Schooling ‘Truant’ tribes: British colonial compulsions and educational evolution in Chhotanagpur, 1870-1930

Abstract

This chapter tries to examine sluggish and uneven growth of British colonial education in the tribal hinterland of Chhotanagpur in the then Bengal province despite the fact that the system was introduced as early as 1839 in the region and received attention from different quarters. First, the system received considerable impetus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the colonial agenda of ‘civilizing’ the ‘barbarians’. For this task, the government usually relied upon the services of missionaries. The efforts of the missionaries, their humanitarian attitude towards the tribals notwithstanding, were ineluctably marred by the constraints of their mission field and prejudiced missionary paradigm. Owing to this, the missionaries were unable to devise a pro-tribal educational policy, thus leading to the tribals receiving the faulty system on their own terms. While the tribals valorized certain aspects of the system; they were, unlike elsewhere, unable to further develop the system through indigenous initiative. The chapter takes a stock of all these issues.