The Calcutta School-Book Society and the Production of Knowledge

AbstractThis article provides an account of the formative years of the Calcutta School-Book Society (CSBS, established 1817) whose chief objective was the ‘preparation, publication and cheap or gratuitous supply, of works useful in Schools and Seminaries of learning’. For the first time in colonial Bengal, books began to be produced for primary schools. While a large number of such schools had been set up by missionaries, no modern curriculum had been put into place, nor were there any publications in Bengali prepared with a pedagogic purpose before 1818. Born of a spirit of collaboration between colonial administrators, the local intelligentsia and missionaries, the CSBS set the tone for similar societies which followed in its wake.