Speaker: Dr. Arun Kumar, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Nottingham University, UK

Chair: Dr. Hem Borker, Assistant Professor, Department of Social Work, Jamia Millia Islamia

A history of defiance by Indian workers who refused to see themselves as mere laboring entities that elites and employers wished them to become. It is the colonial world of the late nineteenth and twentieth century where educational opportunities, especially for socio-economically oppressed castes and the laboring poor, were very limited and uneven. How state and non-state elite power attempted to shape laboring subalterns and how laboring subalterns experienced and responded to educational institutions and elite visions. The contestation between “dreams” of educated and literate subalterns and “educational visions” of elites shaped the projects of non-elite education and marked the birth of industrial and technical education in modern India