Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c3.57

c3.57

A similar fate awaited the extensive network of Indian schools and institutions of higher learning when they began to be surveyed in the 1820s and 1830s. Ironically, it is mainly through the British archival records that one becomes aware of the extensive nature of the education network, as well as its speedy decay in the Madras and Bengal Presidency, and somewhat later in the Presidencies of Bombay and in the Punjab. Of course, the view which we get from such archival material is splintered and not integrated. But the indicators in themselves are of great value. They also provide us glimpses of pre-British life and of aspects of India’s society of which we had lost track from about A.D. 1850 when society was broken up and suppressed, and an imposed alien system of education made us ignore and forget the innumerable accomplishments of our people.