Colonial Education Analysis

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ive urgency can be seen in the words of the missionary Charles Grant found in his “Observations on the state of Society among the Asiatic Society among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain” from the year 1972. According to Grant, the colonial mission seeks to bring the “evangelical system of mission education” to the asiatic subjects of Great Britain, a mission “conducted uncompromisingly in the English language” (24). This reformation of the indigenous asiatic subjects—their transformation into a class of ‘anglicized’ translators, however seem to prove more useful to the colonizing power than to the colonized subjects. In 1835, the “missionary educationist” (125) Thomas Babington Macaulay reiterates his vision for the educated Asiatic subjects of great Britain as such:
We[, The English,] must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, [...] —a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. (124)
In his desire for power—a desire which arises from the need “for a reformed, recognizable ‘Other’ as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” (122), the colonial power imposes his will upon the colonial …show more content…

By becoming not only a manifestation of the colonizer’s oppression and domination, but also a channel of for it to disrupt of the colonial power, mimicry becomes an ambivalent figure in colonial discourse. Thus, as seen Bhabha’s example involving Macaulay’s take on the refined colonial subject, mimicry is not only a mechanism of domination on the side of the colonial master, but also a symbol of subversion on the side of the colonial subject. Because of the ambivalence of mimicry, mimicry can thus be perceived

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