Teaching and Research in Colonial Bombay

Abstract

Bombay did not play the kind of administrative nodal role that first Madras and later Calcutta did in terms of overarching governance in the Indian subcontinent, occupying instead a pivotal position for the region’s commerce and industry. Nonetheless, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Bombay were a formative age for education and research in science, as in the other Presidencies. A colonial government, a large native population enrolled in the new European-style educational system, and the rise of several institutions of instruction and learning, fostered an environment of scientific curiosity. The Asiatic Society of Bombay (1804), which was initially the hub of research in all disciplines, became increasingly antiquarian and ethnographic through the course of the nineteenth century. The Victoria and Albert Museum (conceived in 1862 and built by 1871 and opened to the public in 1872), was established to carry out research on the industrial arts of the region, taking for its original collections fine and decorative arts that highlight practices and crafts of various communities in the Bombay Presidency. The University of Bombay (1857) was primarily tasked with teaching, and it was left to other establishments to conduct research. Key institutions in this regard included the Bombay Natural History Society (1883) given to local studies of plants and animals, and the Haffkine Institute (1899), which examined the role of plague that had been a dominant feature of the social cityscape from 1896. The Royal Institute of Science (1920) marked a point of departure, as it was conceived as a teaching institution but its lavish funding demanded a research agenda, especially at the post-graduate level. The Prince of Wales Museum (1922) would prove to be seminal in matters of collection and display of objects for the purpose of research. All of these institutions would shape the intellectual debates in the city concerning higher education. Typically founded by European colonial officials, they would increasingly be administered and staffed by Indians.