After independence India's leaders committed the country to democracy with universal franchise and to pursuing a socialistic pattern of society. As part of these interlocking projects, it was widely recognised that India's educational systems needed reform. However, with scarce resources, Indian policy-makers faced the dilemma of whether to…

Postcolonial research has often assumed that colonial education fell victim to the forces of nationalism, like other areas of Raj governance in the early twentieth century. However, European-led education that aspired to reach the general population had already failed a generation earlier, at least in north India. This was after highly imaginative…

This article discusses the project of tribal education in the British colonial state in the mid-nineteenth century and the shape into which it developed in Chhotanagpur, an obscure area of east India under the Presidency of Bengal. Known as the "Ruhr of India", it is now the southern part of the State of Jharkhand. Up to the 1840s there…