The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c3.7

c3.7

Countering Gandhiji and the earlier sources in this manner, Sir Philip Hartog was really not being original. He was merely following a well-trodden British path in defence of British acts and policies in India; a path which had been charted some 125 years earlier by William Wilberforce, later considered as the father of Victorian England, in the British House of Commons.¹⁶ Hartog had been preceded in his own time in a similar enterprise by W.H. Moreland, who could not accept Vincent Smith’s observation that ‘the hired labourer in the time of Akbar and Jahangir probably had more to eat in ordinary years than he has now.’¹⁷ Smith’s challenge appears to have led Moreland from the life of a retired senior revenue settlement officer into the role of an economic historian of India.¹⁸ Quite understandably, at least till the 1940s, and burdened as they were with a sense of mission, the British could not accept any criticism of their actions, deliberate, or otherwise, in India (or elsewhere) during the two centuries of their rule.