between the rulers and the ruled. A primary consideration in all
British decisions from the very beginning, continued to be the
aim of maximising the revenue receipts of Government and of
discovering any possible new source which had remained exempt
from paying any revenue to Government.
III
Instructions regarding the collection of information about the
extent and nature of indigenous Indian education (including its
contemporary state) were largely the consequence of the long
debate in the House of Commons in 1813. This debate focussed
on the clause relating to the promotion of ‘religious and moral
improvement’ in India.^31 Before any new policy could be devised,
the existing position needed to be better known. But the quality
and coverage of these surveys varied from Presidency to
Presidency, and even from district to district. (This generally
happens in the gathering of any such information, and more so
when such collection of data was a fairly new thing.)
The information which is thus available today, whether
published, or still in manuscript form in the government
records—as is true of the details of the Madras Presidency
indigenous education survey—largely belongs to the 1820’s and
1830’s period. An unofficial survey made by G.W. Leitner in
1882 for the Punjab compared the situation there for the years
before 1850, with that in 1882.
Before highlighting the main points of information given by
the surveys and then proceeding with its analysis, some
preliminary observations about the data as a whole are in order.
The first observation concerns the largely quantitative
nature of the data presented and the fact that it concentrates
largely on the institution of the school as we know it today. This,
however, may help propagate wrong impressions.
It is important to emphasize that indigenous education was
carried out through pathshalas, madrassahs and gurukulas.
Education in these traditional institutions—which were actually
kept alive by revenue contributions by the community including