Skilling and Its Histories: Labour Market, Technical Knowledge and the Making of Skilled Workers in Colonial India (1880–1910)

Written in the backdrop of the emerging official discourse around occupational skill training in contemporary India, this article returns to the past to explain how the meanings of skill and skill training were produced through the interaction of the colonial education system and industrial actors in modern India. Using archival records, it studies the history of the Lucknow Industrial School—one of the earliest government institutes to skill Indians in various industrial trades and for the local railway workshop. The article argues that industrial training institutions, while crucial in defining and legitimizing a discourse of skill and efficiency based on the scientific and technical knowledge of workers, were subjected to the competing political and training discourses of the shop floor, financial unwillingness of the British empire to create a large infrastructure of industrial and technical education for the colony, local caste politics and aspirations of students. All these forces shaped the nature of skill transference and produced unintended results which strained the relationship between the training institute and industries. Similar conflicts and issues surround the contemporary skill programme. A historical study of skill development during the colonial era allows a better understanding of the prospect and perils of the present-day Skill India Mission.


Introduction
The Skill India Mission (hereafter SIM) is an ambitious state-led programme. For the first time in independent India, the state is asserting its power on an unprecedented scale to provide a large infrastructure of industrial training and thus mediating the labour-capital relationship in this particular way. 1 By training future workers and regulating existing training methods, the state is not only intervening in sectors such as construction, IT, textile, hospitality, aviation, tourism, leather, electronics, fashion, nursing, food and light engineering, but it is also seeking to induce industrial development by attempting to meet the demand of industry for skilled labour. Since the launch of the first National Skill Policy in 2009, India has seen the establishment of numerous new vocational institutes in the countryside and urban areas. According to the National Skill Policy of 2015, around 12,000 training institutes and 3,200 polytechnics exist in India (Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship [MSDE], 2015, p. 5). Skilling has emerged as a new business where amateur educationists and local elites are investing their money and resources in establishing new vocational and industrial training institutes (ITIs). Responding to the needs of capital, the state has parcelled out the responsibility of training to these private training providers, with the educational sector being expected to take over the training responsibilities of the shop floor. The official hype around SIM has, however, subsided recently. Two major concerns have come to haunt the Skill Mission-the inability to train workers according to the expectations of industrial interests and the failure to provide jobs to those who have undergone skill training. Only 15 per cent of newly skilled workers are reported to have found jobs between 2015(News Click, 2018. Employers consider a significant section of those who received skill training to be unemployable. Multiple agencies are involved in training labour, with confusion and a lack of understanding as to what one means by skills, how skills should be imparted and what should be the curriculum and the length of skill development courses. In this respect, importantly, there is no engagement with past skill development initiatives and no attempt to draw lessons from them. In skill development policy documents, the past appears to be a tabula rasa. There is no awareness of very similar issues and challenges faced by skill policies and ITIs in the past. The 2015 policy reads, 'Our country presently faces a dual challenge of paucity of highly trained workforce, as well as, non-employability of large sections of the conventionally educated youth, who possess little or no job skills' (MSDE, 2015, p. 2). Precisely, these concerns-the lack of a skilled workforce and a literary-oriented education system-forced the colonial state to initiate India's first primary level practical, industrial, technical education programme in the 1880s. Continuity in terms of a mismatch between the work of training institutes and the demands of industry is even more glaring. The absence of a historical understanding in policy documents is mirrored in the scholarly literature, where the theme of skill development has been rarely explored from a historical perspective. This article is an attempt to bring these issues to light, and also to draw attention to the role of major historical events and processes in shaping the trajectory of occupational skilling in modern India, such as the introduction of modern technology, colonialism, de-industrialization and educational aspirations of the lower-class students.
This article is divided into four sections. The first two sections explore visions, policies and workings of the first official skilling programmes, and the final two sections investigate the everyday functioning and experience of skill training. The first section deals with multiple ways in which discussions and debates about, and policies on, formal skill learning took shape in colonial India, straddling the fields of education, industry, economy and labour. I will examine how imperial concerns and local pressures forced the colonial state to establish only a limited infrastructure of industrial and technical education in the late nineteenth century. Building upon this, the second section elaborates the history of the Lucknow Industrial School (hereafter LIS) and its role in the production of a trained and skilled labour force for the local railway workshop and regional crafts. I will explain how the school curriculum, textbooks and teaching methods defined and legitimized a new understanding of skill and skill training that was different from the conventional apprenticeship system-a point further elaborated upon in the fourth section. The third section provides an inside view of the LIS and its confrontation with the aspirations of students. I show how artisan students used the LIS education to acquire non-labouring government posts that defied caste boundaries of mental and manual labour. These aspirations had transformative effects on the everyday functioning and vision of the LIS. The fourth section studies the relationship between the LIS (the supplier of trained labour) and the Lucknow railway workshops (employers) in terms of expectations and concrete training. The article demonstrates that the understanding of skills and skill training that the LIS developed did not match the expectations of the railway workshop. Workshop officials constantly questioned the school's ability to train a suitable labour force.
The regional focus of this article is Uttar Pradesh, then known as the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (NWPO) and later changed to the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh in 1902, and the temporal focus is limited to the late nineteenth century. Along with contemporary socio-economic writings, this article uses historical records and digital source material held at the National Archives of India (Delhi), the UP State Archives (Lucknow), the British Library (London) and the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics (Pune).

Discourse on Practical Education and the Beginning of the Industrial Institutes
By the 1880s, the colonial state felt a need to institutionalize programmes of practical and industrial education to produce industry-oriented Indians. Over the coming decades, colonial officials reminded each other that the programmes of industrial and technical education could not be implemented on a large scale in India because of its industrial underdevelopment (Swaminathan, 1992(Swaminathan, , p. 1612. Behind the rhetoric, we will see, was the colonial state's unwillingness to spend large sums of money on skilling infrastructure. Various industrial and technical education committees and enquiries-the Industrial School Committee (1903), the Indian Industrial Commission (1916)(1917)(1918), the Royal Commission on Labour (1929)(1930)(1931)-show the willingness of colonial officials to engage with programmes of industrial and technical education. However, when it came to establishing an extensive permanent infrastructure of industrial and technical education, the colonial state often left the matter in the hands of private capital. We will see that it introduced industrial and technical education on a limited scale to produce skilled workers and foremen for modern industries that were critical to the political economy of the colonial state, such as railways, public works infrastructure, munitions during the war and for indigenous industries that did not compete with British industries, such as handloom weaving, carpentry and carpet making.
The immediate impetus to providing industrial and technical education was generated by a crisis in the colonial education system which came to be seen as being too literary-oriented and producing educated elites whose only aim was to secure a non-labouring government position (Papers relating to Technical Education in India, 1906 [hereafter TEP]). The crisis was deeply informed by an entrenched colonial notion that Indians as a whole were lazy, idle and superstitious. Colonial officials unanimously shared the opinion that educated Indians despised manual labour. E. C. Buck, a Bengal Civil Servant and later the head of the 1901 inquiry into the state of industrial and practical education, collected thousands of petitions from disillusioned youths in the 1880s who unsuccessfully pursued government jobs. Buck noted, to obtain a clerkship in a Government office is, at present time, perhaps the chief object with which a native of India seeks education. He is often indeed inclined to consider that a knowledge of English, however slight, gives him a claim to be employed by the English officials. (Buck, 1883, p. 4) The 'native' that Buck referred to was an upper-and middle-caste Indian who had access to primary and secondary education. Educated Indians mastered their knowledge of English with the help of inexpensive self-guides that were easily available in the book market. Texts such as Angrezí ki pustak: Jinko ám taur par logo ne pasand kiyá hai (The Popular English Book) and English teacher: jis se Hindi aur Urdu jánane wálá mánush 6 mahine me Angreji sikh saktá (The English Teacher: A Six-Month Guide for Hindi and Urdu Speaking Learners) were widely advertised in Hindi newspapers and magazines. Let us look at an employment petition of an aspirant that Buck reproduced in his collection. Written in broken English, the petition was addressed to Charles Dickenson Field, the Session Judge of Burdwan.
Sir, Excuse intrusion as it is a petition; the necessity for some occupation that brings me bread by fair and honest means urged me to write this; and your great reputation for influence in the affairs of the state and for a high minded considerateness emboldens me to connect your august name with this petition.
Gently born but differently brought up-for it were idiotic to presume a Native youth's education is properly finished any time of his life-the premature death of my father obliged me to leave the University before obtaining a Degree and this circumstance fixed my doom. I have tried junior teacherships and subordinate Clerkships, but without any great improvement in my condition. I have been out of employ these many months and now do I beg the favour of your kindly putting me somewhere under you that I can honestly maintain myself and those that naturally depend on me.
My qualification are soon told: this is my own hand on composition and penmanship, I can cast accounts, I am able bodied, young and willing; and very needy. My drawbacks are want of a patron and absence of certificates, and poverty, which is no crime . . . (Buck, 1883, pp. 11-12) The trope of a dual 'crisis' of education pervades the writings of education officials, who refer to the reality of limited non-labouring jobs and the high aspirations of literate castes. 'Native' preference for government jobs and the likelihood of discontent among those failing to secure a decent employment began to be seen as an educational crisis that needed to be resolved immediately. J. C. Nesfield, the education officer of the NWPO, carried out an inquiry into the effects of the colonial education system on rural youths and reached the conclusion that the education imparted to Indians was too literary. He wrote, The form which discontent takes in this country is not of a healthy kind for the Natives of India considering that the only occupation worthy of an educated man is that of a writership in some office, and especially in a Government office. The village schoolboy goes back to the plough with the greatest reluctance; and the town school-boy carries the same discontent and inefficiency into his father's workshop. Sometimes these ex-students positively refuse at first to work; and more than once parents have openly expressed their regret that they ever allowed their sons to be inveigled to school. (Buck, 1883, pp. 5-6) In 1884, the colonial government ordered the provincial governments to promote practical and technical education in their respective provinces. Next year, MacDonnell, the Secretary to the Home Government, was appointed to survey the nature of existing government and private (primarily missionary) technical and industrial educational institutes in the country and to propose a road map. MacDonnell, in his memorandum, emphasized that the emerging industrial economy of India required trained and skilled workers for which training institutions were needed. He pointed out the necessity of restructuring primary and secondary schooling in order to shift the educational orientation of the masses. At the primary school level, MacDonnell recommended the introduction of drawing and 'object lessons' (a teaching method involving a physical object or visual aid). At the secondary school level, he proposed a bifurcation of the education system into literary and practical sides. For practical education, he advocated the setting up of technical schools at the district level (TEP, 1906, p. 22).
However, colonial officials in England rejected his proposed technical education saying that such plans were unsuited for yet-to-be industrialized colonies. Expenditure on such a large scale was neither profitable nor necessary. At top of the colonial administration, India was seen primarily as a market for British products and a supplier of the raw materials. An extensive technical education programme similar to the level of England was not logical for India. Technical education in England itself was newly implemented. It had emerged as a response to the threat posed by rapidly industrializing Germany and France. It was meant to increase England's productivity and fuel its industrial revolution. In such a context, policies governing the economy of India were to be kept subordinate to the needs of the British Empire. A colonial official pointed out that it was a 'delusion' to assume that technical education in India was meant to create a labour force to industrialize India and help in reviving its old industries. J. R. Colvin, the Lieutenant Governor of the NWPO, however, clarified that institutionalized training in India was needed for the industries that came with the British rule and not so much for the hereditary or guild controlled 'caste industries' (Colvin's Minute, TEP, 1906, pp. 133-134).
The result of the imperial intervention was that only limited activities were sanctioned, such as the introduction of object and drawing lessons in government secondary schools and the establishment of a few technical institutes aligned to the needs of state-controlled industries (TEP, 1906, p. 37). However, at the local level, the nationalist critique of the colonial government's economic policies, deindustrialization of indigenous industries and a growing arts and crafts movement among colonial officials would force the state to establish industrial institutes and programmes (peripatetic weaving classes, arts and craft schools) to skill labour for craft industries that would not compete with British products. We will see that these forces also influenced the institutional trajectory of the LIS.
Due to the lack of a clear-cut central policy, the response of the local governments to industrial and technical education question was varied. Initially, only the Madras government prepared a presidency-level technical examination scheme, providing grants-in-aid to private (mainly missionary-run) industrial and technical schools, and establishing higher engineering technical institutes. These schemes were implemented loosely over the years with very little investment in establishing primary level technical institutes, producing qualified teachers and reviving local industries (Swaminathan, 1992(Swaminathan, , pp. 1616(Swaminathan, -1619. It was only in 1886 that the issue of labour demand was discussed in the light of practical education schemes. The central government advised provincial governments to conduct industrial surveys and form expert committees to investigate the nature of industries that required trained labour. Consequently, industrial surveys were carried out in the provinces over the next two decades. In Madras, E. B. Havell did a detailed survey of industries in 1888 and concluded that a large number of indigenous industries, except for goldsmithing, coarse weaving and a few others, had declined due to the import of manufactured goods from Europe, loss of elite patronage, changes in local fashion and taste due to colonialism. The government found Havell's survey futile from the perspective of designing a technical education scheme, since Havell, being an advocate of the arts and crafts movement, did not focus on the needs of modern industries (TEP, 1906, p. 83). In Bengal, E. W. Collin surveyed the existing industries and recommended the establishment of technical institutes and training workshops for modern industries, such as mining and railways. The NWPO government did not take any action. Instead, a pressure to establish industrial and technical institutes in the province was building up from the below. The local vernacular print media carried out a sharp critique of colonial economic policies. They blamed colonialism for India's deindustrialization and argued that the measures taken by the colonial state to revive art industries through art schools, such as in Punjab and Madras, were half-hearted. Oudh Akhbár, published from Lucknow, demanded technical schools 'so that the people may be able to eke out their living by arts and industries, and the large sums of money which they remit to foreign countries as the price of various foreign articles they have to buy at present, may be retained in the country' (Vernacular Newspaper Reports, 1898, p. 93;[hereafter VNR]). Citizen wrote that the colonial government was selfish. It denied higher technical education to Indians on the grounds that India was not yet ready for such high knowledge. According to the newspaper, 'this plea [was] purely imagery' (VNR, 1903, p. 308). Koh-i-Núr published from Lahore brought out two articles on the issue in January 1883 criticizing policies of the colonial government (VNR, 1883, p. 116). A critique of the colonial education was also reflected in the vernacular satire. A popular satirical saying in North India advised youth to forget about Anglo-Vernacular secondary education and instead to go and cut grass:

इडिल डिडिल की छोड़ो आस ले के खु र्पा खोदो घ्स
'Give up all hopes for the Middle and the like [education]. Take a hoe and cut grass [for a livelihood]' (Chaturvedi, 1930, p. 178). 2 By the 1900s, the nationalist critique of British colonialism was not just premised on the drain of wealth from India and deindustrialization of indigenous industries. The colonial state's unwillingness to establish industrial and technical institutes was seen as depriving India of its development potentials and thus denying it a place among industrialized countries. The Swadeshi movement and Gandhian mass nationalism promoted the establishment of nationalist technical and vocational educational institutes. A Swadeshi Cartoon Booklet published a cartoon that tied the issue of unemployment among Indians with the absence of industrial institutes in India ( Figure 1).
The notion that India was poor because it lacked industrial and technical education was shared by both the colonial officials and nationalists. While the nationalist elites wanted higher technical institutes in India, a section of colonial officials was hesitant to create a large infrastructure of industrial and technical education. However, both sides came to provide higher technical education only to the educated upper castes and the middle class. Modern industries, such as, railways, textile mills, printing presses, were run by experts, skilled workers, overseers and managers from Europe. The dominance of elite castes in literary education and the colonial sociological belief that upper castes were an intellectually superior class resulted in turning the higher technical education into a privilege of the upper and middle castes. Shahana Bhattacharya, in the context of leather industries and leather training institutes in colonial India, shows that technical institutes remained a preserve of educated elite castes and the mass of 'outcaste' labourers continued to perform degraded manual labour. For elites, technical education rearticulated the stigmatized profession of leather tanning and production as 'science', thus allowing them to learn the trade and become an expert without losing their caste status (Bhattacharya, 2018, pp. 29-35). While the higher levels of technical education remained restricted to educated upper and middle castes, industrial education with a strong component of manual labour training, to a large extent, was opened to the labouring class. Industrial education, in such a context, was meant to manipulate traditional skills of artisans and workers in order to make them ready for modern enterprises that required knowledge of mathematics, scientific ideas and Western technology. Thus, once a concrete programme of practical education took shape, one sees the bifurcation of industrial and technical education according to the class and caste of students. But, this division was diluted by the efforts of upper-and middle-class students, who entered industrial schools (meant for artisanal classes) by displacing labouring classes. They used industrial education to gain non-labouring government positions (Report on Industrial Education: Part I, 1903, pp. 2-7). In the process, technical institutes which aimed to produce a limited class of scientific and technical experts, highly skilled mechanical labour, foremen and supervisors were favoured because of their better results.

Skills and the Lucknow Industrial School (1892-1903)
The establishment of the LIS in November 1892 was both a result of the local government's response to the imperial call for creating an infrastructure of practical education and of the local aristocrats' (taluqdars) demand for an industrial school in the city. Taluqdars saw industrial education as a progressive and modern element for the locality and as a means to revive their patronage relationship with the poor masses. 3 The provincial government was acting on the recommendations of the 1890 Technical Education Committee, which proposed the establishment of an industrial school and an art school in Lucknow and the reorganization of the Roorkee Engineering College-the only higher technical education institution in the province (established in 1854)-to produce surveyors, engineers, draughtsmen and other high-grade technicians (TEP, 1906, p. 133). The state took over the land and money that taluqdars were willing to invest in an industrial institute, and the LIS was born as a collaborative institute of the colonial state and aristocrats. It was resolved that such an institution should expand the industrial profile of the city, which had several small-scale handicraft industries (weaving, pottery, metalwork, embroidery) and modern industries (railway workshops, printing presses, machine repairing shops). It was thought that the ideal students for the school were low-caste artisans who in the recent years had been demanding education for their children. Practical education fitted their labouring occupations. The principal of the Lucknow Canning College wrote to Colvin: Why should the son of an artisan be tempted to enter a high school, to be taught to look down upon the handicraft of his father, and to have as his highest ambition the securing of an appointment as an inferior and ill-paid clerk? Better that he should be sent into an industrial school and a workshop, where his inherited aptitudes would prove invaluable to him and give him a good start on his way toward competency. He is sure to find employment somewhere . . .Why should a young man whom nature has unfitted for the study of higher mathematics or philosophy be allowed to waste some of the best years in his life in a college, striving for the unattainable? Better that he should be earning an honest livelihood in a good shed, an office, or a shop. 4 The school was modelled on the Lahore Railway Technical School (established in 1889). Its stated objective was to produce trained male working apprentices for three railway workshops at Charbagh in Lucknow, which manufactured railway tracks and coaches and required a large number of skilled smiths and carpenters. The school began with a literary class and a carpentry workshop, and 2 years later, a smithy workshop was added. It offered a literary education and manual labour training to the apprentices who were employed at the railway workshop and to the sons of artisans. Classes in reading, writing, arithmetic, elementary mechanics, physics and drawing were offered along with the manual training in industrial workshops under the watch of skilled artisans brought from the railway workshop. 5 By combining the practical and theoretical aspects of a trade, the school produced a new understanding of skill and occupational training. This new understanding was based on a notion that asserted the superiority and modernity of school training over the conventional apprenticeship system. Artisans under the native system of apprenticeship became skilled by repeating actions of master artisans, but they were seen as good imitators, not creative skilled workers. They did not learn the scientific methods and principles of a trade. The knowledge of science, arithmetic, drawing, geometry, machines was essential for places like railway workshops where modern machinery was in operation under the watch of European managers and skilled overseers. Workers here needed the knowledge that would allow them to understand drawings, designs and instructions of European engineers and finish the task with a greater precision and very little wastage of tools and raw materials. They were also required to learn Western scientific weights and measurements and the names of imported machinery hitherto foreign to their tongue and ear. A little knowledge of English was thought to be necessary along with the ability to work according to the rhythms of clock time. Tara Prassano, the headmaster of the LIS and an alumnus of the Shibpur Engineering College, stressed, Whether the students enter into workshops, or get employed as draughtsmen, or start any commercial enterprise of their own, or work in any other capacity, a fair knowledge of English would prove of great use to them. The names of tools, materials, machines, &c., are all [in] English, and they cannot understand them well unless they know the language. They would be able to exchange thoughts with the officers who almost always use English; and would not stand before them like deaf and dumb creatures, as is the case with the present class of handicraftsmen. 6 The superiority of the LIS was premised on the fact that skills that were required for railway workshop carpenters and smiths were not possible to learn under the indigenous artisanal apprenticeship system. European supervisors, carpenters and foremen brought with them new knowledge of specific trades, new skills and new work practices. The LIS did not only impart these new skills to students but also articulated them conceptually and demonstrated them in practice through workshops. An analysis of what boys were taught inside the classroom allows us to see how new skills were transmitted and older skills of artisans were manipulated for new work settings.
In the initial years, the LIS had standardized, codified and formalized the trade knowledge of smithy and carpentry. A whole new industrial curriculum was designed and transmitted through lectures, textbooks and workshops. Textbook lessons and classroom teaching were followed by manual labour training in the workshop. In the literary class, boys learned to read and write Hindi, Urdu and limited English from primers. They were also taught arithmetic, mensuration, and geometrical, scale and freehand drawing via textbooks. In the carpentry workshop, boys first learned to handle the tools of the trade, such as various types of chisel. Rukháni chisel was used to make clean cuts on wood; majhólá, a larger and thicker chisel, to do coarse work; golak, a curved pointed chisel, to cut grooves; rammá, a long chisel, to make mortise holes; and girdá, a small chisel with a rounded edge, to make lines on the wood (Amin, 2005, pp. 85-86). In the same class, they also learned an art pattern called kingrí to make simple borders on chairs, tables and other furniture. The second year was spent on mastering the use of rukháni and kingrí pattern along with the introduction of new art patterns, such as lehrá and paunchí. In the third year, boys mastered more sophisticated tools of the trade: árá (large saw), ári (smaller saw) and rándá (plane). In the fourth year, students used their newly acquired skills to experiment on various types of locally available wood. They learned to make mortise and tenon joints-a skill to join different parts of wood to make a chair, stool or a table. In the fifth year, the more sophisticated techniques of dovetail and scarf joints were taught, which were used to make table drawers, cupboards and scientific apparatuses. The syllabus also included learning the skill of making roof trusses and centring, wood turning, polishing and painting. 7 In the smithy workshop, lessons in metal began with the learning of filing and heating iron. After that, boys were taught methods of hitting hot metals precisely and moulding them. Boys learned to make nails, bolts with square heads, rivets and tongs. In the third and fourth class, they learned techniques to make hammers, axes, hexagonal and octagonal bolt heads and nuts. In the fifth year, they learned welding, screw cutting, use of lathe, drilling and punching machines. They also learned to identify and use different varieties of iron and steel. A monograph on the trade and industries of Lucknow City informs us that the city imported varieties of wiláyatí (foreign) iron. The chaddar variety was used to make house utensils; the sikh variety to produce chains, hinges and gratings; and the pattiya variety to make cartwheels (Hoey, 1880, p. 141). It was in the sixth year that sophisticated metals such as tin and brass were introduced to students. In the literary classrooms, boys learned metal properties and temperatures required to melt various metals.
As mentioned before, what distinguished the instruction received in the school from the local apprenticeship system was the use of trade textbooks. All the boys had to read an Urdu textbook, Technical Dialogue. For the carpentry class, a textbook titled, The Roorkee Treatise on Carpentry, was listed in the course. Prepared by the Roorkee Civil Engineering College, it explained and visualized skills on the paper through drawings, texts and pictures. In 1897, Mitchell's Carpentry Workshop Practice replaced The Roorkee Treatise. The former was used in the technical classes of the City and Guilds of London. However, it seems that instead of the full textbook, only selected portions, such as lessons on lap and secret dovetail, square scarf and combined joints, were taught. The book carried images of designs, which helped boys to imagine what they were making and how they were making. Some of the designs from the book are given in Figure 2.
To prepare workers as per the requirements of the Charbagh workshop, modern machines were either bought or borrowed from the railway workshop for training purposes. For example, the carpentry class got two lathes for wood turning and a fret-sawing machine for wood cutting in 1895. In 1893, Chhedi Mistri, a 'competent' workman from the Charbagh Railway Workshop, was employed as the instructor of the smithy workshop. There was a constant effort on the part of the school to make their education and training relevant for the railway workshop. Students passing from the school did join as workmen in various railway workshops and mechanical establishments in North India. For example, in 1895, 15 students joined the Oudh and Rohilkhand Railways, 6 joined the Rohilkhand and Kumaun Railways, 4 joined the Indian Midland Railway workshop and 2 students joined the Lucknow Railway station as fitters, clerks, draftsmen and blacksmiths. 8 On the one hand, the LIS produced skilled workers for the railway workshop. On the other hand, it also produced skilled workers for emerging industries outside the railway workshop and influenced the hitherto conventional training methods of trades (carpentry, iron work, glass-blowing). Goods manufactured in the school were sold in the local market. Whether these were locks, kitchen equipment, metal tools produced in the smithy class or chair, tables, doors from the carpentry class, everything was sold at the market price. Carpentry students made doors and windows of colonial offices and taluqdars' houses. They also produced cartwheels, which were in huge demand in the region. In Lucknow, landed elites and wealthy castes such as Brahmans and Banias had entered into the lucrative business of cart transport (Nevill, 1904, p. 53). With the introduction of new courses on glass-blowing, dyeing and clay modelling after 1894, the LIS was no longer an institution merely catering to the skilled labour demand of the railway workshop. The deindustrialization critique of the colonial economy and a growing local pressure to revive indigenous industries, as discussed in the first section, forced the LIS to negotiate its objectives. Its aim now included training skilled workers to revive already declined local crafts. It was believed that if the skills of conventional artisans could be modified in the light of newer technologies and advanced trade methods, there was a potential to revive and improve indigenous industries. The class in glass-blowing was started in 1894-1995 with a 'crude native mud' furnace and rudimentary tools. It was taught by one of the two surviving hereditary glass-blowers of the city. Boys were trained to make bulbs, flasks, plain jars, bottles, flanged jars, oil pots, water jugs, smoking pipes, funnels, lanterns, bell jars and other glass articles of everyday use. They also learned to make sophisticated lamps, which illuminated city streets, railway stations and taluqdars' houses. However, soon there were complaints that the glass-blowing class would not be successful unless better qualities of raw glass and modern methods of glass treatment were used for the training purpose. It was suggested that only new machines and methods could revive the fast disappearing industry from the competitive Austrian and German glass industry (General Report on Public Instruction, 1897, p. 85; [hereafter RPI]). But the colonial state was unwilling to spend large sums of money in modernizing the trade. Consequently, the glass-blowing class failed.
Students' choices further reinforced the linkages between the wider market, skills and the school curriculum. The subject preference of students in the LIS informs us about the hierarchy of trades in a rapidly changing political economy and labour market of the city. The school statistics indicate that the majority of boys opted for the carpentry and smithy classes. In 1895, 116 boys chose carpentry, 44 smithy and 13 glass-blowing. In 1900-1901, 101 boys opted for the carpentry class, 55 for iron work, 13 for glass-blowing, 13 for dyeing and 22 for clay modelling. Although the school administration largely allotted trades to students based on a student's caste and occupational leaning and seats available in a classroom, students asserted their own choices. When the smithy classes were opened in August 1893, the headmaster reported the following, 'a large number of boys are anxious to join the blacksmith's department, but I am unable at present to comply with the wishes of all. They are being gradually transferred from carpentry to blacksmith's shop as vacancies arose by the withdrawal of boys (RPI, 1894, p. 70)'. It appears that students' trade choices were shaped by the prevailing market wages. The Lucknow Gazetteer reported that while an ordinary carpenter, smith and mason earned about `7 and 8 annas monthly on an average, a skilled artisan, a mechanic or a plate layer employed in a railway workshop received comparatively higher wages. A skilled carpenter employed in the building industry earned about 6 to 8 annas per day in the 1880s (Hoey, 1880, p. 68). However, compared to carpenters, wages of smiths witnessed a sudden increase due to the emerging trades, which employed Western machinery (Nevill, 1904, p. 4). The growing demand for smiths along with an increased wage influenced the classroom composition of the LIS. With new technology and new forms of occupation, certain tasks and skills within one particular trade became more popular and valuable over others. Thus, in the carpentry trade, skills of a joiner were considered to be far more complex and valuable than that of a wood painter and polisher. While the LIS played a key role in legitimizing these differences through its knowledge economy and in defining the new regime of skill and skill training, the transfer of skill was not a straightforward process. Rather, as we will see, it was mediated by students' aspirations and shifting visions of colonial authorities.

Social Composition, Aspirations and the Lucknow Industrial School
The LIS in the initial 2 years after its establishment was only open to students from the artisanal class. The state recognized the poverty of artisans and made education in the LIS free. Books, tools, notebooks were also given freely to students. In 1894, the school began to admit boys from the 'gentlemen' classmiddle-and upper-caste Muslims and Hindus. Unlike the artisan class, sons of the gentlemen class had to pay a small fee. The number of free students got limited to 100. Changes brought by the new policy were already visible in the same year. Out of the total 135 students admitted in 1894, 45 students came from a nonartisanal background. They were sons of shopkeepers, teachers, cultivators and clerks. In terms of castes, we see a fair balance of upper-and lower-caste students: 15 Brahmans,11 Kayasths,10 Lohars,7 Ahirs,5 Barahis,4 Lodhs,4 Kahars,3 Telis, 2 Baids, Khatris, Bhats and Banias each, 1 Kori, Tamboli, Sonar, and Mali each. The rest were entered as Muslims (51) and Christians (13) (RPI, 1894, pp. 69-70). Students with an artisanal background, mainly the children of the railway workshop artisans, still dominated the institution (89 against 45). However, their number got reduced significantly in the coming year. For example, in 1895-1896, out of the total 160 boys admitted to the school, only 106 had artisanal parentage (RPI, 1896, p. 45). By 1899 and 1900, their number fell to 17 and 10, respectively. Artisans increasingly found it difficult to keep their sons in the school. Extreme poverty could have been one reason as it was the time of recurring famines in the region. In 1894, 38 students left the school between June 6 and August 21 to earn wages (RPI, 1895, p. 67). The number of students with a clerical background rose to 46 (RPI, 1900, p. 51). The sudden disappearance of labouring class students was accompanied by a sudden increase in the number of students from nonmanual labouring classes who were also upper and middle castes. The headmaster complained that the majority of boys from the 'respectable classes' were 'refuse' of the general schools where they had failed in their studies, and their parents had then sent them to the LIS in the hope of them getting jobs in the technical line (RPI, 1895, p. 66). This fragment of evidence does suggest the extent to which industrial education was still considered a taboo among the conservative elite castes. However, this shift in the social composition of students could not only be attributed to the poverty of artisans. The development of the LIS as an institution that opened doors for students to be employed as teachers, clerks, typewriters, supervisors, foremen-jobs which upper and middle castes considered their caste privilege-also contributed.
As discussed earlier, literary training in vernacular language, English, and drawing along with classes on mensuration and arithmetic for 4 hours in a day were an integral part of the industrial school curriculum. The knowledge of drawing and English that would-be skilled artisans was required to have also made them eligible for clerical and drawing teacher positions. Drawing lessons had been recently introduced in the government secondary schools, giving rise to a significant demand for art teachers. Boys from labouring classes found an opportunity to pursue a non-labouring respectable career. They constantly applied for a government job with a fixed salary, which until now were usually reserved for the 'respectable caste' students. In this way, they sought to defy and overcome the constraint of caste hierarchy and the division between mental and manual labour. By applying for teaching positions, they attempted to surmount their fixed occupational identity that came with their birth in a particular caste. The stigma attached to manual labour often shaped their understanding of respectable and non-respectable work. Artisanal students used education provided in the LIS to disturb the rigid norms of work and identity underpinning their lives. On his visit to the school in March 1893, C. H. T. Crosthwait, the newly appointed Lieutenant Governor General, found that some artisanal boys used the 'school as a means of obtaining an ordinary primary education' with 'no intention of becoming artisans'. 9 While these developments in the school led to an argument between school authorities and the local government over the question of making the school curriculum more practical and oriented towards manual labour, the school, in the meantime, got flooded with students from non-labouring backgrounds who saw a career opportunity for themselves, after being trained at the school. Now both artisanal and non-artisanal class boys used the school to get nonlabouring jobs. The tension between students and the school became more visible forcing the school authorities in 1897 to increase the time spent on manual labour training in workshops and drawing by 8 hours in a day. Consequently, five most regular Muslim students (Zakir Husain, Kamar-ud-Din, Mukhtar Ahmad, Muhammad Sultan and Raza Husain) and six Hindu students (Ram Autar, Chhote Lal Sahib, Mohan Lal, Nanhe Lal, Mahadeo Prasad, Bhagwan Chand and Niranjan Nath) left the school. 10 The general attendance fell from 170 to 117. Boys complained to the headmaster that 8 hours of labour exhausted them, leaving no energy for any literary pursuit in the night. Besides, their parents did not like that their sons were made to labour in the school for long hours.
These attempts at social and status mobility by students did not go down well with the school authorities and the government. E. C. Buck, who was appointed to inquire into the state of industrial and practical education in 1901, concluded that throughout India, industrial schools were being used by a class of students who were not interested in doing manual work. He argued that an illiterate artisan boy trained in his fathers' workshop was a better skilled worker than the schooled trained artisan. 11 Later in 1902, the Industrial School Committee Inquiry, which examined the differences between the indigenous apprenticeship system and the industrial school system, further reiterated the failure of the industrial school. It suggested that workshop training occurring in real market conditions was the best method of skilling workers. The report pointed out, 'Workmen educated far above the average of their "class" become unfitted for work, discontented, and give trouble to the foreman and the management' (Report on Industrial Education: Part I, 1903, p. 7). The local government, now under immense pressure, announced the abolition of literary education from the LIS in 1902. A full-time industrial workshop designed to offer only practical training was opened in a busy commercial street of Aminabad where students worked as apprentices and produced goods for the local market under the watch of a skilled master artisan. Students and the railway workshop apprentices were allowed to learn literacy skills in a night school, located in the LIS building. But, the students complained that it was difficult for them to attend the distantly located night school in the night after working in the workshop. The night school failed, and so did the LIS apprentice workshop system. Out of the total 155 enrolled students in 1902, 141 boys withdrew (RPI, 1902, p. 24;1903, p. 33). The LIS was eventually declared a 'failed' institution and was closed down in 1903. It was later reopened in its old style (literary education combined with manual training) but was reorganized as a technical institute under the watch of a European principal, P. H. Swinchatt (RPI, 1903, p. 33). Under his charge, the name of the school was changed to the Lucknow Technical School, and it now aimed to produce mechanics, fitters, electricians, repair workers, motor drivers, carpenters, smiths for modern industries, including the railway workshop.

Conflicts with the Railway Workshop
There is very little information in the archive about the Charbagh railway workshop, and my request to use the archival material held by the workshop was rejected by the local officials. My analysis in this section is based on very fragmentary evidence, but it suggests that railway workshops in colonial India had developed a sound system of training workers since the introduction of railways in the 1850s. Industrial schools, while supplying the needs of skilled labour for railway workshops, came to exist in tension with the apprenticeship system developed at the railway workshops. From the limited records, we find that even though officials and skilled workers of the Lucknow workshop were involved in establishing and running the LIS, the workshop had a tumultuous relationship with the school. With the very concept of establishing a feeder school for the workshop, not only a new category of skilled worker that was trained differently had emerged but also an institution was born that threatened the idea of the railway workshop apprenticeship system. When opinions of local colonial officials were gathered in the 1880s as to the need of an industrial school in Lucknow, Colonel J. G. Forbes protested. In 1888, he wrote to the provincial government that mistris in railway workshops, foundries and other government workshops trained their own workers and as such, no practical demand existed for an industrial school (Colvin's Minute, TEP, 1906, pp. 91-92). He suggested that railway workshops should be recognized as real technical schools. However, his opinions were sidelined, and the LIS was established. Expert master artisans from the railway workshop were appointed as teachers, and officials from the workshop attended meetings to decide the curriculum and syllabus of the school. But after a few years, when it became clear that the school was being used by students for purposes other than attending the railway workshop, the workshop officials launched a full critique of the LIS. They began to complain that students who joined the workshop were weak in their training. In 1899, the Superintendent of the Charbagh Locomotive and Carriage Workshop wrote to his higher authorities that he was dissatisfied with the quality of trained boys. In his letter, he questioned the ability of the LIS to train expert workers. According to him, the training provided by the school was uneven, lacked thoroughness and real practical experience. He validated the opinion of Forbes that workshops were the best place to skill workers. Apprentices in a workshop, he argued, could not abandon training as they liked. Workshop rules and norms bonded them through a formal or an informal apprenticeship contract, and apprentices were forced to work in all weather conditions. In a workshop, a senior skilled artisan supervised their work, taught them methods and pointed out their mistakes. During the apprenticeship, the apprentice selected his favourite branch (brass foundry, smith's shop, fitting shop and carpenter's shop). By supervising apprentices' actions and their bodies and paying them for their work, the workshop turned a 'native child' into one of the finest workmen in 5 years. 12 Contrasting this to the training of an industrial school, he wrote, Now, in Industrial School, there is no work a boy can be employed at for a couple of years during the time he is learning to work, simply because it is only a school, and there is not that variety of jobs to be worked at like there is in a workshop, and there is no pay or incentive to cause a boy to work; the result is, he either gets tired of doing the same thing over and over again, or else after he gets a smattering of his trade he thinks he has learned all and is far too superior to go and start work at a workshop as a workman. Another point against such a school is, that there is no demand for men such as are turned out, as every large concern has lots of boys who are learning to work, and who are sons and relatives of men in the same works, and who in turn drop into the places of the older men as they leave, and who are glad to advance step by step, and are really worth their money as time goes on. They are far superior to any school-made workman, and they do not think half so much of themselves as the latter, and consequently are more in earnest with their work and will go on improving; whereas the school-made workman after his five year's training has to start pretty much as an apprentice if he gets into a workshop, and has to begin to learn all over again. 13 The disentanglement of workers' training from the shop floor produced tensions between the school skilling programmes and the shop-floor skilling. How shall we explain these conflicts and failures in the presupposed seamless flow and interdependence of the modern education sector and industry? Was it because the two systems generated two distinct notions of skills and skilling that were not compatible with each other? And, if they were not compatible, why was it so? Louis Althusser's formulation that education reproduces 'diversely skilled labour power' and produces conditions conducive to capitalist production outside the shop floor is not very helpful here as it does not consider the problem of skill transference, differing expectations of students, authorities and teachers (Althusser, 1972, pp. 133-154). From the records of the Charbagh workshop and other similar railway workshops, it is clear that railway workshops had created their distinct system of labour training. Locomotive and carriage workshops employed varieties of skilled European and Indian workers and unskilled Indian coolie labour. Among the skilled worker category, workshops hired enginemen, engine drivers, mechanics, turners, draughtsmen, carpenters, smiths, firemen, fitters, stationary engine driver, boiler smiths, spring smiths, carriage turners, painters, coppersmiths, sawyers, brass founders, tin men, iron moulders, carvers and carriage builders.
We get a detailed picture of the earliest system evolved to train natives and Eurasians at the Greater Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR) workshops (locomotive and carriage) during the 1860s from a report by F. I. Cortazzi, the Locomotive Superintendent. Out of 1122 workers employed in the two GIPR workshops (Byculla and Lanowli in Maharashtra) in March 1861, only 56 trained workers were recruited from England, the rest (82 Europeans, 24 Eurasians and 960 Indians) were trained inside the workshop. Except for the highly skilled posts such as of enginemen and foremen which were reserved for Europeans, natives were trained inside the workshop to be employed as machine-men, turners, moulders, carpenters, smiths and fitters. The workshop hired young boys as apprentices who were trained by senior workers. Cortazzi reported that the two workshops were training 76 boys as carpenters, boilermakers and painters in 1861. But these boys were not under any formal apprenticeship contract. However, the table that he presented at the end of his report also included 76 bounded apprentices (60 as fitters, 12 as carriage builders, 3 as smiths and 1 as a painter). He did not explain why certain boys were under a formal contract and others were not. One reason could be that the contracts made it difficult to get rid of inefficient or deviant apprentices. Cortazzi hinted towards this line of argument, 'my system being that if I find a lad does not progress in his business to get rid of him and put another in his place who do the shop more credit'. 14 The Under Secretary of State for India, Herman Merivale, wrote in 1861 that the GIPR system of training 'natives' inside the workshop was a cheap and efficient system of procuring skilled labour for railway workshops. He wrote that importing skilled workers from Europe was a costly affair that other railway companies should not follow. Cortazzi argued that while it was good to train Indians for skilled work, certain jobs such as of enginemen and foremen required higher mental abilities that only Englishmen possessed. 'Natives have no so much nerve and presence of mind in emergencies', he wrote. 15 But his fixed racialized ideas of skilled work, grounded in the assumed superiority of the White race, were often challenged by workers, and once he was forced to employ an exceptionally skilled Indian worker as the foremen of turners.
The GIPR workshops continued to train Indians through the apprenticeship system and discriminated them on the grounds of race. When Burnett-Hurst examined the GIPR workshops in the 1920s, a European foreman told him that 'native machine-men' were not mechanics as they have no knowledge of mechanics and they carry out their duties in a perfunctory manner. So long as the man is confined to the particular task to which he is accustomed and which he has been trained to perform, so long will he carry out his work. He has not the ability, however, to apply his knowledge. (Burnett-Hurst, 1925, p. 98) Hurst confirmed that the system of training apprentices from a young age was still in practice. He was told that workshops employed 11,000 'men and boys' in 1921.
Boys joined the workshop as apprentices on screwing/drilling machines when they were 16 or 17 years old and learned their way up for 5 years (Burnett-Hurst, 1925, p. 99). From being unskilled coolies, they become skilled machine-men. But many remained unskilled, and others were discriminated on the ground of race (Sinha, 2012, pp. 325-323) and for their lack of scientific and technical knowledge.
Evidence suggests that railway workshops cultivated a very specialized taskoriented notion of skill among Indian workers. They designed a formal and informal apprenticeship system that valorized manual dexterity and discouraged the transfer of scientific and technical knowledge to Indians as such knowledge, tied to higher posts, was seen as an exclusive preserve of Europeans and sometimes of Anglo-Indians. European engineers and foremen praised Indian workers for their skills (manual dexterity and the ability to finish a specialized task), but maintained that they were incapable of possessing broader scientific and technical knowledge, necessary for highly skilled technical posts of enginemen, foremen and overseers. Workers who surprised European officials with their scientific, technical and overseer skills became exceptions. A racialized notion of knowledge and skill and a specialized task-oriented training of young workers under the watch of superiors, both native and European, endorsed the concentration of workers from a particular caste, family or region in one department. Hurst saw that complex machines were looked after by Parsis, 'other machines' by Ratnagiri Marathas and Punjabi Muslims, moulding by Kamatis from Hyderabad, smithy by Boris Muslims, brass foundry by Marathas, carpentry by Gujaratis, painting by Pardeshis (Burnett-Hurst, 1925, p. 98). This mode of training workers within the bounds of the workshop was also prevalent at the Charbagh workshop. The aforementioned educational official Nesfield visited the Lucknow workshop in 1882 and wrote down about workers, their education, skills and work experiences. He found that workers earned their way up through hard work, loyalty, experience and constant skilling within the demarcated occupational spheres where Indians were employed. Thus, a Brahman boy, who entered the workshop as a helper supplying drinking water to workers and assisting artisans, learned about machines and work pattern and gradually became one of the skilled workers. We do not know which department he joined. Nitin Sinha (2012, p. 324) in the context of Jamalpur railway workshop showed that those who started as cleaners could become firemen, drivers and shunters after their training. Nesfield was told that literacy was not a formal criterion for becoming a fitter or a supervisor, but fitters whom he met were literate and had used literacy to advance themselves. Chedi, a Lohar caste fitter, rose from the rank of workers to become a supervisor, but over the years he had learned to scribble Kaithi to note orders from supervisors. For workers, he vernacularized English technical terms and names of machines. Nesfield also met fitter Sheo Din, turner Ram Khilal, carpenter Santu, moulder Kedi Ram-all skilled workers using their literary skills on the job (Nesfield, 1883, pp. 90-100).
Railway workshops had produced a culture of skilling under a paternalistic tradition that was governed by the hierarchies of caste, race, region and age. Even though many students with the scientific and technical knowledge and workshop experience from the LIS joined railway workshops, they were looked down upon by the officials and senior workers and were rarely given direct appointments as skilled workers. Instead, they were hired as apprentices (beginners), earning wages similar to the workshop apprentices. However, the necessity of literate and more thoroughly, scientifically and technically trained workers continued to be a key issue for the workshop, suggesting that the notion of skill had to be broadened to include the knowledge of science, maths and technology for a successful development of railway workshops. The Lucknow railway workshop in 1922 envisaged a technical institute, parallel to the status of the Lucknow Technical School. Literate and schooled apprentices working in the workshop were given admission to attend six lectures in a week. Existing textbooks in the market, which were considered to be too abstract and theoretical, were rejected. Instead, the teacher became more important. A good instructor was appointed on a salary of `95 per month. 16 There is very little information available on the exact nature of training in the technical institute. It is known, however, that before this instructor was employed, the chief draftsman instructed apprentices for 2 hours. While the instructor of European and Eurasian apprentices received `95 per month, the instructor of native apprentices received `30 per month suggesting that racialized profiling of skill and skill training continued to be relevant inside the workshop.

Conclusions
This historical account highlights four points that are of relevance to contemporary policymaking on occupational skilling. First, I have tried to show that meanings of skill in the past were often very fluid. What may be considered skills in a school may not be seen as skill at the shop floor. In the aforemnetioned case, the LIS operated on a notion that the skilled worker was both a practical and theoretical person who was not only to be trained in manual labour through workshops but also in work ethic, discipline, sincerity, and, most importantly, the knowledge of science, mathematics, drawing, vernacular languages and English. However, the railway workshop, where the boys were to be employed, had shaped a different notion of skill and skill training which was mediated by the power relation of race, caste, age, region and by the strict hierarchies of mental and manual labour. Here, scientific and technical knowledge was the privilege of Europeans, and Indians were seen as having a 'sheep mentality' who were good at doing specialized routine tasks (manual dexterity) but were incapable of learning scientific and technical principles of machines. While these boundaries were not always very tight, these racialized logics of skills seem to govern the overall life of railway workshops in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Attempts to breach these power relations by industrial school boys were not welcomed as boys educated at the LIS were too theoretical for the railway workshop officials and workers. The lack of the same theoretical and scientific knowledge was seen as the cause of Indian workers' inefficiency. Thus, in the foundry work in the GIPR workshop, Indian workers were seen as seven times inefficient compared to a European worker. In the mechanic section, the efficiency of Indian workers was just one-third of a European mechanic (Burnett-Hurst, 1925, p. 100). Skill emerged as a quantifiable entity in which Indian workers were far behind.
Second, I have pointed out a conflict with regard to the methods of training between the ITIs and the industrial shop floor. The two did not have seamless connections. We saw that programmes of industrial and technical education did not directly translate into skilling. Employers of the Charbagh workshop considered that the learning of trades via classrooms and textbooks produced inferior workers because schools lacked thoroughness, compulsion and harsh work regime of the shop-floor apprenticeship. However, these notions about schooltrained workers were never neutral but were informed by the power politics of railway workshops and workers. Educated, well-trained, scientifically informed workers from outside threatened the authority of workers who built their status inside the workshop by working hard, showing their loyalties to superiors, and by learning skills for years.
Third, I have highlighted the problems of skill transference in an industrial institute. The LIS history shows that aspirations of students could radically transform the nature of an ITI. What was to be taught in the school could not always be imposed from the top, but students constantly ruptured these visions and forced institutes to consider their aspirations. In this particular case, labouring caste boys, who for centuries were denied secondary education, used the school to fulfil their dreams of getting respectable jobs as teacher and clerks, and posts which required intellectual skills and were usually reserved for educated upper and middle castes. However, the LIS was soon hijacked by the elite castes of Lucknow City who threw out the poor labouring classes from the school and asserted their rights over the new education and related government jobs. Results of this intense politics of caste, competition for government jobs and student aspirations were that the LIS became an institution of the middle-class and elite castes and ultimately failed. When it was reopened, its curriculum included training that was heavily shaped by the aspirations of students and the state's desire to produce mechanics, drivers, foremen.
Fourth, I have shown that colonial policy towards industrial and technical education was a product of many visions: visions of the educational officials, nationalists, conservative landed elites, arts and crafts movement advocates, industry personnel, school headmasters. The LIS was never an institution with fixed goals; its objectives kept changing according to the need of colonial officials, local pressures and students' aspirations. The colonial state's unwillingness to spend large sums of money on local industries and in developing India's technical education infrastructure resulted in materializing only a few limited government technical institutes which were subordinated to the needs of British colonialism, while also being reshaped by the aspirations of students.