द ब्यूटीफुल ट्री: १८वीं सदी में भारत की स्वदेशी गुरुकुल शिक्षा (धर्मपाल)

question that the number of both amongst Hindoos and Mussalmans is considerable. This district is a perfect and entire blank in as far as information regarding the state of indigenous education is concerned. NUDDEA: (pp.75-82) The town of Nuddea was the capital of Hindoo principality anterior to the Mahommedan conquest, and in more recent times it has been a seat of Brahmanical learning. Hamilton remarks that, as a seat of learning, it must have apparently declined to a very obscure condition, as in 1801 the Judge and Magistrate, in reply to the Marquis Wellesley’s queries, declared that he knew not of any seminaries within the district in which either the Hindoo or Mahomedan law was then taught. This statement curiously contrasts with the following details, and affords another illustration of a remark already made, that the educational institutions of the Hindoos have sometimes been most strangely overlooked. The celebrity of Nuddea as a school of Hindoo learning is wholly unconnected with any notion of peculiar sanctity as in the case of Benares. Its character as a university was probably connected with the political importance which belonged to it about the time of the Mahomedan invasion, as it seems to have been for a time the capital of Bengal. The princes of Bengal and the latter rajahs of Nuddea endowed certain teachers with lands for the instruction and maintenance of scholars, and the support thus given to pundits and pupils attracted a number of Brahmans to settle there, and gave a reputation to the district. The loss of all political consequence and the alleged resumption of most of the endowments have very much diminished the attraction of the site, but it still continues a place of learning and extensive repute. In 1811, Lord Minto, then Governor-General, proposed to establish a Hindoo college at Nuddea and another in Tirhoot, and set apart funds for that purpose. The design, however, was finally abandoned in favour of that of forming a similar institution on a larger scale, the present Sanskrit College in Calcutta. In the course of the correspondence which took place between government and the Committee of Superintendence provisionally appointed for the proposed college at Nuddea, the Committee stated, under date 9th July, 1816, that there were then in Nuddea 46 schools kept and supported by the most learned and 297