The Citizen of India as an Instrument of Empire

By Elizabeth

Sir William Lee-Warner wrote The Citizen of India in 1897 as a civics textbook for Indian schoolchildren. The text circulated from 1897 to 1907 and was established as “essential reading” in all government and state-aided schools during this time (Topdar 427). At first glance, The Citizen of India seems like a standard anthropological account of Colonial India. It provides readers with an overview of Indian history and government, catalogues the cultures and languages spoken across the subcontinent, and describes the effects of colonial rule on India including technological advancements such as the railroad. In the text’s introduction, Lee-Warner establishes that he meant the text to educate “future citizens the ABC of their rights and duties” (Lee-Warner vii). But a deeper examination of the textbook’s historical context reveals a more insidious purpose: to persuade students of the benefits of colonial society and, in turn, to make them more “loyal and useful” colonial subjects (Topdar 420). 

This purpose is contextualized by the rise of Indian nationalist movements and the emergence of what historian Sudipa Topdar describes as the “new politicized [Indian] child.” These children were essentially the logical result of the liberal, Western English education advocated by Thomas Macaulay in his “Minute on Indian Education” and legalized by the English Education Act of 1835. Although Anglicists such as Macaulay believed that teaching Indian schoolchildren English would interpellate them into British culture and create a more peaceful society, the result was almost the opposite. “It became clear that much of the ‘seditious’ behaviour among Indian students stemmed from their intellectual capacities to reinterpret those very textbooks meant to mould them into law-abiding British subject-citizens,” writes Topdar (431). These students’ literacy in English, combined with their beginning of nationalist movements of the time such as the Swadeshi movement, created a ripe environment for anti-Colonial sentiment. 

As discussed by Burton and Hofmeyr in this week’s reading, this textbook illustrates “the chaotically plural worlds of empire,” and it is evocative not only in its content but also in its purposes and the effects of its circulation (10). The Citizen of India is a highly politicized text that represents a shift in attitudes about the purposes of colonial education. Aware of the inevitable politicization of Indian schoolchildren, colonial administrators such as Lee-Warner aimed to politicize students in their favor. The textbooks attempt to prevent sedition against the British empire by persuading schoolchildren that it is a privilege to be a part of colonial society reveals the ideological and anthropological hegemony of empire. But the controversy surrounding the text and its ultimate removal from circulation ten years after its publication illustrate the power of nationalist counterculture in Colonial Indian society. 

Works Cited 

Lee-Warner, William. The Citizen of India. Macmillan, 1899, London.

Topdar, Sudipa. “Duties of a ‘Good Citizen’: Colonial Secondary School Textbook Policies in Late Nineteenth-Century India.” South Asian History and Culture, Volume 6, Issue 3, 17 Apr. 2015, https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2015.1030877

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