Introduction:
In 1765, Sir Robert Clives became Divan (tax collector) of Bengal, thus beginning British direct rule in India for nearly two centuries. Almost immediately this assumption of administrative duties caused the British several problems, among the more important; ones dealing with the training of East India Company [the institution that ran India until 1858, when India became a Crown Colony, administered directly by the British Government] officers who, like Clives, were suddenly thrust into administrative posts with little or no knowledge of Indian languages, laws and life. For the next 48 years, from 1765 until 1813 - when the Company's Charter was renewed and missionaries allowed in India for the first time - and afterwards as well, this problem would never be far from any colonial administrator's mind. Yet, during these 48 years, a gradual transformation in Indian educational policy occurred which in many ways signified the coming of age of British imperialism. While the British were not so conscious in 1765 of what their role would be in India, by 1813 a clear Anglicist mission began to be articulated, a mission that would continue well into the twentieth century.
This transformation was between two starkly different ideals - Orientalism and Anglicism - and revolved largely around the question: should the British colonial rulers continue to be Indianized or should the Indian colonial subjects begin to be Anglicized? Initially, confronted with the enormous task of rapidly transforming officers into administrators, the Company opted for the former. From 1773 until 1800 Orientalism in varying forms was the official, almost unquestioned education policy. While at first quite amateurish, by the end of the period, it had become institutionalized and professionalized with the establishments of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 and the College at Fort William sixteen years later in 1800.
By the end of the eighteenth century, however, this policy had run out of momentum. Increasingly opposition developed to several aspects of Orientalism, if not the entire edifice. Most of this opposition centered around the Evangelical movement,a movement which sought to introduce active missionary activity into India. Triggered by the establishment of the College of Fort William, an institution that many saw as propagating "corrupt" Indian ways on "virtuous" British officers, many Evangelicals began to clearly articulate an alternative educational policy. Instead of training officers in Indian languages, laws, and cultures, they advocated the education of the Indian subject population in Western ways and the implementation of a British "civilizing mission" which was to be "modelled on Rome's example of civilizing the world." [1] By denying the virtue, if not the necessity of Oriental education, the Evangelicals articulated a much more brazen and hegemonic imperialism that by 1813 had vanquished the earlier, accommodating and not so hegemonic colonial rule. While the formal death knell of Orientalism would not occur until two decades later, when the College of Fort William was abolished (1832) and historian Thomas Babington Macauley's famous Minute on Indian Education (1835) was written, in many ways 1813, not the 1830s, was the decisive break. The allowing of missionaries into India for the first time ushered in a new, much longer era of Anglicism, a new imperialism much more brash and cognizant of its hegemonic position than British rule earlier had been.
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