Education, the press, and new ideas before 1857

British rule brought new institutions of learning and communication that changed how Indians thought about their own society. The Calcutta Madrasa was founded in 1781 and the Sanskrit College at Benares in 1791, but the great debate was over the language and content of higher education. The English Education Act of 1835, following Thomas Macaulay's famous Minute, committed the government to teaching English and western learning, on the argument that it would create a class of Indians who could serve as intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled.

Wood's Despatch of 1854, sent by the President of the Board of Control, Charles Wood, laid out a fuller plan: departments of public instruction in each province, universities, and a system of schools from primary to university level. The first three universities, at Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, were founded in 1857, in the very year of the revolt. Missionary schools, government schools, and Indian-run schools all grew in this period, and a new educated class, often called the middle class or bhadralok in Bengal, began to write, teach, and organise associations.

The press grew alongside education. James Augustus Hickey's Bengal Gazette, founded in 1780, was India's first newspaper, and Indian-owned papers followed, including Raja Rammohan Roy's Sambad Kaumudi, founded in 1821. Newspapers, pamphlets, and journals let Indians debate sati, widow remarriage, and British policy in public, and they created a reading public that stretched across provinces. The government watched the press closely and would later restrict it, but before 1857 the Indian press was already a forum for criticism.

Education and the press did not produce a single opinion. Some educated Indians admired British institutions and wanted reform within the system, others used western ideas of liberty and nationalism to criticise British rule itself, and still others rejected western learning altogether. The importance of the period is that it created the tools, schools, books, newspapers, and associations, with which later nationalists would build a movement.