The Beautiful Tree (35 page)

The collectors’ reports show the careful and scholarly way in which the data were collected and collated. To take one example, the collector from the North Arcot district, a Mr. William Cooke, one of the three that reported a small amount of nonprivate funding, even tells us the cook’s pay at one school and the daily allowance for boiled rice! You get the feeling that he took his assignment very seriously indeed. All his figures are collated in
Table 3
. Cooke recorded 583 private primary schools teaching in the local languages. Of these, 3 charged no fees, while the remaining 580 charged monthly fees, ranging from 15 annas to 21 rupees per year. There were also 40 Persian schools, 31 of which were private fee-paying schools, with 308 pupils, supported entirely by fees ranging from 1 rupee and 14 annas to 24 rupees per year. Seven of the Persian schools were “public schools,” funded either by the villages or with a yearly government allowance, whereas the remaining two Persian schools provided free tuition. Finally, there were seven English private schools, three of which were free of charge, while four charged fees from 7.5 to 42.0 rupees per year.
⁸

The other collectors gave similar levels of detail. They revealed that, in the Madras Presidency, the extensive system of schools was more or less entirely
privately
funded. The same conclusion also stands out from Adam’s evidence for the Bengal Presidency:
⁹
Before the British took over and imposed their alien centralized public education system, India had an extensive system of private schools that catered to the masses. Or put another way, before the British came, the Indians already had a system of private schools, including schools for the poor.
¹⁰

The collectors also told us something about the different motivations of those who set up private schools. One observed that private schools “are partly established occasionally by individuals for the education of their own children, and partly by the Teachers themselves, for their own maintenance.”
¹¹
Some parents, he continued, “who are anxious to have their children educated” cannot “sufficiently pay the Teachers out of their own money.” In which case, they “procure some other children in addition to their own for being educated and get adequate allowance to them by way of subscription from these children, from one quarter, to one Rupee each monthly.” This all seemed strangely reminiscent of what I had discovered in India today, where some parents who want to provide their children with what they view as a better education sometimes start a school and “procure some other children” to make it a viable undertaking.

 

Table 3.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOL FUNDING, NORTH ARCOT, 1823

SOURCE:Collated from C. Hyde (1823). "Principal Collector of South Arcot to Board of Revenue: 29-6-1823, Cuddalore, (TNSA:BRP: Vol. 954,Pro. 7-7-1823, pp. 5622-24, Nos. 59-60," in The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteen Century, by Dharampal (Coimbatore: Keerthi Publishing House, 1995),pp. 145-46

The collectors also gave details of how the system accommodated the ability of parents to pay. For instance, one noted that the school fees were paid according “to the circumstances of the prents.”
¹²
Another observed that “school Masters receive monthly from each Scholar from one quarter to four Rupees, according to their respective means.” Again, this flexibility in payment mirrored what I found in today’s private schools for the poor.

Moreover, the collectors were clear: the schooling system had always been privately funded—the British didn’t come to India and supplant an effective state system of revenue collection that could have funded schooling.
¹³
Most of the collectors provided information on whether the funding had changed over the years. They reported—apparently from detailed investigations—that there were no records, verbal or written, of there having been any public funding in the past. A typical comment came from South Arcot, where the collector argued, “No allowance of any sort has
ever been
granted by the Native Governments to Schools, the Masters of which are entirely supported by the Parents of the Scholars.”
¹⁴

The conclusion is clear. The “deep-rooted and extensive” education system, catering to “all sections of society,” uncovered by Munro’s careful survey of the Madras Presidency of 1822, was a private education system. Indeed, when the Board of Revenue to the Chief Secretary to Government summarized all the evidence collected on February 21, 1825, to be given to the governor, Munro, the secretary agreed with this conclusion: “It will be observed that the schools now existing in the country are for the most part supported by the payments of the people who send their children to them for instruction. The rate of payment for each scholar varies in different districts and according to the different circumstances of the parents of the pupils.”
¹⁵

When Gandhi spoke at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London on October 20, 1931, I could now see more clearly what was at stake. When he said that the British came to India and uprooted “the
beautiful tree
,” he was referring to the beautiful tree of a private education system, serving the poor as well as the rich. Instead of embracing this indigenous private education system, the British rooted it out, and it perished. And this left India “more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago.”
¹⁶

I was truly astounded when I discovered this, from reading Dharampal and following up the original sources in the India Office Room of the British Library. Why wasn’t this extraordinary fact more widely known? And why did people—well-meaning people who might have known better—persist in claiming that the British brought education to India, and it, at least, was a positive legacy of colonialism? Quite a lot of the blame could be laid at the door of Sir Philip Hartog, it would seem. My journey shifted across London’s Blooms-bury district, from the British Library to the annals of the Institute of Education, where I found the Joseph Payne Lectures, delivered there by Sir Philip Hartog in 1935 and 1936, under the title “Some Aspects of Indian Education, Past and Present.”

Not everyone was happy upon hearing Gandhi’s version of events. In the audience was Sir Philip Hartog, a founder of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London, and former vice-chancellor of the University of Dacca, who was positively incensed about what he heard. He questioned Gandhi at the meeting itself, and, unsatisfied by the answers, entered into a long correspondence with him, culminating in an hourlong interview. Gandhi directed him to articles based on the findings noted above, from Bombay and Bengal (it would seem there were no parallel articles written about Munro’s evidence from Madras). But Hartog wasn’t convinced and repeatedly insisted that Gandhi publicly revoke his comments.

On his return to India in 1932, Gandhi was arrested and imprisoned. Meanwhile, Hartog set out to prove him wrong—still parrying Gandhi for answers, who, not surprisingly, politely wrote to inform “of his inability at that moment to satisfy him.” Hartog’s endeavors, however, resulted in his being invited to lecture at the Institute of Education, University of London, aiming to “remove, if possible, once and for all, the imaginary bases for assertions 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.”
¹⁷
It seems he was pretty successful at doing so.

Hartog disagreed about both the
quantity
of indigenous educational provision before the British and its
quality.
His disagreement about the quantity is relatively easy to dismiss. First, Hartog did not appear to dispute that there had been a spontaneous “mushrooming” of private schools in India before the British got involved. He concurred that “English-teaching schools, sprang up all over Bengal,” prompted in part by ordinary people’s desire to learn English and, hence, to enter British service. Moreover, he conceded that these schools had nothing to do with the British: the movement “received little encouragement or stimulus from Government,” for at the time there was “no deep-seated desire of Great Britain to westernize Indian education.” No instead, the growth of the schools “
was spontaneous and voluntary
.”

But, whatever this agreement, he believed that the commentators, including Munro, exaggerated the extent of educational entrepreneurship in 19th-century India. In his lectures, Hartog was curt and dismissive about this evidence: “I have grave doubts as to the accuracy of these figures.” But that’s all he said to his audience about Munro’s detailed survey. Those who wanted more detail were referred to a memorandum, published as an appendix to his book (“Note on the Statistics of Literacy and of Schools in India during the Last Hundred Years”). Reading this, I could see how completely off-target his criticisms of Munro were.

For Hartog cited the writings of only
one
of Munro’s 21 British collectors to dismiss the findings of the entire group, that of a Mr. A. D. Campbell, collector from Bellary. Campbell, he noted, “gave figures for Bellary far below the average reported by Munro.” If Munro’s findings had been applicable to Bellary, he argued, then Campbell should have found twice as many scholars in schools. This is the proof that Hartog was looking for: “The contrast between the figures of Munro for Madras as a whole with those of Campbell for Bellary . . . suggests that Munro’s figures may have been overestimates based on the returns of collectors less careful and interested in education than Campbell.” Campbell supposedly showed that Munro was wrong, because Campbell found only half the schools identified by other collectors and Campbell was purportedly the only conscientious collector.

But this conclusion seemed to me to be totally unsustainable, once the collectors’ reports were examined in detail. To support his thesis that Campbell’s report was the only one to be taken seriously, Hartog noted that the collector from Bellary was “singled out” by the Court of Directors of the East India Company as “the only one among the collectors who wrote ‘
concerning the quality of the instruction
given at the elementary schools.”’ However, far from pointing to a strength, this actually pointed to what the Court saw as a major
weakness
with Campbell’s evidence. For the collectors
weren’t asked
by Munro for their subjective judgments about quality. Munro was after the facts, not opinion. It is true, Campbell thought that the quality of education could be improved, although he wasn’t actually that damning; he wrote, “The chief defects in the native schools are the nature of the books, and learning taught and the want of competent master.”
¹⁸
Hardly enough to support Hartog’s assertion of the “miserably inefficient” indigenous schools. But as for the
quantity
of indigenous education, Campbell’s evidence is the weakest of all the collectors’. Whereas other collectors gave pages and pages of detailed statistical tables broken down by districts and villages, by schools and colleges, and by sex and caste of the scholars, Campbell provided only
one
table, featuring
one line of data
. That’s all.

It would seem much more appropriate to turn Hartog’s comment on its head. It was
Campbell
who was careless and inattentive, not the other collectors. It’s hard to concur with Hartog that Campbell’s figures should be taken more seriously than, say, the collector for Trichinopoly, with his 10 pages of scrupulously prepared quantitative tables; or the collector for North Arcot, with his 14 pages of meticulous statistical detail. It is hard to see how Hartog could dismiss all this and rely instead on Campbell’s one line of data. It is hard to resist the conclusion that Campbell’s observations reinforced Hartog’s prejudices, and
that’s
why he went with what Campbell, rather than the other, more conscientious collectors, reported.

A more objective reading of the evidence was obvious:
because of his prejudices against what he thought was low-quality indigenous education
, Campbell didn’t find—possibly didn’t even look for—many of the schools that the other collectors
did
find. Campbell’s behavior seems similar to the behavior of some of my own researchers, who didn’t believe that unrecognized private schools existed or were worth finding if they did. My researchers sometimes returned saying there were no private schools in slums or villages. Accompanying these same researchers back to the same villages, they’ve been surprised at how many schools there actually were, if they had bothered to look for them carefully. My guess is that Campbell, or Campbell’s teams, behaved similarly when faced with Munro’s request. They didn’t believe the schools existed in any great number or if they did, didn’t believe they were worth bothering with, so they didn’t go out to look, or at least not very carefully.