years later delivered a series of three lectures at the University of
London Institute of Education with the aim of countering
Gandhiji’s statement. After adding three memoranda and
necessary references, Hartog got these published in book form in
1939.^15
Countering Gandhiji and the earlier sources in this
manner, Sir Philip Hartog was really not being original. He was
merely following a well-trodden British path in defence of British
acts and policies in India; a path which had been charted some
125 years earlier by William Wilberforce, later considered as the
father of Victorian England, in the British House of Commons.^16
Hartog had been preceded in his own time in a similar enterprise
by W.H. Moreland, who could not accept Vincent Smith’s
observation that ‘the hired labourer in the time of Akbar and
Jahangir probably had more to eat in ordinary years than he has
now.’^17 Smith’s challenge appears to have led Moreland from the
life of a retired senior revenue settlement officer into the role of
an economic historian of India.^18 Quite understandably, at least
till the 1940s, and burdened as they were with a sense of
mission, the British could not accept any criticism of their
actions, deliberate, or otherwise, in India (or elsewhere) during
the two centuries of their rule.
A major part of the documents reproduced in this book
pertain to the Madras Presidency Indigenous Education Survey.
These were first seen by this writer in 1966. As mentioned
above, an abstract of this survey was included in the House of
Commons Papers as early as 1831-32. Yet, while many scholars
must have come across the detailed material in the Madras
Presidency District Records, as well as the Presidency Revenue
Records (the latter incidentally exist in Madras as well as in
London), for some unexplained reasons this material seems to
have escaped academic attention. The recent Madras University
doctoral thesis pertaining to the various Madras Presidency
districts covering this period also does not seem to have made
any use of this data, despite the fact that some of it does contain
some occasional reference to matters of education.
The Beautiful Tree is not being presented with a view to
decry British rule. Rather, it is the continuation of an effort to