The Beautiful Tree (34 page)

Was it true? I realized that I didn’t have much of a clue about what education was like, or if schooling existed at all, before the imperial powers brought it to their colonies. This was to require another journey, this time back in time. And like my other journey, this one too began in Hyderabad.

11. The Men Who Uprooted the Beautiful Tree

I didn’t read only the reports of development experts as I traveled. On one of my visits to Hyderabad, I read William Dalrymple’s
White Mughals
, the account of James Achilles Kirkpatrick, the British representative to the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad in the late 18th century, and his tragic love affair with the young and beautiful Mughal princess Khair un-Nissa. On a Sunday afternoon, waiting for our evening flight to Delhi, Pauline and I took my team to follow in Dalrymple’s footsteps, to weave through the crowded streets of Koti, to visit the old British residency, now the crumbling home of the Osmania University College for Women. No one challenged us as we wandered around by the glow of our mobile phones in the bat-infested, dank cellars or upstairs in the magnificent old ballrooms and once-elegant parlors. We admired the rusting chandeliers and wall-length mirrors, marveling at the incongruity of these magnificent decaying features juxtaposed against tatty blackboards plastered with economics’ formulas. From there we drove again, to climb to the balconies of the 16th-century Charminar, taking in the vistas across the Old City in which we had been working for the past five years.

I remembered that in Dalrymple’s introduction, he had described how he had had a “moment of pure revelation” in an old bookshop in the labyrinth behind the Chowk Masjid, the teeming bazaars surrounding the Charminar. Serendipity had led him to the “dusty, ill-lit shop the size of a large broom-cupboard,”
¹
where he had found important Persian manuscripts that had been a crucial help in his investigations. Why didn’t we follow his footsteps there too?

The bookshop wasn’t actually too difficult to find, and clearly we weren’t alone in making this pilgrimage, given the blasé, if still curious, way in which other shopkeepers pointed us in the right direction. It was as tiny as Dalrymple had said, with books piled from floor to ceiling, curiously with their spines facing inward so that you couldn’t see the title of any book without pulling it from the shelf. It was also as dusty as Dalrymple had said, and I began to sneeze in the enclosed space.

The old owner who appeared after a while was friendly, if hard of hearing. We told him that we had just been exploring the old British residency, you know, “Osmania University College, following in Dalrymple’s footsteps. . . .” He apparently picked up only on the university bit: “So you’re in education?” “Yes,” we repeated, “we’re following Dalrymple” and that’s why, we explained, we’d come to his bookshop. He looked interested, but promptly went away, leaving us alone in the dark shop, and I thought he’d forgotten us. We browsed, finding some wonderful old maps of Hyderabad, and a fascinating slim volume debating the case for and against Hyderabad’s joining India in 1949. (The Nizam of Hyderabad had prevaricated about wishing to become independent, to join Pakistan, or to remain part of the British Empire. In the end, Indian tanks decided the issue.)

But then the owner returned. And just as Dalrymple had had a stroke of fortune in this antiquarian bookshop, so did I. He returned with
The Beautiful Tree
(the same title that, in homage to Gandhi, I chose for my book). “Dharampal” he beamed triumphantly. “Oh,” I said, “we’ve been reading William Dalrymple, an Englishman, not your Dharampal.” I continued: “The Englishman visited your shop a couple of years ago and found some Persian manuscripts. Do you remember?” He reflected for awhile, then said: “Oh yes, that man. Too hard bargaining.” He shook his head, “Too hard bargaining.” He bade me look at his preferred Dharampal.

I opened the green book. It wasn’t old—dated 1983—but was tatty and dusty. I read as I stood. Dharampal opened with an extended quote from Mahatma Gandhi, at Chatham House, London, October 20, 1931:
²

Hence the title of this book. I was going to buy it anyway just as a souvenir of that day, but I wasn’t then a great fan of Indian revisionism that claimed all the British brought to India was harm, so didn’t think it would be a particularly enjoyable nor enlightening read. But then as I read on, the next few sentences of Gandhi’s speech began to resonate with things that I’d been finding myself:

Wasn’t this a bit like what the development experts and national governments were saying
now
? The private schools for the poor weren’t “good enough,” hence the need for aid programs for “paraphernalia, building, and so forth” in the public schools? I read on, growing more curious:

I’d never heard of such evidence of schools that existed before the British; moreover, this was apparently British contemporaneous evidence itself, so unlikely to fall victim to the desire to trash what the British had ever done for India. Gandhi concluded:

It seemed to chime what I was thinking and finding. Certainly “compulsory primary education of these masses” had not been successfully achieved, “inside of a century,” following the British state education model, as predicted by Gandhi. Indeed, all the “very poor countries” that we were researching, including India, seemed “ill able to sustain” the “expensive method[s] of education” that were being championed by the development experts, whether because of lack of funds, corruption, or a mixture of both. My thoughts rushed ahead: wouldn’t it be strange if what Gandhi was proposing—to “revive the old village schoolmaster and dot every village with a school”—was actually what we were
finding
in the slums and villages of India today?

I bought the book, for what seemed a victory for my own “hardbargaining” prowess (although my Indian team gasped in horror at how much I was prepared to pay). And I read it from cover to cover on the flight back to Delhi and to England. That Sunday afternoon, I embarked on another journey, back to 19th-century British India. It was to take me to libraries across London, following up Dharampal’s sources. What I found seemed almost as remarkable, and as challenging to the accepted wisdom, as what I’d found on my physical journeys across Asia and Africa.

In the early 19th century, Sir Thomas Munro, governor of the Madras Presidency, wanted to do something about education in India. Everyone in England seemed to have an opinion about “the ignorance of the people of India and the means of disseminating knowledge among them.” But no one had any
evidence
. It was idle chatter, based on prejudice, “mere conjectures of individuals unsupported by any authentic documents.”
³
Munro proposed to discover the truth, by conducting a survey of what was actually happening on the ground.

Munro’s Minute (memorandum) of June 25, 1822, was sent to all district collectors. The terms of reference themselves are interesting—clearly pointing to an awareness that there were schools in the villages before the British intervened. Each collector was asked to submit “a List of the schools in which reading and writing are taught in each District showing the number of scholars in each and the caste to which they belong.”

The collectors’ reports filtered back slowly—several taking a year or more, and one taking three years! It was a very long research process. All but one collector took the job seriously: the principal collector for Canara complained that filling in the form “would take up a considerable time,” which would be wasted because everyone knew there are “no Colleges in Canara” nor “fixed schools and Masters to teach in them.”
⁴
Fortunately, his was the only such report. All the other collectors furnished the required information.

The data are quite remarkable. Far from there being no schooling in India before the British brought their system, the figures show an abundance of preexisting schools and colleges: In the 20 districts returning data, 11,575 schools and 1,094 colleges were reported, with 157,195 and 5,431 students, respectively.
⁵
In addition, many collectors reported that considerably more scholars and students were educated in their own homes. Although such numbers were difficult to discern, some estimates were made—for instance, the collector of Madras who had reported 5,699 scholars in school reported that an additional 26,963 school-level scholars were then receiving tuition in their homes, that is
five times more
than were in schools. Munro suggested that such “home-schooling” would be common throughout the presidency.

Satisfied that his research had not been in vain, Munro summarized the evidence in his Minute of March 10, 1826. The existing indigenous schools were serving about 25 percent of the
male
school-age population, he wrote. But given that many more were reportedly being educated in their own homes, he estimated that at least one-third of the male population was being schooled. For girls, the numbers in school were much lower, but this could be explained by the fact that they were educated almost entirely in the home.

This level of educational enrollment, reported Munro, “is higher than it was in most European countries at no very distant period.”
⁶
Moreover, the indigenous schooling system found by the British did not just focus on the elite but included the
most disadvantaged and poorest
. What are today classified as “backward castes” in India amounted to a substantial minority of enrollment in each district—for instance, 38 percent of the school population in Tinnevelly and 32 percent in Salem and Madras.

But there was more evidence than just Munro’s. Thirteen years later, a more limited survey was carried out in the Bengal Presidency, which led to the celebrated Adam reports, “State of Education in Bengal 1835-38,” published in 1841 by the University of Calcutta. Adam’s first report featured his headline conclusion that there were about 100,000 village schools in Bengal and Bihar in the 1830s—something that Gandhi had announced at his talk in London. Adam noted that it appeared “that the system of village schools is extensively prevalent; that the desire to give education to their male children must be deeply seated in the minds of parents
even of the humblest classes
; and that these are the institutions,
closely interwoven as they were with the habits of the people and the customs of the country
.”
⁷
Again, his work revealed an extensive system of indigenous Indian education, responding to the situations and needs of the poor.

Similarly, there was a report around 1820 on areas of the newly extended British Bombay Presidency that 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.” And from the Punjab, a report documented around 330,000 pupils in “the schools of the various denominations who were acquainted with reading, writing and some method of computation.”

From Madras to Bengal, from Bombay to the Punjab, the accumulated evidence showed that any claim of no indigenous schooling worth speaking of before the British intervened was completely wrong: on the contrary, it all pointed to a vibrant indigenous system serving at least as high a proportion of boys as in European countries, including England, just a few years earlier. This was quite an extraordinary finding. In fact, in India, there were schools in almost every village before the British replaced them with the system that provided the foundations for today’s public system.

The crucial question for me as I first read Dharampal’s account of Munro’s survey was, how was all this schooling funded? Could it be that what Munro uncovered was similar to what we were finding today, a vibrant
privately funded
education system, operating underground, with no official recognition, about to be replaced by an alien system? If so, then I could posthumously recruit Gandhi as a supporter of private schools for the poor in India, for he had written that he had wanted a return to this system. It turned out that was exactly what it was, a system funded almost entirely by student fees, plus a little philanthropy.

How the system was funded was one of the questions Munro asked of his collectors. Of the 21 districts of the Madras Presidency, there is an open verdict about funding from two—one because the collector didn’t take the exercise seriously, whereas the second didn’t supply any notes on school funding. Of the remaining 19 collectors’ reports, I could see that 16 described the system of schooling as
100 percent privately funded
, whereas the remaining 3 reported predominantly private—with only a tiny proportion (from 1 to 2 percent of schools) in each funded by government. Indeed, for one of these three, the information on funding for schools and colleges is collated, so it may well be that it was only the colleges that were funded in this way, as in most other districts, rather than schools too.