The Beautiful Tree #1 - What was British Education Like?

Context for the analysis of British sources on Indian education

Happy New Year!

I am thrilled to begin 2025 with this post, which goes through Dharampal’s The Beautiful Tree - Indigenous Indian Education In The 18th Century. I asked on Twitter and the Substack chat which book I ought to post about next, and two-thirds of respondents all agreed on this seminal work over Khushwant Singh’s and Tavleen Singh’s books on 20th-century politics. Understandably so - this book is considered the quintessential source in debunking the notion that the British brought public education to India.

I’m posting this under what I call an “invisible paywall”. Deep diving into books takes me time and effort, and getting paid for it would help me make more time for this. However, this book is already not read enough, so I want to keep it free to read for now. A paid subscription would help me with this quite immensely.

Who is Dharampal?

Mononyms usually indicate social reformers of some sort, who don’t want their last names and other indicators of their origin to make a difference in how the world treats them. Dharampal fits the mold. He was deeply influenced by Gandhian ideals as a young man, dropped out of college and joined the freedom struggle. He took part in the Quit India movement, and eventually decided to research and write about people and society as part of his commitment to Gandhian thought. He seems to have spent some time researching Kibbutzim in Israel, and that lines up quite well with Gandhian thoughts of self-sufficient villages and dignity of labor. This book is also inspired by Gandhi, as we will see momentarily.

He spent his time researching and writing several books, one of which is Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century which feels spiritually similar to this one. His other works involve a research of civil disobedience, Panchayati Raj (village self-governance), understanding Gandhi, and cow slaughter.

I found a 2001 article where he was appointed a Minister of State and head of the National Commission on Cattle, so he was definitely taken quite seriously by the BJP government then. More interestingly, in 1962, he protested against the Nehru government’s handling of the China war and ended up in prison for two months. I haven’t yet found his opinion on what Nehru ought to have done differently, but general opinion is that he didn’t listen to the army enough. What would a Gandhian feel about war, I wonder.

Gandhi and Education

The book is dedicated to Jayaprakash Narayan, a name I have only heard in recent times as having been called a CIA agent during the Emergency. That is a post for another day.

But the inspiration for The Beautiful Tree is all Gandhi.

The book starts with a quote by Gandhi:

I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully, that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, 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. The village schools were not good enough for the British administrator, so he came out with his programme. Every school must have so much paraphernalia, building, and so forth. Well, there were no such schools at all. There are statistics left by a British administrator which show that, in places where they have carried out a survey, ancient schools have gone by the board, because there was no recognition for these schools, and the schools established after the European pattern were too expensive for the people, and therefore they could not possibly overtake the thing. I defy anybody to fulfill a programme of compulsory primary education of these masses inside of a century. This very poor country of mine is ill able to sustain such an expensive method of education. Our state would revive the old village schoolmaster and dot every village with a school both for boys and girls.

See where the title comes from? This quote was by him at Chatham House in October 1931. Chatham House is a British think-tank based in London and is the venue for many talks and debates on international affairs. Makes sense that Gandhi would speak there.

But this pissed off British educationalist Sir Philip Hartog. He had been the vice-chancellor of the University of Dacca at one point and headed some committees on education in India. This man was convinced of the superiority of British education, and he was obsessed with exams enough to write a treatise titled An Examination Of Examinations, so maybe we should be mad at him for being subject to constant exams.

Sir Philip was mad enough to respond to Gandhi with what is essentially “SOURCE?!!!”

Gandhi had none then, mostly because he was in and out of prison. Decidedly luxurious prisons, but had a lot more on his mind than to respond to some inconsequential argument.

Then Sir Philip proceeded to DESTROY Gandhi with FACTS and LOGIC. He dug deep into sources, gave three lectures on the topic at the University Of London Institute of Education, and then published a book with the very British understated title of Some Aspects of Indian Education Past and Present in 1939.

This was in line with the attitude of the British to criticism at that point, and I don’t blame them; that’s what you do when you’re convinced of things. For instance, this revenue official named William Harrison Moreland had retired from the British Raj due to hearing loss and was leading a fine life in England. But Irish Indologist Vincent Smith said something like

‘the hired labourer in the time of Akbar and Jahangir probably had more to eat in ordinary years than he has now.

Moreland flew into an inspired rage, came out of retirement, and went straight back to India to studying the economic history of India through Mughal sources. Such is the power of spite.

Such spite is what motivates me as well, but not having access to arguing on Twitter, and possibly having grown children, Moreland was significantly more productive.

What Dharampal intends then is to analyze 18th century India himself to see if Gandhi was indeed right that literacy had fallen dramatically as the British ruled more and more areas of India.

British Education in the 17th and 18th century

Dharampal focuses heavily on British sources to understand the state of education, so he starts with understanding how the British perceived education in that period. It would do us good to understand this as well as it helps us see patterns we didn’t realize came from that era.

Prior to 1770, (by which time they had become actual rulers of large areas), the British, on whose writings and reports this book is primarily based, had rather a different set of interests. These interests, as in the subsequent period too, were largely mercantile, technological, or were concerned with comprehending, and evaluating Indian statecraft; and, thereby, extending their influence and dominion in India. Indian religions, philosophies, scholarship, and the extent of education {….}

Such a lack of interest was due partly to their different expectations from India. The main reason for this, however, lay in the fact that the British society of this period—from the mid-sixteenth to about the later part of the eighteenth century—had few such interests. In matters like religion, philosophy, learning and education, the British were introverted by nature. It is not that Britain had no tradition of education, or scholarship, or philosophy during the 16th, 17th, or early 18th centuries. This period produced figures like Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Milton, Newton, etc. It had the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh which had their beginnings in the 13th and 14th centuries A.D. By the later part of the 18th century, Britain also had around 500 Grammar Schools. However, this considerable learning and scholarship were limited to a very select elite. This became especially marked after the mid-sixteenth century, when the Protestant revolution led to the closing of most of the monasteries; while the state sequestered their incomes and properties.

I realized here that we need to understand what this protestant revolution was and how it pertained to Britain.

Before the Protestant revolution, according to A.E. Dobbs, ‘the University of Oxford might be described as the “chief Charity School of the poor and the chief Grammar School in England, as well as the great place of education for students of theology, of law and medicine”’; and ‘where instruction was not gratuitous throughout the school, some arrangement was made, by means of a graduated scale of admission fees and quarterages and a system of maintenance to bring the benefits of the institution within the reach of the poorest.’ Further, while a very early statute of England specified: ‘No one shall put their child apprentice within any city or borough, unless they have land or rent of 20 shillings per annum: but they shall be put to such labour as their fathers or mothers use, or as their estates require;’ it nonetheless also stated that ‘any person may send their children to school to learn literature.’

So prior to this Protestant revolution, it seems like education was open to all citizens in Britain, though it was primarily an elite pursuit simply because of its limited utility. Oxford started off teaching Hebrew, Greek, Law, Medicine and Divinity, and these don’t quite have broad appeal. Anyone could become a lawyer, that wasn’t restricted. But let’s see what happened after this revolution:

From about the mid-16th century, however, a contrary trend set in. It even led to the enactment of a law ‘that the English Bible should not be read in churches. The right of private reading was granted to nobles, gentry and merchants that were householders. It was expressly denied to artificers’ prentices, to journeymen and serving men “of the degree of yeomen or under”, to husbandmen and labourers’ so as ‘to allay certain symptoms of disorder occasioned by a free use of the Scriptures.’ According to this new trend, it was ‘meet for the ploughman’s son to go to the plough, and the artificer’s son to apply the trade of his parent’s vocation: and the gentlemen’s children are meet to have the knowledge of Government and rule in the commonwealth. For we have as much need of ploughmen as any other State: and all sorts of men may not go to school.’

So they didn’t want lay people to read the Bible. I wonder if this was because people were taking the Bible too literally - I’ve come across the idea that the Bible contained parables and other such abstract ways of communicating ideas and they needed to be explained to people by a smarter person instead of being taken literally…. but them getting to read it themselves meant they took it literally and this broke society.

Protestant Reformation

Dharampal seems to be talking about the Protestant Reformation, where folks like Martin Luther challenged the authority of the Catholic Church, and questioned practices such as indulgences (which to me seems like prayaschitta or parihara, except they seemed very very financially oriented, like if you donated to the building of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, you were automatically absolved of your sins, and I guess people took the word of the clergy very seriously so this is a huge problem). The Reformation focused on faith over doctrine and rituals and people having a direct relationship with God instead of the Catholic church playing the middleman. They also pushed back against worshipping saints and going on pilgrimages.

Right here, we can see how these ideas influence how we perceive religion in India. This is because these were core to how the Church of England saw religion.

In short, Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife, but the Catholic church wouldn’t let him, so he took advantage of the Protestant Reformation sweeping through Europe and broke off to create his own Church of England in 1534. He seized the land and wealth of Catholic churches in Britain. His successor did the same. The subsequent ruler, Queen Mary aka Bloody Mary, wanted to bring back Catholicism and did so by persecuting Protestants. After she died issueless of natural causes, Elizabeth came to the throne and established the Elizabethan Religious Settlement in 1558, which came to a compromise where the Church of England would be Protestant in outlook but incorporate several traditions of Catholicism.

So I assume many in the Church of England disliked those aspects of Catholicism that were retained. When these missionaries came to India, they probably projected this disdain on Indian practices, and even if people didn’t convert to Christianity, these ideas were in the ether, influencing people, coming out in the form of dialogues in movies where the protagonist calls the murti in a temple “lifeless stone”. Of course, these were given a boost by contemporary missionaries, as well as those who disdained Hinduism for their own reasons, including Communists and others. But these ideas originated in the Protestant reformation and came to India via the British.

Change in Education Due To The Reformation

Let’s read that again:

From about the mid-16th century, however, a contrary trend set in. It even led to the enactment of a law ‘that the English Bible should not be read in churches. The right of private reading was granted to nobles, gentry and merchants that were householders. It was expressly denied to artificers’ prentices, to journeymen and serving men “of the degree of yeomen or under”, to husbandmen and labourers’ so as ‘to allay certain symptoms of disorder occasioned by a free use of the Scriptures.’ According to this new trend, it was ‘meet for the ploughman’s son to go to the plough, and the artificer’s son to apply the trade of his parent’s vocation: and the gentlemen’s children are meet to have the knowledge of Government and rule in the commonwealth. For we have as much need of ploughmen as any other State: and all sorts of men may not go to school.’

So they didn’t want the Bible to be read for fear of even more reformation, possibly. And they seem to have decided that free public education was the problem, and decided that people needed to just follow their parents’ profession.

A century and a half later (that is, from about the end of the 17th century), there is a slow reversal of the above trend, leading to the setting up of some Charity Schools for the common people. These schools are mainly conceived to provide ‘some leverage in the way of general education to raise the labouring class to the level of religious instruction’; and, more so in Wales, ‘with the object of preparing the poor by reading and Bible study for the Sunday worship and catechetical instruction.’ After a short start, however, the Charity School movement became rather dormant. Around 1780, it was succeeded by the Sunday school movement. ‘Popular education’, even at this period, ‘was still approached as a missionary enterprise.’ The maxim was ‘that every child should learn to read the Bible.’ ‘The hope of securing a decent observance of Sunday’ led to a concentrated effort on the promotion of Sunday schools

By this time, they had gotten over the fears of the common man reading the Bible, and I assume the Industrial Revolution was well underway, so they wanted people to be able to read and write. I wonder if the rubric was to just be able to write your name, but since it was missionaries doing it as charity, it had this whole “reading the Bible” aspect to it.

as late as 1834, ‘the curriculum in the better class of national schools was limited in the main to religious instruction, reading, writing, and arithmetic: in some country schools writing was excluded for fear of evil consequences.’

I am not able to get over what this whole thing means combined with the previous two excerpts. These seem to be the origin of the ideas that say that people were not allowed to pursue education based on their caste, or weren’t allowed to read the Vedas. It’s quite possible that those ideas that were used to sow discord in India were not true, but were just projections of how the British saw their own history.

How well did British schools educate children?

At about the same time, however {1802}, the monitorial method of teaching used by Joseph Lancaster (and also by Andrew Bell, supposedly borrowed from India) came into practice and greatly helped advance the cause of popular education.

What is this Monitorial method? I looked it up on Wikipedia and it is apparently also called the Madras System.

It’s a method where students who learned faster were supposed be helpers who taught other students what they had learned. I suppose that’s where the whole Class Monitor thing comes from. Wikipedia says:

"After observing children in a native school, seated on the ground, and writing in the sand, he set a boy, John Frisken, to teach the alphabet on the same principle... Bell was consequently led to extend and elaborate the system."

Interesting.

In public schools like Eton, teaching consisted of writing and arithmetic (a number of English and Latin books were studied); while those in the fifth form also learnt ancient Geography, or Algebra. ‘Those who stayed at Eton long enough’ also ‘went through part of Euclid.’ However it was ‘not till 1851 that Mathematics became a part of the regular school work and even at that date those who taught the subject were not regarded as persons of full standing on the staff of masters.’ School education, especially elementary education at the people’s level, remained an uncommon commodity till around 1800.

So school education in England didn’t teach more than the very very basics. The teachers weren’t always competent, and they tried to scale by appointing students to teach other students and using incentives to get more students to step up.

Based on attachment theory, it seems like this would make sense if children were primarily in a home with parents, siblings and other relatives where they’d have enough oversight to be kinder to those less able than them. But the big public schools in Britain, like Eton, Harrow, Sherbourne, and Radley were boarding schools, and this was just giving children power over other children without much oversight on methods they used, or modeling good leadership behavior. There’s a whole body of literature on “Boarding School Syndrome”, which includes hidden trauma, a feeling of bereavement, emotional numbness, and scaling these schools by the monitor system probably was a big factor in how merciless colonial administrators were.

Though, college education ought to pertain to the best of the best, so Dharampal talks about Oxford University:

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were nineteen colleges and five halls in Oxford. There were about 500 fellows in the colleges, a few of whom were engaged in teaching in each college. In addition, there were nineteen professors in 1800. This total had increased to 25 by 1854.

Theology and classics were the main subjects which were studied at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Examinations were set in classics known as Literae Humaniores. These included Greek and Latin language and literature, moral philosophy, rhetoric and logic, and the elements of the mathematical sciences and physics. Lectures were also available on other topics, e.g. law, medicine and geology.

After 1805, there was an increase in the number of students entering the University. The number of students on the rolls rose from about 760 in the early nineteenth century to about 1300 in 1820-24.

The main sources of financial support of the colleges in Oxford were their endowments, mainly in land, and income from students. The proportion of income from each source varied from college to college. Taking a wider view of all the expenses of a university course (including clothing and travelling), a parent who clothed his son and supported him at university as well as during the vacation could expect to pay from £600-800 for his four year course around 1850.

So in about 1857, college education in Britain was a very elite prospect. The top numbers I see here are 1300 students, 500 fellows (I wonder if they were a subset of the 1300 students), and 25 professors. Even if you triple this for Cambridge and Edinburgh, it’s 6000 people involved in higher education at any point in time in all disciplines, in a population of 27.4 million. And it cost £600-800 pounds to be a college graduate. It sounds expensive and exclusive, something that would be restricted to the wealthy or the highly religious or the extremely brilliant.

We can safely assume then that “Britain wasn’t sending their best” when it came to British officials in India. It is no surprise that the average official was driven by brute force and easily convinced to hate people in the colonies. Many important artifacts were looted and destroyed with no understanding of their value, as asserted by a biography I’d read of Madame Koo, a former first lady of China. It makes sense that with a combination of ignorance and purposeful destruction, existing institutions were destroyed in British India.

But, it was still an era where you didn’t need an education to do most things. What was the situation like in India then?

We’ll see about that next week.