The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c10.s4.11

c10.s4.11

For the immediate purpose of this letter, will you permit me to begin by referring you to the reports of certain provincial enquiries conducted about the time when the British rule first began in those provinces? Let me, however, add a remark as applied to the country, at large, on the authority of Max Mueller, and another on the authority of the historian Ludlow,—both mentioned in Keir Hardie’s work on India. ‘Max Mueller, on the strength of official documents and missionary reports, concerning education in Bengal prior to the British occupation, asserts that there were then 80,000 schools in Bengal, or one for every 400 of the population. Ludlow, in his History of British India, says that “in every village, which has retained its old form, I am assured that the children generally are able to read, write and cipher; but where we have swept away the village system, there the village school has also disappeared.”’ (Cp. B.D. Basu, *Education in India under the E.1. Co.*, p18).