The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century
...That does not finish the picture. We have the education of this...That does not finish the picture. We have the education of thisfuture state. I say without fear of my figures being challengedsuccessfully, that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty ora hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the Britishadministrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold ofthings as they were, began to root them out. They scratched thesoil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, andthe beautiful tree perished. The village schools were not goodenough for the British administrator, so he came out with hisprogramme. 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 showthat, in places where they have carried out a survey, ancientschools have gone by the board, because there was no recognitionfor these schools, and the schools established after the Europeanpattern were too expensive for the people, and therefore theycould not possibly overtake the thing. I defy anybody to fulfill aprogramme of compulsory primary education of these massesinside of a century. This very poor country of mine is ill able tosustain such an expensive method of education. Our state wouldrevive the old village schoolmaster and dot every village with aschool both for boys and girls.
(MAHATMA GANDHI AT CHATHAM HOUSE, LONDON,OCTOBER 20, 1931)
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Dharampal (1922-2006) was a Gandhian thinker and historian, whose seminal works on pre-British Indian society has led to a radical reappraisal of the mainstream historiography on the Indian society and polity prior to the British rule. Born in 1922 in Kandhala, a small town in the Muzaffarnagar district of Uttar Pradesh.
Starting around 1964, Dharampal embarked on what turned out to be a life-long mission to look for archival materials of eighteenth and nineteenth century pertaining to the functioning of Indian society and polity prior to the European conquest of India, and the way they were transformed subsequently under the British rule. Much of this exploration was carried out in the British Library and other archives in England and India, and led to a number of seminal publications. Dharampal’s scholarly work has, for the first time, presented a well-documented and comprehensive view of the Indian society when it was functioning as per its own norms and preferences prior to British rule.
Apart from The Beautiful Tree, his documentation of indigenous education in eighteenth century India, which we will discussing shortly, the following are some of his major works: Panchayat Raj as the Basis of Indian Polity: An Exploration into the Proceedings of the Constituent Assembly (New Delhi: AVARD, 1962); Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts (Delhi: Impex India: 1971); Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition: with Some Early Nineteenth Century Documents (Varanasi: Sarva Seva Sangh Prakashan, 1971); The Madras Panchayat System, Vol II: A General Assessment (Delhi: Impex India, 1972); Some Aspects of Early Indian Society and Polity and their Relevance to the Present (Pune: Indian Association for Cultural Freedom, 1988); Bharatiya Chitta, Manas and Kala (originally published in Hindi from Patna by Pushpa Prakashan; translated into English with a preface and glossary by Jitendra Bajaj: Madras: Centre for Policy Studies, 1993); Despoliation and Defaming of India: The Early Nineteenth Century British Crusade (Wardha: Bharat Peetham, 1999); The British Origin of Cow-Slaughter in India: with some British Documents on the Anti-Kine-Killing Movement 1880–1894 (co-authored with T.M. Mukundan; Mussoorie: Society for Integrated Development of Himalayas, 2002); Understanding Gandhi (Mapusa: Other India Press, 2003); and Rediscovering India: Collection of Essays and Speeches: 1956-1998 (Mussoorie: Society for Integrated Development of Himalayas, 2003). In the 1980s and 90s, Dharampal was elected a member of the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR) for a couple of terms. In 2001, the Government of India appointed him chairman of the National Commission on Cattle. Dharampal passed away on 24 October 2006 at Sevagram (Mahatma Gandhi’s Ashram near Wardha, Maharashtra).