The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c10.s2.22

c10.s2.22

Respect for learning has always been the redeeming feature of the East. To this the Punjab formed no exception. Torn by invasion and war, it ever preserved and added to educational endowments. The most unscrupulous chief, the avaricious money lender, and even the free-booter, vied with the small land-owner in making peace with his conscience by founding schools and rewarding the learned. There was not a mosque, a temple, a Dharamsala, that had not a school attached to it, to which the youth flocked chiefly for religious education. There were few wealthy men who did not entertain a Maulvi, Pandit, or Guru to teach their sons, and along with them the sons of friends and dependents. There were also thousands of secular schools, frequented alike by Mahomedans, Hindus and Sikhs, in which Persian or Hindi was taught. There were hundreds of learned men who gratuitously taught their co-religionists, and sometimes all comers, for the sake of God, “Lillah”. *There was not a single village who did not take a pride in devoting a portion of his produce to a respected teacher.* In respectable Mahomedan families husbands taught their wives, and these their children; nor did the Sikhs prove in that respect to be unworthy of the appellation of “Learners and disciples”. In short the lowest computation gives us 3,30,000 pupils in the schools of the various denominations who were acquainted with reading, writing and some method of computation, whilst thousands of them belonged to Arabic and Sanskrit Colleges, in which oriental literature and system of oriental law, logic, philosophy and medicine were taught to the highest standards. Tens of thousand also acquired a proficiency in Persian which is now rarely reached in government and aided schools and colleges. Through all schools *there breathed a spirit of devotion to education for its own sake*, and for its influence on the character and on religious culture; whilst even the sons of Banias who merely learnt what they absolutely required in order to gain a livelihood, looked with respect, amounting to adoration, on their humble Pandhas, who taught them the elements of two ‘Rs’.