Education, some Indian politicians affirm, should be driven into the Indian masses by compulsory measures. "England," they say, "introduced compulsory education at home long ago. Why does she not do so here? Because, clearly, it suits her purpose to leave the people ignorant."
To this I took down a hot reply from the lips of the Raja of Panagal, then anti-Brahman leader of Madras Presidency.
"Rubbish!" he exclaimed. "What did the Brahmans do for our education in the five thousand years before Britain came? I remind you: They asserted their right to pour hot lead into the ears of the low-caste man who should dare to study books. All learning belonged to them, they said. When the Muhammadans swarmed in and took us, even that was an improvement on the old Hindu régime. But only in Britain's day did education become the right of all, with state schools, colleges, and universities accessible îo all castes, communities, and peoples."
"[The Brahmans] saw well enough," says Dubois,[1] what a moral ascendancy knowledge would give them over the other castes, and they therefore made a mystery of it by taking all possible precautions to prevent other classes from obtaining access to it."
[1. Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, p. 376.]
But the Brahmans, whatever their intellectual achievement in earliest times, rested quiescent upon these laurels through the succeeding centuries. They were content, while denying light to the remainder of their world, to abide, themselves, in the ever-fading wisdom of the ever-dimmer past. Says the Abbé Du-bois again, writing in the beginning of the nineteenth century:[2]
[2. Ibid., pp. 376-7.]
I do not believe that the Brahmins of modern times are, in any degree, more learned than their ancestors of the time of Lycurgus and Pythagoras. During this long space of time many barbarous races have emerged from the darkness of ignorance, have attained the summit of civilization, and have extended their intellectual researches...yet all this time the Hindus have been perfectly stationary. We do not find amongst them any trace of mental or moral improvement, any sign of advance in the arts and sciences. Every impartial observer must, indeed, admit that they are now very far behind the peoples who inscribed their names long after them on the roll of civilized nations.
This was written some half-century before the British Crown assumed the government of India.
During that fifty years a new educational movement sprang up in the land. The design of Warren Hastings and later of the East India Company, impelled by the British Parliament, had been to advance Indian culture, as such, toward a native fruition. It remained for a private citizen, one David Hare, an English merchant domiciled in India, to start the wheels turning the opposite way.
David Hare, no missionary, but an agnostic, was a man with a conviction. Under its impulse he gave himself and his all to "the education and moral improvement of the natives of Bengal." Parallel to him worked the famous Hindu, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a solitary soul fired to action by the status of his own people in the intellectual and social-ethical world. And these two, one in purpose, at length joined to create a secular Hindu College, whose object they announced as "the tuition of the sons of respectable Hindoos in the English and Indian language and in the literature and science of Europe and Asia."
The project, however, only roused the wrath and distrust of the orthodox Hindu. This was in 1817.
A year later three Baptist missionaries, Carey, Marshman and Ward, founded a still-extant school near Calcutta. In 1820 the Anglican Church opened a college. In 1830 Alexander Duff, again with the help of Ram Mohan Roy, instituted a fourth college for the giving of western science to India. A network of primitive vernacular schools at that time existed throughout Bengal, but it was Raja Ram Mohan Roy himself who continuously urged upon the British authorities the necessity, if "the improvement of the native population" were contemplated, of doing away with the old code and system, of teaching western sciences, and of conducting such teachings in the English language.[3] While these influences were still combating the earlier attitude of the British with its basic tenet that Indian education should run along Indian lines, came a new force into the field--one Thomas Babington Macaulay, to be Chairman of a Committee of Public Instruction. Lord Macaulay declared, and with tremendous vigor, on the side of the western school. In the name of honor and of humanity the full light of western science must, he felt, be given to the Indian world. And he demanded,[4] with fervor, to know by what right, when
[3. A Biographical Sketch of David Hare, Peary Chand Mittra, Cal-Mtta, 1877, Raja Ram Mohan Roy's Letter to Lord Amherst.]
[4. Minute on Education, T. B. Macaulay, Feb. 2, 1835.]
...we can patronise sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines, which would disgrace an English farrier,--astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school,--history, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long,--and geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter?...What we spend on the Arabic and Sanskrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth; it is bounty money paid to raise up champions of error.
This new advocate, welcomed with acclaim by a few modernist Hindus facing the condemnation of their community, finally cast the expenditures of public educational monies from oriental into western channels. Departments of Public Instruction were now set up in each province and practical steps taken to stimulate private effort in the establishment of schools and colleges.
All this was done with a definitely stated object--to give into the hands of the peoples the key to health and prosperity and social advance, and to rouse them to "the development of the vast resources of their country...and gradually, but certainly, confer upon them all the advantages which accompany the healthy increase of wealth and commerce."[5]
[5. Despatch of Sir Charles Wood, 1854.]
It should not, however, be understood either that Government now discouraged oriental learning as such or that it excluded the vernacular. On the contrary, it insisted on the proper teaching of the vernacular in all schools, looking forward to the day when that vehicle should achieve a development sufficient to convey the ideas of modern science.[6] Meantime, it chose to teach in English rather than in either of the two classic Indian languages, for the reasons that any one of the three would have to be learned as a new language by all save the most exceptional students, and that the necessary books did not exist in either eastern tongue.
[6. See Calcutta University Commission Report, Vol. I, Chapter III; and Vol. II, Chapter XVIII; also The Educational Despatch of 1854.]
Centers of teaching now gradually multiplied. In the thirty years following 1857, five universities were established--in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Lahore, and Allahabad. Aside from literacy courses, instruction in practical, non-literary branches was urged upon the attention of all minded to learn.
But the difficulty then as now was that commerce, scientific agriculture, forestry, engineering, teaching, none of these avenues for service smiled to Indian ambition. India as a national entity was ever an unknown concept to the Indian. And thought for the country at large holds little or no part in native ethical equipment
This last-named fact, damaging as it is from our viewpoint, should be thoughtfully taken as a fact and not as an accusation. It is the logical fruit of the honestly held doctrines of fate and transmigration and of the consequent egocentric attitude.
For present purposes, the history of modern India's educational progress may be passed over, to reach statistics of today.
In 1923-4 thirteen universities of British India put forth a total of 11,222 graduates. Of these, 7,822 took their degrees in arts and sciences, 2,046 in law, 446 in medicine, 140 in engineering, 546 in education, 136 in commerce, and 86 in agriculture. At the same time, the universities showed an enrollment of 68,530 undergraduates, not dissimilarly apportioned.[7] The high figures consistently stand opposite the arts and law courses, while such vital subjects as agriculture, hygiene and sanitation, surgery, obstetrics, veterinary science and commerce, under whatever aegis offered, still attract few disciples.
[7. Statistical Abstract for British India, 1914-15 to 1923-24, p. 279.]
For example, the agricultural school maintained by the American Presbyterian Mission near Allahabad, although equipped to receive two hundred scholars, had in 1926 only fifty men in residence.
"We don't care to be coolies," the majority say, turning away in disgust when they find that the study of agriculture demands familiarity with soil and crops.
"If," says the director, "we could guarantee our graduates a Government office, we should be crowded."
I heard of few technical schools, anywhere in India, that are pressed for room.
The representative Indian desires a university Arts degree, yet not for learning's sake, [8] but solely as a means to public office. To attain this vantage-ground he will grind cruelly hard, driven by the whip and spur of his own and his family's ambition, and will often finally wreck the poor little body that he and his forebears have already so mercilessly maltreated.
[8. Cf. Mr. Thyagarajaiyer (Indian), Census Superintendent of Mysore, Census of India, Vol. I, p. 182: "The pursuit of letters purely as a means for intellectual growth is mostly a figment of the theorists."]
Previous chapters have indicated the nature of this maltreatment. One of its consequences is to be seen in the sudden mental drooping and failure--the "fading," as it has come to be called, that so frequently develops in the brilliant Indian student shortly after his university years.
Meantime, if, when he stands panting and exhausted, degree in hand, his chosen reward is not forthcoming, the whole family's disappointment is bitter, their sense of injury and injustice great.
Then it is that the young man's poverty of alternatives stands most in his light and in that of Mother India. A land rich in opportunities for usefulness pleads for the service of his brain and his hands, but tradition and "pride" make him blind, deaf and callous to the call.
As Sir Gooroo Dass Banerjee mildly states it:[9]
[9. Calcutta University Commission Report, Vol. III, p. 161.]
The caste system . , . has created in the higher castes a prejudice against agricultural, technological, and even commercial pursuits.
The university graduate m these latter days may not be a high-caste man. But if he is not, all the more is he hungry to assume high-caste customs, since education's dearest prize is its promise of increased izzat--prestige. Whatever their birth, men disappointed of office are therefore apt flatly to refuse to turn their energies in other directions where their superior knowledge and training would make them infinitely useful to their less favored brothers. Rather than take employment which they consider below their newly acquired dignity, they will sponge forever, idle and unashamed, on the family to which they belong.
"I am a Bachelor of Arts," said a typical youth, simply; "I have not been able to secure a suitable post since my graduation two years ago, so my brother is supporting me. He, having no B.A., can afford to work for one-third the wages that my position compels me to expect."
Nor had the speaker the faintest suspicion that he might be presenting himself in an unflattering light. Even the attempt to capture a degree is held to confer distinction. A man may and does write after his name, "B.A. Plucked" or "B.A. Failed," without exciting the mirth of his public.[10]
[10. The terms are actually used in common parlance as if in themselves a title, like M.A. or Ph.D.--as: "The school...is now under an enthusiastic B.A. plucked teacher." Fifteenth Annual Report of the Society for the Improvement of the Backward Classes, Bengal & Assam, Calcutta, 1925, p. 12.]
A second case among those that came to my personal attention was that of a young university graduate, disappointed of Government employment, who petitioned an American business man for relief.
"Why do you fellows always persist in pushing in where you're not needed, and then being affronted and outraged because there's no room?" asked the American, with American bluntness. "How can you possibly all be Government clerks? Why on earth don't any of you ever go home to your villages, teach school, or farm, or do sanitation and give the poor old home town a lift, out of what you've got? Couldn't you make a living there all right, while you did a job of work?"
"Doubtless," replied the Indian, patiently. "But you forget. That is beneath my dignity now. I am a B.A. Therefore, if you will not help me, I shall commit suicide."
And he did.
Lord Macaulay, over ninety years ago, observed the same phenomenon in the attitude of the Indian educated at Government expense. Regarding a petition presented to his committee by a body of ex-students of the Sanskrit College, he says:[11]
[11. Minute on Education, Feb. 2, 1835.]
The petitioners stated that they had studied in the college ten or twelve years; that they had made themselves acquainted with Hindoo literature and science; that they had received certificates of proficiency; and what is the fruit of all this!..."We have but little prospect of bettering our condition...the indifference with which we are generally looked upon by our countrymen leaving no hope of encouragement and assistance from them." They therefore beg that they may be recommended...for places under the Government, not places of high dignity or emolument, but such as may just enable them to exist. "We want means," they say, "for a decent living, and for our progressive improvement, which, however, we cannot obtain without the assistance of Government, by whom we have been educated and maintained from childhood." They conclude by representing, very pathetically, that they are sure that it was never the intention of Government, after behaving so liberally to them during their education, to abandon them to destitution and neglect.
The petition amounts to a demand for redress brought against a Government that has inflicted upon them the injury of a liberal education. "And," comments Macaulay:
I doubt not that they are in the right...[for] surely we might, with advantage, have saved the cost of making these persons useless and miserable; surely, men may be brought up to be burdens to the public...at a somewhat smaller charge to the State.
Sanskrit scholars of a century ago or B.A.'s of today, whether plucked or feathered, the principle remains the same, though the spirit has mounted from mild complaint to bitterness.
All over India, among politicians and intelligentsia, Government is hotly assailed for its failure to provide offices for the yearly output of university graduates. With rancor and seeming conviction, Indian gentlemen of the highest political leadership hurl charges from this ground.
"Government," they repeat, "sustains the university. Government is responsible for its existence. What does it mean by accepting our fees for educating us and then not giving us the only thing we want education for? Cursed be the Government! Come, let us drive it out and make places for ourselves and our friends."
Nor is there anywhere that saving humor of public opinion whose Homeric laugh would greet the American lad, just out of Yale or Harvard or Leland Stanford, who should present his shining sheepskin as a draft on the Treasury Department, and who should tragically refuse any form of work save anti-government agitation if the draft were not promptly cashed.