Suchergebnisse

1 Introduction: Gurus, Grades and the Globe: Khalsa College, Education and Colonial Modernity in South Asia -- 2 The Politics of Education: Socio-Religious Transformation, Politicised Sikhism and Limited Nationalism at Khalsa College, c. 1880-1947 -- 3 Conceiving 'Modern Sikhism': Religious Instruction, Scientific Religion and Sikh History at Khalsa College -- 4 Teaching Development: 'Scientific Agriculture' and 'Rural Reconstruction' at Khalsa College -- 5 Disciplining the Martial Sikh: Physical Education, Youth Organizations and Military at Khalsa College -- 6 Conclusion.

Abstract: The end of the First World War heralded a new age of internationalist and pacifist action. After initial hopes for peace and international justice, however, soon followed disillusionment about a post-war order that left little room for the aspirations of colonized people and those nations not amongst the winners of the new geopolitical order. The present article analyses interwar pacifism as a polycentric discourse, moving beyond earlier Anglo-American and European-centered approaches. It introduces the World Conference for International Peace through Religion , an initiative by the American Church Peace Union, focusing on the (inter)actions of its American, German, Indian, and Japanese members. The World Conference set out to tackle world peace from a perspective outside of formal politics and international relations in hopes that religion might succeed where politicians and secular activists had failed. In the end, however, the organization never achieved its ambitious goals due to internal contradictions, differing visions of peace and international (or transnational) justice, and structural problems like the persisting connections of its f(o)unders to the American Protestant missionary milieu.

The article looks at the planning, introduction and expansion of agricultural education, farming, dairying, co-operation and other related rural economy schemes at Khalsa College, Amritsar (KCA), the first and biggest Sikh higher educational institution in the colonial Punjab, between ca. 1915 and 1947. It examines a set of agricultural initiatives started in the second half of the 1910s as an early attempt at rural reconstruction, and analyses how they were debated among the contemporary paternalist Punjab administration as well as among advocates of 'rural reconstruction' across India. The article scrutinises in particular how the Khalsa College had to look for new ways to reinforce its claim of being a lighthouse institution for the dissemination of 'modern' and 'scientific' agricultural knowledge under the dyarchy system of the interwar years. Through a detailed reconstruction of the college's engagement with both a national and a transnational development discourse in the final decades of the colonial period, it is shown that 'agricultural science' was understood at the KCA as a universal tool for development. As it was not perceived as inherently 'Western', there was no need to 'vernacularise' it. Revealingly, the USA in particular became a popular destination and point of reference for higher studies in agriculture and rural economics. The college's various agricultural schemes were consistently legitimised by the well-entrenched orientalist narrative of the supposedly 'rural' and 'practical' character of the Sikh, the KCA and its ideas on rural development regularly shifted between imperial, nationalist and communal concerns. At the same time, however, its focus on the education of a class of scientifically trained rural specialists paralleled the state-led and expert-driven approaches shared by most nationalist enterprises and the colonial state.