Colonial Education and Translation in India
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The introduction of English education in India was inseparable from the process of subjection/ subjectification under colonialism. The colonial “subject” was indeed constructed through practices or technologies of power/knowledge. One such apparatus of control was ‘translations’. British rule over India lasted for about two centuries. However, in 1793, when the proposal for English education for the natives was put before the parliament, the Board of Directors held wide consultations before shooting down the proposal. Twenty years later, it was agreed that “such measures ought to be adopted, as may tend to the introduction among them [natives of India] of useful knowledge and of religious and moral Improvement”. Slightly later, in the 1835 Minute on Indian education, Macaulay, who was an avid reader of history, claimed he had not found a single Orientalist “who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. Trevelyan, Macaulay’s cousin, also agreed with him whole-heartedly that Indian knowledge was “worse than useless”.
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As Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out in her meticulously researched essay, “The Beginnings of Literary Study in British India” the introduction of English education can be seen as “an embattled response to historical and political pressures: to tensions between the English Parliament and the East India Company, between parliament and the missionaries, between the East Indian company and the native elite classes”. Tejaswini Niranjana extended Vishwanathan’s argument to suggest that the specific resolution of these tensions through the introduction of English education was enabled discursively by the colonial practice of translation. She says “European translations of Indian texts prepared for a Western audience provided to the ‘educated’ Indian a whole range of Orientalist Images. Even when the anglicized Indian spoke a language other than English, ‘he’ would have preferred, because of the symbolic power attached to English, to gain access to his own past through the translations and histories circulating through colonial discourse. English education also familiarized the Indian with ways of seeing, techniques of translation, or modes of representation that came to be accepted as ‘natural’.”
