Education for ‘Uplift’: Christian Agricultural Colleges in India

Abstract

I began this book by proposing that there are a number of gaps in the scholarly as well as popular narratives about religion and secularism in modern India, gaps which have become so entrenched that nobody in the recent furore over St Stephen’s and its ‘Christianization’ appeared to notice any irony in the very fact that demands of rigorously secular policy could be comprehensibly made with regard to an institution which started off, at least officially, as an instrument of Christian evangelization. With due respect to the present Principal of St Stephen’s, Revd Valson Thampu, one of the principal architects of the recent college policy, such widely held expectations cannot be explained purely in terms of majoritarian elitist hypocrisy, although convenient amnesia is of course part of the politics of creating any tradition, including secularist traditions. What is interesting to me, in the context of the present study, is the process by which certain stories come to be told about certain institutions, stories noticeably different from those told by those who created such institutions in the first place. In connection with St Stephen’s College, we have seen how such narrative transformations were intimately connected to internal policy changes within a Christian missionary-created college which morphed to fit the expectations of a new nation, and how, in so far as St Stephen’s is still an evolving institution, there continue to be conflicting narratives about its past and future.