John Nesfield

John Collinson Nesfield (14 August 1836 – 28 June 1919) served in various roles as an educator in British India and was for some time curate of St Michael's Church, Highgate, London.

He joined the inspectorate there in the following year and in 1885 was passed over for promotion to become the province's DPI when, as was not uncommon, the government determined to prefer Edmund White, who was a member of the Indian Civil Service, to an educator.

[10] Nesfield objected strenuously to this decision, firing off letters first to the Secretary of State for the province, R. A.

When those appeals failed, he wrote also to the Viceroy of India, Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, but was again rebuffed.

There had been investigations regarding whether many of the English and vernacular textbooks prescribed for use in schools of the North-Western Provinces had been contrived so as to provide him with a monopoly on publication.

[5] Nesfield's English Grammar: Past and Present was originally written for the market in colonial India.

[15] Bibliographer Manfred Görlach is critical, saying of the frequently reprinted English Grammar: Past and Present that "it is not quite easy to see how its wordiness, lack of clear structure, mixture of synchronic description and diachronic explanation and often unclear definitions gave the book the immense impact it had".

Caste designators, such as Jat and Rajput, were status-based titles to which any tribe that rose to social prominence could lay a claim, and which could be dismissed by their peers if they declined.