SOAS Research Online

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, British officials in India determined that the education offered in colonial schools and colleges would be exclusively secular: no religious teaching would be imparted in educational institutions managed or patronised by the British Indian state. This book examines the impact of the religious-secular distinction in Indian education from this date. After revisiting the origins of the colonial commitment to secular education, it focuses upon the engagement of Indian Muslims with British authorities, bringing under scrutiny the responses of Muslim parties to the public separation of religion from pedagogy. The book traces the ways in which Muslim and British elites engaging in the colonial milieu interrogated the relationship between state and religion in India, exploring possibilities for the accommodation of multiple faiths and identities in a pluralist Indian polity. It reveals how negotiations over the content and form of colonial public instruction played an influential, hitherto unexamined role in the historical development of Indian secularism.