Full Description
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.
Contents
Introduction: A Liberal Arts College in a Colonial Milieu Rochona Majumdar, Sukanya Sarbadhikary and Upal Chakrabarti; Part I: 1. The Multi-Institutional Form of the Presidency College Upal Chakrabarti; 2. Useful Knowledge, Areligious modernity: Pioneering Global Trends in Education at the Hindu College, 1817-1835 Rosinka Chaudhuri; 3. Seductions of the Supercilious: The Mofussil Histories of Presidency College, Calcutta Bodhisattva Kar; Part II: 4. The Rise and Fall of College Square Common Sense: A History of Philosophy at the Hindu and Presidency College Thomas Newbold; 5. Relentless Discursivity: Political Economy at the Hindu College/Presidency College in the Nineteenth Century Iman Mitra; 6. J. C. Bose's hand-machines: Instrumentation as the Transcendence of Limits in Presidency College Sukanya Sarbadhikary and Upal Chakrabarti; 7. Chemical Vernaculars: Chemistry and Vernacularity in Twentieth Century Bengal Projit Bihari Mukharji; 8. A Chemistry Lab for Presidency College: Reading Between the Lines of A Historic Floorplan Madhumita Mazumdar; 9. P. C. Mahalanobis and the Question of Research at Presidency College Sandipan Mitra; Part III: 10. Remembered Teachers: Who and Why? Rochona Majumdar; 11. Politics in Print: The World in the Magazine, The World of the Magazine Titas De Sarkar; 12. Contours of Commemoration: Locating Material Mnemonics in the Hindu/Presidency College Sohini Sengupta and Sourav Chattopadhyay; Afterword Dipesh Chakrabarty; Appendix; Acknowledgments.
