The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s8.1

c4.s8.1

This brings us finally to an assessment of the content of the indigenous system of education. The long letter of the much-quoted A.D. Campbell, collector of Bellary, had been used a century earlier by London to establish that in India reading and writing were acquired ‘solely with a view to the transaction of business’, that ‘nothing whatever is learnt except reading, and with the exception of writing and a little arithmetic, the education of the great majority goes no farther.’