The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c8.s1.t2.10.2

c8.s1.t2.10.2

In other parts of the country, the names of castes, rivers, mountains, etc., are written as well as of persons; but here the names of persons only are employed as a school-exercise. The scholar is then taught to write and read, and by frequent repetition he commits to memory the Cowrie Table, the Numeration Table as far as 100, the Katha Table (a land-measure table), and the Ser Table (a dry-measure table). There are other tables in use elsewhere which are not taught in the schools of this district. The *third* stage of instruction extends from two to three years which are employed in writing on the plantain-leaf. In some districts the tables just mentioned are postponed to this stage, but in this district they are included in the exercises of the second stage. The first exercise taught on the plantain-leaf is to initiate the scholar into the simplest forms of letter writing, to instruct him to connect words in composition with each other, and to distinguish the written from the spoken forms of Bengali vocables. The written forms are often abbreviated in speech by the omission of a vowel or a consonant, or by the running of two syllables into one, and the scholar is taught to use in writing the full not the abbreviated forms. The correct orthography of words of Sanscrit origin which abound in the language of the people, is beyond the reach of the ordinary class of teachers.