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

Another important point which, according to Hartog, emerged during his interview was that Gandhiji ‘had not accused the British Government of having destroyed the indigenous schools, but [that] they had let them die for want of encour- agement.’ To this, Hartog’s reply was that ‘they had probably let them die because they were so bad that they were not worth keeping.’ In the meantime, Hartog had been working and seeking opinion, advice and views of the historian Edward J. Thompson. Thompson agreed with Hartog that Gandhiji could not possibly be right; and that he himself also did not ‘believe we destroyed indigenous schools and indigenous industry out of malice. It was inevitable.’ He felt nonetheless that, with regard to general education, ‘we did precious little to congratulate ourselves on until the last dozen years.’⁷⁰ In a further letter, Thompson elaborated his views on the subject: on how little was done until after 1918; that the ‘very hopelessness of the huge Indian job used to oppress’ even those who had often ‘first class record of intellect’ in places like Oxford ‘before entering the ICS.’ He noted further: ‘I am reading old records by pre-mutiny residents, they teem with information that makes you hope that the Congresswallah will never get hold of it.’ Somehow the correspondence between Hartog and Edward Thompson ended on a sour note. Perhaps, it did not provide Hartog the sort of intellectual or factual support he was actually looking for. At any rate, after the interview with Gandhiji, Hartog finally despatched his rebuttal of Gandhiji’s statement (as intended from the beginning) for publication in International Affairs.⁷¹ In this he concluded that ‘the present position is that Mr Gandhi has so far been unable to substantiate 64

his statement in any way'; but ‘he has undertaken to retract that statement, if he cannot support it.’ Within a few days of reaching India, Gandhiji was put in Yervada Prison. From there he wrote to Hartog on 15 February 1932 informing him of his inability at that moment to satisfy him, mentioning that he had asked Prof K.T. Shah to look into the matter. K.T. Shah’s long and detailed letter reached Hartog soon after. In it, Shah also referred to the various known writings on the subject including those of Max Mueller, Ludlow, G.L. Prendergast, and the more celebrated Thomas Munro, W. Adam, and G.W. Leitner (already referred to in the foregoing pages). For Bombay, Shah quoted G.L. Prendergast, a member of the Council in the Bombay Presidency (briefly referred to earlier) who had stated in April 1821: I need hardly mention what every member of the Board knows as well as I do, that there is hardly a village, great or small, throughout our territories, in which there is not at least one school, and in larger villages more; many in every town, and in large cities in every division; where young natives are taught reading, writing and arithmetic, upon a system so economical, from a handful or two of grain, to perhaps a rupee per month to the school master, according to the ability of the parents, and at the same time so simple and effectual, that there is hardly a cultivator or petty dealer who is not competent to keep his own accounts with a degree of accuracy, in my opinion, beyond what we meet with amongst the lower orders in our own country; whilst the more splendid dealers and bankers keep their books with a degree of ease, conciseness, and clearness I rather think fully equal to those of any British merchants.72 Knowing what Hartog considered as sufficient proof, Shah began his letter by saying that he ‘need hardly point out that at the time under reference, no country in the world had like definite, authoritative, statistical information of the type one would now recognise as proper proof in such discussions’; and that ‘all, therefore, that one can expect by way of proof in such matters, and at such a time, can only be in the form of impressions of people in a position to form ideas a little better and more scientific than those of less fortunately situated, or less well-endowed, observers.’ Shah finally concluded with the view that ‘the 65

closer enquiry of this type conducted by Leitner is far more reliable, and so also the obiter dicta of people in the position to have clear impressions’; and felt that ‘even those impressions must be held to give rather an underestimate than otherwise.’ But Shah’s long letter was a wasted effort as far as Hartog was concerned. It constituted merely a further provocation. In his reply, Hartog told Shah that ‘your letter does not touch the main question which I put to Mr Gandhi’; and concluded that ‘I am afraid that I am altogether unable to accept your conclusion with regard to the history of literacy in Bengal during the past 100 years, of which there remains a good deal to be said.’ Though it is not fair to compare individuals and to speculate on the motivations which move them, it does seem that at this stage Sir Philip Hartog had feelings similar to those experienced by W.H. Moreland after the latter had read Vincent Smith’s observations (in his book on Akbar the Great Mogul) that ‘the hired landless labourer in the time of Akbar and Jahangir probably had more to eat in ordinary years than he has now.’⁷³ In reviewing the book, Moreland had then said, ‘Mr Vincent Smith’s authority in Indian History is so deservedly great that this statement, if allowed to stand unquestioned, will probably pass quickly into a dogma of the schools; before it does so, I venture to plead for further examination of the data.’⁷⁴ And from then on, Moreland seems to have set himself the task of countering such a ‘heretical view, and of stopping it from becoming a dogma of the schools.’ Whatever his motivation, Philip Hartog set himself the task of proving Gandhiji wrong on this particular issue. The result was presented in three ‘Joseph Payne Lectures for 1935-36’ delivered at the University of London Institute of Education under the title, Some Aspects of Indian Education: Past and Present.⁷⁵ The lectures were presented along with three Memoranda: (a) Note on the statistics of literacy and of schools in India during the last 66

hundred years. (b) The Reports of William Adam on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Bihar 1835-38, and the legend of the ‘1,00,000 schools’, and (c) Dr G.W. Leitner and Education in the Panjab 1849-82. These were published in early 1939 by the Oxford University Press under the above title. In Memorandum ‘A’, using the low figures sent by A.D. Campbell for the district of Bellary, Hartog questioned Thomas Munro’s calculation that ‘the proportion of males educated in schools was nearer one-third than one-fourth.’ He countered instead ‘that Munro’s figures may have been over-estimates based on the returns of collectors less careful and interested in education than Campbell.’ Hartog’s conclusion at the end was that ‘until the action taken by Munro, Elphinstone, and Bentinck in the three presidencies, the British Government had neglected elementary education to its detriment in India. But I have found no evidence that it tried to destroy or uproot what existed.’ In a footnote, Hartog further observed: ‘In Great Britain itself it was not until 1833 that the House of Commons made a grant of 30,000 pounds for the purposes of education.’ He also praised various Indian personalities, and more so India’s quaint mixture of ‘most ancient and most modern’. In his Preface, after referring to ‘the imaginary basis for accusations not infrequently made in India that the British Government systematically destroyed the indigenous system of elementary schools and with it a literacy which the schools are presumed to have created’, Hartog observed: ‘When Mr Gandhi, in an address given at the Royal Institute of International Affairs on 20 October 1931, lent his powerful support to those accusations, and challenged contradiction, it was obviously necessary to re-examine the facts.’⁷⁶ 67

It may be fair to observe that, despite his considerable learning and experience, Hartog seemed to have lacked both imagination and a sense of history. He was far too committed to the dogmas of pre-1939 Britain. His immigrant Jewish background may have accentuated such an outlook further. Whatever the reasons, it seemed inconceivable to Hartog that late eighteenth, or early nineteenth century India could have had the education and facilities which Gandhiji and others had claimed. Similarly, it had been inconceivable to William Wilberforce, 125 years earlier, that the Hindoos could conceivably have been civilised (as was stated by many British officers and scholars who in Wilberforce’s days had had long personal experience of life in India) without the benefits of Christianity. To Hartog, as also to Edward Thompson, and before them to an extent even to W. Adam, and some of the Madras Presidency Collectors, it was axiomatic that these Indian educational institutions amounted to very little, and that the Indian system had ‘become merely self-perpetuating, and otherwise barren.’ Besides Gandhiji’s statement, two other facts seem to have had quite an upsetting effect on Philip Hartog. The first, already referred to, were the writings of G.W. Leitner. The second seems to have hurt him even more: this was a statement relating to what Hartog called ‘what of the immediate future’. In this context, Hartog noted that, ‘an earnest Quaker missionary has predicted that under the new regime [evidently meaning the post-British regime] there will be a Counter-Reformation in education, which will no longer be Western but Eastern’; and, he observed: ‘Thus India will go back a thousand years and more to the old days...to those days when she gave out a great wealth of ideas, especially to the rest of Asia, but accepted nothing in return.’ Such a prospect was galling indeed to Philip Hartog, burdened as he was—like his illustrious predecessors—with the idea of redeeming India morally as well as intellectually, by pushing it along the western road. As Gandhiji was the prime cause of this effort, Hartog sent a copy of his lectures to him. He wrote to Gandhiji that he had ‘little doubt that you will find that a close analysis of the facts reveals no evidence to support the statement which you made at the Royal Institute of International Affairs’; adding that Gandhiji ‘will therefore feel justified now in withdrawing that statement.’ Gandhiji replied some months later. His letter had all the ingredients of a classic reply: ‘I have not left off the pursuit of the subject of education in the villages during the pre-British 68

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

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

70

does not seem possible for these areas, much less for the whole of India. According to the 1879-80 Report of the Director of Public Instruction for the Madras Presidency, the total number of educational institutions of all types (including colleges, secondary, middle and primary schools, and special, or technical institutions) then numbered 10,553. Out of these, the primary schools numbered 10,106. The total number attending them: 2,38,960 males, and 29,419 females. The total population of the Presidency at this time is stated as 3,13,08,872. While the number of females attending these institutions was evidently larger in 1879-80 compared to 1822-25, the proportionate numbers of males was clearly much reduced. Using the same computation as those applied in 1822-25 (i.e. one-ninth of the total population treated as of school-going age), those of this age amongst the male population (taking males and females as equal) would have numbered 17,39,400. The number of males in primary schools being 2,18,840, the proportion of this age group in schools thus turns out to be 12.58%. This proportion in the decayed educational situation of 1822-25 was put at one-fourth, i.e. at 25%. If one were to take even the total of all those in every type of institution, i.e. the number 2,38,960, the proportion in 1879-80 rises only to 13.74%. From 1879-80 to 1884-85, there was some increase, however, to be found. While the population went down slightly to 3,08,68,504, the total number of male scholars went up to 3,79,932, and that of females to 50,919. Even this larger number of male scholars came up only to 22.15% of the computed school-age male population; and, of those in primary schools to 18.33%. These figures are much lower than the 1822- 25 officially calculated proportion. Incidentally, while there was an overall increase in number of females in educational institu- tions, the number of Muslim girls in such institutions in the district of Malabar in 1884-85 was only 705. Here it may be recollected that 62 years earlier, in August 1823, the number of Muslim girls in schools in Malabar was 1,122; and, at that time, the population of Malabar would have been below half of that in 1884-85. Eleven years later in 1895-96, the number in all types of educational institutions increased further. While the population had grown to 3,56,41,828, the number of those in educational

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institutions had increased to 6,81,174 males, and 1,10,460 fe- males. It is at this time then that the proportion (taking all those males attending educational institutions) rose to 34.4%: just about equal to the proportion which Thomas Munro had computed in 1826 as one-third (33.3%) of those receiving any education whether in indigenous institutions, or at home. Even at this period, i.e. 70 years after Munro’s computation, however, the number of males in primary education was just 28%. Coming to 1899-1900, the last year of the nineteenth century, the number of males in educational institutions went up to 7,33,923 and of females to 1,29,068. At this period, the number of school-age males was calculated by the Madras Presidency Director of Public Instruction as 26,42,909, thus giving a percentage of 27.8% attending any educational institution. Even taking a sympathetic view of the later data, what clearly comes out of these comparisons is that the proportion of those in educational institutions at the end of the nineteenth century was still no larger than the proportions estimated by Thomas Munro of the number attending the institutions of the decaying indigenous system of the Madras Presidency in 1822-25. The British authorities in the late nineteenth century must have been tempted—as we find state authorities are in our own times—to show their achievements in brighter hues and thus err on the side of inflating figures: therefore, this later data may be treated with some scepticism. This was certainly not the case with the 1822-25 data which, in the climate of that period, could not have been considered inflated in any sense of the word. From the above, it may be inferred that the decay which is mentioned in 1822-25 proceeded to grow in strength during the next six decades. During this period, most of the indigenous institutions more or less disappeared. Any surviving remnants were absorbed by the late 19th century British system. Further, it is only after 1890 that the new system begins to equal the 1822-25 officially calculated proportions of males in schools quantitatively. Its quality, in comparison to the indigenous system, is another matter altogether. The above comparison of the 1822-25 Madras indigenous education data with the data from the 1880s and 1890s period also seems to provide additional support—if such support were required—to the deductions which G.W. Leitner had come to in 1882. These reveal the decline of indigenous education in the Panjab in the previous 35-40 years. 72

VIII During this prolonged debate, the critical issue that was seldom touched upon and about which in their various ways, the Madras Presidency collectors, the reports of Adam, and the work of Leitner provided a variety of clues, was how all these educational institutions—the 1,00,000 schools in Bengal and Bihar, and a ‘school in every village’ according to Munro and others—were actually organised and maintained. For, it is ridiculous to suppose that any system of such wide and universal dimensions could ever have maintained itself without the necessary conceptual and infrastructural supports over any length of time. Modern Indians tend to quote foreigners in most matters reflecting on India’s present, or its past. One school of thought uses all such foreign backing to show India’s primitiveness, the barbaric, uncouth and what is termed ‘parochial’ nature of the customs and manners of its people, and the ignorance, oppressions and poverty which Indians are said to have always suffered from. To them India for most of its past had lived at what is termed, the ‘feudal’ stage or what in more recent Marxist terminology is called the ‘system of Asiatic social organisms’. Yet, to another school, India had always been a glorious land, with minor blemishes, or accidents of history here and there; all in all remaining a land of ‘Dharmic’ and benevolent rulers. For yet others subscribing to the observations of the much-quoted Charles Metcalfe, and Henry Maine, it has mostly been a happy land of ‘village republics’. Unfortunately, due to their British-oriented education, or because of some deeper causes (like the scholastic and hair- splitting tendency of Brahmanical learning), Indians have become since the past century, too literal, too much caught up with mere words and phrases. They have lost practically all sense of the symbolic nature of what is said, or written.⁷⁹ It is not surprising, 73

therefore, that when Indians think of village republics, what occurs to them is not what the word ‘republic’ implies in substance; but, instead, the visual images of its shell, the elected assembly, the system of voting, etc. What Charles Metcalfe, and especially Henry Maine wrote on this point was primarily on the basis of the earlier British information, i.e. what had been derived from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British travellers, administrators, etc., as well as from the writings of other Europeans before them. It implied (and, quite naturally, the British had no particular reason to spell it out for us Indians) that the ‘village’ (it is immaterial how they defined it), to an extent, had all the semblance of the State: it controlled revenue and exercised authority within its sphere. How this ‘village’ State was constituted, (whether in the manner of an oligarchy, or by the representation of the various castes, crafts, or other groups within it, or by representation of all families, or in some other manner), while important in itself as a subject for exploration, was not its basic element. The basic element of this ‘village republic’ was the authority it wielded, the resources it controlled and dispensed, and the manner of such resource utilisation. Notwithstanding all that has been written about empires— Ashokan, Vijayanagar, Mughal, etc., and of ‘oriental despotism’ it is beyond any doubt that throughout its history, Indian society and polity has basically been organised according to non- centralist concepts. This fact is not only brought out in recent research. The eighteenth and early nineteenth century European reports, manuscript as well as published writings also bear evidence to it. That the annual exchequer receipts of Jahangir did not amount to more than 5% of the computed revenue of his empire, and that of Aurangzeb (with all his zeal for maximising such receipts), did not ever exceed 20% is symptomatic of the concepts and arrangements which governed Indian polity. It can be argued of course that such a non-centralist polity made India politically weak; or, rather, soft in the military sense—given that only hierarchical and centralist states are politically and militarily strong and viable. This may all be true and is worthy of serious consideration. Nonetheless, the first requisite is to understand the nature of Indian society and polity especially as it functioned two or three centuries ago. Further, its various dimensions and contours, strengths and weaknesses need to be known, and not only from European writings but much more so from Indian sources; that is from sources rooted 74

in the traditions and beliefs of various areas, communities, groups, etc.,—with special attention being paid to their own images of the society of which they were a part. It is suggested here—and there is voluminous data scattered in the British records themselves which confirm the view—that in terms of the basic expenses, both education and medical care, like the expenses of the local police, and the maintenance of irrigation facilities, had primary claims on revenue. It was primarily this revenue which not only maintained higher education, but also—as was sometimes admitted in the British records—the system of elementary education.⁸⁰ It is quite probable that, in addition to this basic provision, the parents and guardians of the scholars also contributed a little according to their varying capacities by way of presents, occasional feeding of the unprovided scholars, etc., towards the maintenance of the system. But to suppose that such a deep rooted and extensive system which really catered to all sections of society could be maintained on the basis of tuition fees, or through not only gratuitous teaching but also feeding of the pupils by the teachers, is to be grossly ignorant of the actual functioning of the Indian social arrangements of the time. According to the Bengal-Bihar data of the 1770s and 1780s, the revenues of these areas were divided into various categories in addition to what was called the Khalsa, i.e., the sources whose revenue was received in the exchequer of the ruling authority of the province, or some larger unit. These categories together (excluding the Khalsa), seem to have been allocated or assigned the major proportion of the revenue sources (perhaps around 80% of the computed revenue of any area). Two of these categories were termed Chakeran Zemin, and Bazee Zemin in the Bengal and Bihar records of this period. The former, Chakeran Zemin, referred to recipients of revenue who were engaged in administrative, economic, accounting activities, etc., and were remunerated by assignments of revenue. The latter, Bazee Zemin, referred to those who—according to the British—were in receipt of what were termed ‘religious and charitable allowances’. A substantial portion of these religious allowances was obviously 75

assigned for the maintenance of religious places: largely temples of all sizes and celebrity, but also mosques, dargahs, chatrams, maths, etc. Another part was assigned to the agraharams, or what perhaps were also termed Brahmdeya in South India as well as in Bengal. Yet, other assignments were given over to a variety of persons: to great and other pundits, to poets, to joshis, to medical practitioners, to jesters and even for such purposes as defraying the expenses of carrying Ganga water in areas of Uttar Pradesh to certain religious shrines on certain festivals.⁸¹ Regarding the extent of such assignments from Hedgelee in Bengal, it was stated in 1770 that ‘almost one-half of the province is held upon free tenure’ under the Bazee Zemin category.⁸² The number of these Bazee Zemin (one may reasonably assume the term included individuals, groups as well as institutions) in many districts of Bengal and Bihar was as high as 30,000 to 36,000 recipients for the district. According to H.T. Prinsep,⁸³ in one district of Bengal around 1780, the applications for the registration of Bazee Zemin numbered 72,000. The position in the Madras Presidency was not very different, even after all the disorganisation, dispossession and demolition of the period 1750-1800, during which the British made themselves masters of the whole area. As late as 1801, over 35% of the total cultivated land in the Ceded Districts (the present Rayalseema area and the Kannada District of Bellary) came under the category of revenue free assignments, and it was the task of Thomas Munro to somehow reduce this quantity to a mere 5% of the total cultivated land. The reduction intended in the Ceded Districts was also carried out in all other districts, earlier in some, and later in others, and in some, the dispossession of such vast numbers of assignees of revenue took a long time. The returns from the various districts of the Madras Presidency, especially during the years 1805-1820, provide much information on the varied nature of these revenue assignments 76

(or grain, or money allowances). In some measure, these had till then continued to be permitted, or disbursed to a variety of institutions and to individuals in the several districts. Such information usually got collected whenever the government was contemplating some new policy, or some further steps concerning one, or more categories of such assignees, or those to whom any sort of allowances were being paid. As illustrative of such information, a return from the district of Tanjore of April 1813, relating to the money assignments received by 1,013 big and small temples,⁸⁴—which by this time were mostly minute— and between 350-400 individuals is reproduced at the end of this book (Annexures G and H). These payments amounted at this time to a total of Star Pagodas 43,037 for the temples, and Star Pagodas 5,929 to the individuals, annually. A Star Pagoda was valued at about three and one-half rupee. What was true of Bengal, Bihar and the Madras Presidency applied equally to other areas: whether of the Bombay Presidency, Panjab, or in the Rajasthan States. The proportions of revenue allocated to particular categories—as far as the British record indicates—also seem fairly similar. It will not be far wrong to assume that about a quarter to one-third of the revenue paying sources (not only land, but also sea ports, etc.) were, according to ancient practice, assigned for the requirements of the social and cultural infrastructure till the British overturned it all. Further still, the rate of assessment which was paid by cultivators of the revenue assigned lands was fairly low. According to the supervisors of the Bengal Districts in the 1770s and early 1780s, the rate of assessment charged by the Bazee Zemin revenue assignees was around one-quarter to one-third of the rate which the British had begun to demand from the lands which were treated as Khalsa,⁸⁵ a category which was now just swallowing up practically all the other categories. A more or less similar phenomenon obtained in the various districts of the Madras Presidency—even as late as the 1820s.⁸⁶ Moreover, though it may seem unbelievable, the area which constituted Malabar had, till 77

about 1750, never been subject to a land tax.⁸⁷ It had a variety of other mercantile and judicial taxes, but land in Malabar— according to British investigators themselves—never paid revenue of any kind till the peace was wholly shattered by the Europeans, Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. Even during Tipu's period, the actual receipts from Malabar were fairly small. The major dispossession of the various categories of revenue assignees (starting from those who had assignment for the performance of military duties, and who formed the local militias, and going on to those who performed police duties, etc.) started as soon as the British took over de facto control of any area, (i.e. in Bengal and Bihar from 1757-58 onwards). The turn of the Chakeran Zemin and the Bazee Zemin came slightly later. By about 1770, the latter had also begun to be seriously affected. By about 1800, through various means, a very large proportion of these had been altogether dispossessed; and, most of the remaining had their assignments greatly reduced through various devices. Among the devices used was the application of the newly established enhanced rate of assessment even to the sources from which the assignees had received the revenue. This device, to begin with, implied a reduction of the quantity of the assigned source in accordance with the increased rate of assessment. The next step was to reduce—in most cases—the money value itself. The result was that the assignee—whether an individual or an institution—even when allowed a fraction of the previous assignment, was no longer able (because of such steep reduction) to perform the accompanying functions in the manner they had been performed only some decades previously. Those whose assignments were completely abrogated were of course reduced to penury and beggary, if not to a worse fate. Naturally, many of the old functions 78

dependent on such assignments (like teaching, medicine, feeding of pilgrims, etc.), had to be given up because of want of fiscal support, as also due to state ridicule and prohibitions. There are references (see the annexed reports from some of the Madras Presidency collectors) to certain revenue assignments here and there, and to daily cash or grain allowances received by some of those who were occupied in imparting Sanskritic learning, or Persian, and in some instances even education at the elementary level. A few other collectors also made reference to certain revenue assignments which used to exist in the area (but were said to have been appropriated by Tipu, and that, when the British took over these areas, they formally added such revenue to the total State revenue). The various area reports of the period 1792 to about 1806 make much mention of dispossession of revenue assignees by orders of Tipu in the area over which he had control. But, at the same time, it is also stated that through the connivance of the revenue officers, etc., such dispossession during Tipu’s reign was, in most cases, not operative at all. What Tipu might have intended merely as a threat to opponents, became a de facto reality when these areas came under formal British administration. But in most areas which the British had conquered (either on behalf of the Nabob of Arcot, or on behalf of the Nizam of Hyderabad, or administered in the name of the various Rajas of Tanjore), most such dispossession was pre-1800. The process started soon after 1750, when the British domination of South India began gathering momentum in the early 1780s and the revenues of the areas claimed by the British to be under the nominal rulership of the Nabob of Arcot were formally assigned over to the British. One major method used to ensure dispossession was to slash down what were termed the ‘District charges’, i.e., the amounts traditionally utilised within the districts, but which, for purposes of accounting, were shown in the records of the Nabob. The slashing down in certain districts like Trichnopoly was up to 93% of the ‘District charges’ allowed until then: a mere 19,143 Star Pagodas now allowed in place of the earlier 2,82,148 Star Pagodas. The report of the collector of Bellary is best known and most mentioned in the published records on indigenous educa- tion.⁸⁸ It is long and fairly comprehensive, though the data he 79

actually sent was much less detailed. In it, he actually—to the extent a collector could—came out with the statement that the degeneration of education ‘is ascribable to the gradual but general impoverishment of the country’; that ‘the means of the manufacturing classes have been greatly diminished by the introduction of our own European manufactures’; that ‘the transfer of the capital of the country from the native government and their officers, who liberally expanded it in India, to Europeans, restricted by law from employing it even temporarily in India, and daily draining it from the land, has likewise tended to this effect’; that ‘in many villages where formerly there were schools, there are now none; and that ‘learning, though it may proudly decline to sell its stores, had never flourished in any country except under the encouragement of the ruling power, and the countenance and support once given to science in this part of India has long been withheld.’ In elaboration, he added that ‘of the 533 institutions for education now existing in this district, I am ashamed to say not one now derives any support from the State’; but that ‘there is no doubt, that in former times, especially under the Hindoo Governments very large grants, both in money and in land, were issued for the support of learning’; that the ‘considerable yeomiahs or grants of money, now paid to brahmins in this district...may, I think, be traced to this source’. He concluded with the observation that: Though it did not consist with the dignity of learning to re- ceive from her votaries hire, it has always in India been deemed the duty of government to evince to her the highest respect, and to grant to her those emoluments which she could not, consistently with her character, receive from other sources; the grants issued by former governments, on such occasions, contained therefore no unbecoming stipulations or conditions. They all purport to flow from the free bounty of the ruling power, merely to aid the maintenance of some holy or learned man, or to secure his prayers for the State. But they were almost universally granted to learned or religious persons, who maintained a school for one or more of the sciences, and taught therein gratuitously; and though not expressed in the deed itself, the duty of continuing such gratuitous instruction was certainly implied in all such grants.⁸⁹ 80

The Collector of Bellary, A.D. Campbell, was an experienced and perceptive officer, previously having held the post of Secretary of the Board of Revenue, and was perhaps one of Thomas Munro’s favourites. It may be said to Munro’s credit that in his review of 10 March 1826, he did admit in his oblique way that indigenous education ‘has, no doubt, been better in earlier times.’ The fact that it got disrupted, reduced and well- nigh destroyed from the time the British took over de facto control and centralised the revenue, was obviously not possible even for a Governor as powerful as Thomas Munro to state in formal government records. Illustrations such as the above can be multiplied ad infinitum. It only requires searching the records pertaining to the early period of British rule in different areas of India. With much industry and in a fairly objective manner, Leitner tried to do this for the Panjab. For Gandhiji, an intuitive understanding of what could have happened was enough. He could, therefore, with confidence, reply to Hartog that, ‘my prejudice or presentiment still makes me cling to the statement I made at Chatham House.’ IX This brings us finally to an assessment of the content of the indigenous system of education. The long letter of the much- quoted A.D. Campbell, collector of Bellary, had been used a century earlier by London to establish that in India reading and writing 81

were acquired ‘solely with a view to the transaction of business’, that ‘nothing whatever is learnt except reading, and with the exception of writing and a little arithmetic, the education of the great majority goes no farther.’ The question of content is crucial. It is the evaluation of content which led to indigenous education being termed ‘bad’ and hence to its dismissal; and, in Gandhiji's phrase, to its uprooting. Yet it was not ‘the mere reading and writing and a little arithmetic’ which was of any consequence in such a decision. For, school education in contemporary England, except in the sphere of religious teaching, covered the same ground, and probably, much less thoroughly. As mentioned earlier, the average period of schooling in 1835 England was just about one year, and even in 1851, only two. Further, as stated by A.E. Dobbs, ‘in some country schools, writing was excluded for fear of evil consequences.’ While the limitless British hunger for revenue—so forcefully described by Campbell—starved the Indian system of the very re- sources which it required to survive, its cultural and religious content and structure provoked deliberate attempts aimed at its total extermination. It was imperative to somehow uproot the Indian indigenous system for the relatively undisturbed maintenance and continuance of British rule. It is the same imperative which decided Macaulay, Bentinck, etc., to deliberately neglect large-scale school education—proposed by men like Adam—till a viable system of Anglicised higher education had first been established in the country. In 1813, this bold intention was publicly and powerfully expressed by William Wilberforce when he depicted Indians as being ‘deeply sunk, and by their religious superstitions fast bound, in the lowest depths of moral and social wretchedness.’⁹⁰ T.B. Macaulay expressed similar views, merely using different imagery. He commented that the totality of Indian knowledge and scholarship did not even equal the contents of ‘a single shelf of a good European library’, and that all the historical information contained in books written in Sanskrit was ‘less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridge- ment used at preparatory schools in England.’⁹¹ To Macaulay, all Indian knowledge, if not despicable, was at least absurd: absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology. 82