EW INDIA is under no illusion as to the material condition of the people of India. It reverberates with the cry of their excessive poverty, and of their gradual impoverishment in recent times. The highest official estimate of the annual income of an Indian is only thirty rupees. The condition of our agricultural classes who constitute more than threefourths of our population is no better, and is probably much worse now than in 1878 when Sir James Caird wrote:

Three-fourths of the cultivators have no capital. In a good year they have enough for their simple wants; in a year of abundance their banker has something to apply in reduction of their debt; in an unfavourable year they live very poorly, and partly by help of their credit; in a year of famine, that is withdrawn, and they bave no means left of employing labour, and the poorest of them and their labourers are equally destitute.

The increase of population (which is by no means high), and the decadence or extinction of indigenous industry have enormously increased the pressure upon land. But its productive capacity appears to be either stationary or diminishing. Some forty millions of our people were supposed by Sir W. Hunter to be on the brink of starvation

Various causes have been assigned for this colossal poverty. The annual drain on account of the Home charges and remittances of the profits from railways and various commercial undertaking, and of the savings of officials and others, which is now computed at some twenty millions sterling, is urged by some as the main cause of India's impoverishment. There are others who lay stress upon the stringency of the present Land Revenue System, and upon the revision and undue enhancement of assessment at comparatively short intervals.

The strict reservation of forests, the cultivation of lands formerly maintained for pasture, and the closing of the mints to the free coinage of silver have also been adduced by various writers as causes of the gradual impoverishment of the people of India. But whatever the cause urged, the extension of the existing system of education is almost universally held to be the principal means of ameliorating the condition of the people. In fact, new India is under the illusion that it will prove to be the panacea for all the evils India is suffering from. "The death-rate," says a Neo-Indian writer, "is increasing alarm. ingly in the towns through overcrowding, and in

the villages through malaria, plague, and contamination of drinking water. Universal education is the only remedy for the evil."* The late Mr. G. K. Gokhale, who devoted his life to the good of his country in a spirit of self-sacrifice unsurpassed in new India, declared: "I am glad there are signs visible on all sides which go to show that this great truth-this profound truth -that there can be no real national progress for our people without universal mass educationthis great fundamental and profound truth is being realised in an ampler and ampler measure on all sides of us . . . That ninety per cent. of our people should be sunk in ignorance, superstition and squalor-I can think of no injustice more cruel or monstrous than this."

It should be observed, that the mass of our people, though illiterate, are generally not such numskulls, or sunk in such "ignorance, superstition and squalor" as they are usually supposed to be. The Government of India in a recent resolution on Sanitation says: "The diffusion of sound education will, however, remain the most potent and penetrating instrument of sanitation among a population which still views it with hostility or unconcern." This is a charge against our people which has hardly any solid foundation in fact. Col. King, late Sanitary Commissioner, of the Madras Presidency, testifies in a recent lecture delivered in London, that "the Institutes of Vishnu and the Laws of Manu fit in excellently, so far as the subjects touched go, with the bacteriology, parasitology, and applied hygiene of the West. The hygiene of food and of water, private and public conservancy, disease suppression, and prevention are all carefully dealt with Nor if racial prejudices are to be considered, can it be held that either by the teachings of the Koran or the Muhammadan traditions, opposition to hygiene can be reasonably expected.... Personally, I have found in the South of India, where caste prevails more tenaciously than in most parts of the country, that in dealing with the knotty question of religious festivals it was not difficult to secure the support of leading Hindus to refinements of hygiene that could not be enforced by extant laws, by appealing to the fact, that my recommendations were fully within the principles recognised by Vishnu and Manu." Hygienic rules, the results of the ex

....

* J. N. Sircar, Economics of British India, p. xi.

perience of untold centuries, well adapted to our physical environment and economic condition have in many cases crystallised into superstitious practices among the vast majority of the Hindus. Their abodes appear to the Western eye as mere hovels, but they are usually clean hovels. The homestead is generally kept as clean as their means would permit, and the kitchen and the utensils for cooking and eating are kept scrupulously clean. In personal cleanliness they are, class for class, more particular than the peoples of the West. In fact, as Elphinstone observed long ago: "The cleanliness of the Hindus is proverbial." Away from large towns where there are streams with sandy beds, they dig holes in the sands, and carefully ladle out the water therefrom for drinking purpose which shows the importance they attach to wholesome drinking

water.

"The ryots of India," says Sir H. J. S. Cotton, "possess an amount of knowledge and practical skill within their own humble sphere which no expert scientist can ever hope to acquire."

"The Indian peasant," observes Sir T. W. Holderness, "though illiterate is not without knowledge. He has been carefully trained from boyhood in the ritual and the religious observances of his forefathers. He hears the ancient epics read in their pithy vernacular form. He is full of lore about crops and soils and birds and beasts."+

Dr. Voelcker, a renowned agriculturist, who was, some years ago, engaged by the Government to report upon the possible directions in which our agriculture might be improved, says, after carefully inspecting nearly every part of India : "I unhesitatingly dispose of the ideas which have been erroneously entertained that the ryots' cultivation is primitive and backward, and say, that nearly all the attempts made in the past to teach him have led because he understands far better than hisould-be teachers, the particular circumstances under which he has to pursue his calling." The peasants are, as a rule, quite ready to introduce improvements in their cultivation if they are demonstrated to be to their advantage, as is evidenced, among other things, by the recent extension of potato and cotton cultivation, and of "gard cultivation," where they can afford it, and the almost universal adoption of the Behea Sugar Mill, etc. The multitudinous varieties of

People and Problems of India, p. 84,

food-grains and fruits, the mechanical contrivances for irrigation, etc., show that they are not wanting in knowledge or intelligence. They know very well that the liberal application of manures would give increased outturn. No education is necessary to teach them that. But they are often so poor that they are unable to conserve even all their cowdung for manure, the dearness of fuel compelling them to utilise at least a portion of it for culinary purposes. They are fully aware of the value of pasture lands, and they have always had such lands attached to every village. They have, however, now been reduced to the necessity of bringing them under cultivation to the detriment of their cattle.

Though the mass of our people are not SO obtuse or perversely conservative as they are usually supposed to be, education of the right sort, which would secure to them material or moral welfare, or both, would certainly be destrable. But a broad survey of the results of the system of elementary education which has been spreading in India for well-nigh three generations has forced the conviction upon us that it has not subserved these purposes. We shall confine ourselves to the material aspect of the question. We find that this education has not made the cultivators better cultivatiors, nor the artisans and tradesmen more efficient artisans and tradesmen than before. On the contrary, it has distinctly diminished their efficiency by inculcating in the literate proletariat a strong distaste for their hereditary mode of living and hereditary callings, and an equally strong taste for brummagem fineries and for occupations of a more or less parasitic nature. They have accelerated rather than retarded the decadence of indigenous industries and have thus helped to aggravate their own economic difficulties and those of the entire community. The following remarks which the Superintendent of the Lushai Hills makes in regard to the effect of education on the Lushais apply also to the major portion of the mass of the people in other parts of India, especially to the aboriginal section of it :

They are showing a strong tendency to desert agriculture, their hereditary occupation, and live by their wits. They have undoubtedly more money to spend or waste. This is evidenced by the change which is taking place in their dress. Stout home-spun cloths are being discarded for foreign apparel, such as shirts, trousers, or "shorts," coats, caps, etc. Imported yarn is displacing the indigenous article in the manufacture of cloths, and cheap and tawdry articles of personal adornment are becoming very common. Though he may have more money to spend, it is impossible to say that the Lushai is now

better off than he used to be. In his village he had all he wanted, and lived a simple and happy life. The effect on his moral character has, also, been far from satisfactory......It is true that a certain number of the Lushais have taken advantage of the openings for improvement so freely provided by Government and have profited by them, but, on the whole, the results are depressing, and are such as to give grounds for anx ety for the future welfare of the race.

It is very doubtful if the literate peasantry have "more money to spend or waste" than their unlettered brethren. They generally live far beyond their means; and if some of them have more money it is usually obtained not by the improvement of agriculture or manufacture, but by occupations of an unproductive...

....character, the aspiration of the literate proletariat being to enter some service or live upon their wits. The best patrons of native manufactures are still the illiterate peasantry who have not yet taken to shoddy apparel and "cheap and tawdry articles of personal adornment," at least to the extent the literates have. In fact, it is they, especially their women, who have arrested the utter annihilation of indigenous industry.

The subjects which the current system of education comprises have mostly no immediate reference to the requirements of our cultivators, artisans and traders. Their boys cannot derive any earthly benefit, so far as their hereditary oocupations are concerned, by going through a course of elementary Physics, Chemistry and Biology, when there are hardly any teachers at present who can teach properly, or by conning a bald list of Kings and Governors and the wars they waged, which is called history, or by learning the names of mountains, rivers and towns only to be forgotten soon after. If they are sent to schools it is with the view that they may enter some service, preferably Government service, or some profession, preferably the legal profession. The Primary standard is looked upon as a stepping stone to the Middle Vernacular or Middle English, and the Middle Vernacular or Middle English to the High School Standard, and the High School Standard to the Collegiate Standard. This is applauded as the "uplift" of the "lower" classes by Government as well by new India, though it is hardly consonant with commonsense to dub the people who pursue agriculture among whom are to be found representatives of the highest Hindu castes,* as "lower" than those who

It should be noted, that these "lower" classes compose large sections of the higher Hindu castes. Onethird of the Brahmans of Bengal, and two-third of the

earn their livelihood by service or by some profession of a more or less parasitic character, and to regard the translation of the former into the fold of the latter as uplift. For a generation or two, in tracts which are called-backward, that is, where the present system of education has not made much progress as yet, the literates through the favour and patronage of Government and of missionaries, in the case especially of the aboriginal tribes appear to prosper, and their prospect very alluring. A Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, for instance, Sir John Woodburn, who visited Ranchi in 1898, thus spoke of the possibilities of education among the aboriginal tribes of Chota Nagpur :

seems

In the schools of the Missionaries there are scores of Kol boys rapidly attaining University Standards in education. It was to me a revelation that the savage intellect, which we are all apt to regard as dwarfed and dull and inept, is as acute and quick to acquire knowledge as that of the sons of generations of culture. It seems incredible, but it is a fact, that these Kol lads are walking straight into the lists of competition, on equal terms with the high-bred youth of Bengal. This is a circumstance so strange even to me, so striking, so full of significance for the future, that I could not refrain from telling you of this last surprise of this wondeful land we live in.

Similar language of commendation and admiration was used by Government officials in regard to the youth of Bengal two generations ago. How different is their tone now! If the Kols and Oraons succeed in competing with the Bengalis for the various services under Government, leaving agriculture to take care of itself, two generations hence they would be threatened with an economic crisis such as the gentry of Bengal are confronted with to-day.

What with fees, stationery, text-books (which are constantly changed), etc., education, even elementary education, has now become pretty expensive according to the Indian standard. So it is only the well-to-do and the more aspiring among the lower "classes" who are able to send their boys to schools; and the intelligence, ambition and resources which might have improved agriculture and arts are diverted into courses that lead to the professions and services which are yearly getting more and more congested. The number so transferred is really very small. In 1911, for instance, in Bengal, Bihar and Orissa and Assam taken together, of 2,305 gazetted

Billavas and Brahmans of Madras pursue agriculture. The proportion of cultivating Brahmans is even higher in Bihar and Orissa (Galt's Census Report for 1911, Vol. I, Part 1, p. 429).

appointments held by natives of the country, about eight-ninths were held by members of the Brahman, Baidya and Kâyastha castes.* But though the number "uplifted" from the lower castes is proportionately insignificant they are the cream of those castes. This is a heavy loss. But this is not all. The current system of education co-operates with the other forces which such a highly material civilization as the Western has introduced into this country to diffuse among the students a taste for luxuries (in the Indian sense), and inculcate in them Western ideas of decency and cleanliness which consist chiefly, if not solely, in using shoes, stockings, caps, and finer and more plentiful clothing. The Government, with the best of motives, no doubt, make large grants for school-buildings and boarding-houses and their equipment. In fact, a good percentage of the total grant for education is employed for such purposes. Boys who have been accustomed to live in houses, which to the Westerners appear no better than hovels, and who have always been accustomed to squatting on mats, are accommodated in well-appointed houses which the great majority of the middle class gentry can never aspire to live in. Not unoften, they are provided with chairs, tables, kerosine reading lamps, etc. The inexpensive out-door games which formerly used to amuse and invigorate our young men have been superseded by the much more expensive football, cricket, hockey, etc. No wonder that under these conditions the sons of strong, sturdy simple peasants should be gradually converted into full-blown, fashionably draped, effeminate, spruce "gentlemen." No wonder that they should imbibe a dstaste for the " ungentlemanly pations of their forbears. No wonder that such occupations should cease to gratify their enlarged wants and minister to their "civilised" tastes. They undoubtedly assume a showy exterior which to the ordinary Western or the Westernised eye is an indubitable index of progress and prosperity, though, in reality, it is an index of just the reverse. They carry the torch of "civilisation into their village homes. The fashion set by them is extensively imitated,, and thus the "rise in the standard of living,' which new India rejoices in, spreads far and wide. The economic effects of this "rise " disastrous. In the first place, it runs away with resources which should be husbanded for

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* Report of the Census of India, 1912, by E, A. Gait, Vol. 1, Part 1, pp. 429-430,

improving agriculture and the arts. Secondly, it entails an enormous increase in the consumption of foreign manufactures which accelerates the decadence of indigenous industry and swells the volume of economic drain from the country. The writer lately visited a village, among the weaving population of which the Ranchi Union (the central organisation for financing co-operative credit societies in the Ranchi district) has been making a highly praiseworthy attempt to introduce the flyshuttle loom. One of the most serious objections which the weavers urged against the use of this improved loom was, that they could not find a good market even for the scanty produce of the primitive looms which they have been used to; what are they to do with the increased outturn of the improved looms? Yet all the male villagers who congregated round us, including even the weavers themselves, were, almost without exception, well habited in millmade clothes! It is only the females who still affect the coarse and durable wide-bordered Saris. The special encouragement which is being given to female education will, no doubt, soon do away with even this small amount of patronage which indigenous industry still receives from them. For in towns they too, especially the literates among them, almost universally adopt the current fashion which favours the more showy, but much less lasting mill-made fabrics.

A certain amount of literacy is undoubtedly beneficial to the agricultural, manufacturing and trading classes. The indigenous way of imparting elementary education which the present system has replaced was better calculated to secure this object and better adapted to Indian conditions and requirements. Even now some of the trading classes, like the Marwaris, adhere to it and set their face against the exotic system. The young men turned out by their pathshâlâs have generally a much better head for figures and make for more efficient business men than even the graduates turned out by the universities. It is perhaps not generally known that there was a very wide spread system of elementary education in old India, There was a net work of pathshalas all over the country. They are thus described by Mr. Adam:

These schools are generally held in the houses of some of the most respectable native inhabitants or very near them. All the children of the family are educated in the vernacular language of the country; and in order to increase the emoluments of the teachers, they are allowed to introduce, as pupils, as many respectable children as they can procure in the neighbourhood. The scholars begin with tracing the vowels and

consonants with the finger on & sand board and afterwards on the floor with a pencil of steatite or white crayon; and this exercise is continued for eight or ten days. They are next instructed to write on the palm-leaf with a reed pen and with ink made of charcoal, which rubs out, joining vowels to the consonants, forming compound letters, syllables, and words, and learning tables of numeration, money, weight, and measure, and the eorrect mode of writing the distinctive names of persons, castes, and places. This is continued about a year. The iron style is now used only by the teacher in sketching on the palm-leaf the letters which the scholars are required to trace with ink. They are next advanced to the study of Arithmetic and the use of the plantain-leaf in writing with ink made of lamp-black, which is continued about six months, during which they are taught addition, subtraction. multiplication, and division, and the simplest cases of the Mensuration of land and commercial and agricultural accounts, together with the modes of address proper in writing letters to different persons. The last stage of this limited course of instruction is that in which the scholars are taught to write with lamp-black ink on paper, and are further instructed in agricultural and commercial accounts and in the composition of letters.

The end of Pathshala education was entirely material. It was eminently practical and being indigenous and inexpensive was well suited to the social and economic conditious of the community.

Sir Thomas Munro had an investigation made into the state of indigenous education in the Madras Presidency. From the results of his inquiries it appears that, in that Presidency, about 1826, the number of schools amounted to 12,493, and the population to 12,850, 941; so that there was one school to every thousand of the population; but as only a very few females are taught in schools, we may reckon one school to every 590 of the population.

It is remarked by the Board of Revenue says Sir Thomas Munro, that of a population of twelve and a half millions there are only 188,000 or 1 in 67 receiving education. This is true of the whole population, but not as regards the male part of it, of which the proportion educated is much greater than is here estimated; for, if we take the whole population as stated in the

report at 12,850,000, and deduct one-half for females, the remaining male population will be 6,425,000, and if we reckon the male population between the ages of 5 and 10 years, which is the period which boys in general remain at school, at one-ninth, it will give 713,000, which is the number of boys that would be at school if all the males above five years of age were educated: but the number actually attending the schools is only 184,110, or little more than one-fourth of that number ......I am however inclined to estimate the proportion of the whole population who receive school education to be nearer one-third than one-fourth of the whole because we have no returns of the numbers taught at home. In Madras, the number taught at home is 26,903, or about five times greater than that taught in the schools.

If this estimate is correct there would hardly appear to have been any increase in the number of pupils attending boys' primary schools in the Madras Presidency, the ratio of pupils to boys of school-going age in 1907 being 24.5 per cent.

The advantages of this wide-spread system of elementary education were :—

First.-Being naturally evolved it was welladapted to the material condition of the people and to their requirements.

Secondly.-Being maintained by the community it encouraged self-help and self-reliance.

Thirdly. It did not promote luxurious tastes and extravagant habits.

The altered conditions of the country no doubt require some modification of the system. But, as we have seen above, its replacement by an exotic system of Government education unsuited to the condition and needs of the community spells calamitous consequences. Our agricultural classes who form quite three-fourths of our population form the material backbone of our community. They have to practically support the other classes; and anything which tends to attenuate their margin between sufficiency and starvation is highly condemnable.