Building Scientific Institutions in Colonia India: Colleges and Universities

The Hindu College

To start with, the only people committed to introducing Western education into India were the missionaries, particularly the evangelicals, who wanted to use the Western arts, Western philosophy and Western religion to rid the Hindus of the moral depravity that, according to them, was the cause of their degeneracy. These attempts did not receive the expected enthusiasm from the “Hindu subjects of Great Britain”. In addition to this, there was not a way of going about imparting new ideas to the latter. The Hindu upper castes could not be convinced of almost any of their shortcomings, but they could not be called morally depraved. The attempts by both Orientalists and missionaries received no measure of official approval. Consequently, these attempts made little headway.

In sharp contrast, however, to these attempts of both Orientalists and missionaries, a native gentlemen community rose to the occasion. These gentlemen were better known as the Bhadralok . They had an inclination towards the acquisition of Western ideas and Western science through English language education. Indeed, education itself became the hallmark of Bhadralok status. The Simon Commission Report observed, “The school is the one gate to the society of the Bhadralok ”.

Within the colonial framework, the conflict between the different systems of knowledge was also a conflict of the value systems. However, for those sections of the Indian society that first seriously took up science as a profession (for example, the Bengali Bhadralok ), the process of cultural redefinition automatically began. Cultural redefinition implies a prerequisite for the legitimation of the new knowledge system.