This article asks whether the slow process of divesting Indian native schoolteachers of their traditional authority was only about new concepts and representations of education and knowledge. Following the methodological idea of constellations of affordances, emphasising a relational ontology, the article discusses whether changes in the shape and…

Looking at the early educational activities of the anti-caste movement in the Western Indian Bombay Presidency (1848-1882), the article sheds light on the diverse, and sometimes contradictory social effects of the colonial encounter. The military defeat of the Maratha Empire, the setting up of colonial educational governance, and the emergence of…

This article examines the historical backdrop to the involvement of teaching Sisters in convent schooling for girls in India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, since the late nineteenth century. It then explores how, as a consequence of a range of social changes, leadership in convent schools has changed in both countries, across the twentieth…

Thomas Munro, a Scottish highlander, came to the Madras Presidency in South India as a soldier in the army of the East India Company in 1780. He rose to the position of its governor 40 years later in 1820 and died in India in 1827. His rise was not through military campaigns but peaceful administrative policies. During his stay in India, he…

The Calcutta "madrasa" was one of the many institutions which witnessed recurrent attempts at reform in Muslim societies during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Since the eleventh century, when "madrasas" first emerged as the principal institution of higher Islamic learning, it has undergone many changes, adapting in…

The question of script was paramount in the nineteenth-century debate over Hindi and Urdu, two closely related languages that are characterised by "extreme digraphia". Rather than rehearsing the well-known story of the culturally and politically charged process of differentiation in which the two sister languages became prime markers of…

Given that social constructions and deeply embedded cultural misapprehensions about gender, together with conventional views of female intellectual ability, denied women entry into institutional education, Wollstonecraft and Rokeya mounted a literary campaign to promote female education in their respective societies. They argued that female…

In 1893, Annie Besant touched the shores of India as a leader of the Theosophical Society. In India, Besant is widely known for her involvement in the Home Rule Movement and as president of the Indian National Congress, the chief political organisation in the Indian freedom struggle. Before entering into the political arena of the country, Besant…