fuchs shows in his introductory overview of the
historiographical traditions and recent developments in the fi eld of world,
global and transnational history, these trends are based on the assump-
tion that the globalization process requires new perspectives for research
that go beyond traditional historical narratives based on the nation state
and thereby re-contextualize the notion of space. Ever-increasing volumes,
channels and speeds of transnational motion of ideas, goods and people
are compelling scholars to fi nd new ways to conceptualize historical actors,
their movements and the transnational networks enabling or hindering the
interaction and circulation. Both social sciences and humanities are there-
fore increasingly investigating global diffusion and transfer in education in
a historical perspective by going beyond the traditional concepts of space,
especially the notion of ‘nation’, and considering the processes of denation-
alization and redefi nition of territorial boundaries.
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya’s chapter connects well with Fuchs’s by bring-
ing up methodological issues pertaining to transnational history of educa-
tion. Looking at the attempts to push forward towards a global history, he
Introduction 3
observes two kinds of research strategies in the historiography of educa-
tion. First, there is a trend towards a diffusionist viewpoint that emphasizes
the spread of educational phenomena. Second, the research tends to equate
an aggregative approach with transnational, global history, that is, to put to-
gether and add up the history of separate national histories on the assump-
tion that the aggregate of those discrete histories is global history. The fi rst
approach offers a narrative of what is diffused and adopted, but it seldom
addresses the larger systemic questions about diffusion as a process. The
second approach, attempting a transition from a discrete to an aggregative
treatment of educational history, does not go far enough and often leaves
unexplained how discrete histories are interconnected by integrative ten-
dencies to enable us to arrive at a transnational history. Facing the limita-
tions of both approaches, Bhattacharya looks for a research strategy that
circumvents these limitations. He argues that since the interface, confronta-
tion and transactions between civilizations were inherently transnational,
the discourse on civilizations forms a part of a global history of education.
Therefore he suggests studying national histories of education under the
rubric of a civilizational framework to understand international exchanges
and comparisons. Taking this as his point of departure, he provides an intel-
lectual history of the encounter between two civilizations in colonial India
and in doing so offers a genuine non-Western approach to the debates on
transnational history.
Marc Depaepe explores recent trends in the general postcolonial his-
toriography of Belgian educational work in the Congo, turning attention
from the earlier historical emphasis of Belgian educational colonialism
to studies of the infl uence of the Congolese on Belgium. Historians have
shown how Belgian education contributed intentionally to the patroniza-
tion of the Congolese people. This chapter deepens that understanding by
providing the ‘contextualization’ of that patronizing in the light of the peda-
gogical theories, mentalities, and practices of the time – in Belgium as well
as in Congo. The chapter studies how colonial educational historiography,
more sharply still than the Western history of education, exposes the sys-
temic faults and paradoxes of Western modernization and the associated
‘educationalization’.
Alicia Civera examines the historiography of rural schooling in Mexico
and Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She particu-
larly highlights the approaches of distinct disciplinary areas, such as the
history of education, rural studies, historical anthropology and sociology, fo-
cusing on different nations and regions. Such disciplinary variety has largely
escaped the nationalist narrative and led to development of a rich analysis
of local-level school practices throughout the Latin American countryside.