The British “essentialist” view of knowledge of the nineteenth century emphasized the individual, scientific, universal, and moral aims of education ahead of the social and cultural. This, combined with the colonial construction of Indian society, designed to preserve the ideological lead of the Empire post-1857,¹ helped shape the official nineteenth-century school curriculum. The rejection of nationalist Gopal Krishna Gokhale’s Bill (1911) to make primary education free and compulsory by the colonial administration and English-educated and often upper-caste elite further helped sustain a curriculum that focused on colonial objectives. Holmes and McLean (1989, 151) argues that despite tensions between the colonial view of education and the nationalist postcolonial aims of education, British essentialism grew unassailable roots in India partly because “colonial values coincided with those of indigenous traditions.”

The rejection of indigenous knowledge and the sociocultural context in shaping curriculum in the diverse subcontinental landscape of India created a deep conflict between education and culture (Kumar 2005). This is still in contest in contemporary South Asia. Thus “school-based knowledge became isolated from the everyday reality and cultural milieu of the child.”² This isolation characterizes the bulk of educational practice across India even today and lies at the root of the country’s poor performance in universalizing critical education, well over half a century after the close of one of the largest mass emancipation movements that led to India’s independence in 1947.

From the mid-nineteenth century colonial education came to be associated with an urban elite, severed from the culture and economic realities of the rural masses. In 1901, Rabindranath Tagore founded Shantiniketan³as a concrete response to his fervent critique of colonial education. In his view, the British system was inadequate as it failed to resonate with the people of India. His aim was to create a learning environment inspired by nature and a curriculum that was responsive to the culture of the people. Tagore was convinced of the goals of modern education but was equally convinced that these be achieved through the language and culture of the people. Tagore’s views on education influenced the articulation of nationalist ideas on education, but were not accepted by many political leaders of the Swadeshi⁴ movement.

Gandhi’s “Nai Talim”⁵ was conceived as a national system of education—an alternative to colonial education as part of the nationalist struggle for freedom. It was adopted by many states in 1937, about the same time when Tagore popularized science through his idea of loka-siksha (popular education). Although Tagore acknowledged the convergence between his idea of popular education and Gandhi’s basic education, he felt that the scheme of basic education placed undue emphasis on practical training at the cost of artistic creativity (Bhattacharya 2004). Shantiniketan remains to this day a symbol of Tagore’s conviction that the “object of education is the freedom of mind which can only be achieved through the path of freedom . . . (where) children should not have mere schools for their lessons, but a world whose guiding spirit is personal love” (Tagore 1921, 147).

Gandhi’s “Nai Talim” tried to address several critical aspects of the social and economic realities of the 1940s, especially of rural India. School curriculum was designed to use local languages and local cultures in training people in traditional crafts such as spinning and weaving. More importantly, “Gandhi was proposing the allocation of a substantive place in the school curriculum to systems of knowledge developed and associated with oppressed groups of Indian society, namely artisans, peasants and cleaners” (Kumar 2009, 11) The attempt was to break the frames of knowledge associated with dominant castes. Gandhi’s “Nai Talim” was a response to both—the elite system of colonial education perceived to be culturally and economically irrelevant as well as to the upper caste hegemonic control over who can be educated. In doing this the “problem” of curriculum was to become an act of “deliberation” rather than one based on “an intrinsic view of knowledge.” This powerful idea of Gandhi was much ahead of its time, when Western debates on curriculum of the 1950s and 1960s were circumscribed to either articulating the “scientific principles” of developing curriculum or turning toward the philosophers’ claim of identifying knowledge that had intrinsic worth.

The distinction between the colonial curriculum and the curriculum of the countermovements initiated by nationalist leaders lay in the purpose of the educational project of the time. While the British aimed to develop subservient colonial citizens, the aim of the nationalist leaders was to liberate the Indian people from the shackles of colonial English education and create free citizens who could emancipate an India rooted in the diverse cultures of its people.

Gandhi’s idea of basic education was an attempt to make curriculum democratically accessible by making it socially and economically relevant. However, his proposal met with resistance from the upper-caste elite in whose interest it was to preserve the colonial system of education and an essentialist view of knowledge. Holmes and McLean (1989) show how the obstacles to basic education also lay in the shifting nature of economic activities from rural to urban areas and the government’s focus on industrial development in the first national five-year plan. The idea of making education productive both for the child in terms of developing appropriate skills and capacities and for making the school an institution that could sustain itself economically was deeply contested. As a result, Gandhi’s proposal to replace colonial education was experimented only in small pockets of India and never really became part of mainstream education. The National Curriculum Framework (NCF 2005) attempted to revive an interest in reestablishing this link between work and education. This is yet to generate a sustained interest among curriculum developers.

Curriculum in contemporary India is bound to vary across the diverse terrain of Indian society and polity. It would therefore be a fallacy to talk of school curriculum in India as a homogenous entity. We could perhaps talk of a wide set of curricula that operate across different parts of the country. This diversity could, as many would argue, be associated with the diverse ideological hues reflected in the governance of different states. However, there are several other dimensions along which the basic tenets of school curricula in Indian society have been designed and implemented as in the case of Gandhi’s “Nai Talim.” Some of these may be driven by ideologies rooted in movements of social reform,⁶ others in philosophical traditions, and still others in spiritual traditions of Indian society. For instance, schools that follow the philosophical underpinnings of J. Krishnamurti or Vivekananda are distinct in their approach as compared to schools that follow Sri Aurobindo’s approach of integral education. These in turn are distinctly different from Gandhi’s Nai Talim or Tagore’s Shantiniketan. However, the essential aim of education in each of these traditions is to develop the inner self along with the ability to reason and acquire other mental faculties and skills—the focus being the whole, integrated person. Each of these operates with a curriculum that aligns with the vision of education of its founders.

The diversity of these and other school curricula in India is indeed daunting.⁷ However it cannot be said that these different orientations have impacted mainstream school curricula in India—state or private—in any major way. The underpinnings of each of these diverse curricula are philosophical, sociological, educational, spiritual, and ideological in nature. Central to the educational vision of Krishnamurti, for instance, is the idea of the transformation of individual consciousness through an education that regards “relationship” as the basis of human existence. The process of education must therefore include “an understanding and deep cultivation of psychological processes as much as academic excellence” (Thapan 2007, 64). The Krishnamurti Foundation of India (KFI) schools focus on giving children several opportunities to reflect and understand, through deep engagement with nature and community, with the aim to develop an awareness of life and themselves. In Krishnamurti’s (1953, 46) words, “Education must help students to recognise and break down in themselves . . . all social distinctions and prejudices, and discourage the acquisitive pursuit of power and domination.” Foregrounded in many of these perspectives is a view of the curriculum as a process of engagement of the learners with nature, self, and their social milieu. Alternative schools in India, following various persuasions, coexist and struggle to sustain their vision via negotiating spaces within the formal education system that require qualifying public examinations. However, mainstream curriculum remains largely impervious to their influences.

The key ideas that shape curricula in mainstream schools in contemporary India are best understood in two ways: through a detailed study of national curriculum documents and through a close examination of prevalent school practices. A study of the national curricula documents prepared in postindependence India by the apex institution of education—the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT)—gives us an idea of the key aspects that have defined the contours of school curriculum since independence.

Questions of modernity were also crucial for the young Independent India of the 1950s as the aim of education was perceived to prepare the youth to participate in industrialization and technological advancement. The Nehruvian period was thus preoccupied with developing institutes of excellence in science and technology, providing a host of opportunities in higher education. While most of the well-reputed institutes of science and technology were established within the first two decades of independent India, the first serious attempt to articulate the contours of a school curriculum happened as late as 1975, a decade after Nehru’s death. The first policy statement on education came post-1966 when the National Commission on Education (GoI 1966) submitted its report on the state of education in the country and proposed several concrete suggestions for educational and social change.

The thrust of the Ten-Year School Curriculum Framework (NCERT 1975) was the modernization project along the lines of the Education Commission report. The commission viewed modernity and nationalism as synonymous. The central role of education was that of “nation-building.” Hence, educational objectives were defined within the paradigm of national development. This was a marked departure from the Secondary Education Commission,⁸ which in the early 1950s had “laid emphasis on the psychological requirements of the child and the need to relate school subjects to the immediate environment of the child” (Batra 2010, 19). This was to remain an idea until 1986 when the National Policy on Education (NPE) articulated its commitment to bringing the child to the center of educational change.

The aim of school curriculum was to “give up the colonial-feudal system meant for the production of clerks” that underpinned Macaulay’s proposal. Stress was simultaneously laid upon creating Gandhi’s “Nai Talim” that conceptualized curriculum as “internal transformation” with the aim to relate to the “life, needs and aspirations of the nation” (NCERT 1975, 1).

Modernization meant engaging with the growing body of knowledge in science and technology. Tagore’s initiative of popular education had attempted to popularize science among the masses. Gandhi’s “Nai Talim” on the other hand was more about developing the self with the aim to minimize gaps between what is thought, espoused, and “lived” in reality. For Gandhi, bringing work and education together provided opportunities to “enable the use of hands to develop insight into material phenomena and human relationship involved in any organised productive work.” The aim was to develop in the young “attitudes of cooperation, social responsibility within a frame of equality and freedom of the human spirit.” This was the view reflected in the 1975 national curriculum document.

For about twenty years between 1968 and 1986, the modernization project was perceived by the state to help achieve social justice, productivity, national integration, and a rational outlook. Curriculum as an instrument of social change was to inculcate Constitutional values of plurality, an open society that was democratic, secular, and socialist. School curriculum was designed to reflect all this in structure and content thus advocating the crucial role of pedagogic approaches in achieving these curricular aims.

Though the running narrative of the 1975 curriculum framework was one of national development and there was a need to “replace the old with the new,” the central role of India’s states in addressing diversity along language, culture, and tradition was also recognized. The emphasis however was on the national and not the local. For instance, the specific guidelines for history outlined in the 1975 curriculum document cautioned against the introduction of local history at the school stage, which often runs the risk of promoting “parochialism and regional cultural chauvinism.”

The need to create a national identity was accorded a priority greater than the needs of the child and an understanding of its sociocultural environment. The development of national identity in the post-Partition era, which witnessed brutal communal violence, was seen as the most immediate task. It was important that the state accorded respect to the beliefs and practices of minority and majority religious communities and constructed a history of harmonious coexistence and cultural synthesis. This was perceived to be best done through education via well-written school textbooks.

“Unity in diversity” was the “pan-India” historical narrative constructed during the natio...