Every August, as the tricolour goes up over schools and colleges across the country, it’s worth pausing on a quieter part of the independence story: the fight over what — and how — a free India would teach its children. The men and women who led India to freedom on 15 August 1947 weren’t only drafting a constitution and building a government. Many of them had spent decades before that, arguing, experimenting, and building schools of their own, because they believed real independence had to begin in the classroom.

Education as a Battlefield of Its Own

Colonial education in India was never neutral. Thomas Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Education had set the tone decades earlier, aiming to produce, in his words, a class of Indians “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Schools and universities were built to staff the colonial bureaucracy, teach in English, and quietly sideline Indian languages, crafts, and ways of knowing.

For India’s freedom fighters, this made education itself a site of resistance. Boycotting government schools, founding “national” institutions, and reimagining what and how children should learn became as much a part of the independence movement as marches and satyagraha. The result was a handful of institutions and ideas — many of them born in the 1910s and 1920s — that quietly outlasted the Raj and went on to shape independent India’s schools and universities.

Gandhi’s Nai Talim: Learning by the Hand, Not Just the Book

Mahatma Gandhi believed colonial schooling alienated children from their own society by prizing certificates over skills and books over hands-on work. His answer, developed through his years at Tolstoy Farm in South Africa and formalised at the 1937 Wardha education conference, was Nai Talim, or “Basic Education.”

Gandhi’s scheme proposed teaching every child a productive handicraft — spinning, weaving, pottery, farming — not as a vocational add-on, but as the very foundation through which reading, arithmetic, science, and civic values would be taught. “The principal idea,” he wrote in Harijan, “is to impart the whole education of the body, mind and soul through the handicraft that is taught.” It was as much a social idea as an educational one: by building the curriculum around manual work, Gandhi hoped to dissolve the old prejudice that treated labour, and the castes associated with it, as beneath “educated” India.

Independent India never fully adopted Nai Talim — Nehru’s government leaned instead towards industrial and scientific expansion — but its emphasis on dignity of labour, learning by doing, and education rooted in community life still echoes in India’s vocational and experiential-learning reforms today, including strands of the National Education Policy 2020.

Tagore’s Santiniketan: A Classroom Under the Trees

While Gandhi built his philosophy around the workshop, Rabindranath Tagore built his around nature. In 1901, he started a small school at Santiniketan in rural Bengal, and by 1918 had laid the foundation for what would grow into Visva-Bharati University. Tagore rejected the rigid, exam-driven classroom of colonial schooling in favour of lessons held in the open air, under trees, close to art, music, and the rhythms of rural life.

Visva-Bharati’s motto — “Yatra Vishwam Bhavatyeka Nirdam,” where the world makes one nest — reflected Tagore’s belief that Indian education should be rooted in local culture while staying open to the world, rather than either blindly imitating the West or turning inward in isolation. Both Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru backed the institution’s transformation into a central university in 1951, a rare point of consensus between very different visions of India’s future, and a sign of how seriously the freedom movement’s leaders took Tagore’s experiment.

A University Born of the Non-Cooperation Movement

Some institutions were founded not just in the spirit of the freedom struggle, but directly out of it. When Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress launched the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1920, they called on students and teachers to leave government-affiliated colleges. At Aligarh Muslim University, a group of students and faculty answered that call — and, along with leaders like Mohammad Ali Jauhar, Hakim Ajmal Khan, and Dr. Mukhtar Ahmed Ansari, founded Jamia Millia Islamia that same year, envisioning a national university free of colonial control.

Gandhi supported the new institution closely enough to send his own son, Devdas Gandhi, to teach Hindi there, and a young educationist named Zakir Husain — who would go on to become President of India — helped steer Jamia through its most difficult early years. Jamia’s founding idea, blending Islamic scholarship with secular Indian nationalism, made it one of the clearest examples of education deliberately built as an act of political defiance.

Malaviya’s Banaras Hindu University: Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science

Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, a four-time president of the Indian National Congress, spent nearly two decades raising funds and support for a university that would combine the study of Indian philosophy, Sanskrit, and culture with modern science, medicine, and engineering. Banaras Hindu University, founded in 1916, was his answer to a colonial education system he felt was disconnected from India’s own intellectual traditions.

Malaviya’s insistence that ancient learning and modern science belonged in the same institution, rather than in competing systems, became a template that other Indian universities would follow long after independence.

Maulana Azad: Building a Nation’s Education Ministry from Scratch

No one had a bigger direct hand in shaping independent India’s education system than Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the freedom fighter and Congress president who became India’s first Minister of Education in 1947. He inherited a country where literacy stood at roughly 12 percent, and almost no framework for higher or technical education beyond a handful of colonial-era universities.

In just over a decade in office, Azad laid the foundations of much of the system that still exists today. He set up the first Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur in 1951, the University Grants Commission in 1953 to oversee higher education, and the All India Council for Technical Education, along with the Sahitya Akademi and Sangeet Natak Akademi to nurture the arts. He pushed for free and compulsory education for children up to the age of fourteen — a goal later written into the Constitution as Article 45, and eventually into law as the Right to Education Act of 2009 — and championed girls’ education and adult literacy at a time when both were badly neglected. “It is a birthright of every individual,” he said, “to receive at least the basic education without which he cannot fully discharge his duties as a citizen.”

India marks Azad’s birthday, 11 November, as National Education Day in his honour.

Turning Ideas into a System

Once independence arrived, these ideas had to be turned into policy, and the commissions that followed carried the freedom movement’s fingerprints. The University Education Commission of 1948-49, chaired by the philosopher-statesman Dr. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, reshaped higher education and pushed for a more values-driven, less exam-obsessed system. The Education Commission of 1964-66, led by Dr. D. S. Kothari, went further still, recommending the 10+2+3 structure of schooling that most Indian students still follow, a three-language formula, and a stronger push towards science and vocational education — recommendations that shaped the National Policy on Education of 1968, India’s first.

What Stayed With Us

Look closely at Indian education today and the fingerprints of the freedom struggle are still there: in the IITs and UGC that Azad built, in the emphasis on dignity of labour that traces back to Gandhi’s Nai Talim, in Tagore’s insistence that learning should connect to nature and culture rather than sit behind a desk, and in the constitutional promise of free and compulsory education that leaders fought to write into law. These weren’t separate battles from the fight for independence — they were part of the same conviction, that a free people also needed to be an educated, self-respecting one.

As India marks another Independence Day, it’s worth remembering that the freedom fighters we celebrate weren’t only interested in winning a flag and a Parliament. Many of them were, in their own way, also our first teachers.