Reading Public, and the British Novel in Colonial India

Often, the implementation of a new education system leaves those who are colonized with a lack of identity and a limited sense of their past. The indigenous history and customs once practiced and observed slowly slip away. The colonized become hybrids of two vastly different cultural systems. Colonial education creates a blurring that makes it difficult to differentiate between the new, enforced ideas of the colonizers and the formerly accepted native practices.” (Priya Joshi quoted in Contemporary Education By Rao, page 21).

Her theory on the ideological war waged by colonial Britain on India after 1857, ranging from quantitative estimates of book shipments from Britain to India, to library lendings make Priya Joshi’s research compelling.

Her narrative explains the methodology by which national cultures can be subverted, modified and ultimately disfigured. Carrying that logic further, it makes us examine the entire basis of using English in the Indian education system.