‘Confessions’ of a Student-Terrorist: Contesting Education Late Colonial India

Presenter:

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Abstract

Contemporary debates over the crackdown on Indian universities triggered by the politics of saffronization throw into sharp focus issues of state engagement and education. These debates recall similar structural processes of ideological domination from late nineteenth-century colonial India. As a means to civilize natives, channel youth energies in socially productive ways, and implement models of responsible masculine behavior, colonial education aimed to be a stabilizing institution. However, by 1870s, the pitfalls of colonial education were exposed when significant numbers of school and college students engaged in acts of violence against the British colonial regime. Educational focus shifted in two particular aspects: first, an increased government censorship of curriculum to articulate political authority; and second, the criminalization of student rebels to eliminate the scope for sedition.

I unpack an adolescent student-terrorist’s ‘confessions’ made to the police in 1911 after his arrest. His recruitment, among many others’, highlights the widespread appeal among Indian nationalists of using youth as a main agent of a terror-based approach to nationalism. The threat of students’ politicization was potent because it highlighted the engagement of the state’s own employee, the government teacher, in anticolonial activism. A teacher who exercised deep influence over his students’ minds and bodies was alarming both for the education department and the colonial police. Using wayward youth as a lens of analysis, I probe the intersections of colonial education as welfare, assertions of youth as political subjects, and the student as a criminal in late colonial India.