Education and Communalism in Colonial India: The Context of the 1930s

Abstract

The decade of the 1930s appears to be one of the most tumultuous as well as complex in the timeline of India’s anti-colonial struggle. It witnessed a close interplay of community-based identities and their politico-cultural manifestations. Education was one such important cultural attribute which increasingly pervaded the political domain. Its various manifestations, viz., language, script, textbooks and curriculum, etc., gradually acquired political connotations. Such a process began with the nineteenth-century socio-religious reform movements when in the pursuit of cultural nationalism, education and its symbols were appropriated to create community-specific cultural identities. One of the key objectives of this article is to delineate the process by which this appropriation resurfaced with much more vigour during the 1930s; this time associating itself with the idea of separate nationhood. Thus, the category of education was used as an agency to create and further accentuate sociocultural identities with specific political dimensions. Also, a critical observation of the ideological tussle, associated with the various symbols of education during the 1930s, along with the structures of British colonialism would unravel the process which culminated in the Pakistan Resolution of the Muslim League (1940) and ultimately the Partition of India. This would also reveal that amongst a section of Muslims, cultural alienation preceded political alienation.