Educate the East Indies: Western, Islamic and Chinese Morality in Womens Schools, 1900-1930
Final Report Abstract
The Project “Staging the Nation beyond the Raj: Visions of Greater India, the Discourse of Civilization and Nationalist Imagination” highlights how archaeological and Indological knowledge generated by an eclectic group of scholars and adventurers operating in different colonial spheres (British, Dutch, French) was exchanged (trans-colonial knowledge networks) and culminated in the discovery of geo-cultural sphere called ‘Greater India’ that was historically formed by the diffusion of a highly cultured form of Buddhist or Hindu civilization in Central, Southeast and East Asia. This notion of a ‘Greater India’ resonated well with a group of predominantly Bengali historians and intellectuals such as Rabindranath Tagore and Benoy Kumar Sarkar who instrumentalized this knowledge and linked it to different political visions that despite their varying ideological inclinations, were all concerned with reading back their future vision for India into the past. In short, alternative visions of a historical Greater India were evoked to match different ideological imperatives and visions of world order. The prism of Greater India allows us to trace and illuminate the ambiguities, contradictions and tensions at the heart of emerging visions of India as a national and civilizational entity. Moreover, this project shows how such projections – as well as their timing, content and appeal – can only be understood in the context of the anti-colonial struggle, nascent nationalist visions and regional as well as wider transnational and transcolonial configurations, networks and debates. The Greater India imagination was a much more widespread phenomenon than was initially conceived and excited some of the key intellectual minds active in the interwar period in India. It was also much more than an elite discourse centered around the scholarly apparatus of the Greater India Society in Bengal: the trope of Greater India appears in many articles, lectures and speeches addressed to a broader Indian and international audience. Another big surprise was that the Dutch scholars played such a prominent role in bringing all the different Indological research strands on Greater India together in an annual publication issued by the Kern Institute in Leiden. So far the Dutch factor in the generation of Greater India scholarship has been largely ignored in the historiography. Lastly, given the overwhelming amount of scholarship on ‘Pan-Asianism’, it is indeed surprising that so little work has been done on the Pan-Asian visions of Greater India scholars whose ‘Asianist’ projections directly challenged Japanese and Chinese discourses and center-staged the role of India as the great civilizer of Asia while tying this historical notion to a vision of India once again revitalizing Eastern civilization and, ultimately, redeem a, in their eyes, materialist, destructive and morally bankrupt ‘West’.
