The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s5.t5.8

c4.s5.t5.8

Gandhiji’s observation on education emphasized two main points: (i) ‘that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago’; and (ii) that ‘the British administrators’, instead of looking after education and other matters which had existed, ‘began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that and the beautiful tree perished.’ He stated all this with conviction and a sense of authority. He said that he was ‘without fear’ of his ‘figures being challenged successfully.’