Centre for South Asian Studies

Description

This talk tells a history of defiance by Indian workers who refused to see themselves as mere labouring entities that elites and employers wished them to become. It takes the reader back into the colonial world of the late nineteenth and twentieth century where educational opportunities, especially for socio-economically oppressed castes and the labouring poor, were very limited and uneven. It narrates a history of how state and non-state elite power attempted to shape labouring subalterns and how labouring subalterns experienced and responded to educational institutions and elite visions. At the heart of this talk is the contestation between “dreams” of educated and literate subalterns and “educational visions” of elites that I argue has shaped the projects of non-elite education and marked the birth of industrial and technical education in modern India.

Chair: Dr rashné Limki, Business School, UoE