TOWARDS INDIGENOUS EDUCATION
A Book Review Article
by Pranjali Bandhu
THE BEAUTIFUL TREE: INDIGENOUS INDIAN EDUCATION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY by Dharampal. Vol. 3 of 5 volumes of Collected Works. Published by Other India Press, Goa and SIDH (Society for Integrated Development of Himalayas)Mussoorie, 2007 (c. 1983). pp. 424; Pb; Rs. 900/- for set of 5 volumes.
Renowned freedom fighter Dharampal’s scholarly efforts were geared towards a painstaking reconstruction of Indian society and polity prior to the British colonial enterprise in the subcontinent. The disruption of the continuity of Indian knowledge and practice in all spheres of life was deemed necessary by the colonialists for their expropriation of wealth from the country. Dharampal together with other nationalists inspired by Gandhi felt that if India was ever to recover and rejuvenate itself after centuries long mauling during British rule it could do so only on the basis of relinking itself to pre-British social values, traditions and culture and by recreating institutions and social structures in such a way as to reestablish a continuity with the past.
However, the India that freed itself from British rule in 1947 was led along a path by its leaders whereby the institutional framework set up under colonial rule was retained rather than demolished, and to date it continues to suck the blood of the Indian peoples. Instead of freedom and independence, self-determination and self-reliance, the peoples of this country are groaning under neo-colonial strangulation and exploitation. The destructive drain of wealth to the West continues.
One important avenue of facilitating this drain is the education system that was set up by the British on the ruins of the extensive Indian network of schools and institutions of higher learning. As noted by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, the Indian who underwent anglicized education became a foreigner, “a stranger in his own land” (p. 64). Dharampal’s aim in the book under review and in the other volumes of this set is to comprehend the realities of India, her strengths and weaknesses before complete British takeover. In this quest he by and large relies on British archival sources themselves with all their limitations including their propensity of not keeping on record statements and petitions that showed their rule in too negative a light.
This particular piece of research on indigenous Indian education in the eighteenth century was done to prove Gandhi’s statement in London in 1931, wherein he had asserted that Indian technology, industry and education had decayed under colonialism and that this destruction had been deliberately fostered by the British. According to hard data collated by Dharampal in the field of education “in terms of the content and proportion of those attending institutional school education, the situation of India in 1800 is certainly not inferior to what obtained in England then; and in many respects Indian schooling seems to have been much more extensive… The content of studies was better than what was studied in England. The duration of study was more prolonged. The method of school teaching was superior and it is this very method which is said to have greatly helped the introduction of popular education in England…” (p. 20). Superiority to the British system also existed in the proportionate numbers attending school, the conditions under which schooling took place and in the quality of the teachers. Basic reading, writing and arithmetical skills were widespread due to the prevalence of village schools where education was imparted at nominal cost according to the paying capacity of the parents. But the general impoverishment that followed upon turning India into a colony led to the fact that the middle and lower classes were no longer able to defray the expenses for the education of their children, who were instead put to labour to help them eke out a living.
Drawbacks and weaknesses of the education system prevailing in India then are also all too obvious: Girl schooling may have possibly been more extensive in England in 1800 than in India, though the figures may be low also because the schooling of most girls then took place in homes rather than outside, observes Dharampal. Education in India was not general and uniform but was imparted according to caste, creed, region and occupation to fit the children into their respective pre-ordained positions in life in terms of the work to be done by them and the conduct appropriate to it.
With regard to the Panchamas or outcastes of Hindu society Dharampal contradicts British and Dalit versions that claim that these sections were completely excluded from the education system prevalent earlier in the villages. His finding is that “it was the groups termed Shoodras, and the castes considered below them who predominated in the thousands of the then still existing schools” particularly in the districts of the Madras Presidency (and dramatically so in the Tamil speaking areas) as well as in 2 districts of Bihar. However, his assumption that “the castes considered below them included those who today are categorized among the scheduled castes, and many of whom were better known as ‘Panchamas’ some 70-80 years ago” (p. 21) is not sufficiently well-grounded and needs further substantiation.
He concedes that higher learning in the main was limited to Brahmins, particularly in regard to the disciplines of Theology, Metaphysics, Ethics and Law. But he finds that the disciplines of Astronomy and Medical Science were studied by scholars from a variety of backgrounds and castes. Dharampal also points out to the paucity of data in British records used by him on the teaching and training in the scores of technologies and crafts then existing in India. He attributes this lack of data to British writers’ disinterest in these crafts and technologies with the exception of some such as the manufacture of iron and steel, cotton and silk textiles, ship building and so on. However, even in such writings the emphasis tended to be on the technological and scientific details and not on how these were learnt and passed on. Most of the crafts in India, he says, were learnt at home and taught to the children by the parents. Another reason for this omission according to him might lie in the fact that particular technologies and crafts, like the professions of digging tanks, or the transportation of commodities were the functions of particular specialist groups; some of them operating in most parts of India, while others did so in particular regions, and therefore any formal teaching and training in them must have been the function of such groups themselves (p. 38).
The main documents presented by Dharampal in this volume are: “Survey of Indigenous Education in the Madras Presidency (1822-26)”; W. Adam’s “State of Education in Bengal: 1835-38” (Extracts) and G.W. Leitner’s “History of Education in the Punjab Since Annexation and in 1832” (Extracts). Additional materials are Fra Paolino Da Bartolomeo’s observations on “Education of Children in India” (1796) and Alexander Walker on Indian Education (1820). The correspondence between Sir Philip Hartog, eminent British educationist, and Mahatma Gandhi on the Question of Indigenous Indian Education in the Early British Period is included. In this section there are 2 articles from Young India of 8 and 29 Dec. 1920: “The Decline of Mass Education in India” and “How Indigenous Education was Crushed in the Punjab 1849-1886” by Daulat Ram Gupta and a letter by K.T. Shah to Sir Philip—which also contain much useful information on the subject at hand.
Today if we want to embark upon the struggle to set up an indigenous education system in a society that is free of colonial and neo-colonial values and which is internally democratic it is important to understand the following facts unearthed by Dharampal:
In pre-British times education and medical care, like the expenses of the local police and the maintenance of irrigation facilities, had primary claims on revenue. Such a system made it affordable and accessible to most people. The British diverted this revenue for their own purposes leading to a neglect of the large-scale school education provided through pathshalas, madrasahs and gurukuls and a variety of other kinds of schools and schooling and higher educational institutions and learning processes. The British preferred to set up and promote anglicized secondary and higher schools premised on the theory that if Western education was introduced among the upper classes it would “filter down” by a natural process to the lower classes. High fees were charged in these government-aided schools excluding poorer students by a ‘natural’ process. These poorer sections began to be provided education by some Christian missionaries which had the effect of incorporating them too into the colonial framework. The strong divide in the educational field between the rich and the poor today is a legacy of British intervention, but is being nurtured today by the Indian elite.
The challenge of establishing a democratic education system accessible to all lies ahead. Dharampal’s historical research is useful for those looking for alternatives to the present horrendously inequitable socio-economic order with its pro-imperialist biases and dependencies and an education system geared to serve this order. The theory and practice of Gandhi’s Nai Taleem, Kumarappa’s observations on education in his “Economy of Permanence” and Tagore’s educational efforts at Shanti Niketan are some of the ideas and experiments in indigenous education that need to be reviewed. The crux of finding a democratic solution to our caste-ridden and presently highly communalized class society continues to evade us. The question of the Adivasis, their manner of integration into the larger society, an educational model suited to their needs continues to demand our attention. This latter aspect is totally missing in Dharampal’s research work.
Moreover, Dharampal used almost exclusively British records to arrive at the realities of Indian society. Though some work has been done in this field historians in India still have the monumental task of exploring particularly local and regional history in India. In such an exploration the memories of the people have a role to play. This task would be accomplished all the more easily if educational institutions in this country were truly linked with their surroundings and served primarily the needs of the locality in which they are located. This was the strength of the pre-British educational system and the abysmal weakness of our current one.
Dharampal’s vision like that of Gandhi was of a people rebuilding their lives using to the maximum extent possible their local material resources and talents. In the process Western or other technologies as seem relevant can be appropriated. The necessary self-confidence for this creative activity would come from a better awareness of the human past of the own localities, friendly relations with the surrounding plant and animal life, and knowledge of the rivers, lakes, ponds, hills, forests, soil etc.. “Similarly, we should begin to be aware of the linkage of each and every locality with the immediate region, of the region with the country, and of our country with other countries on this earth, and the earth’s linkage with the cosmos. These efforts would require new texts of well told stories of localities, regions, countries, the world…” (cited in the Preface “Making History” by Claude Alvares to Vol 1 “Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century” of this set of Collected Works by Dharampal, p. xv). If education is imparted on such a basis, he says, by the age of 14 our children can become competent citizens of their respective areas well grounded in the elements of various sciences and technologies in agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry and crafts, as well as in history, philosophy, grammar, language and literature. They can then stand up to make history in all dignity instead of languishing as broken people.
The publishers deserve our congratulations for bringing out this set of collected writings by Dharampal. This reviewer missed a glossary explaining terms from pre-British and colonial times in this volume.
Also see:
www.dharampal.net hosted by www.samanvaya.com which has a complete online repository of the works of this thinker-scholar-patriot-historian