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

be ruled out. At any rate, nowhere was there any suggestion made that it was much less than it had been in 1822-25. The population of the Madras Presidency in 1823 was estimated at 1,28,50,941, while the population of England in 1811 was estimated at 95,43,610. It may be noted from this that, while the differences in the population of the two regions were not that significant, the numbers of those attending the various types of schools (Charity, Sunday, Circulating) in England were in all in the neighbourhood of around 75,000 as compared to at least double this number within the Madras Presidency. Further, more than half of this number of 75,000 in English schools consisted of those who attended school at the most only for 2-3 hours on a Sunday. However, after about 1803, every year a marked increase took place in the number of those attending schools in England. The result: the number of 75,000 attending any sort of school around 1800 rose to 6,74,883 by 1818, and 21,44,377 in 1851, i.e. an increase of about 29 times in a period of about fifty years. It is true that the content of this education in England did not improve much during this half century. Neither did the period spent in school increase: from more than an average of one year in 1835 to about two years in 1851. The real implication of Gandhi- ji’s observation, and of the information provided by the Madras Presidency collectors, W. Adam and G.W. Leitner, is that for the following 50-100 years, what happened in India—within the developing situation of relative collapse and stagnation—proved the reverse of the developments taking place in England. It is such a feeling, and the intuition of such an occurrence, that drove Gandhiji, firstly, to make his observation in London in October 1931, and secondly, disinclined to withdraw it eight years later. Gandhiji seemed to be looking at the issue from a historical, social, and a human viewpoint. In marked contrast, men like Sir Philip Hartog, as so commonly characteristic of the specialist, were largely quibbling about phrases; intent solely on picking holes in what did not fit the prevailing western theories of social and political development. Statistical comparisons were what Sir Philip Hartog and many others in his time wanted. And these can, to a large extent, settle this debate: some comparison of the 1822-25 Madras school-attending scholars is made here with the Madras Presidency data pertaining to the 1880s and 1890s. Because of incompleteness of the earlier data available from Bengal and Bihar, and also from the Presidency of Bombay,⁷⁸ such a comparison

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