"...What he eulogized as the beautiful tree was largely a making of
Brahminic Hindu culture, and so any British attempt to uproot it, would
have, in effect, meant assaulting this tenacious culture. If this were to
happen, it would not have taken them long to bury deep the corpse of Manu
without allowing it to stink for so long.
Gandhi was immediately challenged by Sir Philip Hartog, a founder of the
School of Oriental and African Studies, a former vice-chancellor of Dacca
University, chairman of the auxiliary committee of the Indian Statutory
Commission, and of several educational committees on India set up by the
British between 1918 and 1930. Despite his best efforts Gandhi was not able
to face this challenge successfully.
It was as though to fill this void that Dharampal conjured up his beautiful
tree, in 1983, with about 84 pages of text and 354 pages of documents
reproduced from various sources. In it his main arguments were that even in
the early 19th century Indian schooling was more extensive than what was
prevalent in England; the content of the curriculum was not very dissimilar
in nature to what was taught in England; and the duration of study was more
prolonged..."
"... As part of the government^Rs continuing efforts for introducing primary
education among Panchamas (Pariahs and kindred castes) in 1915 the question
of starting morning or evening classes for them in Hindu schools, was
examined and found unfeasible for reasons such as villagers' objection to
the proposal, caste prejudices, parents of caste pupils withdrawing their
children from schools if the buildings, furniture, and apparatus were to be
used by Panchamas, objection of landlords in the case of rented buildings to
the use by Panchamas. ..."
-----------------------
The biggest ministry of the government of France is its Education ministry,
and its budget is around 24% of the French Government's expenditure. Is it
any surprise that France has produced some of the greatest philosophers,
novelists, mathematicians, scientists?
Contrast this with the situation in India. Why do not different
nationalities (or castes) come together on the crucial issue of quality
universal education? Why do not these different nationalities get together
to demand that this society spend on education what it does for instance on
"defence"? Why do they not together demand that there be set up enough
numbers of schools and universities so that they do not have to fight so
unseemly about this most important issue?
The reason is not hard to seek. Education has never been part of the
culture of Hindustan and it is not an accident that there are more
illiterate people here than in the rest of the world put together. All the
universities in ancient India - Taxila, Nalanda, Vikramashila, Somapura,
Odantapuri, Jagaddala, Vallabi ... - were all Buddhist. Hindus never set up
universities, only ashrams, where only a few 'upper' caste could come. And
this tradition continues in today's equivalents of ashrams - the IITs, the
IIMs etc.
Please see below a scathing rebuttal of the claims of the 'Ramarajya'
peddlers.
Shiva Shankar.
http://www.asiantribune.com/index.php?q=node/8395
Dharampal and 'The Beautiful Tree' - Mon, 2007-11-26 03:31 By Prof. P.
Radhakrishnan
On January 8, I got an email from a US-based Indian foundation: 'With the
recent death of Mr. Dharampal, the author of The Beautiful Tree, claims of
the glory of pre-British Indian education are being widely distributed on
the Web. I would appreciate very much if you could send me a copy of your
review of The Beautiful Tree.'
Dharampal believed in the Ramrajya myth of pre-British Indian society as a
land of milk and honey. His passion for this was kindled by Gandhi's
political panegyric. In his Chatham House speech in 1931 Gandhi decried the
decay of indigenous Indian education: `The British administrators, when they
came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root
them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left
the root like that, and the beautiful tree perished.'
I have shown in my works that the institution of indigenous Indian education
evolved and worked on the principle of social closure as revealed by, among
other things, its discriminatory dimensions, and that Gandhi's metaphor of a
beautiful tree to describe it and the subsequent efforts to vindicate it
were seriously misplaced.
Gandhi's beautiful tree could have been beautiful only to those ensconced at
the top of the hierarchy-infested Indian society who alone could have reaped
its fruits. But, even to them, the beauty of the tree had begun to fade down
soon after the alien tree began to bear fruits; in as much as it was they
who first abandoned the former and clambered up the latter. Gandhi, however,
stolidly refused to acknowledge these facts.
What he eulogised as the beautiful tree was largely a making of Brahminic
Hindu culture, and so any British attempt to uproot it, would have, in
effect, meant assaulting this tenacious culture. If this were to happen, it
would not have taken them long to bury deep the corpse of Manu without
allowing it to stink for so long.
Gandhi was immediately challenged by Sir Philip Hartog, a founder of the
School of Oriental and African Studies, a former vice-chancellor of Dacca
University, chairman of the auxiliary committee of the Indian Statutory
Commission, and of several educational committees on India set up by the
British between 1918 and 1930. Despite his best efforts Gandhi was not able
to face this challenge successfully.
It was as though to fill this void that Dharampal conjured up his beautiful
tree, in 1983, with about 84 pages of text and 354 pages of documents
reproduced from various sources. In it his main arguments were that even in
the early 19th century Indian schooling was more extensive than what was
prevalent in England; the content of the curriculum was not very dissimilar
in nature to what was taught in England; and the duration of study was more
prolonged.
Whether the indicators used by him were really sufficient to make a
meaningful comparison of the indigenous education with the `progressive'
system that had evolved in England, who benefited from that education, and
what was its social relevance were of no concern to him. Though within the
Sudra Varna the lower strata of Sudras – castes like Nadars in Tamil Nadu
and Izhavas in Kerala - were treated as polluting and thus formed the upper
strata of the Untouchables; those beyond the Sudra Varna were not treated as
part of the society then and to a large extent are not treated so even now.
For defending the indefensible Dharampal countered the fact that any
education of any sort in India was until recently mostly limited to the
upper strata of society, especially the twice-born. He did this mainly by
using the data obtained from the survey of indigenous education in Madras
Presidency, conducted during 1822-26, at the instance of the Presidency
Governor, Sir Thomas Munro.
According to these data, available for all but one of the 21 Presidency
districts, of the total male school-students (the proportion of female
students was negligible), the percentage from the Brahmin caste was only 19,
from the Chettis/Rajahs (Kshatriyas?) only less than one, from the Vaishyas
only nine, from the Sudras as high as 50, from `other castes' 5, and from
the Muslims 7.
In the absence of other details these figures gave the impression that the
upper strata of society, especially the Brahmins did not dominate the
education system. But the information collected by the district collectors
had a number of weaknesses (as Dharampal himself admitted). Apart from being
incomplete and incoherent, in the data a large number of agricultural castes
such as the Vellalars, Mudaliyars and Kammas, belonging to the upper strata
of society and clearly upper caste non-Brahmins were subsumed under the
Varna-based British category of `Soodras'.
The number of students from different castes was not related to the
population of the respective castes. It was only by doing this one could
have got some idea of the extent to which each group had access to any
education in relation to others. It was also very important in view of the
fact that the twice-born together with the high-castes subsumed under the
Sudra category formed only a small proportion of the total Presidency
population. For instance, even in 1871 (the first decennial census), the
Brahmins formed only 3.7 percent of the Hindu population, the Kshatriyas
only 0.5 percent, and the Vaishyas only 2.4 percent. So, the population of
these groups must have been much less in 1820s.
What is more, the data available on home education were for only one of the
21 districts, namely Madras. These data, however, showed that the number
taught at home was about five times greater than in schools, and that of the
total number of male-students taught at home the percentage of students from
the Brahmins was as high as 29, from the Vaishyas 23, from the Sudras, the
largest Varna category, only 20, from `other castes' 13, and from the
Muslims 6. In any case, the dominance of the upper strata of society,
especially the Brahmins, came out more clearly from the data on higher
learning presented in the book, which showed that virtually all the students
of higher learning were Brahmins.
Dharampal's claim that in the pre-British `Indian social balance'
traditionally, persons from all sections of society received an optimum
schooling which among others, had enabled them to participate openly and
appropriately in the social and cultural life of their locality, was again
misleading. His notion of society was probably like Plato's. Plato's
universe (read society) was limited to a few square miles of Athens, and to
about one-third of its population who alone were freemen or citizens, while
the remaining 250,000 were slaves who were not treated as part of society.
So, Dharampal's `all sections of society' necessarily excluded large
sections of the human population. Even within his limited notion of society
schooling might have meant mostly caste-based occupational reproduction –
schooling in which as Franco Bernier a French physician in the Mughal court
in the mid-17th century observed the embroiderer's son was brought up only
as an embroiderer, the goldsmith's son became only a goldsmith, and the
physician's son grew up only as a physician.
My review, `Blighted roots', in the Sunday edition of the Indian Express of
February 26, 1984, clearly showed how Dharampal's book betrayed a fervour of
what Louis Dumont termed 'Brahmanic patriotism' .
Since the 1870s the British administration made special provisions for the
education (and employment) of the Muslims, and the Depressed Classes (later
classified as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes), and devised an
administrative category of `backward classes' for providing educational
concessions to the children of the groups included in this category.
As part of the government's continuing efforts for introducing primary
education among Panchamas (Pariahs and kindred castes) in 1915 the question
of starting morning or evening classes for them in Hindu schools, was
examined and found unfeasible for reasons such as villagers' objection to
the proposal, caste prejudices, parents of caste pupils withdrawing their
children from schools if the buildings, furniture, and apparatus were to be
used by Panchamas, objection of landlords in the case of rented buildings to
the use by Panchamas.
Following representations on the exclusion of Panchamas and other Depressed
Classes from schools attended by caste Hindus in different parts of Madras
Presidency, in 1918 the government asked local bodies and the DPI to
investigate and report on the matter. The replies received disclosed that
Panchamas and allied castes were totally excluded from all but 609 of a
total of 8157 schools under public management in the Presidency. Foremost
among the reasons reported for such exclusion were caste prejudices of
higher castes resulting in the withdrawal of their children or in the
threats to do so on admission of Panchamas.
If pre-British Indian society was as wicked as the British saw it, which it
tried to change without much success, characterizing it as Ramrajya should
be seen as part of a larger insidious agenda of reintroducing that unjust
social order of aristocracy and social rank, privileged high castes and
despised low castes, Brahminic priesthood and intellectual hegemony and so
on, from the thralldom of which social reformers like Dr. B.R. Ambedkar,
Periyar E.V. Ramasamy Naicker, and Sree Narayana Guru tried to liberate
India's unwashed millions (the lower Sudras and untouchables and not the
present political category of OBCs).
Dharampal, 84, died on October 24, 2006, at Sevagram (Gandhi's ashram).
I had on several occasions run into Dharampal. To be fair to a dead man,
despite his Ramrajya project, I found him amiable and equanimous in striking
contrast to his overbearing hacks and march-past foot-soldiers like the
Alvareses, Bajajs, Govindacharyas, Gurumurthys, and the RSS field-marshal
K.S. Sudarshan. His death has given them yet another occasion for their
macabre celebration.
P. Radhakrishnan is Professor of Sociology, Madras Institute of Development
Studies.
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