Michael P. Brunner, "Education and Modernity in Colonial Punjab: Khalsa College, the Sikh Tradition and the Webs of Knowledge, 1880-1947" (Palgrave, 2020)
02/25/21 • 29 min
Michael P. Brunner's "Education and Modernity in Colonial Punjab: Khalsa College, the Sikh Tradition and the Webs of Knowledge, 1880-1947" (Palgrave, 2020) explores the localisation of modernity in late colonial India.
As a case study, it focuses on the hitherto untold colonial history of Khalsa College, Amritsar, a pioneering and highly influential educational institution founded in the British Indian province of Punjab in 1892 by the religious minority community of the Sikhs. Addressing topics such as politics, religion, rural development, militarism or physical education, the study shows how Sikh educationalists and activists made use of and 'localised' communal, imperial, national and transnational discourses and knowledge. Their modernist visions and schemes transcended both imperialist and mainstream nationalist frameworks and networks.
In its quest to educate the modern Sikh - scientific, practical, disciplined and physically fit - the college navigated between very local and global claims, opportunities and contingencies, mirroring modernity's ambivalent simultaneity of universalism and particularism.
Raj Balkaran is a Scholar, Educator, Consultant, Life Coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Michael P. Brunner's "Education and Modernity in Colonial Punjab: Khalsa College, the Sikh Tradition and the Webs of Knowledge, 1880-1947" (Palgrave, 2020) explores the localisation of modernity in late colonial India.
As a case study, it focuses on the hitherto untold colonial history of Khalsa College, Amritsar, a pioneering and highly influential educational institution founded in the British Indian province of Punjab in 1892 by the religious minority community of the Sikhs. Addressing topics such as politics, religion, rural development, militarism or physical education, the study shows how Sikh educationalists and activists made use of and 'localised' communal, imperial, national and transnational discourses and knowledge. Their modernist visions and schemes transcended both imperialist and mainstream nationalist frameworks and networks.
In its quest to educate the modern Sikh - scientific, practical, disciplined and physically fit - the college navigated between very local and global claims, opportunities and contingencies, mirroring modernity's ambivalent simultaneity of universalism and particularism.
Raj Balkaran is a Scholar, Educator, Consultant, Life Coach. For information see rajbalkaran.com.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Previous Episode
Christopher T. Fleming, "Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Ownership and Inheritance in Sanskrit Jurisprudence (Oxford UP, 2021) provides an account of various theories of ownership (svatva) and inheritance (dāya) in Sanskrit jurisprudential literature (Dharmaśāstra). It examines the evolution of different juridical models of inheritance--in which families held property in trusts or in tenancies-in-common--against the backdrop of related developments in the philosophical understanding of ownership in the Sanskrit text-traditions of hermeneutics (Mīmāṃsā) and logic (Nyāya) respectively.
Christopher T. Fleming reconstructs medieval Sanskrit theories of property and traces the emergence of various competing schools of Sanskrit jurisprudence during the early modern period (roughly fifteenth-nineteenth centuries) in Bihar, Bengal, and Varanasi. Fleming attends to the ways in which ideas from these schools of jurisprudence shaped the codification of Anglo-Hindu personal law by administrators of the British East India Company during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While acknowledging the limitations of colonial conceptions of Dharmaśāstra as positive law, this study argues for far greater continuity between pre-colonial and colonial Sanskrit jurisprudence than accepted previously. It charts the transformation of the Hindu law of inheritance--through precedent and statute--over the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
Next Episode
Bibek Debroy, "The Mahabharata" (Penguin, 2015)
Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war between cousins the Pandavas and the Kouravas but the Mahabharata is about conflicts of dharma. These conflicts are immense and various, singular and commonplace. Throughout the epic, characters face them with no clear indications of what is right and what is wrong; there are no absolute answers. Thus every possible human emotion features in the Mahabharata, the reason the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination. In this translation of the complete Mahabharata (Penguin, 2015), Bibek Debroy takes on a great journey with incredible ease.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/indian-religions
If you like this episode you’ll love
Episode Comments
Generate a badge
Get a badge for your website that links back to this episode
<a href="https://goodpods.com/podcasts/new-books-in-indian-religions-11350/michael-p-brunner-education-and-modernity-in-colonial-punjab-khalsa-co-12271707"> <img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/goodpods-images-bucket/badges/generic-badge-1.svg" alt="listen to michael p. brunner, "education and modernity in colonial punjab: khalsa college, the sikh tradition and the webs of knowledge, 1880-1947" (palgrave, 2020) on goodpods" style="width: 225px" /> </a>
Copy