The illiteracy of India is sometimes attributed to her poverty--a theory as elusive as the famous priority dispute between the hen and the egg. But Indian political critics are wont to charge the high illiteracy rate to the inefficiency, even to the deliberate purpose, of the sovereign power. Thus, Lala Lajpat Rai, the Swaraj political leader, refers to the Viceregal Government as having "so far refused even elementary instruction in the three R's to our masses."[1] And Mr. Mahomed Ali Jinnah [2] accusingly asks, "Why is light denied?"
[1. In 1923-24, India's total expenditure of public funds on education, including municipal, local, Provincial and Central Government contributions, reached 19.9 crores of rupees, or $66,333,300. This sum is much too small for the work to be done. Nevertheless, when taken in relation to the total revenue of British India it compares not unfavorably with the educational allotments of other countries. See India in 1924-25, P- 278; and Statistical Abstract for British India, p. 262.]
[2. Leader of the Nationalist party in the Legislature of 1925-26.]
But, before subscribing to the views of either of these legislative leaders, before accepting either India's poverty or Britain's greed as determining the people's darkness, it may be well to remember the two points recently examined, and to record a third.
First, of British India's population of two hundred and forty-seven million persons, about 50 per cent, are women. The people of India, as has been shown, have steadfastly opposed the education of women. And the combined efforts of the British Government, the few other-minded Indians, and the Christian missions, have thus far succeeded in conferring literacy upon less than 2 per cent, of the womankind. Performing the arithmetical calculation herein suggested, one arrives at an approximate figure of 121,000,000, representing British India's illiterate women.
Secondly, reckoned in with the population of British India [3] are sixty million human beings called "Untouchables." To the education of this element the great Hindu majority has ever been and still is strongly, actively and effectively opposed. Subtracting from the Untouchables' total their female half, as having already been dealt with in the comprehensive figure, and assuming, in the absence of authoritative figures, 5 per cent, of literacy among its males, we arrive at another 28,500,000, representing another lot of Indians con-demned to illiteracy by direct action of the majority will.
[3. Census of India iczi, Vol. I, Part I, p. 225.]
Now, neither with the inhibition of the women nor with the inhibition of the Untouchables has poverty anything whatever to do. As to the action of Government, it has displayed from the first, both as to women and as to outcastes, a steadfast effort in behalf of the inhibited against the dictum of their own people. Expressed in figures, the fact becomes clearer:
Illiterate female population of British India 121,000,000
Illiterate male Untouchables 28,500,000
149,500,000
Total population of British India 247,000,000
Percentage of the population of British India
kept illiterate by the deliberate will of the
orthodox Hindu 60.53%
Apart from these two factors appears, however, a third of significance as great, to appreciate whose weight one must keep in mind that the total population of British India is 90 per cent. rural--village folk.
As long, therefore, as the villages remain untaught, the all-India percentage of literacy, no matter what else happens, must continue practically where it is today--hugging the world's low-record line.
But to give primary education to one-eighth of the human race, scattered over an area of 1,094,300 square miles, in five hundred thousand little villages, obviously demands an army of teachers.
Now, consider the problem of recruiting that army when no native women are available for the job. For the village school ma'am, in the India of today, does not and cannot exist.
Consider the effect on our own task of educating the children of rural America, from Canada to the Gulf, from the Atlantic to California, if we were totally debarred from the aid of our legions of women and girls.
No occidental country has ever faced the attempt to educate its masses under this back-breaking condition. The richest nation in the world would stand aghast at the thought.
As for the reason why India's women cannot teach India's children, that may be re-stated in few words. Indian women of child-bearing age cannot safely venture, without special protection, within reach of Indian men.
It would thus appear clear that if Indian self-government were established tomorrow, and if wealth tomorrow rushed in, succeeding poverty in the land, India, unless she reversed her own views as to her "Untouchables" and as to her women, must still continue in the front line of the earth's illiterates.
As to the statement just made concerning women's unavailability as teachers in village schools, I have taken it down, just as it stands, in the United Provinces, over the Punjab, in Bengal and Bombay Presidencies, and across Madras, from the lips of Hindu and Muhammadan officials and educators, from Christian Indian educators and clergy, from American and other Mission heads, and from responsible British administrators, educational, medical, and police. So far as I know, it is nowhere on official record, nor has it been made the subject of important mention in the legislatures. It is one of those things that, to an Indian, is a natural matter of course. And the white man administering India has deliberately adopted the policy of keeping silence on such points--of avoiding surface irritations, while he delves at the roots of the job.
"I should not have thought of telling you about it," said an Indian gentleman of high position, a strong nationalist, a life-long social reformer. "It is so apparent to us that we give it no thought. Our attitude toward women does not permit a woman of character and of marriageable age to leave the protection of her family. Those who have ventured to go out to the villages to teach--and they are usually Christians--lead a hard life, until or unless they submit to the incessant importunities of their male superiors; and their whole career, success and comfort are determined by the manner in which they receive such importunities. The same would apply to women nurses. An appeal to departmental chiefs, since those also are now Indians, would, as a rule, merely transfer the seat of trouble. The fact is, we Indians do not credit the possibility of free and honest women. To us it is against nature. The two terms cancel each other."
The Calcutta University Commission, made up, as will be recalled, of British, Muhammadan, and Hindu professional men, the latter distinguished representatives of their respective communities, expressed the point as follows:[4]
[4. Report, Vol. II, Part I, p.9.]
The fact has to be faced that until Bengali men generally learn the rudiments of respect and chivalry toward women who are not living in zenanas, anything like a service of women teachers will be impossible.
If the localizing adjective "Bengali" were withdrawn, the Commission's statement would, it seems, as fairly apply to all India. Mason Olcott [5] is referring to the whole field when he says:
[5. Village Schools in India, p. 196.]
On account of social obstacles and dangers, it is practically impossible for women to teach in the villages, unless they are accompanied by their husbands.
Treating of the "almost desperate condition" of mass education in rural parts, for lack of women teachers, the late Director of Public Instruction of the Central Provinces says:[6]
[6. The Education of India, Arthur Mayhew, London, Faber and Gwyer, 1926, p. 268.]
The general conditions of mofussll [rural] life and the Indian attitude toward professional unmarried women are such that life for such as are available is usually intolerable,
"No Indian girl can go alone to teach in rural tricts. If she does, she is ruined," the head of a large American Mission college in northern India affirmed. The speaker was a widely experienced woman of the world, characterized by as matter-of-fact a freedom from ignorance as from prejudice. "It is disheartening to know," she went on, "that not one of the young women that you see running about this campus, between classroom and classroom, can be used on the great job of educating India. Not one will go out into the villages to answer the abysmal need of the country. Not one dare risk what awaits her there, for it is no risk, but a certainty. And yet these people cry out to be given self-government!"[7]
[7. Statement to the author, February, 1926.]
"Unless women teachers in the mofussil are provided with protected residences, and enabled to have elderly and near relatives living with them, it is more than useless, it is almost cruel, to encourage women tf become teachers," concludes the Calcutta University Commission after its prolonged survey.[8]
[8. Calcutta University Report, Vol. II, Part I, p. 9.]
And the authors of an inquiry covering British India, one of whom is the Indian head of the Y.M.C.A., Mr. Kanakarayan T. Paul, report:[9]
[9. Village Education in India, the Report of a Commission of inquiry, Oxford University Press, 1922, p. 98.]
The social difficulties which so militate against an adequate supply of women teachers are well known, and are immensely serious for the welfare of the country. All the primary school work in the villages is preeminently women's work, and yet the social conditions are such that no single woman can undertake it...The lack of women teachers seems to be all but insuperable, except as the result of a great social change.
That a social stigma should attach to the woman who, under such circumstances, chooses to become a. teacher, is perhaps inevitable. One long and closely familiar with Indian conditions writes:[10]
[10. Census of India, E. A. H. Blunt, C.I.E., O.B.E., I.C.S., 1911, Vol. XV, pp. 260-1.]
It is said that there is a feeling that the calling cannot he pursued by modest women. Prima facie, it is difficult to see how such a feeling could arise, but the Indian argument to support it would take, probably, some such form as this: "The life's object of woman is marriage; if she is married her household duties prevent her teaching. If she teaches, she can have no household duties or else she neglects them. If she has no household duties she must be unmarried, and the only unmarried women are no better than they should be. [11] If she neglects her household duties, she is...no better than she should be.
[11. Census of India, 1911, Vol. XV, p. 229. "It is safe to say that after the age of seventeen or eighteen no females are unmarried who are not prostitutes or persons suffering from some bodily affliction such as leprosy or blindness; the number of genuine spinsters over twenty is exceedingly small and an old maid is the rarest of phenomena." These age figures are set high in order to include the Mu-aammadan women and the small Christian and Brahmo Samaj element, all of whom marry later than the Hindu majority.]
This argument might seem to leave room for the deployment of a rescue contingent drafted from India's 26,800,000 widows, calling them out of their dismal cloister and into happy constructive work. The possibility of such a move is, indeed, discussed; some efforts are afoot in that direction, and a certain number of widows have been trained. Their usefulness, however, is almost prohibitively handicapped, in the great school-shy orthodox field, by the deep-seated religious conviction that bad luck and the evil eye are the widow's birthright. But, as writes an authority already quoted:[12]
[12. The Education of India, Arthur Mayhew, p. 268.]
A far more serious objection is the difficulty...to safeguard these ladies who take up work outside the family circle. Their employment without offense or lapse seems possible only in mission settlements and schools under close and careful supervision. In a general campaign [widows] can play only an insignificant part.
In other words, the young widow school-teacher would meet in the villages the same temptations from within, the same pressure, exaction of complaisance, and obloquy from without, that await the single girl.
Thus is reached the almost complete ban which today brands teaching as socially degrading, and which, as an Indian writer puts it, [13] "condemns women to be economically dependent upon men, and makes it impossible for them to engage in any profession other than that of a housewife."
[13. Reconstructing India, Sir M. Visvesvaraya, London, P. S. King and Sons, 1920, p. 243.]
The rule has, however, its exceptions. In the year 1922, out of British India's 123,500,000 women, 4,391 were studying in teachers' training schools. But of that 4,391, nearly half--2,050--came from the Indian Christian community, [14] although this body forms but 1.5 per cent, of the total population. And exceedingly few of the few who are trained serve their country's greatest need.
[14. Progress of Education in India, 1917-22, Vol. II, pp. 14-15.]
Says a professional educator:[15]
[15. Quinquennial Review of Education in Eastern Assam and Bengal.]
It is notoriously difficult to induce Indian women of goot. position, other than Christians and Brahmos, to undergo training for the teaching profession; and even of those who are trained...the majority refuse to go to places when they are wanted.
Now it chanced, in my own case, that I had seen a good deal of Indian village life before opportunity arose to visit the women's training schools. When that opportunity came, I met it, therefore, with rural conditions fresh in mind and with a strong sense of the overwhelming importance of rural needs in any scheme for serving the body politic.
"What are you training for?" I asked the students, "To be teachers," they generally replied. "Will you teach in the villages?" "Oh, no!" as though the question were curiously unintelligent.
"Then who is to teach the village children?" "Oh--Government must see to that." "And can Government teach without teachers?" "We cannot tell. Government should arrange." They apparently felt neither duty nor impulse urging them to go out among their people. Such sentiments, indeed, would have no history in their mental inheritance; whereas the human instinct of self-protection would subconsciously bar the notion of an independent life from crossing their field of thought.
It would seem, then, taking the several elements of the case into consideration, that utterances such as Mr. Jinnah's and Lala Lajpat Rai's[16] must be classified, at best, as relating to the twig-tips, rather than to the root and trunk, of their "deadly upas tree."
[16. See ante, p. 199.]
Coming now to the villager himself--the cultivator or the ryot, as he is called--one finds him in general but slightly concerned with the village school. Whenever his boy can be useful to him--to watch the cattle, to do odd jobs--he unhesitatingly pulls him out of class, whereby is produced a complete uncertainty in the matter of attendance. Often the ryot is too poor to keep his little family alive without the help of the children's labor and of such wages as they can earn. Sickness, too, plays a large part in keeping school-going down--hookworm, malaria, congenital weakness. Or, often, the village astrologer, always a final authority, discovers in the child's horoscope periods inauspicious for school-going. And in any case, the Indian farmer, like the typical farmer of all countries, is skeptically inclined toward innovations. His fathers knew nothing of letters. He knows nothing of letters himself. [17] Therefore who is to tell him that letters are good? Will letters make the boy a better bargainer? A better hand at the plow?
[17. Adult education, in connection with Government's rural cooperative credit movement, is now doing signal work among the peasant farmers of the Punjab.]
"The school curriculum is not sufficiently practical," say many of the British working to better it. "Show the ryot that his boy will be worth more on the land after a good schooling, and he will find means somehow to send the boy to school." And such a writer as the Hindu Sir M. Visvesvaraya does not hesitate to accuse Government of deliberately making economic education unattractive in order to keep India dependent. [18] The report of Mr. Kanakarayan T. Paul's committee, based upon its India-wide inspection, gives, however, different testimony, saying:[19]
[18. Reconstructing India, p. 258.]
[19. Village Education in India, p. 20.]
It is often assumed that the education given in the village school is despised because it is not practical enough. In many cases, however, the parent's objection is just the opposite. He has no desire to have his son taught agriculture, partly because he thinks he knows far more about that than the teacher, but still more because his ambition is that his boy should be a teacher or a clerk. If he finds that such a rise in the scale is improbable, his enthusiasm for education vanishes. Of the mental and spiritual value of education...he is ignorant.
"It is not change in the curriculum in this early stage" pursues the authority just quoted, "that is going to affect the efficiency of the school or the length of school attendance, but the ability ana skill of the teaching staff."