Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Building an Indian Educational System and Subsidies for Samaj Schools

Large-scale British involvement in Indian education began in 1813, and over the next century the shape of that education had changed enormously, opening up unprecedented opportunities for movements like the Arya Samaj. "In the early 1800's," Nurullah and Naik argue,

...the indigenous system of education held the field, but...by the end of the 1800's this system had disappeared almost completely...and a new system of education, which aimed at the spread of Western knowledge through the medium of the English language, was firmly established in its place.¹²

This may be an overstatement; Nita Kumar's recent work on colonial Banares, for example, finds that certain types of education continued almost unchanged,¹³ and evidence from other areas suggests that more traditional forms of education were not swept away, but only significantly restructured.¹⁴ What is indisputable, however, is that after 1854, British subsidies were widely distributed to private Indian schools and were central to the replacement of more traditional forms of education with Western-style ones.

British education policy in India began in 1813 when the British parliament took the opportunity provided by the East India Company's charter renewal that year to authorize the company to spend 100,000 rupees a year on education and order it to provide educational facilities to prepare Indians for [End Page 43] public service. For the next forty years the company's educational policy was based on what Mukerji termed "the filtration theory"—that education should be directed at elites who would pass their learning on to the masses. By the time of the company's charter renewal in 1853, however, only two of the five provinces under British control had established a system of Western-style elementary education, and less than one percent of company revenue was being directed to government schools. ¹⁵ As a result, in 1854 Wood's Despatch was issued, stating the government's intent to focus on providing education from the bottom up through "a properly articulated scheme of education, from the primary school to the university." The Despatch stipulated that nonstate bodies—not the government—were to be the primary agents of educational opportunity and that government grants-in-aid would be distributed accordingly.¹⁶

At this point the key nonstate actors involved in education were Western missionaries, but the onus of private educational provision had already begun to shift to Indians. This trend was further supported by the 1882 Hunter Commission, which reaffirmed the government's focus on private-sector provision of primary education. Of particular importance to groups like the Arya Samaj was the Commission's assertion that it did not consider missionaries to be truly "private sector" entities and that it aimed to create an education system based primarily on (government-subsidized) schools run by Indians.¹⁷ In fact, in the two decades after the Hunter Commission, Indians became "the key agency for spreading Western education."¹⁸ In provinces like the Samaj's Punjab government subsidies were particularly central in shifting the responsibility for the provision of Western-style education from missionaries to Indians: in 1881, one year before the Hunter Commission, only two of the province's 120 private, English-language secondary schools were run by Indians.¹⁹

The availability of subsidies played a varied but central role in the maintenance of the DAV educational network. The question of how much financing various DAV schools obtained from government sources is a sensitive one in Arya Samaj hagiography. The idea that the DAV College, the flagship of the DAV system, was built solely on the contributions of the Hindu public is reiterated time and again in Arya publications as a way of demonstrating the college's centrality in the community. It is also used as a way of differentiating the college from other communal institutions whose willingness to accept government aid, it is implied, compromised their nationalist credentials in some way. At a 1914 Founder's Day celebration in London, Arya educational leader Lala Lajpat Rai's recounting of the founding of the college included reference to an "unwritten law" of the institution that created what he called a "moral obligation" not to seek government aid,²⁰ and in 1920 he recalled that the original prospectus of the college was marked by "an insistence that [its] scheme of national education be absolutely independent of Government patronage and Government help."²¹ The Samaj's most prominent scholarly chroniclers have also argued that not only the flagship DAV College founded in 1886, but also the DAV schools that followed were entirely self-financed. Kenneth Jones, for example, traces the innovative methods that the Samaj developed to fund schools and other projects, including rag and atta funds in which Aryas collected rags and handfuls of flour from housewives.²²

While Samaj fundraising and donations from wealthy Hindu businessmen were important in keeping the schools afloat, the image of an extensive DAV schools movement funded entirely by the Hindu community is belied by evidence in the files of the DAV College Trust and Management Society. These files make clear that from at least the 1920s, British subsidies were essential to the functioning of many DAV schools and colleges. By way of example, the DAV Ayurvedic College received grants from the Lahore Municipal Committee and the Punjab Government for practical training in Ayurvedic medicine.²³ The DAV College and high schools in Rawalpindi, the DAV College in Srinagar (Kashmir), and the DAV High School in Batala were all heavy recipients of subsidy funding. In the early 1940s government funds made up half the income of the Dayanand Primary Education Board, which oversaw approximately twenty primary schools.²⁴ The centrality of subsidy payments is suggested by the fact that when payments came late to a particular school, that school's file at the Trust and Management Company is often filled with urgent requests that the company transfer emergency funds to tide the school over until the grant arrived. When its government grant was delayed, one high school wrote requesting emergency loans from the Managing Committee in order to be able to meet its payroll.²⁵ While the lack of data prior to the 1920s makes it impossible to assess whether, or to what extent, DAV educational institutions were subsidized in an earlier period, the extant evidence clearly demonstrates the centrality of colonial state subsidies for Samaj schools in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s—the peak decades of communal conflict in pre-independence north India.

Advancing Hindu Nationalism in Arya Samaj Schools

The opening of the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic (DAV) High School in Lahore in 1886 signaled the beginning of the educational efforts of the Arya Samaj, founded eleven years earlier in 1875. The high school, which enrolled 550 students in its first month of operation, ²⁶ offered classes from the first grade through the college entrance level. The first DAV College was opened in 1889, and over the next several decades local Samaj chapters in urban Lahore as well as in the smaller and poorer villages in Punjab started their own schools. Jones notes that "education became one of the major preoccupations of the Aryas. During the 1890s [they] would build an educational system throughout the entire province, from the primary grades through college,"²⁷ a system which spread beyond Punjab to the United Provinces and other parts of North India including Kashmir.

The introduction of Western-style education into colonial settings often laid the groundwork for long-term competition and conflict among various ethnic and religious groups as preferential access to education paved the way for particular groups to dominate the state bureaucracy for generations to come. In a North India increasingly characterized by competition and conflict between Hindus and Muslims, success in English-language higher education meant more than just prosperity for individual students. It was also a central indicator of a community's status in the battle for coveted bureaucratic posts, and by extension a barometer of the status of the community as a whole. In the words of a memorial from United Provinces Muslim activists to the viceroy,

...the political importance of a community to a considerable extent gains strength or suffers detriment according [End Page 44] to the position that the members of that community occupy in the service of the State. If, as is unfortunately the case with the Mohammedans, (members of a community) are not adequately represented (in state service), they lose in the prestige and influence which are justly their due.²⁸

Under the Moghul Empire, Muslims had occupied the lion's share of bureaucratic positions, but under the British, Hindus were quickly moving ahead. The growing gap between Hindu and Muslim representation in the north Indian bureaucracy was particularly pronounced in Punjab, the Samaj's home base. While Hindus in Punjab constituted a minority largely excluded from political power by the larger Muslim and Sikh populations, they obtained eighty percent of the "superior" government appointments in the province.²⁹ A key reason for growing Hindu dominance in the bureaucracy in general was the disproportionately high rates at which Hindu children were enrolled in English-language schools, a phenomenon clearly at play in Punjab.³⁰ Fifteen years before the opening of the first DAV school in Punjab, there were more than twice as many Hindu than Muslim children in the province's middle schools and almost three times more Hindus than Muslims in higher education.³¹

In an environment of increasingly intense competition for bureaucratic posts, the relative educational levels of each religious community were among the most sensitive barometers of the community's larger position in society. In such a climate, schools—particularly those schools founded solely or primarily for members of a particular religious community—became key institutional bases for communal mobilization. The desire to remedy what he saw as the educationally "backward" condition of north Indian Muslims led Sayyid Ahmad Khan to found the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh, known simply as Aligarh, in the United Provinces in 1875. Conversely, a key purpose of the DAV schools and colleges was to ensure continuing high levels of education, and particularly high levels of bureaucratic employment, for the Hindu community, a goal made clear by the domination of the curriculum by subjects necessary for bureaucratic employment such as English, math, geography, and physical science. ³² By 1888 the DAV school had achieved a coveted sign of success in this bureaucratic competition, producing more students successful in the entrance exams of Calcutta University than any other school in Punjab.³³ The Samaj was known for the large percentage of its members who were government bureaucrats; as Kenneth Jones notes, Aryas "recognized and alternately praised or denigrated the fact that their members were mostly clerks, 'pen pushers,' who could only contribute small amounts,"³⁴ and the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab noted in 1897 that "there are many servants of Government in [the Arya Samaj's] ranks."³⁵

Sayyid Ahmad Khan's original intent in creating Aligarh was to spread English-language learning among his fellow Muslims, and the founding principle of the DAV schools was initially to spread "secular" learning and Hindu religious reform among Hindus. But in a climate of increasing conflict between Hindus and Muslims Aligarh and the DAV schools, as educational institutions catering primarily to students of a particular religious community in a period in which rates of education and bureaucratic employment were key markers of communal competition, would have become high-profile manifestations of that conflict even if they had shown no overt communal bias in their curricular and extracurricular activities. This framework of competition was precisely the context in which Aryas viewed the foundation of Aligarh, the construction of which was directly cited by the founders of the DAV College and schools as an argument to convince Hindus that creating such Hindu schools was possible.³⁶ Lala Lajpat Rai, one of the most influential leaders of the DAV College Movement, wrote in 1920:

Aligarh was a symbol of the new Muslim nationalism...educational in function, but political in scope and effect. The Arya Samaj, representing the new nationalism of the Hindus, followed suit, and the Dayananda Anglo-Vedic College....was the fruit of its efforts. Each institution created an atmosphere of its own—national to a certain extent, so far as the cult of love of country was concerned, but otherwise openly sectarian.³⁷

Each institution—Aligarh for Muslim nationalists, and the DAV schools and colleges for Aryas—came to be understood in precisely this way—as markers of communal identity, which served to galvanize each community around imaginings of their nation based solely on religion. Francis Robinson, for example, has demonstrated that a substantial proportion of Muslim League leaders were students or trustees of Aligarh.³⁸ The DAV colleges and schools similarly became institutional representations of and mobilizers for the larger Samaj movement. Jones, for example, describes Arya public events to raise money for the schools as becoming "a regular part of Punjabi Hindu life, not only provid[ing] funds for Arya schools but a social forum for the educated elite."³⁹ Fundraising, first done solely within the Punjab, soon traveled outside it, with Aryas traveling to the northwestern Provinces, Sind, and Rajasthan to gather funds on the schools' behalf,⁴⁰ increasing the visibility of the Samaj and its message in the process. In this way, the college and the schools were inextricably tied to the Arya movement as a whole and played a fundamental role in its efforts to mobilize north Indian Hindus around Hindu nationalist causes. DAV College students played prominent roles in anti-British actions in particular, and in the first decade of the 1900s, when unrest led the British to expel several Samaj leaders from the Punjab, these students were frequently cited by the British as a danger to their rule.

By virtue of their high-profile role in helping to maintain the disproportionately high rates of education and bureaucratic employment of Hindus, as well as by their existence as markers of the Samaj's presence and institutional bases for its activities, the DAV schools and colleges were central representations of Arya Samaj ideology. The schools also served movement goals more directly through their curricula. As was previously noted, much of the curriculum was similar to that of government and other schools, focusing on subjects such as math, geography, and English. Unlike many of their counterparts, however, Arya Samaj schools also taught Hindi, as part and parcel of the larger Hindu nationalist cause of making Hindi the national language of India. The same standard spoken language of north India during the colonial period was variously referred to as Urdu, Hindi, and Hindustani.⁴¹ The Mughals had written Urdu in the Persian rather than the indigenous Devanagari script, and while both Muslims and Hindus [End Page 45] used the Persian script, Hindi in Devanagari became identified over time primarily with Hindus. The fact that Urdu contained many words of Persian and Arabic origin was seized on by Hindu nationalists beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century to argue that the Muslim presence in North India was alien, a remnant of a Muslim invasion of "Hindu" India, and that India's unalterably Hindu nature should be recognized by making Hindi in Devanagari script India's official language. The dominant nationalist movement in colonial India, the Congress Party, vehemently resisted what it saw as an intentionally exclusionary Hindu campaign bound to alienate Muslims at precisely the time that Congress sought to convince them not to cast their lot with a future Pakistan. As Gandhi argued before Congress voted on the official language, "during the crisis the Congress must stand firm like a rock. It dare not give way on the question of the lingua franca for India. It cannot be Persianized Urdu or Sanskritized Hindi. It must be a beautiful blend of the two simple forms written in either script."⁴²

In stark opposition to the Congress, the Arya Samaj strongly supported the Hindi effort. Shortly before the Samaj's founding in 1875, founder Dayanand Saraswati switched from speaking Sanskrit in public audiences to Hindi,despite a lack of fluency so severe that"hundreds of words and even sentences still came out in Sanskrit."⁴³ Despite this difficulty he subsequently lectured entirely in Hindi, even in his native Gujarat where he could have much more easily spoken Gujarati.⁴⁴ He also exhorted Aryas to use Hindi, resulting in "volumes of ...letters [to Dayanand which] show how hard they tried...letters written by Punjabis, Marathas, and Gujaratis [in] a strange mixture of Hindi and their own vernacular."⁴⁵ While other Hindu groups also advocated this cause, the Arya Samaj played a particularly central role: Ayesha Jalal notes that the (English-language) Arya Samaj newspaper the Tribune was one of two newspapers which "formed the backbone of the Hindi agitation in the Punjab,"⁴⁶ while census reports from 1911 and 1931 single out Aryas as key leaders of campaigns to encourage Hindus to list their language as "Hindi" in the census.⁴⁷ Given the centrality of Hindi to the Samaj cause, it is not surprising, then, to find that the DAV schools taught Hindi even as this represented a departure from prevailing educational trends in the area. In 1837 the British replaced Persian with English as the official language of administration, and they subsequently chose particular vernaculars to serve as the language of lower-level administration in each province. In the United Provinces and Punjab, the two provinces in which the Samaj was most active, the British made Urdu the official language of the lower levels of administration, with the result that it soon became the language of instruction in the lower levels of most government schools. Many DAV schools, however, bucked this trend. Lala Hans Raj, the first principal of the original DAV school, argued that the three things necessary for the Hindu community to progress were that its members share a common origin, a common language, and a common religion.⁴⁸ Although as late as 1901, there were more Hindus in the Punjab literate in Urdu than in Hindi, ⁴⁹ Hindi was taught in many Samaj schools while Urdu was made an optional language.

The creation of a DAV school and college network, which began with a single college in 1886 and expanded to 179 schools in India and Burma by 1942, would not have been possible without the creation in colonial India of a "subcontracted" educational system, in which private schools willing to meet government education regulations received subsidies essential to their maintenance. To the extent that DAV schools were an important part of the overall Arya Samaj cause of promoting Hindu nationalism in north India, British education subsidies were central to the dissemination of this particular imagining of the Indian nation. A very similar process occurred in Indonesia, where the Dutch created an educational system similarly reliant on "subcontracting," placing substantial educational resources at the disposal of a movement which placed reformist Islam at the center of its imaginings of the Indonesian nation.

Building an Indonesian Educational System and Subsidies for Muhammadiya Schools

The Dutch established their first key stronghold in Indonesia by establishing their control over Java in the 1830 Java War. Dutch education policy from that time forward would be dictated by two interrelated considerations—the need to inexpensively produce civil servants for the continually expanding bureaucracy, and the periodic rise to power in Holland of liberal governments determined to increase funding for social services to Indonesians. Java's economy was quickly restructured to maximize its profitability through the implementation of the cultuurstelsel system, which instituted compulsory cultivation of export crops sold to the state at fixed prices. Cultuurstelsel made Indonesia one of the most profitable colonies in the history of imperialism, generatinga remarkable thirty-one percent of Holland's aggregate government revenue between 1851-1860.⁵⁰ Managing this system necessitated the creation of a local bureaucracy, and royal decrees in 1848 and 1851 called for the "provision in the East-Indies budget for a sum of fls. 25,000 per year for establishing schools among the Javanese, chiefly intended for training native civil servants."⁵¹ By the 1870s a continuing need for local bureaucrats had prompted the repeal of restrictions excluding Javanese from high-ranking posts, and in the Netherlands Liberal governments determined to make state-funded education more accessible captured power. The Fundamental Education Decrees and the General Regulations issued in 1871 and 1872 signaled the government's intent to bind the heretofore independent Western schools scattered across Java into an educational system by setting a standardized curriculum, developing a dramatically expanded teacher training program, and setting strict regulations on the ages of students at various levels of the educational process.

The 1871-1872 regulations also pioneered the extension of Dutch subsidies to private schools run in accordance with government regulations. Private educational providers initially took the government up on its offer in large numbers, with the number of schools receiving government funding more than doubling between 1873 and 1883 while the number of children educated in them almost tripled.⁵² However, the Regulations' stipulation of "religious neutrality," which forbade subsidized schools from teaching religion in any form, severely restricted the number of private schools that could obtain subsidies. As subsidy applications tailed off, the government [End Page 46] commissioned a study of education policy in India and Sri Lanka to ascertain where it had gone wrong. The study singled out missionary schools in these colonies for special praise,⁵³ and when the Dutch Protestant party won the 1888 Netherlands elections, the policy of "religious neutrality" was ended.⁵⁴ This policy change definitively shifted the primary burden of educational provision from schools run directly by the state to those managed by missionaries. In 1871, before mission schools became eligible for government subsidies, the government directly educated the overwhelming majority of those receiving Western-style education in Java, with 4,850 students in regency schools, 3,100 students in district or community schools, and only 350 students in mission schools. By 1898, a decade after subsidies were made available to religious schools, mission schools enrolled 57,000 students to the government's 22,400.⁵⁵

Once the principle of extending educational subsidies to religious groups had been established, all that remained was for the Dutch to increase the subsidy policy's scope. This was achieved in the early decades of the twentieth century with the implementation of the Ethical Policy introduced in 1901. Increasing exposés of the suffering of the Javanese as a result of cultuurstelsel and other Dutch practices had created a sense of guilt that the queen attempted to allay by announcing a "moral mission" to uplift Indonesians by creating more schools, building transportation and infrastructure, and increasing access to health care.⁵⁶ This expansion of services—Dutch spending on health care alone grew by a factor of almost ten between 1900 and 1930⁵⁷ —led to significant growth in the size of the education system in Indonesia, with the 265,940 students in private and government schools across the archipelago in 1900 expanding to 1.7 million by 1930-1931.⁵⁸ Subsidies to privately-run schools skyrocketed, with subventions of missionary schools alone increasing 300 percent between 1909-1912.⁵⁹

While Muhammadiya was determined from its earliest days to work for Islamist reform through its schools, its ability to disseminate its message on a large scale depended substantially on its ability to obtain government subsidies. While the movement seems to have faced some initial difficulty in obtaining subsidies due to early problems in meeting government educational standards, by the early 1920's at the latest its schools regularly received significant government aid, and that aid grew substantially in absolute terms throughout Dutch rule. Muhammadiya's 1923 annual report listed the movement's total revenues from all sources that year as 69,356 guilders, 6,461 of which came from government subsidy.⁶⁰ By 1929-30, the government subsidy had increased to 83,251 guilders—more than the entire budget of the movement from all sources only six years earlier—in addition to 6,290 guilders from the sultan of Jogjakarta. While precise calculations are not possible due to the unavailability of the movement's total budget for 1929-1930, if we assume that it was no larger than Muhammadiya's 1932 total budget of 579,354 guilders, then it appears that subsidies accounted for about fifteen percent of its total income in this period.⁶¹ Because this is fifteen percent of the budget of the movement as a whole, which sponsored many noneducational activities in addition to the schools, this subsidy may well have covered substantially more than fifteen percent of the budget of the schools themselves.

Muhammadiya Schools and the Struggle for Religious Reform

Although the overwhelming majority of the archipelago had converted to Islam by the end of the sixteenth century, in the eyes of Muhammadiya most Indonesian Muslims were far from the correct practice of their faith. Muhammadiya's assessment of the gap between true Islam and adat was almost identical to that of C. Snouck Hurgronje, the primary Dutch colonial expert on Islam, who argued that "the great majority [of Indonesian Muslims] pursue their lives in their half-pagan and wholly superstitious thoughts and practices, only imperfectly clad in a few phrases and other outward ....signs of Mohammedanism."⁶² Muhammadiya believed that un-Islamic adat was practiced because Muslims, unable to consult the Quran themselves because they did not know Arabic, relied on the incorrect edicts of teachers in Islamic schools, or pesantren, to determine proper Islamic behavior. Altering this behavior was first and foremost an educational endeavor, so it is no surprise that the movement's founding statute stipulated "establish[ing] and maintain[ing] good support of educational institutions, where besides common [secular] subjects the principles of Muslim religious teachings would also be given."⁶³

Since direct consultation of the Quran and hadith in the original Arabic were assumed to clearly demonstrate the invalidity of most adat, a key purpose of Muhammadiya schools was extended teaching of Arabic. In the Sumatran highlands of Takengen, for example, pesantren students learned to recite Arabic passages but otherwise studied about Islam entirely in Malay. Students in Muhammadiya schools opened in Takengen in the 1930s studied Arabic grammar and then Islamic topics in Arabic, and reports from the period note students reading the texts themselves and being encouraged to question prevailing interpretations of them.⁶⁴ Facility in Arabic was important not only because it allowed consultation of sacred texts, but it also permitted students to read Arabic texts from the Middle East. Muhammadiya schools in the Sumatran highlands, for example, ordered at least some of their books from Cairo,⁶⁵ which familiarized students with the Muslim reform movement outside Southeast Asia. Other Islamic modernist schools in Indonesia taught Arabic and used Middle Eastern texts as well, but Muhammadiya's extensive network of Western-style schools throughout much of the archipelago dwarfed that of any other privately organized Muslim initiative, and government subsidies were an important part of its ability to do so.

As the example of the Middle Eastern Arabic texts intimates, Muhammadiya's reform project was not only a struggle for the correct practice of Islam, but also a campaign for an Indonesian national identity that prioritized its Islamic nature at the expense of other religious and cultural traditions. In schools run directly by the Dutch, the history of the archipelago was noticeable by its absence; late nineteenth-century government educational reports note these schools "did not contain a single reference to the teaching of history."⁶⁶ While almost all Indonesian-run schools, in keeping with the archipelago's emerging nationalist identity, taught Indonesian history, the battle over whose history, understood in what manner, mattered immensely for the direction Indonesian nationalism would take. In 1925 Muhammadiya aroused sustained protest over the Dutch publication of a Javanese folk history entitled Serat Dermagandul, which praised one of the [End Page 47] Hinduized empires that had ruled Java before Islam's arrival there. This history earned the movement's wrath by arguing that the coming of Islam had rendered the Javanese half-hearted and suggesting that the path to Javanese renewal was through the resuscitation of the old Hindu Javanism. In sharp contrast, national history as taught in Muhammadiya schools presented Indonesia as part of a larger Muslim (modernist) world the history of which was unintelligible outside of a larger narrative of the rise and relative decline of Islam over the centuries. As in the case of the Javanese folk history, Muhammadiya's reading of the past contained a clear prescription for the future: Indonesia's prosperity was inextricably bound up with the practice of true Islam. In its history curriculum "the glory and perfection of Islam's early period were emphasized and contrasted to the regressions in the subsequent periods of Muslim world history, including that of Indonesia. The upshot of casting Islamic history in that perspective was to hold Muslims themselves responsible for the regression and degenerations, urging Muslims to strive to restore the greatness of Islam in the modern world."⁶⁷

Conclusion

The stories of the DAV and Muhammadiya school systems and their role in spreading religious imaginings of the Indian and Indonesian nations do not fit into the prevailing scholarly understandings of how education fosters nationalism in colonial contexts. DAV and Muhammadiya schools were part of state school systems in the sense that they followed state regulations and received state subsidies; they also, like Anderson's colonial educational systems, produced large numbers of future colonial bureaucrats. But while Anderson suggests that education at the higher rungs of the colonial education system facilitated the emergence of wider imaginings of the national community by acquainting students from across the colony, DAV and Muhammadiya schools represented and inculcated much narrower, more exclusive imaginings of the community, in which the cultures and experiences of minority religious communities were systematically deprivileged in the national narrative. Because DAV and Muhammadiya schools educated much wider swaths of the population—measured both in absolute numbers of students and in those students' middle class origins--than the upper rungs of colonial education described by Anderson, these religious schools arguably had a much deeper influence on emerging national identities.

If the DAV and Muhammadiya schools do not fit prevailing understandings of colonial school systems, they are equally distant from narratives of anticolonial nationalism produced by schools rooted firmly in the private sector. India and Indonesia were certainly not the only colonies in which locals strove to build their own schools, either to compensate for colonial neglect or to provide more "culturally appropriate" education than was presumed to be the fare in colonial schools. While these efforts were often successful, local self-help efforts were severely constrained by the limited geographic reach and financial resources of the groups that mounted them. The most that these efforts generally accomplished was the creation of a myriad of schools unconnected to one another and set adrift in a sea of institutions providing more traditional forms of education. Operation on such a limited scale, however, was not conducive to the production and dissemination of a new vision of the nation among significant numbers of the colony's youth. The example of the fate of the schools run by another religious nationalist group—the Association of the Ulama in Algeria—is instructive here. Fearful that French schools would corrupt Muslim children, conservative Muslims began founding their own Islamic schools in Algeria in the 1930s. Severely limited by a lack of funds, most of these schools had only one or two classes and very few qualified teachers. When the French developed legislation in 1938 making it more difficult for such schools to comply with colonial educational law, several of them were closed. It was not until the aftermath of World War II that the schools finally overcame some of their earlier difficulties and began to approximate a school system, establishing in 1947 a "uniform curriculum, a contract to bind local founding committees, and an obligatory oath of fidelity for teachers,"⁶⁸ and later setting up a higher commission that set hours of study and curricula.⁶⁹ As late as 1956 there seem to have been only forty-eight schools affiliated with the association, and because the French began to close them down in 1954, the schools only existed as a system with a relatively unified curricula and goals for less than a decade. When the brief and faltering existence of the Association schools is compared to the three decades of Muhammadiya school activity under the Dutch, represented by over 800 schools by the end of the Dutch period and the five decades of DAV school activity in north India, the severe limitations on advancing religious nationalist imaginings of the community through schools run exclusively by private groups become clear.

In analyzing the ways in which colonial education facilitates the spread of nationalism, then, more detailed scrutiny of the "political economy" of these school systems is essential. Discussions of school systems in advanced capitalist and colonial contexts alike rarely dwell on the economics of school building and maintenance, but the type of nationalisms that these systems produce are profoundly affected by them. Gellner's argument that the mass school systems that are the hallmark of modern capitalist societies inculcate students in versions of nationalism defined by the state is true, but it is true in large part because modern capitalist states are able and willing to fund their own school systems and thus to assert more control over their content. Colonial states, which derived much less benefit from their educational investment in human capital and were under strict orders not to unduly deplete the imperial treasury, faced a very different set of incentives which made them much more likely to subcontract educational provision to private parties which could then significantly influence the character of the nationalism being taught. Similarly, the case of the DAV and Muhammadiya schools reminds us of something that research on colonialism has already taught us—that much of what appears to be resistance by local groups to the colonial state is, in fact, inseparable from that state and unattainable without using its resources.