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

could ill afford. Regarding the former, he stated that ‘if I could possibly have my way, we should get rid of three-quarters of the military expenditure.’ Regarding civil expenditure he gave an instance of what he meant: ‘Here the Prime Minister gets fifty times, the average income; the Viceroy in India gets five thousand times the average income.’ He went on to add: ‘From this one example you can work out for yourselves what this civil expenditure also means to India.’ Gandhiji’s observation on education emphasized two main points: (i) ‘that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago’; and (ii) that ‘the British administrators’, instead of looking after education and other matters which had existed, ‘began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that and the beautiful tree perished.’ He stated all this with conviction and a sense of authority. He said that he was ‘without fear’ of his ‘figures being challenged successfully.’ The challenge came immediately, however, from Sir Philip Hartog, a founder of the School of Oriental Studies, London,69 a former vice-chancellor of the University of Dacca and member and chairman of several educational committees on India set up by the British between 1918 and 1930. After questioning Gandhiji at the meeting, a long correspondence ensued between them during the next 5-6 weeks, ending with an hour long interview which Philip Hartog had with the Mahatma. In the interview, Philip Hartog was referred to some of the sources which Gandhiji had relied on, including two articles from Young India of December 1920 by Daulat Ram Gupta: (i) ‘The Decline of Mass Education in India,’ and (ii) ‘How Indian Education was crushed in the Panjab.’ These articles were largely based on Adam’s reports and G.W. Leitner’s book and some other officially published material from the Panjab, Bombay and Madras. These, however, did not seem sufficient proof to Philip Hartog, and he repeatedly insisted that Gandhiji should withdraw the statement he had made at the Chatham House meeting. Gandhiji promised that after his return to India, he would look for such material which Hartog could treat as substantiating what Gandhiji had said, adding that ‘if I find that I cannot support the statement made by me at Chatham House, I will give my retraction much wider publicity than the Chatham House speech could ever attain.’ 63