Windows into the Past: Life Histories and the Historian of South Asia

Chapter 1: Colleges, Cohorts, and Dynasties

        Colleges, Cohorts, and Dynasties Our exploration of the potential of new kinds of “life history” which are wider than studies of individuals begins with what I wish to call rather loosely “colleges, cohorts, and dynasties.” I want to ask if there are other kinds of “lives” apart from those of individuals which the historian may fruitfully study as a source of evidence about the past. Historians have of course looked at various types of collective lives—career groups or generational groups for example.1 I want to explore how various kinds of institutions, and educational institutions in particular, have “lives” that can be a real source for the historian, including the historian of South Asia. This is an approach far removed from rather old-fashioned institutional history which tracks the foundation , development, and operation of an institution. Instead it concentrates on the people within them: how they came to be there in the first place, what they learned in the broadest sense, the connections  they made there, and where they went subsequently. Schools and colleges not only impart knowledge and train people to think. They also, and often quite intentionally, produce and reproduce specific kinds of people, with common skills and assumptions, and particular sorts of social capital. As such, schools and colleges can become crucial institutions in national and international history and repay a great deal of attention as a historical source. Historians of different societies have of course recognised this. Those who study Great Britain, for example, have learned much about the significance of the English public schools (in English parlance , those private schools for education in which parents paid fees). From the mid-nineteenth century these were crucial in the creation of a new professional elite in Britain, bound by common educational experiences, assumptions, and beliefs, and new networks of friendship and recognition. They helped to fashion a particular kind of masculinity that was then exported through the British Empire. Indeed British parents whose sons were born in India were determined to send them “home” for schooling from a very early age lest they miss out on this institutional socialisation deemed essential for success as a British upper-class male. The value of this was deemed to outweigh by far the pain of separation felt by both parents and children.2 It is hardly surprising that historians of empire should have come to see the significance of mechanisms of education and socialisation among the imperial rulers and their subjects. From the English preparatory and public schools, through the Girl Guides and Boy Scouts, to missionary and government schools in the colonies and dependencies, and even the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate which ran examinations and awarded school-leaving certificates throughout the empire—all these mechanisms of education in the broadest sense have become grist to the mill of the imperial historian.3 Colonial rulers also understood well the key role of educational institutions in the formation of their own kind, and for the new imperial task of forming new generations of key allies in the empire. In India the most obvious example of the latter task was the foundation  Windows into the Past in the s and s of five schools for the sons of Princes in India, the most famous being Mayo College, Rajasthan, and Aitchison College , Lahore. Here the younger generation of a pre-existing social and political elite were to be educated, disciplined, and modernised in institutions modeled on the English public school, to perform a key role as reinvented “traditional” rulers under the raj. Whether these institutions did what they were supposed to was altogether another matter!4 Aiming to create a rather different level of imperial allies, French imperialists in West Africa at the turn of the twentieth century set up the William Ponty School as a highly selective boarding school off the coast of Senegal for Africans destined to become local schoolmasters, clerks, and medical assistants.5 Back in India the British authorities, civil and religious, recognised the dangers of not providing education for certain groups, particularly the children of mixed race and those of poor European families who could not afford education “at home.” In the later nineteenth century the government gave financial help and encouragement to schools for these groups of children, but most were founded and run by churches and religious organisations. As Viceroy Lord Canning had noted in , “If...