Introduction of 'Political Economy' into Colonial-Indian Education 1820-1840 -Vigilance against 'Political Education,' Subterfuges, Quests for Power and Personal Relationships-

Abstract

Frequent displays of appreciation by relatively small groups of Indian elites to political-economy education, to political economists and to some doctrines of political economy during the nineteenth century do not apparently fit well with a mainstream historiography which emphasizes Indian nationalist political leaders' roles as critics of British classical economics. This paper shows that keys to understand such apparent inconsistency lie in the contexts of the academic subject and of its education in UK and in Bombay during the 1820s and the 1830s and in the situations in which Indian residents in Bombay and in Poona came to know about such contexts during the same period, i.e. around the time of its first incorporation into colonial-Indian educational curriculums.