Vendredi 29 juin 2012 : Conférence / Friday 29th of June : Conference
Principales / Main publications

Barnita Bagchi is a faculty member in Comparative Literature at the Department of Modern Languages at Utrecht University. Educated at Jadavpur, Oxford, and Cambridge universities, she was previously on the faculty at the Institute of Development Studies Kolkata in India.  Her areas of research and publication include eighteenth-century and Romantic-era British fiction (with a particular interest in female-centred and female-authored fiction), South Asian (especially Bengali) narrative writing, utopian writing, and South Asian and transnational history of culture and education. She straddles the humanities and the social sciences, and is currently editing and authoring books on non-Eurocentric utopian studies and connected histories of global education.

Vendredi 29 juin 2012 : Conférence / Friday 29th of June : Conference

Rooted Cosmopolitans: Internationalisation of Education and Aspects of the Innovations of Colonial Modernity in South Asia

This lecture has its heart three figures powerfully active in the field of education in South Asia/ India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Ramabai Saraswati Medhavi Dongre (1858-1922), Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932). India between about 1800 and 1950 was an educational laboratory where educational actors such as those in focus here created fascinating international dialogues and cooperative practices, while evolving highly rooted, local practices of education. In the complex educational arena of India, where competing deprivations, demands, practices, and institutions subsisted, actors such as Ramabai, Rabindranath, and Rokeya, through their agency, writing, and educational practices brought into being innovative spaces and discourses in the field of education, each in her different way engaging fearlessly with and producing what we may term the rootedly  cosmopolitan.

Ramabai wrote a rich travelogue about her experiences in the United States of America, delineating the ability of American women to harness social capital in educational and welfarist work. She drew on her alliances with women in a variety of countries, including the US, Britain, and Australia, to further her extremely rooted work in the multiple educational-welfarist institutions she founded in both urban and rural parts of western India. Ramabai was also a pioneer in creating institutions that provided education and livelihoods to blind, hearing-impaired and otherwise disabled women.

Rokeya, Bengali Muslim writer and founder-leader, again, of multiple educational and welfarist institutions, was a genuinely rooted or vernacular cosmopolitan, who never travelled outside India, yet was a Muslim educational actor whose writings and imagination ranged from Britain to Afghanistan, and one who, as an educator, worked with women of multiple races, religions, and nationalities.

Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize, a near-messianic, cosmopolitan poet, writer, and traveller to countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, founded and ran dissenting educational institutions, at both school and university level, at Visva-Bharati in Shantiniketan in rural Bengal; here, Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese were taught pioneeringly, as were Asian crafts such as batik,  and pedagogues and social actors from countries such as India, the UK, the US participated in the educational work. Advocating internationalism and decolonization, fiercely critical of the ideology of nationalism, which he sees as intrinsic to European imperialism, Tagore negotiated his mutual interdependences while maintaining independence, premised above all on his creativity.  The gendering of his own educational work and creative writing is a complex site. Tagore also played a particularly enriching role in encouraging creativity (in writing, song, dance, theatre) among students, and in evolving pedagogical methods and material that were not woodenly didactic, and unpatronizing towards children and adolescents.

I argue that analysis of the heterogeneous, adventurous, often fractured educational worlds of these genuinely local-and-global figures offers entry into new ways of conceptualizing the connected histories of  south Asian and global  education. Earlier Eurocentric approaches saw models of Western education being received either passively or derivatively in areas under colonialism such as South Asia: instead, I argue, the practices and writings of figures such as Tagore, Ramabai, and Rokeya show that fascinatingly hybrid, rootedly cosmopolitan educational writings, practices, and institutions were being innovated and formulated in South Asia, mingling elements from past and present, and global influences from India, other parts of Asia, Europe, or the Americas. I argue that these actors were constitutive producers of internationalisati

Principales / Main publications

1. ‘Créer, Jouer, et Agir: Rabindranath Tagore et l’Action Politique,’ in Penser Pour Résister: Colère, Courage, et Création Politique, ed. Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp, 7 vols (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), vol. 4, pp. 181-189.

2. 'Ein einziges Land, welches die Erde ist: Rabindranath Tagores kreativer Kosmopolitismus,' in Rabindranath Tagore: Wanderer zwischen Welten, ed. G.  Zakaria (Ulm: Verlag Klemm-Oelchläger, 2011), pp. 33-38.

3. ‘Ramabai, Rokeya, and the History of Gendered Social Capital in India’, in Women, Education and Agency, 1600-2000, ed. Jean Spence, Sarah Aiston, and Maureen Meikle (London: Routledge, 2010) pp. 66-82.

4. ‘Two Lives: Voices, Resources, and Networks in the History of Women’s Education in South Asia,’ in ‘Collecting Women’s Lives,’ Special Issue of Women’s History Review, 19 (1), February 2010, pp. 51-69.

5. ‘L’Education, l’Action, et la Désobéissance Civile: Trois Femmes Écrivaines Indiennes en Dialogue avec Hannah Arendt,’ in (Re)Lire Hannah Arendt Aujourd’hui: Pouvoir, Guerre,Pensée, Jugement Politique, ed. Marie-Claire Caloz-Tschopp (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008), pp. 447-452.

6. ‘Towards Ladyland: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the Movement for Women’s Education in Colonial Bengal,’  Special Issue of Paedagogica Historica, ‘Empire Overseas, Empire at Home,’ 45 (3), December 2009, pp. 743-755.

7. ‘Cheery Children, Growing Girls, and Developing Young Adults: On Reading, Growing, and Hopscotching across Categories’, in Reading Children, ed. Rimi B. Chatterjee and Nilanjana Gupta (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009), pp. 163-181.

8. ‘ “Voilà la femme forte”: The Unusual Education of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck’, in The Veil of Moneta: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Malabika Sarkar (Delhi: Pearson Education, 2009), pp. 34-50.

9. ‘Carrying Over: Analysing Female Utopias and Narratives of Female Education Cross-Culturally and Cross-Historically’ in Culture, Development, and Society: Essays for Amiya K. Bagchi, ed. Manoj Sanyal and Arunabha Ghosh (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009), pp. 43-59.