The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s2: III
The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s2
- Language
- English
III
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Instructions regarding the collection of information about the extent and nature of indigenous Indian education (including its contemporary state) were largely the consequence of the long debate in the House of Commons in 1813. This debate focussed on the clause relating to the promotion of ‘religious and moral improvement’ in India.³¹ Before any new policy could be devised, the existing position needed to be better known. But the quality and coverage of these surveys varied from Presidency to Presidency, and even from district to district. (This generally happens in the gathering of any such information, and more so when such collection of data was a fairly new thing.)
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The information which is thus available today, whether published, or still in manuscript form in the government records—as is true of the details of the Madras Presidency indigenous education survey—largely belongs to the 1820’s and 1830’s period. An unofficial survey made by G.W. Leitner in 1882 for the Punjab compared the situation there for the years before 1850, with that in 1882.
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Before highlighting the main points of information given by the surveys and then proceeding with its analysis, some preliminary observations about the data as a whole are in order.
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The first observation concerns the largely quantitative nature of the data presented and the fact that it concentrates largely on the institution of the school as we know it today. This, however, may help propagate wrong impressions.
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It is important to emphasize that indigenous education was carried out through *pathshalas*, *madrassahs* and *gurukulas*. Education in these traditional institutions—which were actually kept alive by revenue contributions by the community including illiterate peasants—was called *shiksha* (and included the ideas of *prajna*, *shil* and *samadhi*). These institutions were, in fact, the watering holes of the culture of traditional communities. Therefore, the term ‘school’ is a weak translation of the roles these institutions really played in Indian society.
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For this reason, the quantitative nature of the data presented should be read with great caution. The increase in the numbers of schools in England may not necessarily have been a good thing, as it merely signified the arrival of factory schooling. On the other hand, the decline in the numbers of traditional educational institutions is to be intensely deplored, since this meant quality education was being replaced by a substandard substitute. These aspects must always be kept at the back of our minds when we commence analysing the data for significance. Before we do that, the highlights first.
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The most well-known and controversial point which emerged from the educational surveys lies in an observation made by William Adam. In his first report, he observed that there exist about 1,00,000 village schools in Bengal and Bihar around the 1830s.³² This statement appears to have been founded on the impressions of various high British officials and others who had known the different areas rather intimately and over long periods; it had no known backing of official records. Similar statements had been made, much before W. Adam, for areas of the Madras Presidency. Men like Thomas Munro, had observed that ‘every village had a school.’³³ For areas of the newly extended Presidency of Bombay around 1820, senior officials like G.L. Prendergast noted ‘that there is hardly a village, great or small, throughout our territories, in which there is not at least one school, and in larger villages more.’³⁴ Observations made by Dr G.W. Leitner in 1882 show that the spread of education in the Punjab around 1850 was of a similar extent.
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Since these observations were made, they have been treated very differently: by some, with the sanctity reserved for divine utterances; and by others, as blasphemous. Naturally, the first view was linked with the growth of a vocal Indian nationalism. Its exponents, besides prominent Indians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, have also included many illustrious Englishmen, like Keir Hardie, and academics like Max Mueller. The second, the blasphemous view of them, was obviously held by those who were in the later period, in one capacity or another, concerned with the administration of India; or those who felt impelled, sometimes because of their commitment to certain theoretical formulations on the development of societies, to treat all such impressions as unreal. Especially after 1860, it had become necessary to ensure that men who had had a long period of service in the British Indian administration or its ancillary branches and who also had the ability to write, should engage in the defence of British rule, especially its beginnings, and consequently attempt to refute any statements which implied that the British had damaged India in any significant manner.
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While much ink has been spilt on such a controversy, little attempt is known to have been made for placing these statements or observations in their contextual perspective. Leaving Leitner's work, most of these statements belong to the early decades of the nineteenth century. For the later British administrator, the difficulty of appreciating the substance of the controversy is quite understandable. For England had few schools for the children of ordinary people till about 1800. Even many of the older Grammar Schools were in poor shape at the time. Moreover, the men who wrote about India (whether concerning its education, or its industry and crafts, or the somewhat higher real wages of Indian agricultural labourers compared to such wages in England)³⁵ belonged to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century society of Great Britain. Naturally, when they wrote about a school in every village in India—whether that may or may not have been literally true—in contrast to the British situation, it must have appeared to them so. And though they did not much mention this contrast in so many words, it may reasonably be assumed that, as perceptive observers, it was the very contrast which led them to make such judgements.
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These surveys, based not on mere impressions but on hard data, reveal a great deal: the nature of Indian education; its content; the duration for which it ordinarily lasted; the numbers actually receiving institutional education in particular areas; and, most importantly, detailed information on the background of those benefiting from these institutions.
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The idea of a school existing in every village, dramatic and picturesque in itself, attracted great notice and eclipsed the equally important details. The more detailed and hard facts have received hardly any notice or analysis. This is both natural and unfortunate. For these latter facts provide an insight into the nature of Indian society at that time. Deeper analysis of this data and adequate reflection on the results followed by required further research may help solve even the riddle of what has been termed ‘the legend of the 1,00,000 schools’.³⁶
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According to this hard data, in terms of the content, the and proportion of those attending institutional school education, the situation in India in 1800 is certainly not inferior to what obtained in England then; and in many respects Indian schooling seems to have been much more extensive (and, it should be remembered, that it is a greatly damaged and disorganised India that one is referring to). The content of studies was better than what was then studied in England. The duration of study was more prolonged. The method of school teaching was superior and it is this very method which is said to have greatly helped the introduction of popular education in England but which had prevailed in India for centuries. School attendance, especially in the districts of the Madras Presidency, even in the decayed state of the period 1822-25, was proportionately far higher than the numbers in all variety of schools in England in 1800. The conditions under which teaching took place in the Indian schools were less dingy and more natural;³⁷ and, it was observed, the teachers in the Indian schools were generally more dedicated and sober than in the English versions. The only aspect, and certainly a very important one, where Indian institutional education seems to have lagged behind was with regard to the education of girls. Quite possibly, girl schooling may have been proportionately more extensive in England in 1800, and was definitely the case, a few decades later. Accounts of education in India do often state (though it is difficult to judge their substantive accuracy from the data which is so far known), that the absence of girls in schools was explained, however, by the fact that most of their education took place in the home.
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It is, however, the Madras Presidency and Bengal-Bihar data which presents a kind of revelation. The data reveals the background of the teachers and the taught. It presents a picture which is in sharp contrast to the various scholarly pronouncements of the past 100 years or more, in which it had been assumed that education of any sort in India, till very recent decades, was mostly limited to the twice-born³⁸ amongst the Hindoos, and amongst the Muslims to those from the ruling elite. The actual situation which is revealed was different, if not quite contrary, for at least amongst the Hindoos, in the districts of the Madras Presidency (and dramatically so in the Tamil-speaking areas) as well as the two districts of Bihar. It was the groups termed Soodras, and the castes considered below them³⁹ who predominated in the thousands of the then still-existing schools in practically each of these areas.
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The last issue concerns the conditions and arrangements which alone could have made such a vast system of education feasible: the sophisticated operative fiscal arrangements of the pre-British Indian polity. Through these fiscal measures, substantial proportions of revenue had long been assigned for the performance of a multiplicity of public purposes. These seem to have stayed more or less intact through all the previous political turmoils and made such education possible. The collapse of this arrangement through a total centralisation of revenue, as well as politics led to decay in the economy, social life, education, etc. This inference, if at all valid, warrants a re-examination of the various currently held intellectual and political assumptions with regard to the nature of pre-British Indian society, and its political and state structure.
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Before discussing this last issue any further, however, it is necessary first to understand the various aspects of the educational data, and the controversy it gave rise to in the 1930s. Since the detailed data of the Madras Presidency is the least known and the most comprehensive, we shall examine it first.