A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c18.18

c18.18

Of the system of education, we get more positive information on higher studies in Sanskrit than on popular education; while the former formed the subject of liberal endowments recorded in inscriptions of considerable length, we have to make inferences about the latter from the mention of the village teacher and his share in the arable land of the village and also occasional direct endowments, as for the teaching of Tamil, Marathi, and Prakrit in the schools in Kuntala. What we should now call technical or vocational training was a private affair; the father brought up his children in his calling, and learning went side by side with doing. The erection of a temple or palace must have been the occasion as much for the discovery of fresh talent as for the application of known abilities; and, judging from the monuments that have survived, we may well conclude that at no time was there a dearth of artisans who were also great artists. The beauty and accuracy which mark the engraving of most inscriptions on stone and copper attest the high degree of the literacy and skill of the engravers, while the literary quality of many of the inscriptions, as well as the volume of literature produced in all languages, shows that the cultivation of the popular speech of each locality and its employment in administration and education was by no means neglected. All we lack is clear knowledge of the processes by which these results were achieved, especially during the earlier period when the mathas had not come up in such large numbers as they did later to foster vernacular learning and culture. The ‘three Rs’ were taught in village schools which met under the shade of a tree or in the verandahs of temples, and the village teacher (vātti or akkariga) was among the regular village officials who held assignments of land from the village on the condition that they fulfilled specified duties. The Italian traveller Pietro Della Valle (1623) has left a vivid account of the village schools and the methods of instruction they followed, including the process of learning by rote and the use of fine sand strewn on the floor for writing, methods which survived in full force till the other day and have perhaps not quite gone out yet in remote villages. Ibn Batuta (1333-45) records: ‘I saw in Hanaur thirteen schools for the instruction of girls, and twenty-three for boys, a thing I have not seen anywhere else.’ Robert de Nobili, in a letter of 1610, says that in Madura there were 10,000 students who went to the Professor in Theology and Philosophy. When the Christian missionaries came, they began to start schools which, besides hospitals, formed the main channels for the propagation of their gospel. They had schools at Madura, San Thomé and Chandragiri.