This article asks whether the slow process of divesting Indian native schoolteachers of their traditional authority was only about new concepts and representations of education and knowledge. Following the methodological idea of constellations of affordances, emphasising a relational ontology, the article discusses whether changes in the shape and the relations of objects in Indian classrooms together with the arrival of new objects may have played a silent role in the process of erosion of schoolteachers' authority. Based on a wide range of official and missionary sources, but also referring to individual native voices, the article reconstructs more pervasive and subtle transformations of native elementary classrooms, focusing on surfaces for writing and on "books". The article argues that shifts in the materialities of elementary native schooling took place that repositioned old "gurus" in an unfavourable light before the take-off of teacher training institutions would provide for new definitions of their role as schoolmasters.