Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India (2011) Indira Sengupta & Daud Ali, editors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Knowledge Production, Pedagogy, and Institutions in Colonial India, edited by Sengupta and Ali, belongs to a body of literature that attempts to provide scholarly understandings of colonial societies and imperial history through the lens of colonial knowledge.Colonial knowledge is conceived as the form and content of knowledge that was produced out of and facilitated the process of colonisation.The idea that colonialism could be understood by focusing on the production and dissemination of knowledge that accompanied it owes much to Edward Said's Orientalism, published in 1978, which foregrounded representation as a key aspect of imperialism.The idea of representation made possible the understanding that colonial authorities exercised power over colonised people not only through military conquest or economic dominance but also through the command of knowledge that they had over the colonised people.Therefore, scholarly work inspired by Said (1978) views colonialism as much a cultural project as a military or an economic one.Whereas Sengupta and Ali rely on colonial knowledge as an analytic category in the study of imperial power, they dispel the notion held by earlier researchers of a static, coherent, and hegemonic colonial knowledge that ruled, marginalised, and stood in direct opposition to colonial subjects and their agency.On the contrary, the book aligns itself with the view advanced by newer studies, which argue that the relationship between knowledge and the state was neither predictable nor straightforward.Sengupta and Ali go on to argue that "knowledge production, like the state project itself, was often more considerably fragmented, even while it operated within the framework of blatant and sustained asymmetrical power relations" (p.4).This thinking, according to the authors, required a change in approach from an exclusive focus on state power and its control over knowledge and discourse to a pragmatic study of local processes of knowledge production and the roles local actors play in them.The research focus within this new paradigm requires a localised and archive-based approach that interrogates "specific interactions on the ground between agents of colonial rule and indigenous social groups and individuals who were involved, with varying degrees of power and agency, in the production and dissemination of what is now called colonial knowledge" (p. 6).In line with the thought pattern described above, the book addresses two major concerns.The first is to facilitate an understanding of the process of knowledge production through examining its localised and historically specific social and intellectual contexts.In particular, Sengupta and Ali ask how important Indian elites and their agency were in the knowledge production process.The second, which the editors consider innovative, is to go beyond
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".