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 “Oriental” 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 who valued knowledge and understanding and critical thinking. Seth suggests that reading this situation purely in terms of intentionality (i.e. the British were trying to create modern subjects as part of the colonial project, and the Indian students were resisting British hegemony) is too simplistic. He develops a more sophisticated argument that hinges on the different notions of “subjectivity” and “being” presupposed by the western and Indian systems of knowledge and learning.

Rather than implying that the concerns articulated in the discourse of instrumentalism could be explained by positing an alternate subjectivity, Seth points out that the category of the subject itself comes out of the modern framework of knowledge. Seth argues that the claims of the moral decline of the educated Indian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century offer another example of a discourse that is predicated on modern categories of selfhood and belief. He points out that while many educated Indians did not see any inconsistency between transitioning between their “traditional” life-worlds and the modern world of colonial civil society, there were some who did “cross over into the realm where they could experience crisis and … have the language to perceive and articulate it” (p. 77). Seth's argument is that the explanatory categories imbricated in the western framework play a constitutive role in the creation of the crisis even as they purport to explain it.

Seth develops this argument further in his examination of the construction of the “backward but proud” Muslim (p. 110). The Indian Education [Hunter] Commission Report of 1883 tried to explain the lack of enthusiasm for western education in the Muslim population as stemming from a nostalgia for the past as well as religious fears. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking, Seth points out that this discussion of “backwardness” was made possible through the use of statistics in the context of colonial governmentality, which required such studies of the population for the purpose of governance and regulation.

Even though there appeared to be an apparent public consensus on the issue of the education of women in India by the late nineteenth century, there was still extensive discussion of this issue amongst the Indian nationalists. Seth suggests that the anxieties reflected in this discourse stem from the iconic role assigned to women as guardians of national identity and religion in the domestic sphere; the fear was that western education would result in Indian women losing their “Indianness” and their femininity. However, the Indian nationalists also wanted to stake their claim as the true modernizers of Indian society who were capable of leading social reform. Seth examines how this tension is reflected in the controversy generated by Katherine Mayo's Mother India (1927), a book that was seen as an indictment of Indian backwardness, and was referred to by Gandhi as a “Drain Inspector's Report” (p. 156).

Seth also examines how Rabindranath Tagore and other nationalists championed the engagement of modernity through vernacular education as well as the ways in which the transition to the western educational system marked a shift from the living traditions of indigenous knowledge practices. Seth's book displays impressive range and theoretical sophistication in its exploration of the impact of western education in India. It serves as a thoughtful interrogation of modern frameworks of knowledge, challenging us to examine the presumptions that enable modern knowledge claims to be made and histories to be written. This book is recommended for readers interested in Indian historiography as well as those interested in the negotiation of modernity and the politics of knowledge in the postcolonial context.