Decolonising education, decentering the university – A response

By Andi Schubert

Kaushalya Herath, Harshana Rambukwella, and Darshi Thoradeniya, all friends and colleagues, have recently made some important interventions through the Kuppi Talk column on the topic of decolonising education. Framed within part of a larger conversation on the importance and value of arts education within the university, their interventions have brought a topic discussed globally to the attention of the local reading public. I broadly concur with much of their suggestions. But I want to highlight some thorny questions that decolonisation as a problem forces us to contend with and which I feel is not adequately highlighted in the interventions made thus far. In doing so, I aim not to devalue or discount their work but rather to nudge them towards more public interventions which grapple with the problems posed by decolonisation. My hope is that they will help all of us to think more critically about the possibilities for decolonising university education in Sri Lanka today.

The Unevenness of Colonial Power

It is often easy to fall into the trap of treating colonialism as a monolith when discussing the legacies of colonial rule in countries like Sri Lanka. Given that nationalist movements also frame colonialism in this way, it behooves those of us interested in critiquing both colonialism and nationalism to be vary of discussing colonial policies as a cogently theorised, cohesively implemented set of practices. As more recent research into colonial histories have shown, colonial policies were often ad hoc and haphazard, defined and re-defined in response to the pressures taking shape at the time both within and without the colony.

To give one relevant example that Prof. Rambukwella touches on, let me consider Thomas Babbington Macauley’s famous Minute on Indian Education which so clearly articulates the idea of an intermediary class between European colonisers and indigenous communities. The Minute itself was the culmination of a lengthy debate between British Orientalists who thought that indigenous literatures and languages (Sanskrit, Arabic, Pali for example) should be the basis for education in India and Anglicists who rejected indigenous languages in favour of English. Scholars trace this debate to 1781 and the establishment of an institution for Muslim higher education in Calcutta by the then British Governor, William Hastings. Hastings’ desire to set up an institution of this nature should be understood in the context of the precarity of British rule in Calcutta at the time and the need to win the support of powerful local elites by functioning as a patron for the development and promotion of indigenous cultures. Thus, an emphasis on its culmination masks the longer trajectories of the debate, particularly since some of these trajectories continue to influence our thinking today.

Colonial policies were also shaped by specific external and internal pressures. External considerations such as religious conflicts directly impacted colonial educational policies. For example, tensions between the Roman Catholic Portuguese empire and the Protestant Dutch empire are often identified as the reason why, after the exit of the Portuguese, the Roman Catholic church was not permitted to set up educational institutions in Ceylon until 1799, a few years after the British took control of the Coastal areas of the Island. Similarly, British priorities for education were also rarely monolithic and often complex. For example, as the memoirs of James Chapman, the first Anglican Bishop of Colombo show, there was a strong desire among Christian clergy to promote education in indigenous languages as a mechanism for developing the Christian church in the Island. Thus, decolonial efforts must engage with the fact that the colonial enterprise was complex and rarely unidirectional.

Most importantly perhaps, it is worth asking about the extent to which less critical presumptions about colonial policies fail to take into account the ways in which indigenous agency shaped colonial policies and practices. To give one example from the Sri Lankan context, as Anne Blackburn has shown in her well-research book Locations of Buddhism, Ven. Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala and his patrons were able to use the Orientalist educational commitment of Governor Gregory as well as changes in the way Government funding for education was offered to secure State support when setting up the Vidyodaya Pirivena in the 1870s.

When we frame Ceylon’s colonial education system within the parameters of English, we would also do well to keep in mind that the actual percentage of the population educated in the English medium was almost negligible. For example, census statistics from 1911 show that even with the inclusion of the primarily English literate European and Burgher populations, only around 3% of men and 1% of women in Ceylon were classified as being literate (able to read and write) in English. This is well below the percentage of the population considered literate in 1911 (40% of men, 11% of women), further proof that English was not the primary medium of instruction for most students in Colonial Ceylon. But to Prof. Rambukwella’s point about English education being critical to colonial rule, one of the major factors for this was that English medium education was the most critical requirement when voting was introduced for Ceylonese in 1910, a requirement that limited franchise to 0.07% of the population. However, the introduction of franchise in this very limited way was a direct result of pressure exerted by Ceylon’s indigenous elite. Further, the introduction of this limitation was also vehemently opposed by the then British Governor, Henry McCallum on the grounds that it would exclude the majority of the population.

Thus, a closer look suggests that colonial policies relating to education in Ceylon/ Sri Lanka were rarely unidirectional, flowing from a pernicious, ideologically unified source in London. Rather, it was a set of complex, negotiated, and transient practices that evolved in response to local as well as international pressures. This is why those of us interested in raising the problem of decolonisation in relation to education must begin by questioning our own assumptions about the uniformity and evenness of colonial power. If our practice of decolonisation does not account for these negotiations, we run the risk of perpetuating now well-worn, Manichean dichotomies between colonisers and colonized which inadvertently perpetuate colonial distinctions.

Anticolonial Resistances,
Decolonial Horizons

But perhaps the larger question that decolonisation throws up for me is the question of what to do with the university itself. All the writers mentioned above as well as in the larger Kuppi Talk column have highlighted the need to defend the university itself from neoliberal attacks that seek to constrain the possibilities for critical thinking and exploration afforded within that space. It is worth remembering that the university was a central platform in Ceylon’s anti-colonial imagination. Its earliest proponents in Ceylon saw the university as a means of decolonising the mind and resisting the intellectual, artistic, and cultural denudation of indigenous traditions and approaches through an over-emphasis on Europe. But can these conditions and imaginations be recuperated within our current context? And what is the role of a university within these decolonial horizons?

I want to conclude by adding my voice to a growing list of decolonial thinkers who are arguing for replacing the idea of a university with that of a ‘pluriversity’ and a ‘subversity, terms developed by the key decolonial thinker, Boaventura de Sousa Santos. De Sousa Santos reminds us that as a result of the influence of capitalism as well as the continued dominance of Europe in intellectual work, the university today is no longer the radical, alternative space it was once thought to be. Thus, the question arises as to whether there is any value in attempting to reform the university in its current form.

For example, would more interest in and funding for humanities and social sciences education really address the problems the university in Sri Lanka faces today? It would certainly go some way towards this, but the structural conditions that have denuded the radical possibilities within the space of a university would continue to be largely unaffected. We would merely have put off for tomorrow the problems of today.

This is why I want to end by echoing de Sousa Santos’ call for imagining the possibilities of polyphonic spaces he terms a ‘pluriversity’ and a ‘subversity’. These are spaces built outside the space of the conventional university with a commitment to challenging the continued function of capitalism and colonialism in pedagogy and intellectual production. Those of us seriously committed to the task of decolonizing education, particularly university education, must begin by imagining different horizons of possibilities and new structures and conditions for intellectual and pedagogical work. This may help us to engage more critically with our own anticolonial histories, reconsider our own commitments and positions, and perhaps most importantly, think and act beyond the limits capitalism and colonialism has set for us. This, for me at least, is the first and most critical step on the long and hard road to the decolonization of any university space.

Andi Schubert teaches at the Department of Language Studies of the Open University of Sri Lanka.