Bengaluru academic gathers a digital history of education

Bengaluru academic gathers a digital history of education

Imagine a student in the mid-19{+t}{+h}century — a rarity in the days of rampant illiteracy — hunched over textbooks in preparation for classes. Unlike today, when a bare retelling of facts dominate textbooks, the student of the British Raj, may instead have felt as if the book was calling out to him, as if engaging him in a dialogue.

“Though we feel as if we were all at rest, God has made this earth, with us upon it, to travel at a fearful rate of 58 thousand miles every hour…And how strange is it that man should neglect to worship and obey this awful Being, who has such dreadful power!” reads a book on the solar system, printed by the Baptist Mission Press in 1836.

This strange mixture of morals and science peppers the digital repositories of 275 textbooks and reference books of the colonial era between 1800s and 1920s, which has been collected by Varadarajan Narayanan, faculty member of the Azim Premji University.

The books have been printed and bound, and are testament to three years of scouring by the professor.

“These books help us to understand the way textbooks, teacher manuals and school education was conceived and written during that period. A closer study of such material would contribute to much richer histories of school education in the colonial period,” said Prof. Narayanan.

The collection was compiled after scanning through various document catalogues of digital libraries and publishers that have been scattered around the internet.

This he says would be a “rich archive” for historians of education.

The long-term plan, however, is to find and collect the books in their original form. Recently, the University conducted an exhibition of some of the works curated by Prof Narayanan.

Source | The Hindu | 21 December 2015

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Librarian

Khaitan & Co