Abstract
Learning and education in Mughal India has inspired divergent views
and conflicting assessments. The British historians during the colonial period
generally portrayed it in negative colours accusing the Mughals for neglecting
mass-scale education, ignoring scientific and technological advancements and
following traditional system of rote learning which gradually became out-dated
and irrelevant. This criminal negligence, according to them, became the major
cause of decline of the Empire and loss of political power. A comparison with the
development of knowledge in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is
often made to further the argument. This colonial estimation has become a
dominant theme in modern academic discourse. The present paper challenges this
dominant narrative and argues that it needs to be seriously revised in the light of
the new evidence. It emphasises that the colonial viewpoint fails to note two
important points: firstly, the colonial perceptions about literary practices in
Mughal India were inspired by ethnocentric bias and this research paper by
placing this perception in the conceptual framework of Orientalist discourse,
reveals that this viewpoint was partisan, subjective and Euro-centric. Secondly,
education and learning is a cultural process which cannot be divorced from its
social context. If during the Mughal rule in India, the Western world was
pulsating with a new vigour of philosophical and scientific ideas, it was not
relevant to Indian context as the socio-cultural and epistemological basis on
which these ideas developed was entirely different from that of Mughal India.
Faraz Anjum. (2018) Education and Learning in Mughal India: A Critical Study of Colonial Perceptions, Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, Volume 55, Issue 1.
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