With a focus on the Hindu/Presidency College, this book offers new ways of doing histories of education in colonial and postcolonial historical settings. Each essay utilizes new archival materials to present “liberal arts” education as an arena of competition, conversation, the rise of new disciplines, and politics. The everyday life of the College comes alive in a set of interdisciplinary essays that analyse different aspects of the institution's existence from student publications to the challenges of under-funding. Together, they shed new light on the daily labour and strife as well as the work of the imagination that shaped a centre of excellence. Excellence, however, was also premised upon social, cultural, and financial exclusions that cannot be ignored as we write new global histories of education and intellectual life in postcolonial India. The volume offers vital historical insight into the survival and challenges faced by an educational institution that is salutary as higher education, globally, faces unprecedented challenges.

‘This edited volume offers a collection of outstanding articles, coming together with a rare level of coherence. It presents a history of the Hindu College/Presidency College over roughly 150 years, covering the institutional history and the relations with the colonial state no less than the history of the knowledge produced and transmitted, the lives of the professors and the students and closing with a close look at practices of memorialization. While the focus in on the college, it remains embedded in the world beyond its walls, be it Kolkata's vernacular publics and policies or the transnational influences shaping the educational and scientific policies. The book is a welcome addition to the growing, but still relatively small collection of monographs on South Asian educational institutions. It will hopefully encourage other ventures in the field, setting a high standard against which future projects will be measured.'

Margrit Pernau - Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin

‘In skillfully exploring the sustained production of academic excellence in the face of colonial constraints and checks, this volume reveals the institutional imaginations and pedagogical experiments that animated British India's premier educational establishment. Known as much for its vibrant intellectual culture as for its routine production of English-educated babus who constituted the bureaucratic and clerical backbone of the Raj, the Hindu College/Presidency College schooled generations of young men who spearheaded everything from the Bengal renaissance to early Indian nationalism. Critically, in also suggesting that such excellence and eminence co-existed with systemic exclusions, the authors of this innovative endeavor, many distinguished alumni themselves, remind us that privilege and prerogative have for long undergirded higher education in colonial and postcolonial India.'

Sumathi Ramaswamy - Duke University

‘This remarkable volume on the Hindu/Presidency College (1817/1855), offers, not a connected history, but a set of brilliant, nuanced studies of an institution that played a critical role in the intellectual life of Bengal and India for nearly two hundred years. Using archival data, social analysis, and anecdotal evidence to look at questions of status, apparatus, language, and identity, it problematizes with exceptional clarity the central issues of excellence and exclusion, showing how achievements in the experimental and social sciences, and in textual scholarship (by figures like J. C. Bose, P. C. Mahalanobis, Susobhan Sarkar, and H. M. Percival) had to contend with colonial discrimination and neglect, while the college's elitism, fostered by state patronage, alienated ‘provincials' within and outside its fold. The editors' focus on the complicated inner life of an institution whose public face is on official record restores ambivalence, conflict and resonance to our understanding of historical processes. This is exemplary, essential reading.'

Supriya Chaudhuri - Jadavpur University