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Subject Lessons

The Western Education of Colonial India
  • Sanjay Seth
  • Edited by: Julia Adams and George Steinmetz
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2007
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Politics, History, and Culture
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About this book

A study of how modern, Western knowledge came to be disseminated in India and came to assume its current status as the obvious, and almost the only, mode of knowing about India; further, and more dubiously, the work examines whether this knowledge is in f

Author / Editor information

Sanjay Seth is Reader in Politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, and Professor of Politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial India and a coeditor of the journal Postcolonial Studies.

Reviews

Subject Lessons is a very important contribution to understanding of the coloniality of knowledge and of being. Imperial control is mainly control of subjectivity, and the control of subjectivity is largely based on education, on the formation of those to be subjected. Sanjay Seth’s study of education in colonial India has implications far beyond the subcontinent. Touching on epistemology, politics (governmentality), religion (Muslims in India), the idea of the nation, gender and sexuality, ethics and history, Seth describes how the logic of coloniality has been and continues to be globally enacted.”—Walter Mignolo, author of The Idea of Latin America

Subject Lessons revives a field that has remained dormant for years: the history of education in colonial India. This in itself is no small achievement. But Sanjay Seth does a lot more than that. Weaving together history and philosophical critiques of historicity and modernity, Seth has produced a book that is at once thoughtful and provocative. This outstanding book makes an original contribution to postcolonial criticism.”—Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies

“[T]hought-provoking . . . further enriches the growing wealth of material on women’s and gender history and highlights the significance of educational history within it.”

-- Ruth Watts Gender & History

“Very rarely has the English education of colonial India and its contiguities been closely examined and problematized. Seth’s enquiry into the dissemination of western education poses larger questions about what we accept as history and historiography, modern and modernity, and more importantly, remains conscious of the inescapability from western epistemologies in knowing the world. . . . [A]n erudite starting point for those like me to critically examine the learning and unlearning of the canon from within the canon itself.”

-- Divya Anand Thesis Eleven

"The most triumphant success of Seth's book is the way it takes apart influential epistemological categories."

-- Saikat Majumdar Los Angeles Review of Books


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Part I: subject to pedagogy

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Part II: modern knowledge, modern nation

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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
August 29, 2007
eBook ISBN:
9780822390602
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
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280
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