to defeat that object itself which is professed. The Board
would naturally enquire how these children who are so
destitute as not to be able to procure instruction in their
own villages, could subsist in those to which they are
strangers, and to which they travel from 10 to 100 miles,
with no intention of returning for several years. They are
supported entirely by charity, daily repeated, not received
from the instructor for the reasons above mentioned, but
from the inhabitants of the villages generally. They receive
some portion of alms daily at the door of every Brahmin in
the village, and this is conceded to them with a
cheerfulness which considering the object in view must be
esteemed as a most honourable trait in the native
character, and its unobtrusiveness ought to enhance the
value of it. We are undoubtedly indebted to this benevolent
custom for the general spread of education amongst a class
of persons whose poverty would otherwise be an
insurmountable obstacle to advancement in knowledge,
and it will be easily inferred that it requires only the liberal
and fostering care of Government to bring it to perfection.^48
The collector of Guntoor was equally descriptive and
observed that though there seemed to be ‘no colleges for
teaching theology, law, astronomy, etc. in the district’ which are
endowed by the state yet,
These sciences are privately taught to some scholars or
disciples generally by the Brahmins learned in them,
without payment of any fee, or reward, and that they, the
Brahmins who teach are generally maintained by means of
maunium land which have been granted to their ancestors
by the ancient Zamindars of the Zillah, and by the former
Government on different accounts, but there appears no
instance in which native Governments have granted
allowances in money and land merely for the maintenance
of the teachers for giving instruction in the above sciences.
By the information which has been got together on the
subject, it appears that there are 171 places where
theology, laws and astronomy, etc. are taught privately,
and the number of disciples in them is 939. The readers of
these sciences cannot generally get teachers in their
respective villages and are therefore obliged to go to others.
In which case if the reader belongs to a family that can
afford to support him he gets