INDIAN STUDENT

 Date: August 20, 2025 at 11:11:34 PM EDT

—From an Indian student who came (with his parents) to the in-person TCR History Camp at the Commonwealth School in Boston this Summer:

        When I got accepted into the camp in early February, I was almost ecstatic. I had been looking for a space where history was taken seriously, not treated like a subject to memorize, as it is in India. I wasn’t sure how my work on colonial education policy in India would fit in. Most people were writing on classical history or the American culture revolution, while I came with notes on Macaulay’s Minute, missionary schools, and the rewriting of Indian history through textbooks. Instead of being out of place, it turned into an advantage. People pushed me with questions I hadn’t faced before: was colonial schooling in India different from British models in Africa? How did textbooks play a role in the epistemic conquest?

        What stood out at camp was how much attention went to the process of writing history. Back home, no one asks how you frame a thesis or whether you’re using primary sources well. At the TCR History Camp, those were the first things people wanted to know. It forced me to explain my ideas on epistemes, how colonial schools created new ways of thinking, and to back them up clearly. That kind of feedback was different from anything I had experienced in India. I got one-on-one sessions with each of the instructors and I have to specially thank Mr. Gray for working closely with me and pushing me to deliver to a very high standard of writing.

        The History Camp was also my first time in Boston. I hate the cliché, but it was love at first sight. I spent hours at the Boston Public Library, walked along the Charles River, and wandered down Newbury Street. The mix of historic architecture, the energy of the college culture, and the sense of history running through the city made it hard not to be drawn in.

        The camp left me with a clearer sense of what I was doing. I arrived thinking my topic was narrowly Indian. I left knowing it was part of a larger story about how empires use schools to shape knowledge, and how those structures stay in place long after the empire is gone. 

        Thank you TCR for this experience. I will treasure it.