“Book Review | The British Makeover of India: Indigenous Education and Languages Downgraded by Meenakshi Jain”, Brhat, November 03, 2025
“Introduction and Overview
Meenakshi Jain’s The British Makeover of India: Indigenous Education and Languages Downgraded offers a rigorous historical account of how the British dismantled the indigenous pāṭhaśāla system—an inclusive and community-supported network of education that had long served children across ‘caste’ lines—and replaced it with an exclusivist and utilitarian structure designed to advance imperial interests. The colonial educational apparatus, Jain argues, was never intended to enrich India’s intellectual traditions but rather to produce a class of intermediaries—clerks, translators, and administrators—who could sustain the machinery of British governance and, over time, facilitate the moral and cultural subjugation of Indian society through Christianization and Anglicization.
As outlined by Jain in her work, during the early phase of East India Company rule, British officials themselves acknowledged the efficacy and vitality of indigenous institutions. Across the presidencies of Madras, Bengal, and Bihar, local schools exhibited striking uniformity in method and organization. Typically, these were modest, one-teacher establishments that served all strata of society. Prior to British intervention, records from Hindu polities had attested to a vibrant educational landscape that included children of all castes—particularly śūdras—and offered instruction not only in language and mathematics but also in economics and the moral narratives of the purāṇas and itihāsa. They were accessible, affordable, and financed through voluntary community contributions; remuneration to teachers often took the form of small gifts or payments in kind rather than formal fees. Jain frequently cites Dharampal and others, who have shown that this system represented an integrated model of intellectual and ethical formation, one that was systematically uprooted in the colonial remaking of India.
Yet this organic, vernacular-based model did not align with the evolving priorities of the empire, and the colonial state sought to erode these autonomous educational institutions. A self-sufficient system that could have been strengthened by integrating modern sciences was instead viewed as an impediment to colonial consolidation. The ideological foundations of this project were laid as early as 1792, when Evangelical reformer Charles Grant proposed a deliberate scheme for the gradual Christianization and Anglicization of India. His scheme, initially resisted by many Company officials who favored the continuation of vernacular instruction to serve other interests, would later find its most forceful executor in the infamous Thomas Babington Macaulay. The main premise of Jain’s book is that by alienating Indians from their linguistic and civilizational foundations, the British weakened indigenous resistance to conversion and strengthened the colonial stronghold…….”
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