The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s5.6

c4.s5.6

Yet another cause for the lack of information on the teaching of techniques and crafts may possibly lie in the fact that ordinarily in India most crafts were basically learnt in the home. What was termed apprenticeship in Britain (one could not practise any craft, profession, etc., in England without a long and arduous period under a master craftsman, or technologist) was more informal in India, the parents usually being the teachers and the children the learners. Another reason might have been that particular technologies or crafts, even like the profession of the digging of tanks, or the transportation of commodities were the function of particular specialist groups, some of them operating in most parts of India, while others in particular regions, and therefore any formal teaching and training in them must have been a function of such groups themselves. Remarks available to the effect that, ‘it is extremely difficult to learn the arts of the Indians, for the same caste, from father to son, exercises the same trade and the punishment of being excluded from the caste on doing anything injurious to its interests is so dreadful that it is often impossible to find an inducement to make them communicate anything’,⁶⁴ appear to indicate some organisation of individual technologies at group levels. However, to know anything regarding their teaching, the innovations and improvisations in them, (there must have been innumerable such instances even if these were on a decline), it is essential to have much more detailed information on such groups, the nature of these technologies, and what in essence constituted a formal, or informal apprenticeship in the different crafts. On this so far we seem to have little information.