Rethinking Intellectual Responses to Colonial Education in India: Bhudeb Mukhopadhyaya—A Case Study

Gauri Viswanathan adopts two methods to tell a somewhat complicated story of English in India from a post-Saidian theoretical framework. 1 Firstly, she talks about the “adaptation of the content of English literary education to the administrative and political imperatives of British rule” (Viswanathan, 3) and secondly, she examines the “ways in which these imperatives in turn charged that content with a radically altered significance, enabling the humanistic ideals of enlightenment to co-exist with and indeed even support education for social political control” (ibid). Her study therefore, singularly attempts to understand the whole project of English education in India as a “disguised form of authority” (“masks of conquest”) that dominated India by constructing certain ideologies and selling them at an affordable rate (ibid., 10–11). But one fails to appreciate how “it is possible to study the ideology of British education quite independently of an account of how Indians actually received, reacted to, imbibed, manipulated, reinterpreted, or resisted the ideological content of the British literary education” (ibid., 11 emphasis added).