Historicizing the Politics of Education: A Study of Colonial Factory Schools in Bombay Textile Mills

palak vashist, PhD

This study aims to analyze the effects of schooling on child labor employed in the Textile Mills of Bombay in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century India. It was a significant period as it was the first time the discussions over the compulsory education for child laborers were set in place. With the introduction of the First Factory Act in 1881, the colonial state started criticizing India’s existing school structures and introduced the factory and municipal schools. The Factory Act of 1881 is key to understanding the development of factory schools. This was the first Factory Act to be introduced in India, which included a separate category of child labor. This study argues that the humanitarian concerns portrayed by the colonial state towards children’s education and its relationship with the betterment of child labor were false. There was much broader politics of state hidden behind the factory schools. Moreover, the new factory and municipal schools’ condition was so bad that it had been described as ‘leisure rooms’ in the colonial records. Therefore, the discussion on the aspect of education and schooling in the mills is vital to explore. It provides a context to explore the politics of schooling through a historical lens. This study would explore the question of the importance of education of the factory laborers and much broader debates in colonial records on the condition of schooling, curriculum, understaffed schools, management of the factory schools, and politics of time and work schedule within the factory setup.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 208. Politics of Schooling