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In the 1830s, the British colonial authorities debated whether the official policy on education in India should promote modern western knowledge (and the English language) or "Orientalâ[euro] knowledge, taught by scholars well-versed in Sanskrit and Arabic. Following Thomas Babington Macauley's Minute on Indian Education (1835), which derided indigenous knowledge systems and literature, the decision was made to embark on a process of disseminating western knowledge in India. Sanjay Seth's Subject Lessons goes beyond offering a history of the spread of western education in India to examine how the framework of modern western knowledge came to be seen as a universal framework, and not just one of many possible knowledge systems. Seth also suggests that the debates about whether the western model of education was succeeding in India reflected anxieties about the nature of the modern subject who was supposed to be constituted through the dissemination of western knowledge.
One of the oft-repeated concerns about the new educational system was that Indian students were using western education in an instrumental way, using rote knowledge to pass examinations and get degrees and jobs in the colonial administration, while refusing to emerge as truly modern subjects...