Adam gives some literacy figures which are worth
examining in detail. I will look up the Census returns for the
actual districts for which Adam has given figures.
Yours sincerely,
Sd/- P.J. Hartog...
Scar Top,
Boars Hill, Oxford.
December 5, 1931Dear Sir Philip Hartog,
I am really not clear as to what we are disputing about.
My statement is mild enough, moderate enough and its
purpose is plain. I was obviously trying to go to the limits of
concession that truth permitted, as to claims that I consider
entirely wrong. That seems to me the only way to get a
controversy forward. I never did believe in the method of
belittling whatever case my opponent, whether British
imperialist or Indian nationalist, may have. The context makes it
clear that I have never thought that Indian schools amounted to
much. It makes equally clear what I remember quite well was in
my mind when I wrote that passage—this was that I do not agree
with the steady crabbing of the last dozen years but to
emphasise that on the whole they have been years far more
progressive than any previous decade.
Of course—literacy and school attendance are not the same
thing. They are not the same even now. But that is the realm of
the imponderable and not worth arguing. If it comes to that, just
now I rank mere literacy low enough. It seems to me we are in
for a rotten ten years of struggle to keep any sort of decency
alive. I may be overdepressed; but I saw the utter wash that the
‘literate’ populace of the United States read as their only gain
from education, and I come back to this country to find that the
weeklies are dying or recently dead, and that Daily Mail, Daily
Express, and the infamous Sunday popular papers are about all
the reading that Demos does. I believe the most popular weekly
is ‘Competitions’, which guides the huge mob whose sole
intellectual recreation (an absorbing and costly one) is making
‘bullets’ or cross-word puzzles (sending up six-pence a time). On
the other hand, Akbar was ‘illiterate’.
There are in India poor folk who never went to any sort of
school who have learnt to read. But these of course are few. They