The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s3.t11: Private Tuition (or Education at Home)
The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s3.t11
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Private Tuition (or Education at Home)
c4.s3.t11.1
Several collectors, especially the collector of Canara, who did not send any statistical returns at all, mentioned the fact that many of the boys and especially the girls received education at home from their parents, or relatives, or from privately engaged tutors. Many also stated that higher learning is being imparted in Agraharams, etc. However, it was only the collectors of Malabar and of the city of Madras who sent any statistical data on the subject. The collector of Malabar sent such data with regard to higher learning, while the collector of Madras about the boys and girls who were receiving education in their homes. Both the returns are reproduced in *Tables 7A & B*.
c4.s3.t11.2
Regarding the data concerning higher learning from Malabar, it is reasonable to assume that though learning through private tutors did exist in most other districts, it was carried out in Malabar to a far greater extent due to its rather different historical and sociological background. As will be noted from *Tables 7A & B*, those studying in this fashion at this period (1823) were about twenty-one times the number of those attending the solitary college supported by the more or less resourceless family of the Samudrin Raja. The Malabar data also shows 194 persons studying medicine. As indigenous medical practitioners existed in every other district and perhaps in every village—some of them still in receipt of revenue assignments for their services to the community—it can logically be assumed that similar teaching in Medical Science existed in most other districts too.
c4.s3.t11.3
What number and proportions in the various disciplines were thus educated privately in the other districts, however, is a speculative question. Still, it may not be too erroneous to assume that the number of those ‘privately’ studying Theology, Law, Astronomy, Metaphysics, Ethics, Poetry and Literature, Medical Science, Music, and Dance (all of which existed in this period) was perhaps several times the number of those who were receiving such education institutionally.
c4.s3.t11.4
The data from Madras regarding the number of boys and girls receiving tuition at their homes is equally pertinent. In comparison to those being educated in schools in Madras, this number is 4.73 times. Though it is true that half of these privately tutored were from amongst the Brahmins and the Vysees, still those from the Soodras form 28.7% of this number, and from the other castes 13%. Furthermore, the Indian part of Madras city at this period was more of a shanty-town. In comparison to the older towns and cities of the Presidency, it was a relatively badly organised place, the status of its Indian inhabitants being rather lower in the social scale than their counterparts in other places like Madura, Tanjore, Trichinopoly, etc. It may be quite probable, therefore, that the number of those privately educated in other districts, if not some 4 to 5 times more than those attending school as in Madras city, was still appreciably large. The observation of Thomas Munro that there was 'probably some error' in the number given of 26,903 being taught at home in Madras city—a remark incidentally which has been made much of by later commentators on the subject—does not have much validity. If the number had been considered seriously erroneous, a new computation for the city of Madras, to which alone it pertained, would have been no difficult matter, especially as this return had been submitted to the Governor a whole year before this comment. It was perhaps required of Thomas Munro—as head of the executive—to express such a reservation. Undoubtedly, it was the sort of comment which the makers of policy in London wished to hear.⁵⁵ This draft, however, was followed by the remark that 'the state of education here exhibited, low as it is compared with that of our own country, is higher than it was in most European countries at no very distant period.' As may be guessed from the data pertaining to Britain, the term 'at no very distant period' really meant the beginning of the nineteenth century, which had been the real start of the Day schools for most children in the British Isles.