The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c5.s25.9

c5.s25.9

8. The Board would naturally enquire, how these children who are so destitute as not to be able to procure instruction in their own villages, could subsist in those to which they are strangers, and to which they travel from 10 to 100 miles, with no intention of returning for several years. They are supported entirely by charity, daily repeated, not received from the instructor for the reasons above mentioned, but from the inhabitants of the villages generally. They receive some portion of alms daily (for years) at the door of every Bramin in the village, and this is conceded to them with a cheerfulness which considering the object in view must be esteemed as a most honorable trait in the native character, and its unobtrusiveness ought to enhance the value of it. We are undoubtedly indebted to this benevolent custom for the general spread of education amongst a class of persons whose poverty would otherwise be an insurmountable obstacle to advancement in knowledge and it will be easily inferred that it requires only the liberal and fostering care of government to bring it to perfection.