5 - Class and Colonial Knowledge

Summary

This chapter considers the relationship between colonial knowledge, imperial education, and class mobility. British working-class children were not educated for the empire, and British soldiers received almost no country-specific training. Once in India, enlisted men were actively discouraged from developing more than the most basic of language skills. But in spite of gaining no material benefits from learning about India, some non-elite Brits did devote themselves to learning native languages, local religious practices, and further understanding the social world of British India. To do so, they at times crossed boundaries of class and race, developing relationships with native Indians and elite British in the process. The remnants of these educational endeavors include poetry, exam results, scrapbooks, and hand-illustrated glossaries through which non-elites constructed their own forms of colonial knowledge. But autodidacts failed to translate this learning or these new relationships into material gain because the governing institutions of the Raj could not conceive of the utility of colonial knowledge for this class.