Rice-beaters Shoe makers
Toddy makers Pen painters
Preparers of earth Mat makers
for washermen Carpenters
Washermen Dubbee makers
Barbers Winding instrument makers
Tailors Seal makers
Basket makers Chucklers
Mat makers
There is a sense of widespread neglect and decay in the
field of indigenous education within a few decades after the
onset of British rule. This is the major common impression
which emerges from the 1822-25 Madras Presidency data, the
report of W. Adam on Bengal and Bihar 1835-38, and the later
Panjab survey by G.W. Leitner. If studies of the detailed data
pertaining to the innumerable crafts, technologies and
manufactures of this period, or for that matter of social
organisation were to be made, the conclusions in all probability
will be little different. On the other hand, the descriptions of life
and society provided by earlier European accounts (i.e. accounts
written prior to the onset of European dominance) of different
parts of India, and the data on Indian exports relating to this
earlier period (notwithstanding the political turmoil in certain
parts of India), on the whole leaves an impression of a society
which seems relatively prosperous and lively. The conclusion
that the decay noticed in the early 19th century and more so in
subsequent decades originated with European supremacy in
India, therefore, seems inescapable. The 1769-70 famine in
Bengal (when, according to British record, one-third of the
population actually perished), may be taken as a mere
forerunner of what was to come.
In the context of some historical dialectic, however, such a
decay might have been inevitable; perhaps, even necessary, and
to be deliberately induced. For instance, Karl Marx, as such no
friend of imperialism or capitalism, writing in 1853 was of the
view, that, ‘England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one
destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of the old
Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundation of
Western society in Asia.’^65 However, it is not India alone which