This chapter reflects on the institutional form of the Presidency College, as it emerged out of that of the Hindu College, and continued to be shaped in the twentieth century, amidst and by a range of disciplinary, pedagogic, and governmental developments in the field of higher education in British India. An analytical reconstruction of the institutional form of this earliest and most illustrious site of Western education in South Asia, I argue, offers uncharted avenues into the history of the codification of higher learning in India, and its constituent categories like “college,” “university,” “teaching,” and “research.” The Presidency College, as this chapter will demonstrate, remained an exemplary (yet also anomalous) subject of this history, both driving this codification and, in a sense, being superseded by it. Its privileged origin enabled its peculiar design, which in turn stamped, in the making of its institutional form, the history of higher education in colonial India as a range of contradictions, differentiations, and divisions of other institutional forms—ones that the Presidency College harbored, folded out, forgot, rejected, embraced, remained suspicious of, or played around with experimentally. Such formations of the institutional, I argue, open up ways of thinking about education beyond empire and nation, in the history of modern India. This chapter begins such an inquiry: it attempts to understand the institutional both in terms of its specific role in a bigger history of an abstract category— in this case the modern university—and as an autonomous analytic, one that exceeds given abstractions to gesture toward new ones.

The Presidency College Magazine was born on the platform of the Howrah station. The story was recounted by Pramatha Nath Banerjee in the golden jubilee edition of the magazine in 1964. Banerjee, the first editor of the magazine, and Jogeshchandra Chakraborty, its first secretary, were sixthyear students when they persuaded the then principal of the college, Mr H. R. James, to start a college magazine while he was boarding a train to Bombay on his way to England. With theatrical flair, Banerjee writes, “Mr. James agreed as the train steamed off.” The birth of the college magazine on a bustling railway platform is a dramatic instantiation, albeit metaphorical, of its life. Just as a platform is a place where people from afar reach, interact, and leave, the magazine became a robust space for discussion of world events, ideas, and political incidents that occurred in distant lands. I specifically focus on these writings to demonstrate the overwhelming interest of a section of the Bengali youth on contemporary global politics and political thought, intellectually situating themselves in the broader networks of the empire and subsequently forming solidarities against it, and staking a claim in the ongoing political debates of the twentieth century on forms of governance, diplomatic alliances, and revolutionary activities. The study is bookended by two hyperbolic moments—from a declaration of loyalty for the empire from its first volume in 1914 to a thorough anti-state call for action in the writings from the banned volume of 1968–69.

Globality, Limits, and Difference

A ceremony was organized at the Presidency College in December 1916 to observe Jagadish Chandra Bose's retirement. Bose stood at the end of an exceptional career at the Presidency College, having become a worldrenowned personality—as a pathbreaking experimentalist and philosophermetaphysician of science. The college recognized his contributions by creating the post of Professor Emeritus for him. What stood out in the retirement celebrations was the college's keen awareness of Bose's global footprints, and the college's specific contributions to them. Thus, Principal Henry Rosher James noted during the ceremony that of the many “homes” that Bose has in India, Bengal, and Calcutta, the college is the most “intimate,” as it “has been the home of J.C. Bose's work” (emphasis added). James further noted that Bose shared this sense about the location of the college in his global-intellectual ventures:

When the Hindu College (called simply the Vidyalaya to start with), the first such institute of higher education anywhere in the world, was founded in Calcutta in 1817 at the insistence of Indian “gentlemen of distinction,” they urged Chief Justice Edward Hyde East that they wanted their children to have “a liberal education” and that “they should wish to be informed of everything that the English gentlemen learnt.” What followed has been characterized as “a global phenomenon” that was “chronologically … perhaps the earliest manifestation of the revolution in the mental world of Asia's elite groups.”

This chapter will show that the Hindu College was the first educational institution of its kind—not just in Asia, but anywhere in the world. A close examination of the founding and initial years of the college in relation to developments in education in England itself, Europe, and even distant America shows that the values that underpinned its establishment were what we might call modern, rational, and progressive, to an extent, in fact, that was unrivalled on the world stage till then. In the event, as we shall see, a handful of Indians succeeded in establishing, in 1817, an educational institution that was unprecedented in its form—with no links to either church or state, funded by “subscriptions,” and run by Indian managers on their own terms—setting up parameters for higher education that would in time become the norm globally.

Attracting “youths of good promise from every part of the [Bengal] Presidency, including the most remote provinces,” was the founding mandate of Presidency College that was supposed to distinguish it from “the very small circle of districts heretofore connected with the Hindoo College.” The district constituencies of the Presidency College stretched far and wide, and this vast hinterland—indiscriminately clubbed as “mofussil” in the official documents—presented a set of peculiar predicaments to the institution. On the one hand, the claim of serving the mofussil equally with the metropolis of Calcutta was the formal justification for many of the unusual institutional privileges that the college came to enjoy. On the other hand, the college authorities never tired of complaining that this very responsibility of serving the mofussil held the institution back from realizing its full potential. To the Presidency College's evolving metropolitan selfimage, the mofussil was both a supply house of talent and a rustic source of cultural embarrassment. It was a distant exterior that, in the form of migrant students, was also an intimate presence. For such students, again, the mofussil was an identity that had to be alternately performed and concealed in the urban theater of bhadralok modernity. In examining the evolving institutional, spatial, and experiential registers of this unresolved tension from 1855 to 1920, this chapter attempts to suggest one way of uncocooning the history of Presidency College.

Reminiscences of teachers by former students pervade accounts of the Presidency College, whether they are articles in the Presidency College Magazine, Autumn Annual, or autobiographies and other kinds of recollections. Not all teachers, however. A select list of names recur repeatedly in memories of the college. My effort in this chapter is to understand why it is that some individuals stand out over hundreds of others. A teacher, I argue, gains a storied reputation though several types of collective memorywork. First, there are some teachers who are remembered as transformative pedagogues, both inside and outside the classroom. Second, there are some whose names are associated with movements of political and cultural import that reach far beyond the college's walls, such as nationalism and modernity. Third, and most important, a remembered teacher is someone about whom there are anecdotes that get handed down generations and eventually make their way to us in writing. While there may be many teachers who are privately remembered by individual students, only some generate a trove of anecdotes that become part of institutional lore.

In an essay on the anecdote as a critical resource in Bengali history and public culture, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that a narrative that is based primarily on anecdotal evidence is different from historical biography. The latter are more exhaustive about the life of their chosen subjects while anecdotes are, by definition, fragmentary. Their fragmentary character allows anecdotes to travel between orality and writing.

The earliest successful and sustained venture in the promulgation of a Western-style, liberal arts education in colonial India that continued into the postcolonial period, the Hindu College—established in 1817 and later renamed in 1855 as the Presidency College—is the subject of this book. The institution made extraordinary contributions to both education and public life. We examine critically the ideas that shaped the institutional imagination of this enterprise, its historical development, the multifarious challenges it faced along the way, and the ways that teachers and students experienced and memorialized the institution. We map the traffic of ideas that led to Presidency College's flourishing and the interventions and experiments that contributed to its distinct image as a “center for excellence” but without the neoliberal associations with which the expression is loaded in modern-day academic parlance. We also analyze the ways in which the college became the preeminent birthplace ground of a modern middle class and a harbinger of secular values in colonial and postcolonial Indian modernity.

Histories of educational institutions in the erstwhile colonized parts of the world are inevitably caught up in concerns about the implications of colonial modernity for their academic vision, functioning, and agenda. If earlier histories from the 1960s to 1970s critically addressed decisions of the colonial state in India favoring Orientalist or Anglicist policies in education and their fallout on the colonized, recent work has focused closely on individual educational institutions where these debates were played out.

Introduction: Derivative Anxieties?

In the first decade of its establishment in 1817, the Hindu College, Calcutta, was seeing a steady growth in terms of both the number of students and the introduction of new courses. “A Drawing class was added in 1827,” the Presidency College Centenary Volume observes, “but a more significant development was the creation of a professorship of Law and Political Economy so that in a few years the college came to have two branches—the General Department and the Law Department.” Although the Centenary Volume mentions 1831 as the year in which the instruction in law and political economy started, the college might not have had a teaching position specifically for it before 1840. In October 1840, the General Committee of Public Instruction wrote a response to the Governor-General Auckland's minute on education. In the response, the General Committee acknowledged the necessity of lectures on jurisprudence, ethics, and political economy and asked for the provision of “the services of a Lecturer on the Principles of Jurisprudence and Political Economy” at the Hindu College. The letter further mentioned the plan to start the lectureship also at other institutions under the Committee's jurisdiction.

The decision to introduce a course on law and political economy was underpinned by deliberate reasoning.

In 1896, a small booklet titled the Descriptions with Plans of a Chemical Laboratory: Presidency College, designed by Alexander Pedler, professor of chemistry, and erected by the Bengal Public Works Department, was published by the Bengal Secretariat Press. About thirty-five pages in length, the booklet was composed of a brief introductory note followed by a series of eighteen plates of detailed design and floor plans of both the interior and the exterior structures of the new building.

Pedler outlined the significance of the publication in the following terms:

Appendix A.1 Hindu College Cash Book (1830), The Hindu/ Presidency College Archive

Moral Philosophy, Mental Philosophy, Reformism, Brahmo

On an undisclosed date in the 1880s, the gods came to College Square. There, under the impressive colonnade of the recently completed university building, Varuna informed Brahma, first among the gods, that the recent appointment of Prasanna Kumar Ray (1849–1932) to a professorship in “mental philosophy” (manobijnan śastra) inaugurated a new era in the history of higher education in Bengal. That the gods would descend from Kailaśa to Presidency to celebrate the academic achievements of mortals might appear eccentric, even idiosyncratic, but Durgacarana Ray's puranic novel Debagaṇera marttye āgamana (“The Gods’ Visit on Earth”) was registering a pervasive worldly concern: the enduring interest among the Bengali bhadralok in the “philosophy of mind.”

This chapter investigates how the fortunes of “mental philosophy” rose and fell in College Square. In the early nineteenth century, a set of distinctively Scottish arguments soldering together epistemological realism, neo-Baconian anti-scholasticism, and theories of moral intuition into a single tradition of “common sense” philosophy came to acquire a disciplinary life as an increasingly global subject—“mental philosophy.”Though bemoaned in Britain by “philosophical radicals” as a conservative project unable to make a case for moral change, the common-sense arguments of “mental philosophy” found an unforeseeably radical reception in Calcutta, where Henry Louis Viven Derozio (1809–31) turned to the Scottish idea of self-evident morality to mount an explosively original challenge to extant śastric norms.

As a contribution to a volume devoted to the history of one iconic educational institution, readers might well expect its object of analysis to be fairly clearly defined. Yet, as Michel Foucault reminds us, “concepts of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation present all historical analysis not only with questions of procedure, but with theoretical problems.”1 There are two kinds of discontinuities that I want to interrogate. First, the coherence and specificity of disciplinary backgrounds, rather than a general sense of belonging to the Presidency College as a whole. Did disciplinary affiliation, to let us say English literature or history or chemistry, remain confined to the object of analysis alone or did it contribute in some way a student's or teacher's more general social identity? Did it, for instance, in any way shape their political and social choices?

By raising this question, I also want to signal my distance from histories that invoke ahistorical and generalized categories such as “Science” or “Humanities.” Particularly in the case of “Science,” there is now enough scholarship that establishes that whatever might be the political utility of invoking the sign of science, a singular, unified notion of science as a category of historical analysis makes little sense.

P. C. Mahalanobis (1893–1972) taught physics at the Presidency College from 1915 to 1948. During that period he conducted statistical analysis of anthropometric measurements and data on flood, rainfall, crop production, rural indebtedness, the handloom weaving industry, and students’ intelligence. After independence, he emerged as a key figure within the scientific– technocratic apparatus of the developmental state. During that period he played a crucial role in the formulation of the Second Five Year Plan, the construction of the Hirakud dam, and the foundation of the statistical system of India. The physicist-turned-statistician was considered an authority on the writings of Rabindranath Tagore. He was the joint secretary of Visva-Bharati for a decade. This Mahalanobis is known to us. This chapter engages with a lesser-known Mahalanobis who, in the process of coming to terms with the administrative hurdles that he faced in his professional life, strategically assembled an idea of research that bound his academic ambitions with his nationalist aspirations, teaching with innovation, science with society and institutional interests with social concerns. Its larger objective is to examine, through the figure of Mahalanobis, what it meant to do original research in the late colonial context.