Education in India before the British
J K Bajaj
Abstract:
We know about the pre-British indigenous education in India primarily through the British surveys of the nineteenth century. These show that education in India at that time was widespread and probably universal. It was also inclusive. Both the children and the teachers in the schools belonged to all castes and communities. This came as a surprise for many when Dharampal presented detailed records of the survey of Madras (1822) in The Beautiful Tree published in 1983. In this note, in addition to this fact, we draw attention to the purpose of indigenous schooling. This, the surveyors suggest, was to equip the student to carry out the ordinary business of his native society. Education, they say, had a practical, as against moral, tendency. They note that with this well-defined purpose, the indigenous schools were able to impart foundational literacy and numeracy in a remarkably efficient and economic manner.
The Pre-British Surveys
We know about pre-British education in India mainly from the extensive surveys that the British carried out in the early nineteenth century before attempting to establish a new colonial system of their own. That colonial system is what we have continued with after Independence.
Of the surveys of indigenous Indian education that the British undertook, the most extensive and systematic was the one ordered by Thomas Munro, then Governor of Madras, in 1822. The survey was much like our modern surveys. The Governor sent a tabular format to be filled by the Collectors of each of the 22 districts of the Presidency, seeking information on the number of schools and colleges, the number of students in them, and their disaggregation by gender, religion, and caste, along with the counted or estimated population of the district. All of the Collectors sent back filled-out tables. Many of them also sent additional information about the number of teachers, the average number of years a student spent in the school, the subjects taught, and the textbooks used in the school, etc. Several also included their detailed observations and opinions about indigenous education in their districts. Dharampal has compiled this entire material in The Beautiful Tree, with which many of us are familiar.1
There is another major survey of indigenous education from about the same period: the detailed survey of some districts of Bengal and Bihar carried out by William Adam and published in his reports of 1835 and 1838.2 The Beautiful Tree includes extensive extracts from Adam’s reports. It also presents much of the relevant data from these reports in tabular form.
Around the same time, the Bombay Presidency also endeavoured to collect information on the state of indigenous education. Dharampal has quoted briefly from the Minute on Education of G. L. Prendergast, Member of the Council in the Bombay Presidency, of 1821.
Finally, there was a much later survey of education in Punjab by G. W. Leitner. It was published as History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab Since the Annexation in 1882.3 The lateness of this survey is because that State could be annexed by the British only in 1849. Dharampal includes some extracts from Leitner’s book in The Beautiful Tree.
These surveys of the early British times thus cover almost the whole of India, including parts of Pakistan and Bangladesh. Most of us have learnt about this material from Dharampal’s The Beautiful Tree. On the basis of this book, we have formed a picture of pre-British indigenous education. What are the prominent features of this picture? What do these surveys compiled together in Dharampal’s book tell us about our way of education?
Extent and Inclusiveness of Education
The main lesson of The Beautiful Tree that all of us have learnt is that education in India in the first half of the nineteenth century was much more widespread and inclusive than what is generally assumed. A surprisingly large share of the children of school-going age were at school and, contrary to what we presume even today, the students and teachers belonged to all castes and communities.
The specific numbers of the survey of Madras Presidency suggest that 21.5 per cent of the boys of school-going age were attending school. In addition, there were many who received instruction at home. Taking this into account, Thomas Munro concluded that: “I am, however, inclined to estimate the portion of the male population who receive school education to be nearer to one-third than one-fourth of the whole, because we have no returns from the provinces of the numbers taught at home.”4
This number seems small, but it was much larger than what prevailed in Britain then. Widespread schooling in Britain began later, after 1850. The rest of Europe was behind Britain.
The actual number of children (both boys and girls) receiving school education was probably much higher than what the numbers of the survey of Madras Presidency suggest. Other observers quoted in The Beautiful Tree—William Adam from Bengal and Bihar, Leitner from Punjab, and Prendergast from Bombay—suggest that education was much more widespread.Adam’s Reports famously state that there were one lakh indigenous schools in the Bengal Presidency. This amounted to a school for every 400 persons or for every 31 or 32 boys of the relevant age.5 That number seems to suggest universal schooling.
Leitner suggests that there were 3,30,000 pupils in Punjab at the time of annexation in 1849, which number had declined to 1,90,000 in 1867 after 19 years of British rule. He also says that in the Punjab: “There was not a mosque, a temple, a dharmasala that had not a school attached to it… There were also thousands of secular schools, frequented alike by Muhammadans, Hindus and Sikhs…”6
Prendergast says, “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, …”7
Adam and Leitner were reporting from the ground; they travelled extensively, and described and narrated what they saw, unlike Thomas Munro who asked his Collectors to fill proformas. The impression of widespread, almost universal school education that they convey is, therefore, authentic and valuable.
None of the observers noticed any limitation of education to specific castes, communities, or groups. In the Madras Survey, the number of Shudra students outnumbers others by large margins almost everywhere. Adam gives numbers of teachers from different castes. In these lists, you see tens of names of what we today consider as the low castes. In Leitner’s accounts from Punjab, the question of caste does not even seem to arise. All are engaged in education in one way or the other.
The documented extent, inclusiveness, and almost universality of education in the pre-British Indian polity is the most striking aspect of The Beautiful Tree and much of the attention has remained focussed on this. But the early nineteenth-century surveys presented in the book also tell us much else about indigenous education—the purpose of school education, the methodology of imparting education, the pedagogy, the textbooks used in the schools, the infrastructure of the schools, and the economy of schooling.
The issue of the vast extent and deep inclusivity of indigenous education that the surveys document has now become moot. We have, in our own colonial ways, achieved universal school enrolment. The other aspects that the surveys dealt with remain relevant and important. Unfortunately, notwithstanding the great reach of The Beautiful Tree, there has not been much discussion about the objectives of education, the pedagogy of foundational literacy, the content of textbooks at the school stage, and the economy of schooling, in the light of what the nineteenth-century surveys tell us about these aspects of indigenous education.
Purpose and objective of school education
In this note, let us discuss only one of these foundational aspects of school education: the objective and purpose of school education. This was not one of the questions that Thomas Munro asked the Collectors of Madras Presidency to answer. But some of the Collectors included detailed observations on all aspects of indigenous education while returning answers to the formal survey. There are even more detailed quantitative observations in the reports of William Adam from Bengal and Bihar. The brief extracts from Punjab, Bombay, and from other observers also have much to say on the issues of purpose, pedagogy, infrastructure, and economy of indigenous education.
All the reports seem to say that the education had a practical, as against moral, tendency and that its purpose was to equip the scholar to carry out the ordinary business of his native society. Adam puts it most succinctly; after describing the system and content of instruction in the elementary schools of Bengal in detail, he observes:8
In the matter of instruction there are some grounds for commendation, for the course I have described has a direct practical tendency; and, if it were taught in all parts, is well adapted to qualify the scholar for engaging in the actual business of native society. My recollection of the village schools of Scotland do not enable me to pronounce that the instruction given in them has a more direct bearing upon the daily interests of life than which I find given, or professed to be given, in the humbler village schools of Bengal.
The insistence on teaching how to engage “in the actual business of native society” was so strong that Adam suggests that students from agricultural families and those from trading families were taught different kinds of accounts. He lists, and Dharampal tabulates, the number of schools in different districts that taught agricultural accounts, commercial accounts, or both.
What impressed these observers was that with its single-minded insistence on practicality, the system was able to achieve the task of imparting what we today call “foundational” literacy and numeracy with remarkable efficiency and economy. On this, almost every observer quoted in The Beautiful Tree comments effusively.
The Collector of Bellary in the Madras Presidency describes in great detail the pedagogy adopted in the schools in his district, at the end of which he comments:9
The economy with which children are taught to write in the native schools, and the system by which the more advanced scholars are caused to teach the less advanced, and at the same time to confirm their own knowledge is certainly admirable, and well deserved the imitation it has received in England.
We have quoted Prendergast from Bombay earlier in this note on his observations on the extent of education. In the same context, he goes on to describe the efficiency with which the children learn to keep their accounts: 10
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.”
It is difficult to find an appropriate quote from Leitner in this context because he seems to be describing a society where literacy is universal and all institutions—the schools, the temples, the gurdwaras, the mosques, and the families—take it to be their primary task to impart learning. He seems to suggest that everyone in the then recently annexed society of Punjab was literate and numerate, which seems to have been the only purpose of elementary education in the indigenous system of schooling.
Is that purpose enough?
C. N. Krishnan, in his note published in this issue, has listed two purposes of education:11
i. Inculcate values and practices in the young to become good citizens of the country and the world.
ii. Impart the knowledge and skills needed to make them useful and productive members of the society and the economy.
The purpose of pre-British indigenous education as described by the observers of that time aligns with the second of these two. They find nothing corresponding to the first purpose, that of inculcating values and practices, etc., and this disturbs many of them. They use this supposed lack in indigenous education to dismiss it as severely deficient. It will be tedious to quote these observers. The essence of their critique is that it lacked the teaching of “morality” and of “Euclid”. The former in their minds meant Christianity and the latter Western sciences.
The Austrian missionary, Fra Paolino Da Bartolomeo, quoted in The Beautiful Tree, seems to have some answer to this criticism of the British and Scottish observers. He suggests that morality was not taught as a separate subject but naturally flowed from the texts that were used to teach language, grammar, or even arithmetic. The verses in the texts of grammar, for example, he says, “serve not only as examples of the manner in which the words must be combined with each other, but contain, at the same time, most excellent moral maxims, which are thus imprinted in the minds of the young people as if in play; so that, while learning the language, they are taught rules proper for forming their character, and directing their future conduct in life.” 12
We need not take this explanation of the absence of the teaching of morality and Euclid in the indigenous school system seriously. What we should discuss is whether we really need to begin teaching what the foreign observers call “morals and Euclid” at the elementary school level. The primary purpose of the indigenous school was to impart literacy and numeracy, which it did efficiently and economically. All available data indicates that in our modern schooling we fail to do even this for a majority of the students passing out from the middle school.
From the current data about modern school education and the older descriptions of indigenous schools, it seems that if we could simply lower our ambitions and begin imparting foundational literacy and numeracy in the first four or five years of schooling, to the exclusion of everything else, Dharampal’s explorations into the pre-British systems would have helped in resolving a major bottleneck that we have created for ourselves.
The new National Educational Policy (NEP) takes note of the fact that our schooling fails to impart foundational literacy and numeracy; the data is so patent that it could not have not noticed it. But, in its policy prescriptions, it completely ignores that fact. Instead of devising a system that would concentrate on foundational literacy and numeracy, as the indigenous schools did so emphatically, it recommends bringing children as young as 3 years of age to a formal school, and putting all kinds of demands on them, including making them learn more than one language from that tender age onwards. The aim of the new policy is not to make the students effectively engage in the actual business of native society, but to make them global citizens. That, perhaps, has been the objective of the entire system of education that we have put in place after Independence. The earlier policies did not spell it out quite so openly. The new policy makes it the epitome of its vision statement to remake an Indian citizen into a truly global citizen.
Some of our colleagues, including Prof. C. N. Krishnan of MIT, Chennai, are initiating an effort to make at least the state-level engineering colleges turn their attention to the industry and crafts around them, within their state and their immediate vicinity rather than focussing on the globe. This is welcome and has the potential to do much in remedying the extraordinary emphasis of the NEP on globalisation of education.
We must, however, urgently address our failure to efficiently perform the primary task of schooling—that of imparting foundational literacy and numeracy—for the vast majority of our students. This is a task that our indigenous systems accomplished effortlessly, efficiently, and at almost no cost. Dharampal’s laborious and meticulous effort to collect the data from the British surveys on Indian education and making the information widely available would have served a great national purpose, if we learn to follow our earlier systems at least in this respect.
Dr. Jatinder Kumar Bajaj (b. 1952), founding Director of the Centre for Policy Studies and former Chairman of the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR), is a theoretical physicist and a social scientist engaged in the study of scientific and technological traditions of India; Indian society, economy and polity; Indian ideas and institutions; religious demography of India; and of the natural resources, geography and history of various micro-regions of India. He had the opportunity to learn from and work with Dharampal for many years. He was awarded Padma Shree in 2022. He was a founding member of the PPST Group from early 1980s. Bajaj can be reached at jatinderkbajaj@gmail.com
1The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century, Biblia Impex, New Delhi, 1983. Also published in the Dharampal Classics Series (eds. J. K. Bajaj and M. D. Srinivas), Vol. 4, Centre for Policy Studies and Rashtrotthana Parishad, Bengaluru, 2021. This article is based almost entirely on that book. Page references in the text are to the 2021 edition.
2 W. Adam, Reports on the State of Education in Bengal (1835 & 1838) by William Adam, edited by Ananthnath Basu, Calcutta, 1941.
3 G. W. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab Since the Annexation and in 1882, Calcutta 1882.
4 The Beautiful Tree, ibid, p.245.
5 The Beautiful Tree, ibid, pp.267-268.
6 Ibid. pp.369-370
7 Ibid., p. 61
8 The Beautiful Tree, ibid, p.279, emphasis added.
9 Ibid. pp.181-185
10 The Beautiful Tree, ibid., p. 61
12 The Beautiful Tree, ibid., p. 253
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