VIII
During this prolonged debate, the critical issue that was seldom
touched upon and about which in their various ways, the
Madras Presidency collectors, the reports of Adam, and the work
of Leitner provided a variety of clues, was how all these
educational institutions—the 1,00,000 schools in Bengal and
Bihar, and a ‘school in every village’ according to Munro and
others—were actually organised and maintained. For, it is
ridiculous to suppose that any system of such wide and
universal dimensions could ever have maintained itself without
the necessary conceptual and infrastructural supports over any
length of time.
Modern Indians tend to quote foreigners in most matters
reflecting on India’s present, or its past. One school of thought
uses all such foreign backing to show India’s primitiveness, the
barbaric, uncouth and what is termed ‘parochial’ nature of the
customs and manners of its people, and the ignorance,
oppressions and poverty which Indians are said to have always
suffered from. To them India for most of its past had lived at
what is termed, the ‘feudal’ stage or what in more recent Marxist
terminology is called the ‘system of Asiatic social organisms’. Yet,
to another school, India had always been a glorious land, with
minor blemishes, or accidents of history here and there; all in all
remaining a land of ‘Dharmic’ and benevolent rulers. For yet
others subscribing to the observations of the much-quoted
Charles Metcalfe, and Henry Maine, it has mostly been a happy
land of ‘village republics’.
Unfortunately, due to their British-oriented education, or
because of some deeper causes (like the scholastic and hair-
splitting tendency of Brahmanical learning), Indians have
become since the past century, too literal, too much caught up
with mere words and phrases. They have lost practically all
sense of the symbolic nature of what is said, or written.^79 It is
not surprising,