indigenous schools and 740 colleges giving instruction to
1,57,664 boys, and 4,023 girls. (Vide Education Commission
Report by the Madras Provincial Committee 1884). It is therefore
estimated, that considering the population in that period
(123,50,941) elementary indigenous education was imparted to
about one-fourth of the boys of school-going age. It was also
estimated that there was at least one school to every 1,000 of the
population. ‘But as only a few females were taught in schools, we
may reckon one school to every 500 of the population.’
Mr Munro, (as he then was) further supplements this
estimate of the spread of education with the following
observation:—
I am, however, inclined to estimate the portion of the male
population, who receive school education, to one-third than
one-fourth of the whole, because we have no return of the
numbers taught at home.
In 1826, such was the state of purely indigenous education
in a province which had been under British influence for over a
century and was, therefore, fast disintegrating old institutions
and adopting new ones.
In Bengal, Mr W. Adam, conducted a similar inquiry and
found that in 1835 ‘a network of primitive Vernacular schools
existed throughout Bengal’, and he estimated their number to be
about one lakh. The Sadler Commission has pointed out that ‘no
attempt was made to develop these schools.’ Government
preferred to devote its energies to secondary and higher schools,
on the theory that, if Western education were introduced among
the upper classes, it would ‘filter down’ by a natural process to
the lower classes. Practically all the public funds available for
education were expended on schools and colleges founded and
controlled by Government, and nothing was spent upon
indigenous schools, and as rent-free lands attached to these
schools were resumed, the schools were left without any
financial aid and naturally collapsed.
The purpose of all this was political. Sir Sankaran Nair in
his masterly Minute of Dissent writes:—
Efforts were made by the government to confine higher
education and secondary education, leading to higher
education, to boys in affluent circumstances...Rules were
made calculated to restrict the diffusion of education
generally and among the poorer boys in particular.
Conditions for “recognition” for “grants”—stiff and
various—were laid down and enforced, and the non-
fulfillment of any one of these