December 14th which appeared in the Journal of the Royal
Institute for January.
With every good wish, I am,Yours sincerely,
Sd/- Philip Hartog...
5 Inverness Gardens,
London, W.8.
March 10, 1932
Professor K.T. Shah
45 Chowpatty Road,
Bombay (7).
Dear Professor Shah,
I am much obliged for your letter of February 20, and for
the great trouble, you have taken in this matter. I received a
letter dated February 15 from Mahatma Gandhi by the same
post, and am sending to him a copy of this reply to you. I enclose
copies of my reply to him, and of a letter from me which
appeared in ‘International Affairs’, (the Journal of the Royal
Institute of International Affairs) for January, 1932.
When you have read these documents you will realise that
your letter does not touch the main question which I put to Mr
Gandhi, viz., what authority he had for the statement that
literacy had diminished during the last 50 years in India. The
latest authority that you quote is Leitner, whose History of
Indigenous Education in the Punjab was published in 1882—50
years ago—and throughout your letter you do not give any
literacy percentages at all.
On the other hand, you appear to think that the number of
schools is a guide to literacy percentages. I agree that that would
be a natural conclusion, but, on the other hand, as has been
pointed out in the census, a number of Indian schools in the
past did not aim at literacy, and more recently the Education
Committee of the Indian Statutory Commission, of which I was
Chairman, pointed out that in the ten years 1917 to 1927 the
number of primary schools in Bengal was increased by nearly
eleven thousand, and the number of pupils by nearly 370,000
whereas in Class IV, the lowest class in which permanent
literacy is likely to be attained under existing conditions, the
number of pupils had actually diminished by nearly 30,000. I
am afraid