How can we unpack the history of schooling in colonial India by looking beyond official records of success and failure? How did the classroom in the Princely State of Mysore become a place where children and young adults unlearned traditional prejudices and picked up new sensory skills, which in turn shaped their understanding of their own selves in a modern world?

In this GHIL podcast interview PR Officer Kim König is joined by GHIL Senior Research Fellow and Head of the India Research Programme Indra Sengupta to talk to Janaki Nair about the ideas behind her lecture on ‘The Classroom as Sensorium: Tactility, Attention, and Perception in the Mysore School, 1860–1930’.