द ब्यूटीफुल ट्री: १८वीं सदी में भारत की स्वदेशी गुरुकुल शिक्षा (धर्मपाल)

hundred years. (b) The Reports of William Adam on Vernacular
Education in Bengal and Bihar 1835-38, and the legend of the
‘1,00,000 schools’, and (c) Dr G.W. Leitner and Education in the
Panjab 1849-82. These were published in early 1939 by the
Oxford University Press under the above title. In Memorandum
‘A’, using the low figures sent by A.D. Campbell for the district of
Bellary, Hartog questioned Thomas Munro’s calculation that ‘the
proportion of males educated in schools was nearer one-third
than one-fourth.’ He countered instead ‘that Munro’s figures
may have been over-estimates based on the returns of collectors
less careful and interested in education than Campbell.’ Hartog’s
conclusion at the end was that ‘until the action taken by Munro,
Elphinstone, and Bentinck in the three presidencies, the British
Government had neglected elementary education to its detriment
in India. But I have found no evidence that it tried to destroy or
uproot what existed.’ In a footnote, Hartog further observed: ‘In
Great Britain itself it was not until 1833 that the House of
Commons made a grant of 30,000 pounds for the purposes of
education.’ He also praised various Indian personalities, and
more so India’s quaint mixture of ‘most ancient and most
modern’.
In his Preface, after referring to ‘the imaginary basis for
accusations not infrequently made in India that the British
Government systematically destroyed the indigenous system of
elementary schools and with it a literacy which the schools are
presumed to have created’, Hartog observed: ‘When Mr Gandhi,
in an address given at the Royal Institute of International Affairs
on 20 October 1931, lent his powerful support to those
accusations, and challenged contradiction, it was obviously
necessary to re-examine the facts.’⁷⁶
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It may be fair to observe that, despite his considerable
learning and experience, Hartog seemed to have lacked both
imagination and a sense of history. He was far too committed to
the dogmas of pre-1939 Britain. His immigrant Jewish
background may have accentuated such an outlook further.
Whatever the reasons, it seemed inconceivable to Hartog that
late eighteenth, or early nineteenth century India could have had
the education and facilities which Gandhiji and others had
claimed. Similarly, it had been inconceivable to William
Wilberforce, 125 years earlier, that the Hindoos could
conceivably have been civilised (as was stated by many British
officers and scholars who in Wilberforce’s days had had long
personal experience of life in India) without the benefits of
Christianity. To Hartog, as also to Edward Thompson, and before
them to an extent even to W. Adam, and some of the Madras
Presidency Collectors, it was axiomatic that these Indian
educational institutions amounted to very little, and that the
Indian system had ‘become merely self-perpetuating, and
otherwise barren.’
Besides Gandhiji’s statement, two other facts seem to have
had quite an upsetting effect on Philip Hartog. The first, already
referred to, were the writings of G.W. Leitner. The second seems
to have hurt him even more: this was a statement relating to
what Hartog called ‘what of the immediate future’. In this
context, Hartog noted that, ‘an earnest Quaker missionary has
predicted that under the new regime [evidently meaning the
post-British regime] there will be a Counter-Reformation in
education, which will no longer be Western but Eastern’; and, he
observed: ‘Thus India will go back a thousand years and more to
the old days...to those days when she gave out a great wealth of
ideas, especially to the rest of Asia, but accepted nothing in
return.’ Such a prospect was galling indeed to Philip Hartog,
burdened as he was—like his illustrious predecessors—with the
idea of redeeming India morally as well as intellectually, by
pushing it along the western road.
As Gandhiji was the prime cause of this effort, Hartog sent
a copy of his lectures to him. He wrote to Gandhiji that he had
‘little doubt that you will find that a close analysis of the facts
reveals no evidence to support the statement which you made at
the Royal Institute of International Affairs’; adding that Gandhiji
‘will therefore feel justified now in withdrawing that statement.’
Gandhiji replied some months later. His letter had all the
ingredients of a classic reply: ‘I have not left off the pursuit of the
subject of education in the villages during the pre-British
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period. I am in correspondence with several educationists. Those
who have replied do support my view but do not produce
authority that would be accepted as proof. My prejudice or
presentiment still makes me cling to the statement I made at
Chatham House. I don’t want to write haltingly in Harijan. You
don’t want me merely to say that the proof I had in mind had
been challenged by you!’
There the matter ended as far as Gandhiji was concerned.
On 10 September 1939, however, after learning of Gandhiji’s
statement regarding the War in Europe, Hartog wrote him a very
grateful letter:
I cannot wait to express to you my profound gratitude,
shared, I am sure by an innumerable number of my fellow
countrymen, all over the world, for the attitude you have
taken up in regard to the present War at your interview
with the Viceroy, reported in the Times.
Hartog’s book of lectures led to much immediate writing in
India on the subject. Even a new edition of the complete Adam’s
Reports was published by the University of Calcutta. Yet, what
was written produced the same data and analysis all over again;
and, in the main, covered the same ground, and advanced more
or less the same arguments as had already been advanced by
K.T. Shah in his long letter to Philip Hartog in February 1932.⁷⁷
VII
The significance of what Gandhiji said at Chatham House in
October 1931 ought to have been understood not in the literal
way in which Philip Hartog did, but within the total context of
Mahatma Gandhi’s address, which attempted to reveal the
overall disruption and decline of Indian society and its
institutions under British rule. That a great decay had set in by
the 1820s, if not a few decades earlier, in the sphere of
education was admitted by the Madras Presidency survey, as
well as by W. Adam with regard to Bengal and Bihar. In 1822-
25, the number of those in ordinary schools was put at over
1,50,000 in the Madras Presidency. Evidently, the inference that
the number was appreciably, perhaps a great deal higher some
20 or 30 years earlier, cannot
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be ruled out. At any rate, nowhere was there any suggestion
made that it was much less than it had been in 1822-25. The
population of the Madras Presidency in 1823 was estimated at
1,28,50,941, while the population of England in 1811 was
estimated at 95,43,610. It may be noted from this that, while the
differences in the population of the two regions were not that
significant, the numbers of those attending the various types of
schools (Charity, Sunday, Circulating) in England were in all in
the neighbourhood of around 75,000 as compared to at least
double this number within the Madras Presidency. Further, more
than half of this number of 75,000 in English schools consisted of
those who attended school at the most only for 2-3 hours on a
Sunday.
However, after about 1803, every year a marked increase
took place in the number of those attending schools in England.
The result: the number of 75,000 attending any sort of school
around 1800 rose to 6,74,883 by 1818, and 21,44,377 in 1851,
i.e. an increase of about 29 times in a period of about fifty years.
It is true that the content of this education in England did not
improve much during this half century. Neither did the period
spent in school increase: from more than an average of one year in
1835 to about two years in 1851. The real implication of Gandhi-
ji’s observation, and of the information provided by the Madras
Presidency collectors, W. Adam and G.W. Leitner, is that for the
following 50-100 years, what happened in India—within the
developing situation of relative collapse and stagnation—proved
the reverse of the developments taking place in England. It is
such a feeling, and the intuition of such an occurrence, that
drove Gandhiji, firstly, to make his observation in London in
October 1931, and secondly, disinclined to withdraw it eight
years later. Gandhiji seemed to be looking at the issue from a
historical, social, and a human viewpoint. In marked contrast,
men like Sir Philip Hartog, as so commonly characteristic of the
specialist, were largely quibbling about phrases; intent solely on
picking holes in what did not fit the prevailing western theories
of social and political development.
Statistical comparisons were what Sir Philip Hartog and
many others in his time wanted. And these can, to a large
extent, settle this debate: some comparison of the 1822-25
Madras school-attending scholars is made here with the Madras
Presidency data pertaining to the 1880s and 1890s. Because of
incompleteness of the earlier data available from Bengal and
Bihar, and also from the Presidency of Bombay,⁷⁸ such a
comparison

70

does not seem possible for these areas, much less for the whole
of India.
According to the 1879-80 Report of the Director of Public
Instruction for the Madras Presidency, the total number of
educational institutions of all types (including colleges,
secondary, middle and primary schools, and special, or technical
institutions) then numbered 10,553. Out of these, the primary
schools numbered 10,106. The total number attending them:
2,38,960 males, and 29,419 females. The total population of the
Presidency at this time is stated as 3,13,08,872. While the
number of females attending these institutions was evidently
larger in 1879-80 compared to 1822-25, the proportionate
numbers of males was clearly much reduced. Using the same
computation as those applied in 1822-25 (i.e. one-ninth of the
total population treated as of school-going age), those of this age
amongst the male population (taking males and females as
equal) would have numbered 17,39,400. The number of males in
primary schools being 2,18,840, the proportion of this age group
in schools thus turns out to be 12.58%. This proportion in the
decayed educational situation of 1822-25 was put at one-fourth,
i.e. at 25%. If one were to take even the total of all those in every
type of institution, i.e. the number 2,38,960, the proportion in
1879-80 rises only to 13.74%.
From 1879-80 to 1884-85, there was some increase,
however, to be found. While the population went down slightly to
3,08,68,504, the total number of male scholars went up to
3,79,932, and that of females to 50,919. Even this larger
number of male scholars came up only to 22.15% of the
computed school-age male population; and, of those in primary
schools to 18.33%. These figures are much lower than the 1822-
25 officially calculated proportion. Incidentally, while there was
an overall increase in number of females in educational institu-
tions, the number of Muslim girls in such institutions in the
district of Malabar in 1884-85 was only 705. Here it may be
recollected that 62 years earlier, in August 1823, the number of
Muslim girls in schools in Malabar was 1,122; and, at that time,
the population of Malabar would have been below half of that in
1884-85.
Eleven years later in 1895-96, the number in all types of
educational institutions increased further. While the population
had grown to 3,56,41,828, the number of those in educational

71

institutions had increased to 6,81,174 males, and 1,10,460 fe-
males. It is at this time then that the proportion (taking all those
males attending educational institutions) rose to 34.4%: just
about equal to the proportion which Thomas Munro had
computed in 1826 as one-third (33.3%) of those receiving any
education whether in indigenous institutions, or at home. Even
at this period, i.e. 70 years after Munro’s computation, however,
the number of males in primary education was just 28%.
Coming to 1899-1900, the last year of the nineteenth
century, the number of males in educational institutions went
up to 7,33,923 and of females to 1,29,068. At this period, the
number of school-age males was calculated by the Madras
Presidency Director of Public Instruction as 26,42,909, thus
giving a percentage of 27.8% attending any educational
institution. Even taking a sympathetic view of the later data,
what clearly comes out of these comparisons is that the
proportion of those in educational institutions at the end of the
nineteenth century was still no larger than the proportions
estimated by Thomas Munro of the number attending the
institutions of the decaying indigenous system of the Madras
Presidency in 1822-25.
The British authorities in the late nineteenth century must
have been tempted—as we find state authorities are in our own
times—to show their achievements in brighter hues and thus err
on the side of inflating figures: therefore, this later data may be
treated with some scepticism. This was certainly not the case
with the 1822-25 data which, in the climate of that period, could
not have been considered inflated in any sense of the word.
From the above, it may be inferred that the decay which is
mentioned in 1822-25 proceeded to grow in strength during the
next six decades. During this period, most of the indigenous
institutions more or less disappeared. Any surviving remnants
were absorbed by the late 19th century British system. Further,
it is only after 1890 that the new system begins to equal the
1822-25 officially calculated proportions of males in schools
quantitatively. Its quality, in comparison to the indigenous
system, is another matter altogether.
The above comparison of the 1822-25 Madras indigenous
education data with the data from the 1880s and 1890s period
also seems to provide additional support—if such support were
required—to the deductions which G.W. Leitner had come to in
1882. These reveal the decline of indigenous education in the
Panjab in the previous 35-40 years.
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VIII
During this prolonged debate, the critical issue that was seldom
touched upon and about which in their various ways, the
Madras Presidency collectors, the reports of Adam, and the work
of Leitner provided a variety of clues, was how all these
educational institutions—the 1,00,000 schools in Bengal and
Bihar, and a ‘school in every village’ according to Munro and
others—were actually organised and maintained. For, it is
ridiculous to suppose that any system of such wide and
universal dimensions could ever have maintained itself without
the necessary conceptual and infrastructural supports over any
length of time.
Modern Indians tend to quote foreigners in most matters
reflecting on India’s present, or its past. One school of thought
uses all such foreign backing to show India’s primitiveness, the
barbaric, uncouth and what is termed ‘parochial’ nature of the
customs and manners of its people, and the ignorance,
oppressions and poverty which Indians are said to have always
suffered from. To them India for most of its past had lived at
what is termed, the ‘feudal’ stage or what in more recent Marxist
terminology is called the ‘system of Asiatic social organisms’. Yet,
to another school, India had always been a glorious land, with
minor blemishes, or accidents of history here and there; all in all
remaining a land of ‘Dharmic’ and benevolent rulers. For yet
others subscribing to the observations of the much-quoted
Charles Metcalfe, and Henry Maine, it has mostly been a happy
land of ‘village republics’.
Unfortunately, due to their British-oriented education, or
because of some deeper causes (like the scholastic and hair-
splitting tendency of Brahmanical learning), Indians have
become since the past century, too literal, too much caught up
with mere words and phrases. They have lost practically all
sense of the symbolic nature of what is said, or written.⁷⁹ It is
not surprising,
73

therefore, that when Indians think of village republics, what
occurs to them is not what the word ‘republic’ implies in
substance; but, instead, the visual images of its shell, the
elected assembly, the system of voting, etc.
What Charles Metcalfe, and especially Henry Maine wrote
on this point was primarily on the basis of the earlier British
information, i.e. what had been derived from the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century British travellers, administrators,
etc., as well as from the writings of other Europeans before
them. It implied (and, quite naturally, the British had no
particular reason to spell it out for us Indians) that the ‘village’
(it is immaterial how they defined it), to an extent, had all the
semblance of the State: it controlled revenue and exercised
authority within its sphere. How this ‘village’ State was
constituted, (whether in the manner of an oligarchy, or by the
representation of the various castes, crafts, or other groups
within it, or by representation of all families, or in some other
manner), while important in itself as a subject for exploration,
was not its basic element. The basic element of this ‘village
republic’ was the authority it wielded, the resources it controlled
and dispensed, and the manner of such resource utilisation.
Notwithstanding all that has been written about empires—
Ashokan, Vijayanagar, Mughal, etc., and of ‘oriental despotism’
it is beyond any doubt that throughout its history, Indian society
and polity has basically been organised according to non-
centralist concepts. This fact is not only brought out in recent
research. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century European
reports, manuscript as well as published writings also bear
evidence to it. That the annual exchequer receipts of Jahangir
did not amount to more than 5% of the computed revenue of his
empire, and that of Aurangzeb (with all his zeal for maximising
such receipts), did not ever exceed 20% is symptomatic of the
concepts and arrangements which governed Indian polity.
It can be argued of course that such a non-centralist polity
made India politically weak; or, rather, soft in the military
sense—given that only hierarchical and centralist states are
politically and militarily strong and viable. This may all be true
and is worthy of serious consideration. Nonetheless, the first
requisite is to understand the nature of Indian society and polity
especially as it functioned two or three centuries ago. Further,
its various dimensions and contours, strengths and weaknesses
need to be known, and not only from European writings but
much more so from Indian sources; that is from sources rooted
74

in the traditions and beliefs of various areas, communities,
groups, etc.,—with special attention being paid to their own
images of the society of which they were a part.
It is suggested here—and there is voluminous data
scattered in the British records themselves which confirm the
view—that in terms of the basic expenses, both education and
medical care, like the expenses of the local police, and the
maintenance of irrigation facilities, had primary claims on
revenue. It was primarily this revenue which not only
maintained higher education, but also—as was sometimes
admitted in the British records—the system of elementary
education.⁸⁰ It is quite probable that, in addition to this basic
provision, the parents and guardians of the scholars also
contributed a little according to their varying capacities by way
of presents, occasional feeding of the unprovided scholars, etc.,
towards the maintenance of the system. But to suppose that
such a deep rooted and extensive system which really catered to
all sections of society could be maintained on the basis of tuition
fees, or through not only gratuitous teaching but also feeding of
the pupils by the teachers, is to be grossly ignorant of the actual
functioning of the Indian social arrangements of the time.
According to the Bengal-Bihar data of the 1770s and
1780s, the revenues of these areas were divided into various
categories in addition to what was called the Khalsa, i.e., the
sources whose revenue was received in the exchequer of the
ruling authority of the province, or some larger unit. These
categories together (excluding the Khalsa), seem to have been
allocated or assigned the major proportion of the revenue
sources (perhaps around 80% of the computed revenue of any
area). Two of these categories were termed Chakeran Zemin, and
Bazee Zemin in the Bengal and Bihar records of this period. The
former, Chakeran Zemin, referred to recipients of revenue who
were engaged in administrative, economic, accounting activities,
etc., and were remunerated by assignments of revenue. The
latter, Bazee Zemin, referred to those who—according to the
British—were in receipt of what were termed ‘religious and
charitable allowances’. A substantial portion of these religious
allowances was obviously
75

assigned for the maintenance of religious places: largely temples
of all sizes and celebrity, but also mosques, dargahs, chatrams,
maths, etc. Another part was assigned to the agraharams, or
what perhaps were also termed Brahmdeya in South India as
well as in Bengal. Yet, other assignments were given over to a
variety of persons: to great and other pundits, to poets, to joshis,
to medical practitioners, to jesters and even for such purposes
as defraying the expenses of carrying Ganga water in areas of
Uttar Pradesh to certain religious shrines on certain festivals.⁸¹
Regarding the extent of such assignments from Hedgelee in
Bengal, it was stated in 1770 that ‘almost one-half of the
province is held upon free tenure’ under the Bazee Zemin
category.⁸² The number of these Bazee Zemin (one may
reasonably assume the term included individuals, groups as well
as institutions) in many districts of Bengal and Bihar was as
high as 30,000 to 36,000 recipients for the district. According to
H.T. Prinsep,⁸³ in one district of Bengal around 1780, the
applications for the registration of Bazee Zemin numbered
72,000.
The position in the Madras Presidency was not very
different, even after all the disorganisation, dispossession and
demolition of the period 1750-1800, during which the British
made themselves masters of the whole area. As late as 1801,
over 35% of the total cultivated land in the Ceded Districts (the
present Rayalseema area and the Kannada District of Bellary)
came under the category of revenue free assignments, and it was
the task of Thomas Munro to somehow reduce this quantity to a
mere 5% of the total cultivated land. The reduction intended in
the Ceded Districts was also carried out in all other districts,
earlier in some, and later in others, and in some, the
dispossession of such vast numbers of assignees of revenue took
a long time.
The returns from the various districts of the Madras
Presidency, especially during the years 1805-1820, provide
much information on the varied nature of these revenue
assignments
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(or grain, or money allowances). In some measure, these had till
then continued to be permitted, or disbursed to a variety of
institutions and to individuals in the several districts. Such
information usually got collected whenever the government was
contemplating some new policy, or some further steps
concerning one, or more categories of such assignees, or those to
whom any sort of allowances were being paid. As illustrative of
such information, a return from the district of Tanjore of April
1813, relating to the money assignments received by 1,013 big
and small temples,⁸⁴—which by this time were mostly minute—
and between 350-400 individuals is reproduced at the end of
this book (Annexures G and H). These payments amounted at
this time to a total of Star Pagodas 43,037 for the temples, and
Star Pagodas 5,929 to the individuals, annually. A Star Pagoda
was valued at about three and one-half rupee.
What was true of Bengal, Bihar and the Madras Presidency
applied equally to other areas: whether of the Bombay
Presidency, Panjab, or in the Rajasthan States. The proportions
of revenue allocated to particular categories—as far as the
British record indicates—also seem fairly similar. It will not be
far wrong to assume that about a quarter to one-third of the
revenue paying sources (not only land, but also sea ports, etc.)
were, according to ancient practice, assigned for the
requirements of the social and cultural infrastructure till the
British overturned it all.
Further still, the rate of assessment which was paid by
cultivators of the revenue assigned lands was fairly low.
According to the supervisors of the Bengal Districts in the 1770s
and early 1780s, the rate of assessment charged by the Bazee
Zemin revenue assignees was around one-quarter to one-third of
the rate which the British had begun to demand from the lands
which were treated as Khalsa,⁸⁵ a category which was now just
swallowing up practically all the other categories. A more or less
similar phenomenon obtained in the various districts of the
Madras Presidency—even as late as the 1820s.⁸⁶ Moreover,
though it may seem unbelievable, the area which constituted
Malabar had, till
77

about 1750, never been subject to a land tax.⁸⁷ It had a variety of
other mercantile and judicial taxes, but land in Malabar—
according to British investigators themselves—never paid
revenue of any kind till the peace was wholly shattered by the
Europeans, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. Even during Tipu's
period, the actual receipts from Malabar were fairly small.
The major dispossession of the various categories of
revenue assignees (starting from those who had assignment for
the performance of military duties, and who formed the local
militias, and going on to those who performed police duties, etc.)
started as soon as the British took over de facto control of any
area, (i.e. in Bengal and Bihar from 1757-58 onwards). The turn
of the Chakeran Zemin and the Bazee Zemin came slightly later.
By about 1770, the latter had also begun to be seriously
affected. By about 1800, through various means, a very large
proportion of these had been altogether dispossessed; and, most
of the remaining had their assignments greatly reduced through
various devices. Among the devices used was the application of
the newly established enhanced rate of assessment even to the
sources from which the assignees had received the revenue. This
device, to begin with, implied a reduction of the quantity of the
assigned source in accordance with the increased rate of
assessment. The next step was to reduce—in most cases—the
money value itself. The result was that the assignee—whether an
individual or an institution—even when allowed a fraction of the
previous assignment, was no longer able (because of such steep
reduction) to perform the accompanying functions in the manner
they had been performed only some decades previously. Those
whose assignments were completely abrogated were of course
reduced to penury and beggary, if not to a worse fate. Naturally,
many of the old functions
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dependent on such assignments (like teaching, medicine, feeding
of pilgrims, etc.), had to be given up because of want of fiscal
support, as also due to state ridicule and prohibitions.
There are references (see the annexed reports from some of
the Madras Presidency collectors) to certain revenue
assignments here and there, and to daily cash or grain
allowances received by some of those who were occupied in
imparting Sanskritic learning, or Persian, and in some instances
even education at the elementary level. A few other collectors
also made reference to certain revenue assignments which used
to exist in the area (but were said to have been appropriated by
Tipu, and that, when the British took over these areas, they
formally added such revenue to the total State revenue). The
various area reports of the period 1792 to about 1806 make
much mention of dispossession of revenue assignees by orders of
Tipu in the area over which he had control. But, at the same
time, it is also stated that through the connivance of the revenue
officers, etc., such dispossession during Tipu’s reign was, in
most cases, not operative at all. What Tipu might have intended
merely as a threat to opponents, became a de facto reality when
these areas came under formal British administration.
But in most areas which the British had conquered (either
on behalf of the Nabob of Arcot, or on behalf of the Nizam of
Hyderabad, or administered in the name of the various Rajas of
Tanjore), most such dispossession was pre-1800. The process
started soon after 1750, when the British domination of South
India began gathering momentum in the early 1780s and the
revenues of the areas claimed by the British to be under the
nominal rulership of the Nabob of Arcot were formally assigned
over to the British. One major method used to ensure
dispossession was to slash down what were termed the ‘District
charges’, i.e., the amounts traditionally utilised within the
districts, but which, for purposes of accounting, were shown in
the records of the Nabob. The slashing down in certain districts
like Trichnopoly was up to 93% of the ‘District charges’ allowed
until then: a mere 19,143 Star Pagodas now allowed in place of
the earlier 2,82,148 Star Pagodas.
The report of the collector of Bellary is best known and
most mentioned in the published records on indigenous educa-
tion.⁸⁸ It is long and fairly comprehensive, though the data he
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actually sent was much less detailed. In it, he actually—to the
extent a collector could—came out with the statement that the
degeneration of education ‘is ascribable to the gradual but
general impoverishment of the country’; that ‘the means of the
manufacturing classes have been greatly diminished by the
introduction of our own European manufactures’; that ‘the
transfer of the capital of the country from the native government
and their officers, who liberally expanded it in India, to
Europeans, restricted by law from employing it even temporarily
in India, and daily draining it from the land, has likewise tended
to this effect’; that ‘in many villages where formerly there were
schools, there are now none; and that ‘learning, though it may
proudly decline to sell its stores, had never flourished in any
country except under the encouragement of the ruling power,
and the countenance and support once given to science in this
part of India has long been withheld.’ In elaboration, he added
that ‘of the 533 institutions for education now existing in this
district, I am ashamed to say not one now derives any support
from the State’; but that ‘there is no doubt, that in former times,
especially under the Hindoo Governments very large grants, both
in money and in land, were issued for the support of learning’;
that the ‘considerable yeomiahs or grants of money, now paid to
brahmins in this district...may, I think, be traced to this source’.
He concluded with the observation that:
Though it did not consist with the dignity of learning to re-
ceive from her votaries hire, it has always in India been
deemed the duty of government to evince to her the highest
respect, and to grant to her those emoluments which she
could not, consistently with her character, receive from
other sources; the grants issued by former governments,
on such occasions, contained therefore no unbecoming
stipulations or conditions. They all purport to flow from the
free bounty of the ruling power, merely to aid the
maintenance of some holy or learned man, or to secure his
prayers for the State. But they were almost universally
granted to learned or religious persons, who maintained a
school for one or more of the sciences, and taught therein
gratuitously; and though not expressed in the deed itself,
the duty of continuing such gratuitous instruction was
certainly implied in all such grants.⁸⁹
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The Collector of Bellary, A.D. Campbell, was an
experienced and perceptive officer, previously having held the
post of Secretary of the Board of Revenue, and was perhaps one
of Thomas Munro’s favourites. It may be said to Munro’s credit
that in his review of 10 March 1826, he did admit in his oblique
way that indigenous education ‘has, no doubt, been better in
earlier times.’ The fact that it got disrupted, reduced and well-
nigh destroyed from the time the British took over de facto
control and centralised the revenue, was obviously not possible
even for a Governor as powerful as Thomas Munro to state in
formal government records.
Illustrations such as the above can be multiplied ad
infinitum. It only requires searching the records pertaining to the
early period of British rule in different areas of India. With much
industry and in a fairly objective manner, Leitner tried to do this
for the Panjab. For Gandhiji, an intuitive understanding of what
could have happened was enough. He could, therefore, with
confidence, reply to Hartog that, ‘my prejudice or presentiment
still makes me cling to the statement I made at Chatham House.’
IX
This brings us finally to an assessment of the content of the
indigenous system of education. The long letter of the much-
quoted A.D. Campbell, collector of Bellary, had been used a
century earlier by London to establish that in India reading and
writing
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were acquired ‘solely with a view to the transaction of business’,
that ‘nothing whatever is learnt except reading, and with the
exception of writing and a little arithmetic, the education of the
great majority goes no farther.’
The question of content is crucial. It is the evaluation of
content which led to indigenous education being termed ‘bad’
and hence to its dismissal; and, in Gandhiji's phrase, to its
uprooting. Yet it was not ‘the mere reading and writing and a
little arithmetic’ which was of any consequence in such a
decision. For, school education in contemporary England, except
in the sphere of religious teaching, covered the same ground,
and probably, much less thoroughly. As mentioned earlier, the
average period of schooling in 1835 England was just about one
year, and even in 1851, only two. Further, as stated by A.E.
Dobbs, ‘in some country schools, writing was excluded for fear of
evil consequences.’
While the limitless British hunger for revenue—so forcefully
described by Campbell—starved the Indian system of the very re-
sources which it required to survive, its cultural and religious
content and structure provoked deliberate attempts aimed at its
total extermination. It was imperative to somehow uproot the
Indian indigenous system for the relatively undisturbed
maintenance and continuance of British rule. It is the same
imperative which decided Macaulay, Bentinck, etc., to
deliberately neglect large-scale school education—proposed by
men like Adam—till a viable system of Anglicised higher
education had first been established in the country.
In 1813, this bold intention was publicly and powerfully
expressed by William Wilberforce when he depicted Indians as
being ‘deeply sunk, and by their religious superstitions fast
bound, in the lowest depths of moral and social wretchedness.’⁹⁰
T.B. Macaulay expressed similar views, merely using different
imagery. He commented that the totality of Indian knowledge
and scholarship did not even equal the contents of ‘a single shelf
of a good European library’, and that all the historical
information contained in books written in Sanskrit was ‘less
valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridge-
ment used at preparatory schools in England.’⁹¹ To Macaulay, all
Indian knowledge, if not despicable, was at least absurd: absurd
history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology.
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A little later, Karl Marx seems to have had similar
impressions of India—this, despite his great study of British
state papers and other extensive material relating to India.
Writing in the New York Daily Tribune on 25 June 1853, he
shared the view of the perennial nature of Indian misery, and
approvingly quoted an ancient Indian text which according to
him placed ‘the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch
even more remote than the Christian creation of the world.’
According to him, Indian life had always been undignified,
stagnatory, vegetative, and passive, given to a brutalising
worship of nature instead of man being the ‘sovereign of
nature’—as contemplated in contemporary European thought.
And, thus Karl Marx concluded: ‘Whatever may have been the
crimes of England’ in India, ‘she was the unconscious tool of
history’ in bringing about—what Marx so anxiously looked
forward to—India’s westernisation.
The complete denunciation and rejection of Indian culture
and civilisation was, however, left to the powerful pen of James
Mill. This he did in his monumental three volume History of
British India, first published in 1817. Thenceforth, Mill’s History
became an essential reading and reference book for those
entrusted with administering the British Indian Empire. From
the time of its publication till recently, the History in fact
provided the framework for the writing of most histories of India.
For this reason, the impact of his judgments on India and its
people should never be underestimated.
According to Mill, ‘the same insincerity, mendacity, and
perfidy; the same indifference to the feelings of others; the same
prostitution and venality’ were the conspicuous characteristics
of both the Hindoos and the Muslims. The Muslims, however,
were perfuse, when possessed of wealth, and devoted to
pleasure; the Hindoos almost always penurious and ascetic; and
‘in truth, the Hindoo like the eunuch, excels in the qualities of a
slave.’ Furthermore, similar to the Chinese, the Hindoos were
‘dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess which
surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated society.’ Both
the Chinese and the Hindoos were ‘disposed to excessive
exaggeration with regard to everything relating to themselves.’
Both were ‘cowardly and unfeeling.’ Both were ‘in the highest
degree conceited of themselves, and full of affected contempt for
others.’ And, above all, both were ‘in physical sense, disgustingly
unclean in their persons and houses.’
Compared to the people of India, according to Mill, the
people of Europe even during the feudal ages, (and
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notwithstanding the vices of the Roman Church and the defects
of the schoolmen), were superior in philosophy. Further, the
Europeans ‘were greatly superior, notwithstanding the defects of
the feudal system, in the institutions of Government and in
laws.’ Even their poetry was ‘beyond all comparison preferable to
the poetry of the Hindoos.’ Mill felt that it was hardly necessary
to assert that in the art of war ‘the Hindoos have always been
greatly inferior to the warlike nations of Europe.’ The agriculture
of the Europeans ‘surpassed exceedingly that of the Hindoos’,
and in India the roads were little better than paths, and the
rivers without bridges; there was not one original treatise on
medicine, considered as a science, and surgery was unknown
among the Hindoos. Further still, ‘compared with the slavish and
dastardly spirit of the Hindoos’, the Europeans were to be placed
in an elevated rank with regard to manners and character, and
their manliness and courage.
Where the Hindoos surpassed the Europeans was in
delicate manufactures, ‘particularly in spinning, weaving, and
dyeing’; in the fabrication of trinkets; and probably in the art of
polishing and setting the precious stones; and more so in
effeminate gentleness, and the winning arts of address. However,
in the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture the Hindoos
in no way excelled Europeans. Further, ‘the Hindoo loom, with
all its appurtenances, is coarse and ill-fashioned, to a degree
hardly less surprising than the fineness of the commodity which
it is the instrument of producing.’ The very dexterity in the use
of their tools and implements became a point against the
Indians. For as James Mill proclaimed: ‘A dexterity in the use of
its own imperfect tools is a common attribute of rude society.’
These reflections and judgments led to the obvious
conclusion, and Mill wrote:
Our ancestors, however, though rough, were sincere; but
under the glossing exterior of the Hindoo lies a general
disposition to deceit and perfidy. In fine, it cannot be
doubted that, upon the whole, the gothic nations, as soon
as they became a settled people, exhibit the marks of a
superior character and civilisation to those of the
Hindoos.92
As to James Mill, so also to Wilberforce, Macaulay, and
Karl Marx and the thought and approaches they represented (for
it is more as spokesmen of such thinking and approaches that
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they are important in the context of India rather than as
outstanding individuals), the manners, customs and civilisation
of India were intrinsically barbarous. And to each of them, India
could become civilised only by discarding its Indianness, and by
adopting ‘utility as the object of every pursuit’⁹³ according to Mill;
by embracing his peculiar brand of Christianity for Wilberforce;
by becoming anglicised, according to Macaulay; and for Marx by
becoming western. Prior to them, for Henry Dundas, the man
who governed India from London for twenty long years, Indians
not only had to become subservient to British authority but also
had to feel ‘indebted to our beneficence and wisdom for
advantages they are to receive’; and, in like manner, ‘feel solely
indebted to our protection for the countenance and enjoyment of
them’⁹⁴ before they could even qualify for being considered as
civilised.
Given such complete agreement on the nature of Indian
culture and institutions, it was inevitable that because of its
crucial social and cultural role, Indian education fared as it did.
To speed up its demise, it not only had to be ridiculed and
despised, but steps also had to be taken so that it was starved
out of its resource base. True, as far as the known record can
tell, no direct dismantling or shutting up of each and every
institution was resorted to, or any other more drastic physical
measures taken to achieve this demise. Such steps were
unnecessary; the reason being that the fiscal steps together with
ridicule, performed the task far more effectively.
An official indication of what was to come was conveyed by
London to the Madras Presidency when it acknowledged receipt
of the information that a survey of indigenous education had
been initiated there, much before the papers of the survey were
actually sent to London. The London authorities expressed their
appreciation of this initiative. They also approved of the
collectors having been cautioned against ‘exciting any fears in
the people that their freedom of choice in matters of education
would be interfered with.’ However, this approval was followed by
the observation: ‘But it would be equally wrong to do anything to
fortify them (i.e. the people of the Madras Presidency) in the
absurd opinion that their own rude institutions of education are
so perfect as not to admit of improvement.’ The very expression
of such a view in the most diplomatically and cautiously worded
of official instructions was a clear signal. Operatively, it implied
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not only greater ridicule and denunciation of the Indian system;
but further, that any residual fiscal and state support still
available to the educational institutions was no longer to be
tolerated. Not surprisingly, the indigenous system was doomed
to stagnate and die.
The neglect and deliberate uprooting of Indian education,
the measures which were employed to this end, and its
replacement by an alien and rootless system—whose products
were so graphically described later by Ananda Coomaraswamy—
had several consequences for India. To begin with, it led to an
obliteration of literacy and knowledge of such dimensions
amongst the Indian people that recent attempts at universal
literacy and education have so far been unable to make an
appreciable dent in it. Next, it destroyed the Indian social
balance in which, traditionally, persons from all sections of
society appear to have been able to receive fairly competent
schooling. The pathshalas and madrassahs had enabled them to
participate openly and appropriately and with dignity not only in
the social and cultural life of their locality but, if they wished,
ensured participation at the more extended levels. It is this
destruction along with similar damage in the economic sphere
which led to great deterioration in the status and socio-economic
conditions and personal dignity of those who are now known as
the scheduled castes; and to only a slightly lesser extent to that
of the vast peasant majority encompassed by the term ‘backward
castes’. The recent movements embracing these sections, to a
great extent, seem to be aimed at restoring this basic Indian
social balance.
And most importantly, till today it has kept most educated
Indians ignorant of the society they live in, the culture which
sustains this society, and their fellow beings; and more
tragically, yet, for over a century it has induced a lack of con-
fidence, and loss of bearing amongst the people of India in
general.
What India possessed in the sphere of education two
centuries ago and the factors which led to its decay and
replacement are indeed a part of history. Even if the former
could be brought back to life, in the context of today, or of the
immediate future, many aspects of it would no longer be
apposite. Yet what exists today has little relevance either. An
understanding of what existed and of the processes which
created the irrelevance India is burdened with today, in time,
could help generate what best suits India’s requirements and the
ethos of her people.

Notes

1. See Annexures, especially A(i)-(xxx), C, and D(i), (iii)-(iv)h.
2. A. E. Dobbs: Education and Social Movements 1700-1850, London,
   1919, p.80, quoting Oxford Commission, 1852, Report, p.19.
3. Ibid, p.83.
4. Ibid, p.104, f.n.l. quoting 7 Henry IV, c.17.

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