The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c3.2

c3.2

Reaching a far wider audience is the voluminous work of Pandit Sundarlal, first published in 1939,⁵ though perhaps less academic. The 36th chapter of this celebrated work entitled, ‘The Destruction of Indian Indigenous Education’, runs into 40 pages, and quotes extensively from various British authorities. These span almost a century: from the Dispatch from England of 3rd June 1814 to the Governor General in India, to the observations of Max Mueller; and the 1909 remarks of the British labour leader, Keir Hardie. However, given the period in which the book was written and the inaccessibility of the detailed manuscript records, it was inevitable that the author had to base his work entirely on existing printed sources. Nevertheless, as an introduction, this chapter of *Bharat men Angreji Raj* is a landmark on the subject of indigenous Indian education in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.