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

period. I am in correspondence with several educationists. Those who have replied do support my view but do not produce authority that would be accepted as proof. My prejudice or presentiment still makes me cling to the statement I made at Chatham House. I don’t want to write haltingly in Harijan. You don’t want me merely to say that the proof I had in mind had been challenged by you!’ There the matter ended as far as Gandhiji was concerned. On 10 September 1939, however, after learning of Gandhiji’s statement regarding the War in Europe, Hartog wrote him a very grateful letter: I cannot wait to express to you my profound gratitude, shared, I am sure by an innumerable number of my fellow countrymen, all over the world, for the attitude you have taken up in regard to the present War at your interview with the Viceroy, reported in the Times. Hartog’s book of lectures led to much immediate writing in India on the subject. Even a new edition of the complete Adam’s Reports was published by the University of Calcutta. Yet, what was written produced the same data and analysis all over again; and, in the main, covered the same ground, and advanced more or less the same arguments as had already been advanced by K.T. Shah in his long letter to Philip Hartog in February 1932.⁷⁷ VII The significance of what Gandhiji said at Chatham House in October 1931 ought to have been understood not in the literal way in which Philip Hartog did, but within the total context of Mahatma Gandhi’s address, which attempted to reveal the overall disruption and decline of Indian society and its institutions under British rule. That a great decay had set in by the 1820s, if not a few decades earlier, in the sphere of education was admitted by the Madras Presidency survey, as well as by W. Adam with regard to Bengal and Bihar. In 1822- 25, the number of those in ordinary schools was put at over 1,50,000 in the Madras Presidency. Evidently, the inference that the number was appreciably, perhaps a great deal higher some 20 or 30 years earlier, cannot 69