The Beautiful Tree #3 - Indian Education in the 18th Century
What was it like in Madras and Bengal?
We’re reading Dharampal’s The Beautiful Tree - Indian Indigenous Education In The 18th Century. The past two weeks, we’ve covered a lot of context about education in England and India, as well as the motivations behind Britishers documenting India. This week, we’ll paint a vivid picture on what education in India was like in the 18th century.
Part 1 is here, where we covered how the Protestant Reformation affected education in Britain negatively as lower classes were disallowed from learning to read the Bible for fear of another religious revolt.
In Part 2, we explored how the takeover of Scotland by the British, followed by their insidious dismantling of the Highland clans through the Clearances, led to the Scottish Enlightenment. Dispossessed Scots emigrated, joined the British armed forces, flooded the cities, and took advantage of the superior Scottish education system to better their lives. This led to an era of great Scottish thinkers, writers, and explorers. These Scotsmen, when they came to India as missionaries and administrators, painfully aware of how British rule decimated their own traditions and knowledge systems, decided they needed to document everything in India before British rule similarly ruined India. Of course, they were motivated more by the goals of spreading Christianity and being able to pick and choose Indian cultural traditions to elevate to make it easy for them to push British laws onto India.
In this section, we’ll go into the data collected by British administrators on education in India in the 18th century.
Why document the Indian education system?
The data we’re looking are from two massive surveys conducted in the 1820s in Madras and the 1930s in Bengal.
The Madras survey was commissioned by Sir Thomas Munro, the Governor of Madras Presidency. Thomas Munro is known as the “father of the ryotwari system”. I haven’t gone deep into this, but the Ryotwari system meant the government collected land taxes directly from the peasants. I think this is better than the Zamindari system where the government appointed a landlord (Zamindar) to pay taxes, and the Zamindar enacted atrocities on his tenants and workers to extract taxes. But, make no mistake, all of this was to extract as much from Indians as possible so England could be made wealthier.
There is an interesting anecdote about Sir Thomas Munro here:
The village of Mantralayam in Andhra Pradesh is where the tomb of the famous Dvaita saint Raghavendra Swami is located. An anecdote of Sir Thomas Munro is told about this place. When Sir Thomas Munro was the Collector of Bellary in 1800, the Madras Government ordered him to procure the annual tax from the Math and Manthralaya village. When the Revenue officials were unable to comply with this order, Sir Thomas Munro visited the Math for investigation. He removed his hat and shoes and entered the sacred precincts where the original tomb is located. Sri Raghavendra Swamy emerged from the tomb and conversed with him for some time, about the resumption of endowment. The Saint was visible and audible only to Munro, who received Mantraskata (God's blessing). The Collector went back and wrote an order in favour of the Math and the village. This notification was published in the Madras Government Gazette in Chapter XI, page 213, with the caption "Manchali Adoni Taluka". This order is still preserved in Fort St. George and Mantralayam.
The Bengal one was led by William Adam, a Scotsman who came to India as a missionary but then lost interest after debates about Christianity with Raja Rammohan Roy. He founded the Unitarian Society of Calcutta, but that ended in an interesting way when the members decided they preferred the Brahmo Samaj. So that gives him some interesting motivations. He also later went on to be a professor of linguistics at Harvard. Interesting dude.
There was also another survey in Punjab in 1882 comparing the situation then with the situation before 1850 by Dr. GW Leitner, once the Principal of Government College, Lahore, and an acting Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab.
But why were these large scale surveys even commissioned?
Turns out, in 1813, there was a debate in the British House Of Commons, regarding the “promotion of religious and moral improvement” in India. Before they could make any policy towards this, they needed to document the contemporary situation. So it was broadly agreed that data needed to be collected in the Presidencies.
I suppose this is part of the East India Company Act of 1813. From Wikipedia:
The Act expressly asserted the Crown's sovereignty over British India, allotted 100,000 rupees annually for the improvement of literary and scientific knowledge, and permitted Christian missionaries to propagate English and preach their religion in Company's territories. The power of the provincial governments and courts in India over European British subjects was also strengthened by the Act, and financial provision was also made to encourage a revival in Indian literature and for the promotion of science.
Prior to the 1813 legislation, the British Parliament and the East India Company had refused to countenance missionary activity in India, and proscribed the Bible and forbade religious education, in support of a policy of religious neutrality and on the basis that, if exposed to Christianity, Indians may have felt threatened and thus would have posed a threat to British commercial ventures.
Okay.
1,00,000 schools
So these surveys were commissioned. In Madras, what Munro did was to ask the Collectors of each district to find the number of schools and colleges in their district, and the number of students in them. And then he wanted to know the genders and caste/religion breakup of each school. The breakup was like Brahmin, Vysee, Soodra, ‘other castes’, and Musalmans. This data heavily depended on the mettle of the Collectors. There is data from 20 districts - Ganjam, Vizagapattnam, Rajahmundry, Masulipatnam, Guntoor, Nellore, Cuddapah, Bellary, Seringapatnam, Malabar, North Arcot, South Arcot, Chingleput, Tanjore, Trichinopoly, Madura, Tinnevelly, Coimbatore, Salem, Madras.
(Side note: I find these spellings hilarious because they approximate the way the British say these names, but are totally not how these places are pronounced by the people who live there. I find Chingleput particularly funny, and Trichinopoly so weird.)
In Bengal, Adam collected similar data over multiple reports. The first was he did a literature survey of official records, and estimated that there was a school in every village, and it was likely that in Bengal and Bihar, there would be 1,00,000 villages that have a school each. Subsequently he did a pilot survey of Nattore in the district of Rajshahy. And then he surveyed five districts of Murshidabad, Beerbhoom, Burdwan in Bengal and South Behar and Tirhoot in Bihar.
Munro basically said “every village had a school”. Similarly, an official of the Bombay Presidency said “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”.
The folks conducting these surveys, we should remember, likely were in school in the late 1700s in Britain, when education was not a priority for anyone and there were active efforts to prevent everyone from learning to read the Bible. So, they were quite impressed by the ubiquity of schools in India.
However, later administrators, like those in the late 1800s and those in the 20th century, considered these documents fantastical and couldn’t imagine how these figures were true. They had grown up in a wealthier Britain, with a greater focus on education, and they were working in an India where institutions had decayed greatly and schools reduced greatly in number.
People reading these surveys got hooked on to the 1,00,000 schools number and didn’t pay attention to the other details. This caused great controversy in the era.
Dharampal’s summary of the data and its perception
Here’s the conclusions Dharampal draws from this data:
The material studied in Indian schools was not dissimilar to the contents of schools in Britain at the same time.
Indian students spent more time in school, both over the course of a day, as well as the number of years they spent at school, when compared to British students.
School attendance, even in the decayed state of the 1820s, was much higher than the numbers in all varieties of schools in England in 1800.
Indian schools had better conditions in comparison, and were much less dingy and more airy and bright.
The teachers in Indian schools were “generally more dedicated and sober” than those in England.
The methods of teaching included the ‘monitor method’ where quicker students were assigned to help their classmates. This was adopted in Britain, which allowed them to scale their education over the 19th century.
Fewer girls were in Indian schools when compared to England, but girls seem to have been educated privately at home in India.
But most importantly:
In contrast to popular perception in much of the 20th century, education in India was not restricted to the “twice-born” among the Hindus and the ruling elite among the Muslims. Instead, in most schools in India, the students were overwhelmingly from the “Soodra” castes or “Other castes” which Dharampal, with his research, concludes mapped roughly to SC/ST groups today.
This has already gotten quite long, and we will go into detail over the data next week. But before we end, let’s take a look at what the average day was like for students
Life of an 18th century Indian schoolboy
The lucky day for starting school was considered ‘the fifth day of the fifth month of the fifth year of the boy’s age”. I’m surprised this is so standard all over. Students stayed in school until about age 15, though this varies by district and collector. The collector of Rajahmundry for instance says students stayed in school for 7 to 12 years, which would make the oldest student about 17.
The collector of Madras (then an underdeveloped swamp) noted that “it is generally admitted that before they (1.e. the students) attain their 13th year of age, their acquirements in the various branches of learning are uncommonly great.”
School days started at 6 am in all surveyed districts, and while they had breaks for meals, they went on till 6-7 pm. That is a long, immersive schoolday!
In Bengal, William Adam divided the period spent in elementary schools into four stages.
First, for a period of usually 10 days, the young scholar was taught “to form the letters of the alphabet on the ground with a small stick or slip of bamboo” or on a sandboard.
The second stage, extending from two and a half to four years, was “distinguished by the use of the palm leaf as the material on which writing is performed,” and the scholar was “taught to write and read’, and commit “to memory the Cowrie Table, the Numeration Table as far as 100, the Katha Table (a land measure Table), and the Ser Table,” etc.
The third stage extended “from two to three years which are employed in writing on the plantain-leaf.” Addition, subtraction, and other arithmetical rules were additionally taught during this period.
In the fourth and last stage of up to two years, writing was done on paper, and the scholar was expected to be able to read the Ramayana, Mansa Mangal, etc., at home, as well as be qualified in accounts, and the writing of letters, petitions, etc.
So… they learn the alphabet at age 5 on sand. This is quite effective, I can say, in teaching kids to write. From 5 to 7-10, they were writing and reading basics, memorizing currency, knowing numbers 1-100, had memorized land measures and conversions. From 7-13, they were learning basic maths, and then they were learning accounts, to write formal communications and reading deeper texts.
18th Century Textbooks
Two districts - Bellary and Rajahmundry - sent over details of textbooks used in schools.
Everyone seemed to read the Ramayana and Mahabharata in schools, as well as the Bhagavatam in Madras Presidency. When you think about it, a lot of how the Ramayana and Mahabharata are structured are tailored towards teaching children things like geography or herbs, so of course it’s taught in schools.
“Children from the manufacturing classes” in Bellary were taught the Vishwakarma Purana among other works. Lingayat children were taught the Chennabasava Purana and Girija Kalyana (a work by the 12th-century poet Harihara about the wedding of Shiva and Parvati). There seems to be a similar work in Rajahmundry called Rukmini Kalyanam.
Fun reads included the Panchatantra and Mahatarangini (which I looked up, and it seems to be a collection of moral stories).
And they seem to have taken grammar and vocabulary quite seriously. They used the Andhra-deepika which is a book about Telugu grammar, and the Andhra-maha-sangraham which is a book containing words in the Telugu lexicon students were supposed to learn by rote. Another text seems to be called “Shabdambari” which sounds like a Kannada dictionary. There’s another called ‘Vyakarna’ which would probably be a Kannada grammar book.
They also used the Pavuluri Ganitam, which is a 9th-century Sanskrit treatise on mathematics translated into Telugu by the 12th-century mathematician Pavuluri Mallana. This book seems to cover arithmetic, fractions, calculating areas, and calculations involving shadows among other things, so it probably covers all the stuff you learn from age 10 to 13.
There are many more books mentioned that I haven’t been able to figure out what they are about (e.g. Punklee-soopooktahuller, what could that be?), but it strikes me that education was taken quite seriously, and things taught seem to roughly correspond to what is taught these days in a standard school syllabus.
Next week
We’ll go over this data in more detail next week, and we’ll also go over what higher education was like. Students specialized in the Vedas, law, medicine, astronomy, ethics, metaphysics, and high poetry among other subjects, and how higher ed worked is quite interesting. We’ll touch on private education and women’s education (which this book is kinda sparse on tbh).
We’ll also go into more detail on the data from Bengal and observations from Punjab.
And we might even have some time to go over why all of this declined over the next 50 years.
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