The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s5.t5.20

c4.s5.t5.20

Besides Gandhiji’s statement, two other facts seem to have had quite an upsetting effect on Philip Hartog. The *first*, already referred to, were the writings of G.W. Leitner. The *second* seems to have hurt him even more: this was a statement relating to what Hartog called ‘what of the immediate future’. In this context, Hartog noted that, ‘an earnest Quaker missionary has predicted that under the new regime [evidently meaning the post-British regime] there will be a Counter-Reformation in education, which will no longer be Western but Eastern’; and, he observed: ‘Thus India will go back a thousand years and more to the old days...to those days when she gave out a great wealth of ideas, especially to the rest of Asia, but accepted nothing in return.’ Such a prospect was galling indeed to Philip Hartog, burdened as he was—like his illustrious predecessors—with the idea of redeeming India morally as well as intellectually, by pushing it along the western road.