[IMC Bombay] Indian Modernity

[Mangesh Kulkarni]

Constructing Post-Colonial India: National Character and the Doon School  - 
Sanjay Srivastava, London & New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 259.

Reviewed by Mangesh Kulkarni in The Australian Journal of Anthropology,
14:1, April 2003


The Doon School (Dehra Dun, Uttar Pradesh)–a high-profile residential school 
for boys–is one of the key institutional sites of modernity in post-colonial 
India. It is therefore quite appropriate that Sanjay Srivastava  should seek 
“to provide an ethnography of Indian modernity” (p. 1) by explicating the 
School’s discursive dynamics.

More specifically, the book deals with four main issues: rationality, 
secularism and ‘metropolitanism’ (these are treated as cultural 
qualifications for citizenship), and the reality of the larger civil 
society. The first chapter of the book explores the socio-political world of 
the elite coterie that contributed to the founding of the School in 1935. 
Seeking to model the School on the English public school system, they 
manoeuvred deftly between imperial loyalty and an anti-colonial stance, 
between entrenched feudal interests and emerging bourgeois concerns. An 
Englishman, who had earlier taught at Eton, was appointed as the first 
Headmaster of the School and shaped its regimen (which was widely emulated 
by other public schools in India) geared to the cultivation of “character, 
intellect and physique” (p. 42) in the service of the nascent nation.

The second chapter focuses on the Mayo College (Ajmer, Rajasthan) that was 
founded in 1875 for providing suitable education to the sons of the native 
princes. The physical ambience and social space of the College were so 
structured as to embody British cultural paramountcy–“unfettered cultural 
encroachment upon existing forms by a paramount power” (p.50). The resulting 
feudal pattern of accommodation emphasised traditionalism, religiosity, 
physical manliness and hierarchy. The Doon School broke with this pattern by 
projecting ‘post-colonised’ bourgeois notions of rationalism, secularism, 
intellectual manliness and egalitarianism. The third chapter critiques the 
School’s construct of scientific rationality that is evident both in its 
architecture and modus operandi. According to Srivastava, the construct 
abstracts social stasis from “entrenched forms of structural oppression” (p. 
61) like class, caste and gender, and attributes it to the absence of a 
‘scientific temper’ among the masses. Thus, the spirit of science is 
surreptitiously assimilated to the exigencies of capital, and the 
upper-caste bourgeois male is seen as its natural bearer.

The proud claim of the Doon School to a modern secular-nationalist vision 
(vis-à-vis the supposedly primordial otherworldly-communal mindset of the 
hoi polloi) is scrutinised in the fourth chapter. Srivastava argues that in 
stark contrast to the lived, everyday ecumenism frequently encountered among 
the common people, the School’s ethos is actually suffused with the symbols, 
ceremonies and axiology of Hinduism. This Hindu contextualism–“an acceptance 
of Hindu contexts as multi-religious” (p.126)–stems from larger nationalist 
discourses and unwittingly resonates with the worldview of the Hindu 
chauvinist organisations. The fifth chapter explains the pioneering role 
played by the School in supplying the cultural capital of colonial 
metropolises like Calcutta to the upper-caste middle classes of the 
hinterland, best exemplified by the Arya Samajist technocrats inhabiting the 
canal colonies of Punjab. In the process, the School enabled a section of 
the provincial intelligentsia, which “had traditionally played a limited 
role in the political and cultural economy of the state” (p. 140) to gain 
national prominence. This gain was consolidated in the post-Independence 
years.

In the sixth chapter Srivastava investigates the Doon School’s self-image as 
a microcosmic metropolis–a contractual, cosmopolitan, masculine space 
incarnating and disseminating modernity. A critical inspection of this 
“fetishism of the metropolis” (p. 168) reveals its exclusionary logic 
leading to the ideological and social marginalisation of the subaltern 
strata. The concluding section of the book contains a theoretical reprise. 
Locating his critique at the intersection of Marxism and 
post-structuralism/post-colonialism, Srivastava underscores the heuristic 
significance of “post-colonised national forms” (p. 195) such as the Doon 
School. He then presents the School as a phantasmatic civil society through 
an expose of its self-serving espousal of ‘excellence’ and ‘secularism’ 
against the backdrop of contemporary controversies surrounding quotas for 
Other Backward Classes and the demolition of the Babri mosque respectively.  
The School’s adroit strategies of mobilising support and managing dissent 
are also discussed. The book ends with a coda on the growing pertinence of 
the Doon model to the requirements of the classes aspiring to join the 
‘globalisation’ bandwagon.

As the foregoing account indicates, the sweep of the book is fairly broad, 
with the author moving nimbly from a nuanced description of the School to 
wider theoretical and thematic concerns. Going far beyond the ‘sociology of 
education’ framework, the study marks a noteworthy intervention in the 
academic debate on India’s tryst with modernity. In particular, it makes an 
important contribution to the slowly growing corpus on the manifold 
ramifications of masculinity in the Indian context. Srivastava’s apt 
analytical deployment of Hindi literature and cinema deserves commendation. 
His innovative inflection of concepts drawn from key theorists like Gramsci, 
Bakhtin, Foucault and Baudrillard is also exemplary. The manner of 
presentation, though somewhat ponderous and manifesting a proclivity to 
repetitiveness and neologism, nevertheless has a stylishness of its own, 
which is most evident in the occasional flashes of a wry wit.

All this is not to say that the book is flawless. Srivastava should have 
given adequate attention to the curriculum and pedagogical practices of the 
School, instead of nearly occluding them on a priori theoretical grounds. A 
more methodical mapping of the country’s complex educational landscape would 
also have been in order. A comparative examination of similar schools in the 
post-colonial sphere–the Kamuzu Academy of Malawi (though not an exclusively 
boys’ school), touted as ‘the Eton of Africa’ is an example that readily 
comes to mind–would have further enhanced the scope and value of the 
inquiry. Finally, a word about the deeper premises and telos underlying the 
book. The study derives its critical edge from an unrelenting focus on “the 
articulation of a regime of post-colonial capital with the cultural-politics 
of post-coloniality” (p.1). However intellectually appealing such a 
marxisant form of radicalism might appear in the cloistered academe, its 
practical political purchase seems increasingly suspect in the world at 
large.
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