Before the British, before the madrasas: a quieter argument about India's classroom origins

The conventional story of Indian education begins, for most schoolchildren, with the village pandit, the British grammar school, and the modern university. A column published by The Indian Express on 19 June 2026 argues, gently but firmly, that the conventional story leaves out the longest chapter. Writing in his regular "Art and Culture with Devdutt" feature, the mythologist and author Devdutt Pattanaik pushes back against the framing that India's organised learning traditions began with missionary schools or, alternatively, with the Mughal madrasa. The argument is not that either institution is invented — both existed — but that the standard public narrative treats centuries of temple-anchored scholarship, monastery-universities and guild-based knowledge transmission as if they were local colour rather than infrastructure.

The column's quiet thesis is that the popular imagination of Indian learning has been shaped by the categories the colonial census, and later the post-colonial textbook, used to describe it. Once "Hindu" and "Muslim" are the only institutional headings on offer, a vast and mostly secular continuum of teaching — Vedic pathshalas, Buddhist viharas, Jain maths, the long apprenticeship networks of artisans, merchants and courtesans — is forced to live inside one of those two boxes or disappear from the record entirely. Pattanaik's intervention is, in effect, a complaint about the available filing cabinet rather than a polemic against the documents themselves.

What the column actually claims

Pattanaik does not dispute that the British established modern universities in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras in 1857, or that missionary schools and madrasas long predated that moment. His claim is narrower and more interesting. The dominant public story treats these as the two authentic lineages of formal Indian education and treats everything else — the gurukul, the temple school, the Buddhist monastery-university, the artisan guild — as informal, religious, or both. That framing, he writes, flatters the colonial-era and the early modern, and leaves pre-medieval India without a usable educational history.

The practical consequence is that when a present-day Indian politician or commentator wants to invoke a classical past, the only legitimate material on the shelf is religious. The result is a public conversation in which every debate about ancient Indian knowledge collapses into a sectarian argument about whose scripture counts. The plural reality — that learning was carried in multiple institutional containers, often in parallel, and often with substantial cross-pollination — is crowded out.

The counter-read

There is a legitimate counter-position, and it deserves air. The British and the early post-colonial educational apparatus genuinely did formalise schooling in ways that earlier institutions largely did not. The 1857 universities were the first to award degrees in the modern sense; the district-level inspectorate was a Victorian innovation; the textbook industry that grew up around them was a creature of print capitalism. To say that the gurukul and the vihara were educational institutions in the full sense is not quite the same as saying they were universities. Some scholars of Indian intellectual history would go further and argue that the categories "university" and "school" themselves are colonial imports, retroactively applied to institutions that operated on different assumptions about what counted as a graduate.

A second counter-read, often heard in academic rather than popular venues, is that the temple-and-monastery story has itself been polished into a nationalist prop. The ruins of sites associated with classical Buddhist learning have, in recent years, been re-narrated by state-linked heritage projects in ways that serve a present-day political mood more than they serve historical method. If the old colonial framing flattened Indian learning, the new framing risks doing the same in reverse — selecting for grandeur and selecting out the genuinely ordinary, everyday, small-scale transmission of craft and letter that made up most of the country's pedagogical life.

A structural point, in plain terms

What the column is really after is a less editorialised archive. The argument is not that pre-colonial Indian learning was better, purer, or more moral than what followed. It is that the available public story of how Indians learned things — from arithmetic to astronomy to grammar to medicine to music — has been filtered through the institutional categories of two different empires, the Mughal and the British, neither of which had much interest in giving the older institutions their due. Each wave of rulers left behind a vocabulary for describing learning; the next wave used that vocabulary, and the result is that the present-day conversation is forced to argue inside boxes built in the 1830s.

The point generalises. The same pattern shows up wherever modern nation-states inherit their descriptive apparatus from a colonial predecessor: the categories look objective, but they are the residue of a previous administration's administrative needs. The new state is then asked to have a debate about its own past using a vocabulary designed to manage that past for someone else.

Stakes for the present

The contemporary stakes are concrete. Indian classrooms are in the middle of a long-running argument about curriculum, language of instruction, and the role of religious education. A historiography that recognises the country's pre-colonial pedagogical inheritance as institutional rather than merely devotional gives reformers a wider set of tools to work with — and gives populists a smaller target. The more textured the past, the harder it is to monopolise.

What remains genuinely contested is methodological. The Indian Express column is, at heart, an essay in public pedagogy rather than a research paper. It does not offer a quantitative estimate of how many Indians were schooled in which kind of institution at which period, because the surviving record does not support such an estimate. The evidence base for pre-colonial Indian literacy rates, enrolment in temple schools, or the geographic spread of Buddhist viharas is partial, philological, and still being revised. Anyone using the past to score present-day political points will find plenty of room to do so — and the responsible response from journalism is to keep the categories honest rather than to crown a winner.

Desk note: Monexus treats Pattanaik's column as a prompt for a wider editorial conversation about how the pre-colonial Indian archive is publicly described. The piece is filed on the culture desk because the intervention is historiographical; the politics it brushes against will be handled on the Asia desk in a separate, more narrowly sourced report.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_India