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

retained a part at the time of Dr Buchanan's investigation. He appointed six pundits to teach, and gave them an allowance be- sides the lands which they possess. They are reckoned higher in rank than the other professors in the vicinity, and are called rajpundits. The thirty-one pundits in that quarter addict them- selves chiefly to the study of grammar, law, and the mythological poems. Logic and metaphysics are neglected, as well as astronomy and magic. In the western side of the district there are no less than thirty-three teachers within a small space and there astrology as well as metaphysics is studied; mythological poems are not much read and magic is not known. The number of the teachers is owing to the patronage of the Rajahs of Darbhanga to whom the greater part of the lands belong; but their patronage did not appear to be very efficacious, for, of the thirty-three Pundits in the whole territory west of the Kosi, only eight were considered well-versed in the sciences and learning, which they professed to teach, viz., one in logic and metaphysics, three in grammar, and four in astrology. All these are Mithila Pundits. Dr Buchanan has communicated some details of the proportions in which the different branches of learning were studied. Eleven Pundits taught metaphysics; of these six confined themselves entirely to that branch; one also taught grammar, another added law; two others with law also read the Sri bhagvut; and one man included the whole of these within the range of his instructions. There were no less than thirty-one teachers of the law, of whom one only confined himself to that pursuit; twenty of them taught one additional science; and of these nineteen taught grammar, and one logic and metaphysics; eight taught two additional branches, of whom three taught grammar and explained the bhagvut, two taught logic and metaphysics and also explained the bhagvut, two taught grammar and the modern ritual, and one taught grammar and astronomy. Two taught three other branches, one explaining grammar, logic and the mythological poems, and the other substituting the modern ritual for logic. Of eleven teachers of the astronomical works, ten professed nothing else. Of seven persons who taught the modern ritual, one only confined himself to it, two professed the law, three taught grammar and the metaphysical poems, and six were proficients in grammar. Only five Pundits limited themselves to the teaching of grammar. With regard to the state of medical education and practice, Dr Buchanan ascertained that there were twenty-six Bengalee practitioners who used incantations (muntras); thirty-seven who 313

rejected them and administered medicine; and five Mahomedan physicians who seemed to be little superior to the Hindoos. The doctrines of both are nearly the same, and seem to be founded on the school of Galen. Those who practice at large make from 10 to 20 rupees a month. They do not keep their recipes or doctrines secret, but seemed to practice in a liberal manner, although without having gained a high reputation. A considerable number are servants, and attend on wealthy families for a monthly pension. Many of them cannot read. There is another class of medical practitioners who reject incantations and exhibit herbs. They have no books, and the greater part cannot read the vulgar tongue. They have been early instructed in the use of certain herbs in certain diseases. Dr Buchanan heard of about 450 of them, but they seemed to be chiefly confined to the Hindoo divisions of the district, and they are held in very low estimation. There is also a class of persons who profess to treat sores, but they are totally illiterate and destitute of science, nor do they perform any operation. They deal chiefly in oils. The only practitioner in surgery was an old woman, who had become reputed for extracting the stone from the bladder, which she performed after the manner of the ancients. According to Dr Buchanan the science of the Arabs has been exceedingly neglected in this district, so that very few even of the kazis are supposed to understand the Koran or any Arabic work on grammar, law or metaphysics. He did not hear of one man who attempted to teach any of these branches of learning, and he expresses a doubt whether even one man employed in administering the Mohammedan law and born in the district was tolerably well-versed in the subject, or so well informed or liberally educated as the common attornies in a country town of England. 314

III W. ADAM ON STATE OF NATIVE MEDICAL PRACTICE (pp.195-200) The state of Native Medical Practice in the (Rajshahy) district is so intimately connected with the welfare of the people that it could not be wholly overlooked; and as the few facts that I have collected tend additionally to illustrate their character and condition, it would be improper to omit them. They are submitted with deference to those who may have made professional inquiries, and can form a professional judgment on the subject. The number of those, who may be called general practitioners and who rank highest in the native medical profession in Nattore is 123, of whom 89 are Hindus and 34 are Mahomedans. The Medical School at Vaidya Belghariya possesses considerable interest, since it is, as far as I can ascertain, the only institution of the kind in the district, and the number of such institutions throughout Bengal is, I believe, very limited. The two medical teachers of this school are employed as domestic physicians by two wealthy families, and they have each also a respectable general practice. As a domestic physician, the junior teacher has a fixed salary of twenty-five rupees a month; while the senior teacher in the same capacity has only fifteen rupees a month, and that only as long his attendance may be required during periods of sickness in the family that employs him. I have spoken of that family as wealthy, but it is only comparatively so being in very reduced circumstances; and to that cause rather than to the low estimation in which the physician is held, we must ascribe the scant remuneration he receives. At another place, Hajra Nattore, No.26, there are three educated Hindu practitioners, all three Brahmans and brothers and more or less acquainted with Sanscrit, having acquired the grammar of the language at Bejpara Amhatti, and subsequently applied their knowledge of it to the study of the medical works in that language. The eldest has practised since he was eighteen, and he is now sixty-two years of age, and employs his leisure in instructing his two nephews. On an average of the year he estimates the income derived from his practice at five rupees a month, while one of his brothers who is in less repute estimates his own income at three rupees. At a third place, Haridev Khalasi, No.100, there are four educated Hindu practitioners, three of whom appeared to be in 315

considerable repute for skill and learning. They were all absent, and I had not an opportunity of conversing with them; but their neighbours and friends estimated their monthly professional income at eight, ten, and twelve rupees, respectively. There are at most two or three other educated Hindu physicians in Nattore, and all the rest are professionally uneducated, the only knowledge they possess of medicine being derived from Bengali translations of Sanscrit works which describe the symptoms of the principal diseases and prescribe the articles of the native materia medica that should be employed for their cure, and the proportions in which they should be compounded. I have not been able to ascertain that there is a single educated Musalman physician in Nattore, and consequently the 34 Mahomedan practitioners I have mentioned, rank with the uneducated class of Hindu practitioners, deriving all their knowledge of medicine from Bengali translations of Sanscrit works to the prescriptions of which they servilely adhere. The only difference that I have been able to discover between the educated and uneducated classes of native practitioners is that the former prescribe with greater confidence and precision from the original authorities, and the latter with greater doubt and uncertainty from loose and imperfect translations. The mode of treatment is substantially the same, and in each case is fixed and invariable. Great attention is paid to the symptoms of disease, a careful and strict comparison being made between the descriptions of the supposed disease in the standard medical works and the actual symptoms in the case of the patient. When the identity is satisfactorily ascertained, there is then no doubt as to the practice to be adopted, for each disease has its peculiar remedy in the works of established repute, and to depart from their prescriptions would be an act of unheard of presumption. If, with a general resemblance, there should be some slight difference of symptoms, a corresponding departure from the authorised prescription is permitted, but only as regards the medium or vehicle through which it is administered. The medicines administered are both vegetable and mineral. The former are divided into those which are employed in the crude state, as barks, leaves, common or wild roots, and fruits etc.; and those which are sold in the druggist's shop as camphor, cloves, carda- mums, etc. They are administered either externally or in the forms of pill, powder, electuary, and decoction. The preceding class of practitioners consists of individuals who at best know nothing of medicine as a science, but practise 316

it as an art according to a prescribed routine, and it may well be supposed that many, especially of the uneducated class, are nothing but quacks. Still as a class they rank higher both in general estimation and in usefulness than the village doctors. Of these there are not fewer than 205 in Nattore. They have not the least semblance of medical knowledge, and they in general limit their prescriptions to the simplest vegetable preparations, either preceded or followed by the pronouncing of an incantation and by striking and blowing upon the body. Their number proves that they are in repute in the villages; and the fact is ascribable to the influence which they exercise upon the minds of the superstitious by their incantations. The village doctors are both men and women; and most of them are Mahomedans, like the class to which they principally address themselves. The smallpox inoculators in point of information and respectability come next to the class of general practitioners. There are 21 of them in Nattore, for the most part Brahmans, but uninstructed and ignorant, exercising merely the manual art of inoculation. One man sometimes inoculates from 100 to 500 children in a day, receiving for each operation a fixed rate of payment varying from one to two annas; the less amount if the number of children is great, the greater amount if the number is small. The cow-pox has not, I believe, been introduced into this district amongst the natives, except at the head station. Elsewhere the smallpox inoculators have been found its opponents, but, as far as I can understand, their opposition does not arise from interested motives, for the cow-pox inoculation would give them as much labour and profit as they now have. Their opposition arises, I am assured, from the prejudice against using cow-pox. The veneration in which the cow is held is well- known, and they fear to participate in a practice which seems to be founded on some injury done to that animal when the matter was originally extracted. The spread of the cow-pox would probably be most effectually accomplished by the employment of Mussalman inoculators whose success might in due time convince the Brahman inoculators of their mistake. Midwives are another class of practitioners that may be noticed, although it has been denied that Hindus have any. An eminent London physician, in his examination before the Medical Committee of the House of Commons, is stated to have affirmed that the inhabitants of China have no women-midwives, and no practitioners in midwifery at all. ‘Of course,’ it is added, ‘the African nations and the Hindus are the same.’ I enquired 317

and noted the number of women-midwives (there is not a man- midwife in the country) in the villages of Nattore, and find that they amount to 297. They are no doubt sufficiently ignorant, as are probably the majority of women-midwives at home. Still lower than the village doctors there is a numerous class of pretenders who go under the general name of conjurors or charmers. The largest division of this class are the snake- conjurors, their number in the single police sub-division of Nattore being not less than 722. There are few villages without one, and in some villages there are as many as ten. I could, if it were required, indicate the villages and the number in each; but instead of incumbering Table I with such details, I have judged it sufficient to state the total number in this place. They profess to cure the bites of poisonous snakes by incantations or charms. In this districts, particularly during the rainy season, snakes are numerous and excite much terror among the villagers. Nearly the whole district forming, it is believed, an old bed of the Ganges, lies very low; and the rapid increase of the waters during the rainy season drives the land-snakes from their holes, and they seek refuge in the houses of the inhabitants, who hope to obtain relief from their bites by the incantations of the conjurors. These take nothing for the performance of their rites, or for the cures they pretend to have performed. All is pecuniar- ily gratuitous to the individual but they have substantial advan- tages which enable them to be thus liberal. When the inhabitants of a village hitherto without a conjuror think that they can afford to have one, they invite a professor of the art from a neighbouring village where there happens to be one to spare, and give him a piece of land and various privileges and immunities. He possesses great influence over the inhabitants. If a quarrel takes place, his interference will quell it sooner than that of any one else; and when he requires the aid of his neighbours in cultivating his plot of ground or in reaping its produce, it is always more readily given to him than to others. The art is not hereditary in a family or peculiar to any caste. One I met with was a boatman, another a chowkidar and a third a weaver. Whoever learns the charm may practise it, but it is believed that those who practise it most successfully are ‘to the manner born’, that is, who have been born under a favourable conjunction of the planets. Every conjuror seems to have a separate charm, for I have found no two the same. They do not object to repeat it merely for the gratification of curiosity, and they allow it to be taken down in writing. Neither do they appear to have any mutual jealously, each readily allowing the virtue of other incantations than his own. 318

Sometimes the pretended curer of snake-bites by charms professes also to possess the power of expelling demons, and in other cases the expeller of demons disclaims being a snake- conjuror. Demon-conjurors are not numerous in Nattore; and tiger-conjurors who profess to cure the bites of tigers, although scarcely heard of in that thana, are more numerous in those parts of the district where there is a considerable space covered by jungle inhabited by wild beasts. Distinct from these three kinds of conjurors and called by a different name is a class of gifted (guni) persons who are believed to possess the power of preventing the fall of hail which would destroy or injure the crops of the villages. For this purpose when there is a prospect of a hailstorm, one of them goes out into the fields belonging to the villages with a trident and a buffalo's horn. The trident is fixed in the ground and the Gifted makes a wide circuit around it, running naked blowing the horn, and pronouncing incantations. It is the firm belief of the villagers that their crops are by this means protected from hailstorm. Both men and women practise this business. There are about a dozen in Nattore, and they are provided for in the same way as the conjurors. Some of these details may appear, and in themselves probably are, unimportant, but they help to afford an insight into the character of the humblest classes of native society who constitute the great mass of the people, and whose happiness and improvement are identical with the prosperity of the country; and although they exhibit the proofs of a most imbecile superstition, yet it is superstition which does not appear to have its origin or support in vice or depravity, but in a childish ignorance of the common laws of nature which the most imperfect education or the most limited mental cultivation would remove. These superstitions are neither Hindu nor Mahomedan, being equally repudiated by the educated portions of both classes of religionists. They are probably antecedent to both systems of faith and have been handed down from time immemorial as a local and hereditary religion of the cultivators of the soil, who, amid the extraordinary changes which in successive ages and under successive races of conquerors this country has undergone, appear always to have been left in the same degraded and prostrate condition in which they are now found.

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(c) BOOKS USED IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS Abbreviations: Murshidabad = MD; South Beerbhoom = BM; S. Behar = SB; Burdwan = Bun; Tirhoot = TT 326

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