the absence of girls in schools was explained, however, by the
fact that most of their education took place in the home.
It is, however, the Madras Presidency and Bengal-Bihar
data which presents a kind of revelation. The data reveals the
background of the teachers and the taught. It presents a picture
which is in sharp contrast to the various scholarly pronounce-
ments of the past 100 years or more, in which it had been
assumed that education of any sort in India, till very recent
decades, was mostly limited to the twice-born^38 amongst the
Hindoos, and amongst the Muslims to those from the ruling
elite. The actual situation which is revealed was different, if not
quite contrary, for at least amongst the Hindoos, in the districts
of the Madras Presidency (and dramatically so in the Tamil-
speaking areas) as well as the two districts of Bihar. It was the
groups termed Soodras, and the castes considered below them^39
who predominated in the thousands of the then still-existing
schools in practically each of these areas.
The last issue concerns the conditions and arrangements
which alone could have made such a vast system of education
feasible: the sophisticated operative fiscal arrangements of the
pre-British Indian polity. Through these fiscal measures,
substantial proportions of revenue had long been assigned for
the performance of a multiplicity of public purposes. These seem
to have stayed more or less intact through all the previous
political turmoils and made such education possible. The
collapse of this arrangement through a total centralisation of
revenue, as well as politics led to decay in the economy, social
life, education, etc. This inference, if at all valid, warrants a re-
examination of the various currently held intellectual and
political assumptions with regard to the nature of pre-British
Indian society, and its political and state structure.
Before discussing this last issue any further, however, it is
necessary first to understand the various aspects of the educa-
tional data, and the controversy it gave rise to in the 1930s.
Since the detailed data of the Madras Presidency is the least
known and the most comprehensive, we shall examine it first.