Education in Ancient India c9.s3.23

c9.s3.23

The extent of Literacy at c. 1200 A. D. With the levelling down of both the Kshatriyas and Vaishyas to the position of the Shudras, the extent of literacy must have further gone down during this period. The average farmer at this time was illiterate and members of commercial and industrial guilds were no longer as educated and cultured as those of the weavers' guild at Mandsore in *c.* 400 A. D. We have however no sufficient evidence to compute the extent of literacy at *c.* 1200 A. D. We may perhaps utilise the data about the state of affairs at the advent of British rule in this connection. The village teacher was not usually one of the grain-sharing servants supported by the village community; his services therefore were clearly required not by the whole community, but only by certain sections of it; literacy must have been confined only to them. In the second decade of the 19th century Sir Thomas Monroe found a primary school in every village; 'I am inclined' says he, 'to estimate the proportion of male population receiving education to be nearer one third than one fourth'.¹ In Bengal at this time most villages possessed schools for primary education, but the percentage of boys attending them varied in different places. In some districts² as many as 18 percent of the boys of the school going age attended schools, in others the percentage was only 3. In Malva, which for more than half a century was suffering from anarchy, Malcolm found a school in almost every village with more than 100 houses.³ It would therefore appear that about 15 percent of the boys of the school-going age were attending schools towards the beginning of the 19th century. If in spite of the prevailing unsettled conditions, about 15 percent boys were attending schools at the beginning of the 19th century, we may well conclude that the percentage may have been at least twice this figure at the end of the Hindu period. For during the Muslim rule the government educational effort for a long time was confined only to the Muslim section of the population; Hindus also could not continue to get the same state patronage for their education and literature, which was possible under their own rule. This must have affected the spread of education and the extent of literacy in the population as a whole, which was predominently Hindu. If therefore the percentage of literate male population among Indians as a whole was about 15 at the beginning of the 19th century, it may as well have been about thirty towards the end of the 12th century A. D. At the time when Upanayana was a reality with the whole of the Aryan community, we have already seen that the percentage of literacy in it must have been as high as 80. Towards the end of the 8th century A. D. it had declined to about 40, as shown already. It further went down by about another 10 percent by the 12th century A. D. These percentages however refer to male population only and are exclusive of the Shudras and Untouchables, who were as a rule all illiterate.