could ill afford. Regarding the former, he stated that ‘if I could
possibly have my way, we should get rid of three-quarters of the
military expenditure.’ Regarding civil expenditure he gave an
instance of what he meant: ‘Here the Prime Minister gets fifty
times, the average income; the Viceroy in India gets five
thousand times the average income.’ He went on to add: ‘From
this one example you can work out for yourselves what this civil
expenditure also means to India.’
Gandhiji’s observation on education emphasized two main
points: (i) ‘that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a
hundred years ago’; and (ii) that ‘the British administrators’,
instead of looking after education and other matters which had
existed, ‘began to root them out. They scratched the soil and
began to look at the root, and left the root like that and the
beautiful tree perished.’ He stated all this with conviction and a
sense of authority. He said that he was ‘without fear’ of his
‘figures being challenged successfully.’
The challenge came immediately, however, from Sir Philip
Hartog, a founder of the School of Oriental Studies, London,^69 a
former vice-chancellor of the University of Dacca and member
and chairman of several educational committees on India set up
by the British between 1918 and 1930. After questioning
Gandhiji at the meeting, a long correspondence ensued between
them during the next 5-6 weeks, ending with an hour long
interview which Philip Hartog had with the Mahatma. In the
interview, Philip Hartog was referred to some of the sources
which Gandhiji had relied on, including two articles from Young
India of December 1920 by Daulat Ram Gupta: (i) ‘The Decline of
Mass Education in India,’ and (ii) ‘How Indian Education was
crushed in the Panjab.’ These articles were largely based on
Adam’s reports and G.W. Leitner’s book and some other officially
published material from the Panjab, Bombay and Madras.
These, however, did not seem sufficient proof to Philip Hartog,
and he repeatedly insisted that Gandhiji should withdraw the
statement he had made at the Chatham House meeting.
Gandhiji promised that after his return to India, he would look
for such material which Hartog could treat as substantiating
what Gandhiji had said, adding that ‘if I find that I cannot
support the statement made by me at Chatham House, I will give
my retraction much wider publicity than the Chatham House
speech could ever attain.’