Anarchies of Youth

Studies in History
http://sih.sagepub.com Anarchies of Youth: The Oaten Affair and Colonial Bengal

Satadru Sen Studies in History 2007; 23; 205 DOI: 10.1177/025764300602300202 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sih.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/23/2/205
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Anarchies of Youth: The Oaten Affair and Colonial Bengal

Satadru Sen
History Department Queens College City University of New York
This article examines the crisis in Calcuttas Presidency College in 1916, when a white professor was assaulted and the college closed down. Focusing on conversations in the vernacular press, Anglo-Indian newspapers and the colonial government, it unpacks the meanings of anarchy, the word commonly used by all observers to describe the condition of young, middle-class Indian males. By locating this apparent anarchy in the context of nationalist agitation, the internal convulsions of middle-class Bengal, colonial race relations, wartime anxieties, and conflicting understandings of youth as a social phenomenon, it argues that the discourse of anarchy articulated a perception of incompatibility between colonialism and youthfulness that was broadly shared by whites and Indians of diverse political persuasions. At the same time this vision of deviant youth provided a platform on which blame could be assigned, and on which the competing factions of colonial Bengal could attack one another.
In February of 1916, Presidency College in Calcutta was rocked by an incident that has, over the decades, acquired a prominent place in the Indian national narrative. A white history professor, Edward Oaten, was assaulted by a group of students. Two students were expelled and the college was temporarily closed. A media frenzy ensued, and a high-powered committee of enquiry published a report containing various observations and recommendations about schools and students in Bengal. Among the expelled students was Subhas Bose, who would go on to greater infamy as a nationalist politician and Axis-aligned generalissimo. It is because of Boses involvement that the Oaten incident is remembered today.1 At the time of the incident, however, Bose was unknown: a promising student and a member of the representative body of Presidency College students, but otherwise insignificant. The assault on Oaten took place within a wider context of trouble in the schools and colleges2 of Bengal, which was itself framed within race relations in colonial
1 The Amar Chitra Katha comic book biography of Bose suggests simultaneously that Bose was innocent and Oaten was a racist who deserved the beating. 2 The term college referred to institutions of secondary as well as university education.
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society, the first partition of Bengal, nationalist political mobilization, the World War and the deployment of laws such as the Defence of India Act, which allowed for the detention without trial of suspected enemies of the state.3 The response that the incident generated from Anglo-Indians, the colonial government and elite Indians was an extension and amplification of a discourse that had existed for a decade. This might be called a discourse of anarchy, in which white colonials in particular labelled a significant portion of the student body in Bengal as anarchist and demanded draconian policing and punishment. Indians did not entirely disagree. Anarchy became a point of intersection for the ideas of youth and rebellion, for those classes in colonial society that regarded these concepts as meaningful within modern pedagogy, domesticity and political life. Like the concept of the terrorist, the word anarchist was used loosely by agents and allies of the colonial regime to cover a wide assortment of enemies. While Indian nationalists at the turn of the century had sporadic contact with Peter Kropotkin and Kakuzo Okakura, colonial anarchy had nothing to do with doctrine or organization.4 It was not, however, a casual malapropism. It indicated the breakdown of normative social and political hierarchies, and consequent distortions in the nature and behaviour of the colonized. It, thus, constituted an identifiable prose of counter-insurgency whereby rebellion could be stripped of reason and deliberation, and imputed to inferior nature (that of the immature native) and external impulse (that of the political provocateur).5 In the context of student disorder, the British usage of anarchy implied that the colonial school, as a civic arrangement between the races and the generations, had collapsed: an imagined enclave of white/adult pedagogical authority over native/youth had been infiltrated by the indiscipline of native society,6 with its rebel politics and bad parenting.7 Most fundamentally, the usage withheld from native youth the privileges and immunities of adolescence just when the concept of adolescence was taking root in India. It eroded their status as the appropriate wards of teachers and parents, and upheld their subjection to an alternative and overtly colonial model of adult authority, which was that of policemen and jailers. The diverse, conflicted Indian responses to the Oaten episode were informed by the above maneuver. Journalists, educators and parents who commented on the incident spoke within an ongoing critique of British attempts to deny the youthful condition of Indian students. While some saw the assault on Oaten as the distorted reflection of a maturity that could no longer be denied, others described it as evidence of a youth damaged by the colonial experience: its racism,
3 4
Heehs (1993); Sarkar (1973). Heehs (1993). 5 Guha (1983). 6 Arnold (1994). 7 Sen (2003).
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Anarchies of youth: The Oaten affair and colonial Bengal / 207
its legal repression and its schools. They linked this damage to other areas of discontent in Bengali society, including not only perceptions of religious decay and inter-generational conflict, but also animosities of class and political affiliation. Narrating, lamenting and explaining the Oaten incident thus gave Indians the opportunity to articulate a wide range of anxieties, with the student serving as a metaphor of the colonized adult. This was a parallel discourse of anarchy: not disconnected from the British version, but not aligned with it either. There can be little doubt that age was a critical factor in these conversations about males in their middle and late teens. The problems (and solutions) that such youth represented were not autonomous of what was inscribed on younger children by colonial adults, but adolescence in Indiaconstructed through pedagogical procedures and laws governing juvenile delinquencyrepresented a problem in its own right.8 While it extended childhood, it encroached into adulthood at a historical moment when adulthood in the colony had become fraught with political tension. The encroachment complicates what Ashis Nandy9 has characterized as the childishness of the rebel native, because the rebellion perceived by British and Indian observers of the attack on Oaten was not that of the childish adult, but that of the prematurely adult child. The significance of the assault on Oaten is not simply that the colonial regime and its Indian critics blamed each other for corrupting native youth. The greater significance lies in the fact that observers on both sides agreed that Indian students had been corrupted to the extent that they were not recognizably youthful. The consensus emerged in a period when nationally-oriented Indian administrators, psychologists and social workers in colonial institutions for the children of the marginal classes sought to wrest a universal model of childhood for application to young Indians, defying European colleagues invested in models of difference.10 The Oaten affair extended the contest into the theatre of middle-class youth, producing a fundamental incompatibility between a state of youth and a state of revolt. One could either be colonized and rebellious, or youthful and innocent, but not both. A colonial society could sustain neither the apolitical schools nor the innocent students that Mangan11 and Whitehead12 have described in their studies of imperial education. The Event The incident on 15 February was not the first clash between Oaten and students at Presidency College. There had been a prior encounter on 10 January, when students
Sen (2005). Nandy (1983). 10 Sen (2005). 11 Mangan (1986). 12 Whitehead (1988, 2003).
9 8
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dismissed early from their class had gathered outside the room where Oaten was teaching. Their loud chatter had distracted him. Emerging twice from his classroom, he had attempted to disperse the boys from the corridor. On the second occasion he had reinforced his message by shoving a student. He had also confronted an Indian professor standing nearby, compelling the man to prove his adulthood by protesting that he was a member of the faculty (RPCEC). The students had immediately gone to Henry R. James, principal of the college and prominent member of the Indian Education Service,13 to lodge a protest against Oaten. When James failed to convince them of his sympathy or impartiality, a substantial section of the student body had gone on strike. James had imposed a fine of Rs 5 on the strikers, and simultaneously engaged in some quiet negotiating: the leaders of the protest (who were also the leaders of the elected Student Advisory Council) had conceded that their supporters had violated college rules, and Oaten had expressed regret for his part in the imbroglio. James had also met with the white faculty and impressed upon them the importance of not laying hands upon the students. Ruffled feathers had been smoothed somewhat, and the strike ended after a day of boycotts (RPCEC). There was, however, considerable anger about the fine. Also, Oaten had soured the dtente by ordering half his class to leave the room for having participated in the strike, telling James that he expected his students to support him unconditionally. The 15 February incident was similar. A chemistry class was dismissed early and the students chatted in the corridor. Oaten confronted them, demanding quiet. As he began to retreat, one of the boysKamal Bosecalled out loudly to another student, Panchanan. A furious Oaten physically dragged Kamal Bose to the college steward and fined him Re 1. Bose protested to James, adding that Oaten had called him a rascal and grabbed him by the neck. A hapless James told the boy to file a written complaint, and scheduled a joint meeting with Oaten. Oaten was assaulted before the meeting could take place. As he descended a staircase some hours after his encounter with Kamal Bose, several boys waiting below knocked him to the ground. The assailants vanished when another teacher appeared, and Oaten was unable to identify his attackers. Nevertheless, two studentsSubhas Bose and Ananga Daswere quickly expelled for complicity in the assault. The reasons for their expulsion remained mysterious, although it appears that a watchman had claimed to have seen them among the attackers (Sanjivani, 2 March 1916). James closed down the college for the remainder of the term. He himself was soon sacked, following an altercation with P.C. Lyon of the Governors Executive Council.
13
Whitehead (2003).
These are the facts of the event as determined by the Presidency College Enquiry Committee.14 It was never an uncontested narrative: forty years later, Oaten remained adamant that he had not assaulted any student.15 Long before the committees report was made public in mid-May, the Calcutta press was awash in leaks, rumours and alternative versions of the story. An Anglo-Indian newspaper reported that in the second incident, Oaten was responding to a fire in the chemistry laboratory, and had merely pushed past students gathered in the doorway. It also claimed that Oaten had been attacked from behind by a group of concealed students (Statesman, 18 February 1916). A story constituted by rumours and unsubstantiated whispers suited the air of conspiracy surrounding the event, reinforcing the British inclination to see the attack as an extension of anti-colonial plots, and the Indian inclination to see a self-serving cover-up by the college and the government. The native press highlighted Oatens tendency to call his students barbarians and monkeys; the Anglo-Indian press was largely silent on this point. The Enquiry Committee conceded that a professor had used the word barbarian to describe Indians, but insisted that he had used the word in the sense of non-hellenic and been misunderstood by touchy students. Was this unnamed professor Edward Oaten? Was he representative of the white faculty? It remained unclear. There was confusion in the Bengali press about the identity of the student who had provoked Oaten in the second incident (Hitavadi, 20 May 1916), and about the circumstances of the first clash. Sanjivani (13 January 1916) reported that Oaten had grabbed as many as three students by the neck when he confronted them in the hallway. The two incidents sometimes became conflated in the retelling (Dainik Chandrika, 1314 January 1916). The Amrita Bazar Patrika claimed in January that James had been forgiven and reinstated as principal; Nayak (28 February 1916) dismissed the story, adding that the Presidency College incident had become grist for a hopelessly unreliable rumor mill. Another paper reported that the Eden Hindu Hostel, the main dormitory at the Presidency College, had been summarily closed and the college itself was about to be abolished (Charu Mihir, 7 March 1916). As Rudrangshu Mukherjee16 and Shahid Amin17 have indicated, such rumours and discrepancies flourish in conditions of insurgency and counter-insurgency, not least because they lend themselves to the articulation of diverse and conflicting
14 The committee consisted of Ashutosh Mukherji, W. Hornell (DPI), C.W. Peake (professor, Presidency College), Rev. J. Mitchell (principal, Wesleyan College) and Heramba Chandra Maitra (principal, City College). 15 Edward Oaten to Nimai Chatterjee (of the BBC), 1959, precise date unclear. Chatterjee was a student in London when he befriended the retired Oaten. Private correspondence in Chatterjees possession. 16 Mukherjee (1998). 17 Amin (1988).
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political positions. Disinterred, these positions reveal a widely shared ambivalence about youth as a historical condition of a colonized elite in an advanced stage of political mobilization. British Interpretations of Student Disorder Well before the Oaten incidents, British officers in the Indian Education Service the largely white bureaucracy that oversaw government-affiliated schoolshad come to the conclusion that the project of educating Bengali youth had been fatally damaged by the nationalist agitation that followed the partition of the province in 1905. I shall not reiterate in detail the expectations that surrounded the experiment, noting only what Lelyveld18 has observed about Aligarh College and James19 about education in the Caribbean: the school for native youth was intended to inculcate particular kinds of physical and political discipline that would normalize the critical hierarchies of a colonial society. This normalizing process produced a model of colonial subjecthood that was based on a combination of similarity, difference and loyalty.20 Elite native youth had to be similar to its metropolitan counterpart in some ways, yet different enough to preserve the superiority of the rulers and the ornamental functions of colonialism.21 The contradiction between similarity and differenceessentially the phenomenon of mimicry22would be managed and partially resolved through political loyalty to the empire. Towards these ends, colonial educators created not only the age-graded school, the calendar of periods and terms, the curriculum of classics and cricket, and the racially marked hierarchy of pedagogical expertise and administrative authority, but also experiments in self-government such as the Student Council at Presidency College. In the early twentieth century the arrangement produced more anxiety than satisfaction. Soon after the reunification of Bengal, an education official described the schools and colleges of the province: Serious breaches of discipline are becoming fewer, but...though there is acquiescent discipline everywhere, there is not very much of the true spirit of discipline manifesting itself in active co-operation with authority.23 Two years later, the verdict remained unchanged: Discipline, as we understand it in English schools, is a thing unknown.24 True discipline was equated with
18 19
Lelyveld (1996). James (1963). 20 Sen (2004a). 21 Cannadine (2001). 22 Bhabha (1984). 23 RPIB (191213: 31). 24 Ibid. (191415: 20).
active cooperation with the regime of teachers and administrators: a willingness to inform on troublemakers and a choosing of sides in a political conflict. This notion of discipline was also highly gendered, since the explicitly masculine space of elite education25 was subject to the assumption that native manliness must be based upon loyalty to racial superiors.26 Clearly, the intertwined expectations of youth, subservience and manliness were not being met, and the failures were being interpreted as a kind of delinquency. The 1916 Report on Education in Bengal elaborates on the point: The Presidency College is not at present a credit to Bengal. One of the acts of the late Principal was to establish a Students Representative Committee. This was an elective body, and the idea was that it would act as an aid to authority and as a means of communication between the Principal and the general body of students. The committee...was, in the words of the present Principal, largely composed of undesirable characters, whose intentions were vicious, and their actions, and the ease with which the general body of students was misled by them, suggest the desirability of paying greater attention to education in personal and collective responsibility. The Students Representative Committee proved ...an obstacle, if not an enemy, to authority in time of difficulty. The...first attempt to give the students of the premier college in Bengal some real responsibility in the management...of their college has had to be abandoned as a complete failure.27 The report referred briefly to the Oaten episode, adding that two students of the college had been interned under the Defence of India Act on suspicion of involvement in a conspiracy. The plight of the Students Representative Committee (which, in a telling confusion, was occasionally called the Principals Consultative Committee) is not unlike that of the Indian National Congress: founded in a moment of liberal imperialism, it had embarrassed its founders by refusing to contain itself within civil lines.28 William Hornell, director of public instruction in Bengal, read this not only as a political problem, but as a failure of youth on the part of Indian students. He noted acidly that while students at the Presidency College showed little interest in playing football, they were all too eager to follow cup football.29 Since cup football in Calcutta in this period was suffused with nationalist aspirations,30
25 26
Haley (1978); Mangan and McKenzie (2000). Sinha (1995); Streets (2004). 27 RPIB (191516: 34). 28 McLane (1977: 89129). 29 RPIB (191516: 34). 30 Das Sharma (2002).
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Hornells irritation was double-edged: not only were the boys not participating in a quasi-metropolitan ritual of public school youth31 that was being reduced to mockery in wartime Europe,32 they had allowed themselves to be drawn into the rebel politics of Bengali adults. The connection between such physical delinquency and political delinquency was obvious to Hornell, who wrote: Politically it means an ever increasing production of the citizen whom the French call declass: the physically weak, mentally inflated, unemployed educated man who is the gravest political danger in every country of the world (RPEB). Observations about a danger that could be glimpsed in the body of native youth were firmly within an expert discourse on youth in British India, where from the late 1890s onwards, white administrators of prisons and reformatories had begun to see apes, jackals and mythological criminals in the faces of the institutionalized.33 Hornell had concluded that this vision of deviance was applicable to young middle-class bodies. Students at elite institutions like Presidency College were expected by white educators to show some of the characteristics of the metropolitan subject, albeit without demanding the rights of citizenship. When the expectation faltered, the student revealed instead the physical-moral degeneracy that Hornell noted, and that was a racial by-product of colonial education.34 The vexing contradictions of the Macaulayan project of producing brown Englishmen in the British-Indian school could be explained in terms of the rotten condition of the student.35 Rottenness was not without its political uses. The identity of the Macaulayan intermediarybased on loyalty without rights, and a permanent desire to become, impossibly, the object of ones own emulationis essentially that of the child relative to its parents. Yet because the literal and metaphorical child was implicated in the politics of nationalist agitation, and the physical unfitness of the Bengali male (determined by delinquent adolescence and colonial masculinity) merged with the political unfitness of the disloyal native, familiality and citizenship were simultaneously nullified. The English-educated youth was transformed into the pseudo-educated and uppity baboo-in-training, who could not be captured within a healthy parentchild relationship within or without the school. The claim to a parental relationship with native youth was not relinquished easily by educators; Oaten36 would long insist that I was very fond of my students and they of him, and that his own students were not among his attackers (RPCEC).
Haley (1978). The Victorian cult of manly youth shaped by muscular Christianity and the Edwardian vision of athletic arcadia would both be exploded by the war (Fussel 1975). 33 Sen (2005). 34 Sen (2003); Stoler (1995). 35 Metcalf (1995). 36 Oaten (1959).
32 31
There was, nevertheless, a broad consensus among white observers that the good surrogate parent in the colonial school had been overwhelmed by a legion of bad parents, surrogate as well as natural, in the society outside.37 Among the bad surrogate parents were Indian teachers, towards whom white bureaucrats felt a mixture of revulsion and guilty sympathy. Indian lecturers in the elite colleges, locked into an inferior Provincial Service that offered little in the way of money and respect, had reason to be disgruntled, Hornell observed in 1917 (RPEB). He believed, moreover, that their unhappiness infected students with visions of bleak futures and the germs of rebellion. (The Presidency College Enquiry Committee also described the racial divide in the education services as dangerously provocative, and called for reforms.) Hornell linked rebel youth to warped adults and a pedagogical environment that was more alien than British: It is customary to trace the genesis of much sedition and crime to the back streets and lanes of Calcutta and Dacca, where the organizers of anarchist conspiracies seek their agents from among University students. This view is correct so far as it goes, but it is in the high schools with their under-paid and discontented teachers, their crowded, dark and ill-ventilated class-rooms and their souldestroying process of unceasing cram, that the seeds of discontent and fanaticism are sown!38 This connection between a political-criminal habit and hidden areas of darkness in native society was an indictment of the colonial school, but it also indicted the native adult as a creature of race and culture: cramming was typically a bhadralok cultural weakness, generating weaknesses of body and soul. One dejected school inspector wrote, under the apt heading of Physical and Moral Training: Parents and guardians generally detest the attempts...to seduce their boys into sedition and anarchy; but...the general situation would be a good deal better, if their indignation took a more indignant form.39 Native parents and teachers could, therefore, be either contaminating or passive, and of no help to the white educator. What was contaminated was youth itself. Since youth, innocence, dependence and loyalty were interrelated, political activityinterpreted as disloyalty and conspiracy, and signifying acts of willviolated modern childhood.40 The location of the problem within the colonial archive indicates that the problem of discipline was subsumed within the fields of morality and health, and that both were defined with reference to loyalty. The notion of seduction highlighted a metaphorical
37 38
Sen (2003); Stoler (1995). RPIB (191516: 7). 39 RPIB (191314: 21). 40 Gillis (1974).
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link between political activity and sexual activity: in either case the good child was corrupted by the delinquent. Politics was thus imagined as being external to the child until the latter was seduced away from the normative healthiness of the enclave, producing the pathological state described as anarchic. Not surprisingly, the outbreak of war in 1914 triggered a new crisis of morality/ discipline in the school, linking the enclave to a wider world of political conflict. One administrator noted a surge in the reckless dissemination of seditious pamphlets among students.41 The regime was unable to acknowledge what it in fact knew at the outset of the war: middle-class Indian parents, students and political agitators shared a common ground of disloyalty. Given the factionalism within bhadralok society, this common ground was not uniform or even very broad, but it was enough to frustrate the project of constructing the colonial school as an enclave of apolitical youth. Once the youthful status of the student had been called into question, it became ideologically possible to demand that the disloyal be policed as adults. This was not a new demand in 1916: as early as 1906 the Bengal government had begun expelling from its schools students who had openly opposed the partition or deserted government schools to show alignment with Swadeshi boycotts. Curzon and Morley had calculated that the prospect of forfeited academic credentials and careers might dissuade young rebels and deserters (L/PJ 1906). The logic, initially resisted by Bengal governor Andrew Fraser, became irresistible once the war gave the government broader powers of coercion and converted youthful anarchists into friends of the enemy. The internment of scores of students now became justifiable, as did the involvement of the police and CID (the intelligence service) in campus administration, the monitoring of dormitories and the admissions process.42 The Anglo-Indian press in particular was determined that Indian students not be allowed to hide behind their youth. After the Oaten incidents, the Statesman editorialized: In England the strike and the assault would have been settled by the application of the cane and the expulsion of the chief offenders. But in Bengal schoolboys are apparently to be treated as an important political factor. Not only do they provide our orators and their audiences and anarchists with willing agents for the perpetration of murder and outrage, but they also aspire to regulate their own education and to discipline their professors. We trust...that the Committee [of Enquiry] may prove to be a rod for their backs. (Statesman, 25 February 1916)
41 42
RPIB (191415: 20). Ibid.
The reference to the cane is especially telling. British educators in India in this period lamented the sentimentality of a system that held back from a more liberal use of beatings.43 The colony, in their vision, was both a nature (that of the native) and a political arrangement (of remorseless and violent authority). Hornell once expressed the hope that caning would render the native schoolboy disciplined like his English counterpart,44 but the Statesman understood that the rhetoric of likeness was fraudulent: beating a native and beating a white schoolboy were not the same politically or ideologically. Because subjection to corporal punishment was a major ingredient of the juvenile condition in contemporary England and even more so in the colony, exemption from itmanifested in James orders that white faculty not touch their studentsreflected the recognition of a lapsed youth in middle-class Indian students. With these, colonial authorities could use a different rod: the prison, a definitively adult apparatus of punishment that aged the incarcerated just as flogging juvenilized the whipped.45 The idea that students might want to control their own education and discipline their professors reflected an anxiety that the interconnected structures of knowledge, age, race and authority in the colony were under attack within and without the school. Indeed, it was the disruption of these connections that constituted anarchy. Accordingly, the Statesman urged the colonial government and school authorities to proceed with an innovative severity necessary for the restoration of the hierarchies of a colonial society, not only by rendering native adults as quasijuvenile, but also by imagining and approaching native adolescents as adults. While the two processes may appear to be contradictory, they are in fact sides of the same coin: perverse and undisciplined pseudo-youth would never truly grow up, except to become perverse, undisciplined and politically unfit pseudo-adults. Rebel Youth and Indian Opinion After the assault on Oaten and the closing of the Presidency College, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a long opinion piece in Sabuj Patra. The incident was a predictable result of colonial rule, he declared, because of the racism that permeated the BritishIndian academy and curriculum. Refusing to reject this curriculum, Tagore phrased its impact on native youth within a subversive formulation of nature. Far from being pathological, he argued, rebellion was natural to colonial youth just as racism was natural to the colonizer: The incident is only an outward expression of the spirit of rebellion which has been bred in the minds of Bengali students by the haughtiness and aggressive
43 44
RPIB (191415: 20). Ibid. 45 Sen (2004b).
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egotism of English professors and by the sense of injustice done to Indian professors. Situated as all Englishmen are in India, an English professor of a college in Bengal looks upon his Bengali student not merely as a student but also as a subject. He considers it his duty not only to train up Bengali youths but also to maintain the prestige of the British Raj. Besides this, he is in the habit of wounding the social and religious susceptibilities of his Indian students. Of course, it is difficult for an English professor in India to forget that he belongs to the ruling race...but it is equally natural for his Indian students to resent this treatment and sometimes give outward expression to this feeling of resentment. English rule and English education have, for more than a hundred years, been creating in the minds of the Indians a sense of self-respecting individuality which it will now be hard to destroy and the destruction of which will mean the unfulfilment of Englands mission in India. It therefore behooves all English professors in India to build up the character of their Indian students into one of love for Englishmen. And this can only be done by subjecting them to a rule of love and not to a hard and heartless rule.46 Tagore acknowledged that the rebellion of students was rooted in an individualism that was necessarily hostile to the state that had fostered it, anticipating a point that Purnima Bose47 has made about the individual in colonial society. That individuality was the result not only of a curriculum of conquest,48 but also of what Dirks49 calls institutional self-mimesis in the colony: the Indian school, like its metropolitan model, was based on individualizing assumptions of norm and deviation.50 Tagore recognized, moreover, that the content of colonial education went against the grain of certain colonial practices, in which teachersin their role as imperialistsnecessarily engaged. (It had not gone unnoticed in the native press that Oaten was also an officer in the military reserve [Sanjivani, 13 January 1916].) The colonial school, thus, simultaneously produced and repressed the native, the pleasure of production turning immediately into the burden of repression. In spite of the imbedded critique of colonial race relations, the article was remarkably sympathetic to British rule and its mission. The timing provides a partial explanation: in 1916, Tagore was at the height of his respectability in the empire, positioned between knighthood and its renunciation. Engaged as he was in bringing that respectability to bear on the Presidency College issue, he did not step outside empire. Instead, he articulated a familial model of empire and school rule of lovethat editors in the Anglo-Indian press might have recognized. At
46 47
Sabuj Patra (1916). Bose (2003). 48 Viswanathan (1987). 49 Dirks (1997). 50 Foucault (1990).
the same time, he reversed the direction of the love, placing the onus upon the parent and making it the price of filial loyalty. There was nothing wrong with native youth even at its most rebellious, whereas a great deal was wrong with the dysfunctional family of the colony. The article did not go unchallenged. Oatenwho was not hostile to Tagore in all circumstanceswould describe it as an ill-informed screed that anticipated the writers seditious response to the Amritsar massacre. Tagore, Oaten implied, was not only encouraging racial animosity, but also instigating a premature and damaging independence for India and native students.51 Indian responses were more complicated. While a section of the native press seconded Tagores sentiments (Bangali, 28 March 1916), an articulate rebuttal came from an anonymous writer in Hitavadi who simply called himself A Teacher. He began by dismissing Tagores authority to speak for Indian educators, calling him privileged, insulated and nave: Sir Rabindra Nath has said that he knows the students of this country very well. I, too, being a teacher all my life, can make such a boast. Moreover, Sir Rabindra Nath was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and...has seen only the bright side of students. I have always entertained the ambition of winning the heart of my students, but...many students have no hearts. I have loved them as I would love my children, but...this has not prevented them from jeering at me behind my back. For this sort of thing repression is necessary, not for their good but for the good of other students. Even educated men pass such jeering remarks against poor teachers that their position is greatly lowered in society. [Tagore] advises students in the words: If we are slapped on the cheek by even the Christian Principal, we cannot turn the other cheek to him. Students are not to forgive teachers for chastisements received at their hands. We have heard that the relation between a teacher and his student is similar to that between a father and his son. Now, Sir Rabindra Naths advice is tantamount to an advice to a sonnever forgive your father if he is unjust to you.52 We are confronted here with competing knowledges of youth within the native elite. Clearly, Tagore had struck multiple nerves: not only of the adult/teacher beleaguered by insubordinate children/students, but also of class. The position taken by the writer in Hitavadi was especially pertinent to those who did not have whiteness, wealth or titles to reinforce their authority as adults and professionals.
51 Oaten to Nimai Chatterjee, 1959. Oaten had become an apologist for General Dyer, characterizing the Amritsar massacre as wrong but understandable under the political circumstances of 1919. He had known Dyer personally, and it appears from the correspondence that the two were friends. Yet Oaten was generous towards Tagores educational enterprise in Santiniketan. 52 Hitavadi (7 April 1916).
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It voiced the angst that Sumit Sarkar53 has identified in the marginal bourgeoisie embedded in the less remunerative offices of the colonial administration. The classroom was one such office. The unhappiness of the native teacherwho believed that he had been reduced to little more than a clerkcould take the form of hostility towards insubordinate students who were one side of the perceived oppression, the other side being the white educator and bureaucrat. Evidently, condemnation of the Presidency College authorities was not universal among middle-class Indians, and even those who felt Oaten had made a serious mistake could be uncomfortable with the autonomous political initiative shown by the students. The reference to chastisements is worth noting again; the writer in the Hitavadi was invested in the adult authority that corporal punishment generated in teachers and anxious patriarchs. From this perspective, Tagores incitement to equality in the classroomand the rustic liberalism of Santiniketan, where the classroom had been re-imaginedwas deeply threatening. The most provocative aspect of the anonymous article is its implication that youth has a dark side. The darkness is not universal: it is rooted in the specific environment of the colonial city, the urban school, and the social and economic insecurities of the lower middle class. The author argues, nevertheless, that the relationship between the teacher and the student in the modern school is tense and coercive regardless of race. The adult/teacher in this vision is necessarily a wellmeaning colonizer, but the savages are not grateful for the good intentions and familiality can fail in the struggle. The implication is that neither the colonial school nor its youthful inmates could be innocently apolitical or free, and Tagores apparent evocation of equality between teacher and student was an upper-class fantasy. The idea that the Oaten incident reflected a malaise within Indian youth was in fact widespread in the native press. Panchcowri Banerji, editor of Nayak, saw the assault as evidence of a growing cowardice and viciousness among students, and contrasted it with a morally superior violence from his own college years. He and his peers would apparently get into brawls with white soldiers and faculty alike, and occasionally beat up Africans for sport (Nayak, 14 January 1916, 14 March 1916). While this is on the surface a conventional Bengali narrative of compensatory machismo,54 Banerji was attempting to disconnect manly youth from nationalist ideology by implying that nationalism was unnatural in the young. The violence of his own school days, being in the nature of sport (and, therefore, innocent), was also in the nature of youth; it was, thus, categorically different from the overtly political and cowardly attack on Oaten. Banerji spelled out the reasons for the decline into behaviour that was both unmanly and unyouthful. Two causes are gradually spoiling our boys, he wrote,
53 54
Sarkar (2002). Chowdhury-Sengupta (1995).
and they are commercialism in education and so-called patriotism(Nayak, 13 January 1916). He argued that students who knew that their fees paid the professors salary would inevitably view faculty with contempt. This commercialism not only reversed the normative relationship of dependency between parent-figure and child, it also signified a fall from a past in which gurus maintained their students as members of their own households.55 Presumably, that had not been the typical arrangement in Calcutta in the boisterous years of Banjerjis youth, but such details were irrelevant; he was more interested in constructing a golden age of inter-generational relations in which even the late nineteenth century became authentically Indian or Hindu, predating both colonialism and nationalism. Only in this mythical past were teachers and fathers safe in their adulthood. At first glance, Banerjis views on the effect on Bengali youth of nationalist politics are uncannily like those of the Anglo-Indian press. Anarchy is portrayed as a problem generated or exacerbated by native adults, who cynically force students to take on adult responsibilities. He wrote: Thanks to Surendra Nath Banarji and his crew, [patriotism] has ruined many a student. Indeed, every big agitation requires young men. Consequently, Surendra Nath has to be the champion of boys and the good folk of the Brahmo Samaj have to depend on boys. It is the boys who possess any real capacity for work. If there are floods or famine, organizers of relief works send bands of boys to help the afflicted peopletaking care, of course, not to send any of their own children. No wonder, therefore, that they should now suffer from slightly swelled heads. And [this] is the main cause of all the anarchism, assassinations and arrests of the present day.56 This critique of patriotic students, however, is unlike British narratives of student unrest in its recessed envy of youth that had evidently displaced adults in powers and responsibilities, and its reflection of the internal resentments of Bengali elite politics, especially conservative resentment of secular politicians like Surendranath, Brahmo reformists and even a Hindu nationalist like Bankim.57 Banerji excoriated the last for having turned Hinduism into junk food for consumption by youthful readers of Anandamath (Nayak, 1 March 1916). Banerjis vision of youth is not uncomplicated in its hostility to Indian nationalism. Superficially similar to the nostalgist view of pre-colonial India articulated by Ashis Nandy,58 it constitutes a reactionary critique of modernity. Banerji,
Ibid. Ibid. 57 Bankimchandra Chatterjees status as a Hindu nationalist was not always apparent or true, but by 1916 his work had become inseparable from an overtly Hindu rhetoric of nationhood (Kaviraj 1998). 58 Nandy (1987).
56 55
220 / SATADRU SEN
moreover, was not consistently anti-modern; he had participated in Swadeshi agitation as an occasional ally of the extremist politician Bipin Pal.59 His tirades represent an alternative nationalism that included a grudging admiration for the conflation of youthful masculinity, social work and national service engineered by Vivekananda.60 While Banerji refused to condemn Oaten, he told an imagined British reader: All this mischief of sedition and anarchism is the result of the godless education that you have introduced...,which only turns out M.A.s and B.A.s while sapping the foundations of our society and religion. The products of this iconoclastic system of education first break up their own households and then set themselves to breaking the laws and rules of Government. Why should men whom you have taught to break the rules of caste care to accept any distinction between white and black? The sons of orthodox Hindu parents who receive religious education at home and students of Hindu tols never become anarchists or throw bombs. The Englishman wants to have meetings and associations stopped. We should...go yet further [and] have schools and colleges and...hostels abolished. (Nayak, 16 February 1916) The same pedagogically produced and peculiarly colonial youth that encouraged Tagore, then, appalled Banerji. Dainik Basumati (18 February 1916) put the problem even more starkly: May we ask what has brought about such a radical change in the nature of Bengali youths? How is it that the Bengali youth, who, thirty years ago, used to become either a dandy or a Bengali sahib after receiving an English education, now fires revolvers as a result of the same education? The guardians of Bengali boys have never given them any religious education, and nobody has ever cared to advise them as to whether they should grow up as Hindus or as Christians. The present malady will never be cured unless the blood is purified. The society, which at one time used to be the repository of righteousness and love, has now assumed a curious shape owing to its hankering after money. Anarchism is spreading among our boys who are growing insolent and ungovernable. Iconoclasts have come into existence in every family, and have gradually come to be intoxicated with the wine of anarchism. This notion of anarchy is only tangentially related to that of the Anglo-Indian press and the colonial government. Dainik Basumati had borrowed the term and reinterpreted it to indicate not only a politically-oriented violence antithetical to
59 60
Sarkar (1973). Beckerlegge (2000); Heehs (1993).
youth, but also a collapse of civilization and race brought about by secular education, individualism and iconoclasm. The notion of intoxication, like those of seduction and athletic indifference, marked a moral failure that might be located in the corrupted body and blood: not an insignificant concern in a period when eugenics and biological constructions of deviance were perceptible influences within Indian nationalism.61 In a similar manoeuvre, the Bengalee acknowledged the diagnosis of anarchy made by the Presidency College Enquiry Committee, but asked whether the condition was degenerative or regenerative. The journal declared: When the Committee says that political causes have helped to develop an excessive sense of touchiness among students, the fact is overlooked that the forces in operation amongst Indians, largely due to Western culture and contact with Western civilization, have strengthened the instincts of individualism. In the family, politics have no place; but even in the family, the assertion of individual opinion, the excessive touchiness to which the Committee refers, is a feature that is clearly in evidence. It would indeed be idle to ignore the fact that political considerations exercise a profound influence upon the mind of Indian students. Nor will it do to ascribe everything to revolutionary propaganda. The Indian mind, young and old, abhors revolution. (Bengalee, 19 May 1916) The editor of the Bengalee, thus, tied the change in the nature of native youth to the impact of colonialism upon race/nation; while he did not assign an altogether negative value to the change, he nevertheless saw it as a fall. Like Tagore, he read the change as individualism and equated it with rebellion. He diverged, however, by noting that not even the family, literal or metaphorical, could be a refuge from politics (rebellion or revolution) in an age of individualism. As Sibnarayan Ray62 has observed, Tagores vision of the individual was essentially bifocal: it included the modern agent of social reform as well as the inhabitant of the Romantic community, not so much reconciling them as accepting their conflict. Whereas some scholars have sought to deal with this schizophrenic individuality by dividing it between Romantic poetry and reformist prose,63 Amit Chaudhuri64 has argued that the separation is not a viable reading of Tagore. The individual lurked within the Arcadian family of colonial Bengal, requiring that observers either accept the disharmony or recoil in horror. Such choice was fraught with political meaning in middle-class Bengal in the early twentieth century. At a time when the Hindu home was an entrenched and
61 62
Ahluwalia (2004); Malter (2007). Ray (1977). 63 Chakrabarty (2000); Radice (1985). 64 Chaudhuri (2006).
222 / SATADRU SEN
embattled enclave of nationhood,65 the disruption of the internal hierarchy of the familyspecifically, the authority of the fathercould only be alarming. The rebellion of the students opened the home to false adults (that is, disorderly youth) and alternative patriarchs: rebel politicians and writers, and colonial pedagogues, policemen, magistrates and jailors. The violation was, thus, multi-layered, consisting not only of the generational, racial and political identities of the intruders, but of the act of intrusion itself. This too was a critical component of the anarchy perceived by Indian observers of the Oaten episode. Practically all observers believed that Indian youth in 1916 were different from their predecessors. All the Indians, including Tagore, argued that colonial educators had themselves sabotaged the civic arrangement of the school, making it incapable of nurturing youth. Banerji echoed the British emphasis on discipline in his memory of a student body that was recognizably youthful. At the same time, because the Indian outlook on the schools was informed by the anti-colonial politics of middle-class Bengal, not even Banerjis conception of youth was entirely hostile towards the idea of rebellion. The school, for him as well as for Tagore, was a location where youth, discipline and rebellion might be reconciled. If this reconciliation had failed to materialize, the fault lay in the colonial nature of the institution. Locating Anarchy in a Troubled Age The unease of 1916 was hardly the first crisis over schooling in colonial India. It has, for instance, many parallels with the Young Bengal movement of 182930.66 That earlier brouhaha also involved a history professor at the Presidency College (then called the Hindu College): the charismatic Eurasian Henry Derozio, who led students in strident critiques of their social and religious milieux at the precise moment when liberal-evangelical interventions67especially the abolition of satihad triggered the first major clash between the colonial state and a newlyconstituted upper-class Hindu family.68 Then, as later, conservative fathers were outraged that their rivals and critics had turned their sons against them. There are, however, significant discontinuities between the situations of 1830 and 1916. The angry men in the later episode came from a different set of classes, with anxieties rooted in different professional-economic realities and in a new relationship between the British and Indian elite, including a different climate of race relations. Indian nationalism in 1916 was vastly more developed as an ideology and a political force, and its pressures and claims upon the state, the school and the family were more pervasive. What might be called the institutional knowledge
65 66
Chatterjee (1990); Sarkar (2001). Dalmia (1992). 67 Metcalf (1995). 68 Mukherjee (1970).
of youth (and its management) in 1916, produced by two generations of experiments with discipline in reformatories, prisons and boarding schools, was barely embryonic in 1830. That knowledge had diffused into the broader society of middle-class parents, politicians and professionals who were caught up in various anti-colonial contestations, and who saw youth as a critical component of nationhood.69 Banerji was only deceptively similar to the conservative critics of Young Bengal. In the Bengali newspapers, the Oaten controversy was interpreted broadly as a crisis within arrangements of race, knowledge and power at a particular moment in the colonial experience, that is, as emblematic of an age that was necessarily distinguishable from other ages and arrangements of power. More narrowly, it was interpreted as the culmination of a simmering hostility between students and teachers in the government schools. The anarchy of youth represented the breakdown of an imagined order. This order was, on the one hand, mythical: it was contained within the experience of British rule but itself contained a time when the British did not approach the middle class with the instruments of discipline and punishment. On the other hand, the fantasy was historical, seeking to displace the colonial power from its presumed monopoly on power/knowledge. At the time of the Oaten affair, violent confrontation between students and faculty, followed by strikes and the imposition of fines, had already occurred in the Bangabasi College and elsewhere (Nayak, 13 January 1916). Such incidents had been on the increase since 1905 (L/PJ 1906). Innocuous issues such as students demands for extra holidays had merged with Swadeshi agitation, and the government had become determined to use police measures to punish conspiracies.70 Sections of the native press were convinced that any conspiracy was on the other side of a racial-political divide, and even Ashutosh Mukherji was explicitly whitened by his association with the colonial power (Nayak, 21 February 1916). In the Presidency College crisis, the conviction that the principal had sided with Oaten came to reflect other conspiracies in colonial politics that required penitence from adults and not youth: Some time ago, when Mr Harrison insulted the students, the affair was settled on his voluntarily apologizing to them. Let Mr Oaten also admit his fault and restore peace to the College. The old days are now gone and it is no longer very easy to have the work of teaching done by English professors. So long as India does not get self-government and Indians and Englishmen stand on an equal footing, English Professors will be out of place in this country. (Sanjivani, 13 January 1916)
69 70
Sen (2005). Ibid.
224 / SATADRU SEN
The focus on the racism of the faculty was a critique of the wider racism of colonial society in a period marked by widespread segregation, economic and professional inequality, and highly visible incidents of white-on-black physical assault.71 When James lost his job soon after the Oaten incident, it was whispered bizarrely that he had also been assaulted by P.C. Lyon (Hitavadi, 3 March 1916). Hitavadi remarked: James ought to have borne in mind that it is never safe for anybody, be he a white man or a black man, to tread on the tail of any member of the Heaven-born Service.72 James, in particular, was simultaneously vilified and martyred in the native press, the vitriol and empathy both reflecting Indian resentment of privileged and violence-prone Europeans in the colony. The racial and corporal relations of campus and classroom were, to middle-class Indian adults, familiar violations of the terms of liberal government. The apparently alien anarchist had emerged from familiar circumstances, which rendered him familiar to adults and simultaneously allowed adults to walk in the alien/rebel shoes of youth. Indian newspapers also pointed out that the racial arrogance of the faculty had distanced them from their students to the extent that they were unaware of what young natives thought and how they lived (Bangabasi, 18 March 1916; Hablul Matin, 1 March 1916). This implied that the schoolan investigative instrument that existed not only to disseminate knowledge but also to create knowledge about its human materialhad failed to know its pupils, repudiating the wider claim to knowledge that undergirded a confident colonialism.73 A major objective of Indian nationalism in the early twentieth century (indeed, as Fanon74 has suggested, a common objective of anti-colonial nationalisms) was to establish a competing field of knowledge of all things modern, which included knowledge of a youth located at the intersection of racialized minds and bodies.75 We also have worked as teachers...and have dealt with very naughty boys, Nayak (14 January 1916) editorialized, investing a broad Indian we with the powers of modern pedagogy. We know what makes boys angry and what cools their tempers. If the British lacked this knowledge, they possessed no real authority as teachers or rulers, or, for that matter, as experts on the moral, material and psychological content of race and age. Their interaction with Indians of all ages could only be ineffective or damaging. In a comprehensive polemic against the poor quality of the colonial faculty, Panchcowri Banerji connected the weakness of the white faculty to the apparent weakness in the youth under their tutelage, and articulated parallel entropies of authority and youth in a racially organized police state. British educators had
71 72
Bailkin (2006). Ibid. 73 Cohn (1997); Foucault (1990). 74 Fanon (1965). 75 Ibid.; Hartnack (2001).
become progressively inept in their handling of Indian youth, he argued, pointing to an incident in 1876 in which a professor named Bellet had been assaulted by students for punishing a boy who had fallen asleep in class (Nayak, 17 February 1916). In that episode, however, the principal had been able to defuse the crisis without resorting to committees and police investigations: he had gathered the students together and told them that unless the assailants stepped forward, he would have to resign in disgrace. Such was his moral authority, Banerji wrote, that the guilty had immediately identified themselves. They had been punished with a years suspension.76 The lesson that Banerji drew from this was that in a past which was undeniably British-Indian, but nevertheless benign and intimate, strong teachers had nurtured boys whose tendency towards physical aggression was matched by their courage and their loyalty towards the paternal head of the school. In the overtly colonial present, teachers were simultaneously weak and oppressive, and students cowardly and insubordinate. Why is the memory of Embank, Mowat [sic] and Elliot still reverentially cherished by Bengali students? he asked. Does Mr James want to secure police help in keeping his students in order? Would he convert each college into a jail? (Nayak, 28 January 1916). Eulogizing white teachers of the past generated a political space within which Banerji could critique his white contemporaries without appearing disloyal. It also allowed him to distinguish between strength and power, that is, between professional and familial knowledge of youth on the one hand, and punitive surveillance on the other. Equating the former with moral authority and the latter with arbitrary policing, he wrote: We were by no means docile boys but rather in comparison with the presentday students, quite the opposite. Still we never fell out with our professors...nor went out on strike at any and every provocation. The boys of those days used to enjoy great freedom, the rules were not very strict, [and] Principals...were not so powerful. But now laws and regulations have become very stringent, the Principal...is vested with the powers of an autocratic Badshah, and yet ill-feeling between students and Professors are greater now than before. (Nayak, 13 January 1916) The malaise within Bengali youth was thus identified with an epoch, rather than any essence of race or culture. Are our boys so unruly in comparison with those of Europe or America? Dainik Basumati (29 January 1916) asked, directly blaming the colonial power for warping youth with a violent education. Is it...intended that every school should be provided with a gallows or guillotine? In a movement that was both mythical and historical, race and youth became factors of time: the enclave of the school could be liberated without expelling the
76
Ibid.
226 / SATADRU SEN
British, if only it was enveloped in a soft-focus pastor, for that matter, a future when boys and men were manly, and neither was shackled to the disciplinary apparatus of the colony. Conclusion What Banerji and Tagore were saying, from opposite sides of a fence within Indian nationalism, is that British educators, the colonial government and the AngloIndian press were at best nave to demand that native youth be properly youthful. Both implied that the apparent anarchy of youth was actually the anarchic condition of a society in which state-supported structures of authority had lost their legitimacy, and with it the ability to read or write their human material. In spite of Banerjis fulminations against individualism and iconoclasm, his ideal of youth could overlap Tagores. He wrote: Boys are bound to be naughty, and...no boy who is not so, is worth being called a boy. The boys who are worth the name must be full of animal spirits and must fight...and indulge in sports and frolics even if their frolicsomeness may cause annoyance. The Professor who can control naughty boys and make good men of them, is truly worth his name. If there is any misunderstanding between any Professor and his pupils, and if the help of the Governor or the police is sought to settle such a misunderstanding, it is the Professor whom we are inclined to blame. Hot-headed as young men naturally are, they cannot exercise self-restraint and thus often overstep their bounds. They are not convicts doing their time in a jail that they should always be kept under stern discipline. (Nayak, 14 January 1916) In this discourse, the crisis in inter-generational relations was a metaphor of colonial society and politics. In the kaliyuga of the degenerate present, boys are not true children, and adults are not real men. Whereas Banerji voiced his alarm in terms of nostalgia for a time of inter-generational and interracial harmony, Tagore located his solution in an academy of the future in which confident, competent, caring adults ruled over respectful, grateful, manly, and yet genuinely youthful youth. One envisioned a Romantic familiality that informed a community submissive to proper authority,77 the other articulated a relatively democratic family that had room for whole individuals. Both schools, and both utopias, were shelters from colonialism, rather than its proofs and its instruments. The lesson from the assault on Edward Oaten, ultimately, was that colonial arrangements of power were incompatible with contemporary expectations of youth. The relationship of dependence and loyalty that Anglo-Indians insisted upon was
77
Greenfeld (1992).
inevitably undermined by failures of knowledge and nature, and corrosion of the hierarchies between parent and child, adult and youth, teacher and student, and colonizer and colonized. Under the circumstances, it surprised nobody that James and the Enquiry Committee had sought to involve the police in campus affairs, or that the colonial school was not far removed from that other iconic colonial institution: the prison. References
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Heehs, Peter (1993), The Bomb in Bengal: The Rise of Revolutionary Terrorism in India 190010, Delhi, pp. 7788. James, C.L.R. (1963), Beyond a Boundary, London. Kaviraj, Sudipta (1998), The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formulation of Nationalist Discourse in India, Delhi, p. 26 Lelyveld, David (1996), Aligarhs First Generation: Muslim Solidarity in British India, Delhi. Malter, Michele (2007), Birth Control and Modernity in India, masters thesis, Tufts University, Chapter 4. Mangan, J.A. (1986), The Games Ethic and Imperialism, New York. Mangan, J.A. and Callum McKenzie (2000), The Other Side of the Coin: Victorian Masculinity, Field Sports and English Elite Education, in J.A. Mangan, ed., Making European Masculinities: Sport, Europe, Gender, London, pp. 6285. McLane, John (1977), Indian Nationalism and the Early Congress, Princeton. Metcalf, Thomas (1995), Ideologies of the Raj, Delhi, pp. 3941 Mukherjee, R. (1998), Spectre of Violence: The 1857 Kanpur Massacres, Delhi, pp. 82122. Mukherjee, S.N. (1970), Class, Caste and Politics in India, 181538, in Edmund Leach and S.N. Mukherjee, eds, Elites in South Asia, Cambridge, pp. 5178. Nandy, Ashis (1983), The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism, Delhi, pp. 1516. (1987), Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, Delhi, 1987, pp. 2055. Ray, Sibnarayan (1977), Apartheid in Shakespeare and Other Reflections, Calcutta, p. 111. Radice, William (1985), Selected Poems of Tagore, Harmondsworth, pp. 28, 31. Sabuj Patra (1916), Chaitra 1322, Native Newspaper Reports, Bengal. Sarkar, Sumit (1973), The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903-1911, Delhi, p. 75 (2002), Beyond Nationalist Frames, Bloomington, pp. 1037. Sarkar, Tanika (2001), Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism, Bloomington, pp. 2352. Sen, Satadru (2003) The Politics of Deracination: Empire, Education and Elite Children in Colonial India, Studies in History, Vol. 19:1, pp. 1939. (2004a), Migrant Races: Empire, Identity and K.S. Ranjitsinhji, Manchester, passim (2004b), A Separate Punishment: Juvenile Delinquency in Colonial India, Journal of Asian Studies, 63:1 (2005), Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India 18501945, London, pp. 7279. Stoler, Ann (1995), Race and the Education of Desire, Durham, pp. 14550. Streets, Heather (2004), Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 18571914, Manchester. Sinha, Mrinalini (1995), Colonial Masculinity: The Manly Englishman and the Effeminate Bengali in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester. Viswanathan, Gauri (1987), Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, New York, pp. 1122. Whitehead, Clive (2003), Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Educational Service 18581983, London. (1988), British Colonial Education Policy: A Synonym for Cultural Imperialism? in J.A. Mangan, ed., Benefits Bestowed? Education and British Imperialism, Manchester, pp. 21130.
Archival Sources
Native Newspaper Reports, Bengal, OIOC, London. Progress of Education in Bengal (RPEB) (191213 to 191617), Fifth Quinquennial Review, OIOC.

Report of the Presidency Committee Enquiry Committee (RPCEC) (1916), The Statesman weekly Edition, Vol. XCV, No. 20, 19 May, new series, pp. 1416, British Library. Report on Public Instruction in Bengal (RPIB) (190516), OIOC. Records of the Public & Judicial Departments (L/PJ) (1906), OIOC.
Periodicals
Bangabasi, 18 March 1916. Bangali, 28 March 1916. Bengalee, 19 May 1916. Charu Mihir, 7 March 1916. Dainik Basumati, 29 January 1916. 18 February 1916. Dainik Chandrika, 1314 January 1916. Hablul Matin, 1 March 1916. Hitavadi, 3 March 1916. 7 April 1916. 20 May 1916. Nayak, 13 January 1916. 14 January 1916. 28 January 1916. 16 February 1916. 17 February 1916. 21 February 1916. Nayak, 28 February 1916. 1 March 1916. 14 March 1916. Sabuj Patra, 1916. Sanjivani, 13 January 1916. 2 March 1916. Statesman, 18 February 1916. 25 February 1916.

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http://sih.sagepub.com Anarchies of Youth: The Oaten Affair and Colonial Bengal

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