The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s7.3

c4.s7.3

Unfortunately, due to their British-oriented education, or because of some deeper causes (like the scholastic and hair-splitting tendency of Brahmanical learning), Indians have become since the past century, too literal, too much caught up with mere words and phrases. They have lost practically all sense of the symbolic nature of what is said, or written.⁷⁹ It is not surprising, therefore, that when Indians think of village republics, what occurs to them is not what the word ‘republic’ implies in substance; but, instead, the visual images of its shell, the elected assembly, the system of voting, etc.