and quotes extensively from various British authorities. These
span almost a century: from the Dispatch from England of 3rd
June 1814 to the Governor General in India, to the observations
of Max Mueller; and the 1909 remarks of the British labour
leader, Keir Hardie. However, given the period in which the book
was written and the inaccessibility of the detailed manuscript
records, it was inevitable that the author had to base his work
entirely on existing printed sources. Nevertheless, as an
introduction, this chapter of Bharat men Angreji Raj is a
landmark on the subject of indigenous Indian education in the
late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Very little, however, has been written on the history, or
state of education during this period, starting with the thirteenth
century and up until the early nineteenth century. Undoubtedly,
there are a few works like that of S.M. Jaffar^6 pertaining to
Muslim education. There are a chapter or two, or some cursory
references in most educational histories pertaining to the period
of British rule, and to the decayed state of indigenous Indian
education in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Nurullah and Naik’s book^7 devotes the first 43 pages (out of 643
pages) to discussing the state of indigenous education in the
early nineteenth century, and in challenging certain later British
views about the nature and extent of it.
Most of the discussion on the state of indigenous Indian
education in the early nineteenth century, and the differing view-
points which give rise to it, use as their source material (a) the
much talked about reports by William Adam, a former Christian
missionary, on indigenous education in some of the districts of
Bengal and Bihar 1835-8,^8 (b) published extracts of a survey
made by the British authorities regarding indigenous education
in the Bombay Presidency during the 1820s,^9 and (c) published
extracts from another wider survey of indigenous education
made