period. I am in correspondence with several educationists. Those
who have replied do support my view but do not produce
authority that would be accepted as proof. My prejudice or
presentiment still makes me cling to the statement I made at
Chatham House. I don’t want to write haltingly in Harijan. You
don’t want me merely to say that the proof I had in mind had
been challenged by you!’
There the matter ended as far as Gandhiji was concerned.
On 10 September 1939, however, after learning of Gandhiji’s
statement regarding the War in Europe, Hartog wrote him a very
grateful letter:
I cannot wait to express to you my profound gratitude,
shared, I am sure by an innumerable number of my fellow
countrymen, all over the world, for the attitude you have
taken up in regard to the present War at your interview
with the Viceroy, reported in the Times.
Hartog’s book of lectures led to much immediate writing in
India on the subject. Even a new edition of the complete Adam’s
Reports was published by the University of Calcutta. Yet, what
was written produced the same data and analysis all over again;
and, in the main, covered the same ground, and advanced more
or less the same arguments as had already been advanced by
K.T. Shah in his long letter to Philip Hartog in February 1932.^77
VII
The significance of what Gandhiji said at Chatham House in
October 1931 ought to have been understood not in the literal
way in which Philip Hartog did, but within the total context of
Mahatma Gandhi’s address, which attempted to reveal the
overall disruption and decline of Indian society and its
institutions under British rule. That a great decay had set in by
the 1820s, if not a few decades earlier, in the sphere of
education was admitted by the Madras Presidency survey, as
well as by W. Adam with regard to Bengal and Bihar. In 1822-
25, the number of those in ordinary schools was put at over
1,50,000 in the Madras Presidency. Evidently, the inference that
the number was appreciably, perhaps a great deal higher some
20 or 30 years earlier, cannot