Parvati Nawar, a fish-seller from a presidency town, wrote a letter to the government of the British Raj in 1883 seeking protection from the police. She complained that the police were oppressing vendors at the local market.
Not only is it awe-inspiring that she stood up to the might of authority, but that she wrote her letter in a format colonial authorities couldn’t ignore or erase from their archives. Although we do not know whether the government intervened to end her grievance, the letter is illustrative of the sort of social consciousness that was prevalent at the time in British India.
The importance of modern education cannot be stated more here. While caste and class still determined one’s access to education across the subcontinent, it was slowly democratised in presidency towns thanks to subaltern(ised) social reform movements that worked in tandem with colonial policy. Meanwhile, in parts of India where missionary education and evangelisation were concomitant, entire tribes converted to Christianity, and with it came modern literacy.
“Khasi Syiems or Chiefs started expressing their wish to have schools in their territories and the females were willing to be taught. The sale of books, slates and paper rose as also the number of schools...