One of the most important questions in India’s recent history—why so many Indians remain in poverty despite all the development initiatives of the last seven decades—is crucially linked to education. Why has the implementation of goals formulated 70 years ago and reaffirmed by many successive governments been so deeply flawed? This paper argues that part of the answer can be found in the historical genealogy of the ideology shaping education policy in postcolonial India. It examines this ideology through a critical analysis of a sample of 15 documentary films on the subject of education made by the Films Division of India in the 1950s and early 1960s. Film Division of India is a government-run film production organisation that has made over 7000 documentaries since the Independence of 1947, compulsorily screened in cinema halls across the country prior to feature films. The author of this article is also the author of a recently released monograph Visions of Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), which is the first scholarly volume to be published on the work of the Films Division and its reflection of the prevailing government development ideology in postcolonial India. This article builds on this work by analysing a further sample of documentary films about Indian education from this period.

The arguments presented in this paper is aligned with the contention of historians of South Asian education that after Independence, much like during the colonial period, education continued to be a polarizing force that served to elevate the ‘elites’ above the ‘masses’ of Indian society. The films analysed in this paper, however, point to important shifts in the 1950s and 60s. While colonial-era elites were largely complicit with the colonial government in using education to perpetuate their socioeconomic status vis-à-vis the ‘masses,’ the middle classes of the 1950s and beyond—a crucial constituency in Nehru’s India on whom the project of development rested—were not united in their degree of educational elitism. In contrast to earlier documentaries, several of the late 1950s and 1960s films on education, documentaries that were produced by and for the middle classes, no longer depicted education in strictly utilitarian terms as a tool for economic and social development. They focused on the possibility of education to aid in social mobility. Films made in late 1960s went even further and openly critiqued the status quo of education in India, pointing to deep rooted inequalities within the education system.

The films thus show an ambivalent relationship of the middle classes to the state’s project of educational development—a relationship driven both by a desire to preserve and strengthen class divides and a moral impulse for greater equality through education. This analysis thus suggests that the source of resistance to the state’s goals of inclusivity in education in postcolonial India may have been a paralysis caused by contradictory forces acting on the Indian middle classes.