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

Adam gives some literacy figures which are worth examining in detail. I will look up the Census returns for the actual districts for which Adam has given figures. Yours sincerely, Sd/- P.J. Hartog . . . Scar Top, Boars Hill, Oxford. December 5, 1931 Dear Sir Philip Hartog, I am really not clear as to what we are disputing about. My statement is mild enough, moderate enough and its purpose is plain. I was obviously trying to go to the limits of concession that truth permitted, as to claims that I consider entirely wrong. That seems to me the only way to get a controversy forward. I never did believe in the method of belittling whatever case my opponent, whether British imperialist or Indian nationalist, may have. The context makes it clear that I have never thought that Indian schools amounted to much. It makes equally clear what I remember quite well was in my mind when I wrote that passage—this was that I do not agree with the steady crabbing of the last dozen years but to emphasise that on the whole they have been years far more progressive than any previous decade. Of course—literacy and school attendance are not the same thing. They are not the same even now. But that is the realm of the imponderable and not worth arguing. If it comes to that, just now I rank mere literacy low enough. It seems to me we are in for a rotten ten years of struggle to keep any sort of decency alive. I may be overdepressed; but I saw the utter wash that the ‘literate’ populace of the United States read as their only gain from education, and I come back to this country to find that the weeklies are dying or recently dead, and that Daily Mail, Daily Express, and the infamous Sunday popular papers are about all the reading that Demos does. I believe the most popular weekly is ‘Competitions’, which guides the huge mob whose sole intellectual recreation (an absorbing and costly one) is making ‘bullets’ or cross-word puzzles (sending up six-pence a time). On the other hand, Akbar was ‘illiterate’. There are in India poor folk who never went to any sort of school who have learnt to read. But these of course are few. They 369