EDUCATION OLD AND NEW—A PERSPECTIVE 5 potential Indian science, Ayurved. Debi Prasad Chattopadhyay has shown us how Ayurved was systematically thwarted, decanonised, excommunicated by the Brahminical authority structure because it did not place causality in Karm, nor cure in priestly intervention, but within an analysable and verifiable matrix of materiality.1 To this day, long after allopathy, Ayurved remains the Shudra among the Vedas. Thus, every education policy from the beginning of historical time in all hierarchical and class societies has been much more than an education policy. All such policies have aimed either at consolidating existent structures of dominance, or at forging with the perceived requirements of the ruling classes. It is another matter, of course, that almost without fail such enterprises yield in turn countering structures of resistance, causing transformations without which history as a dynamic event cannot be conceived. Not that this is always a comforting, linear, positivist occurrence; often, in moving onward history falls among deflections, zig-zags, regressions, but move it does. So that an epistemology of struggle is not merely a wishful chimera to keep social hope alive; its justification lies in the totality of the historical process—now sluggish, halted, hopeless but under our very eyes breaking out in battle to new vistas of endeavour and social reconstruction. When Hastings gave his blessings to a system of Gurukuls and Madrassahs he was only keeping in place a civil formation that had the most to offer John Company. It kept the two religious orders in helpful contention, and it encouraged the hegemony of secrets of the very complicated indigenous land revenue system.2 Further, an 'orientalist1 direction in education consolidated the myth of a transhistorical, mystical India quite above the mundane and murky concerns of trade and materiality, which mundane concerns the Company benevolently took upon itself to plough and to profit by. The story is indeed too well-known to need belabouring. Classicism was thus patronized as an archive of received truths that made history a matter of subsidiary importance in the colony. That not every orientalist had a cognition matching such a historical fallout is true enough. Yet, it is hardly the purity of individual exertions that history makes its epistemological object. There cannot but have been well-meaning people who believed Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian education to be the sumum bonum of attainment, incidentally best restricted to the endowed social groups alone (after all, Plato had a vision of guardianship as well); and yet another, admittedly less favourable, nomenclature for all such 'felt* perceptions, however nobly held, is ideology. And all ideology is pregnant with consequences. And precisely because the dynamics of history constantly reformulates interests and ideologies, orientalist education had to yield place to English education in 1837. Suddenly, full in the face of the brotherhood of Jones, Wilkes, Wilson and others Macaulay could