actually sent was much less detailed. In it, he actually—to the
extent a collector could—came out with the statement that the
degeneration of education ‘is ascribable to the gradual but
general impoverishment of the country’; that ‘the means of the
manufacturing classes have been greatly diminished by the
introduction of our own European manufactures’; that ‘the
transfer of the capital of the country from the native government
and their officers, who liberally expanded it in India, to
Europeans, restricted by law from employing it even temporarily
in India, and daily draining it from the land, has likewise tended
to this effect’; that ‘in many villages where formerly there were
schools, there are now none’; and that ‘learning, though it may
proudly decline to sell its stores, had never flourished in any
country except under the encouragement of the ruling power,
and the countenance and support once given to science in this
part of India has long been withheld.’ In elaboration, he added
that ‘of the 533 institutions for education now existing in this
district, I am ashamed to say not one now derives any support
from the State’; but that ‘there is no doubt, that in former times,
especially under the Hindoo Governments very large grants, both
in money and in land, were issued for the support of learning’;
that the ‘considerable yeomiahs or grants of money, now paid to
brahmins in this district...may, I think, be traced to this source’.
He concluded with the observation that:
Though it did not consist with the dignity of learning to re-
ceive from her votaries hire, it has always in India been
deemed the duty of government to evince to her the highest
respect, and to grant to her those emoluments which she
could not, consistently with her character, receive from
other sources; the grants issued by former governments,
on such occasions, contained therefore no unbecoming
stipulations or conditions. They all purport to flow from the
free bounty of the ruling power, merely to aid the
maintenance of some holy or learned man, or to secure his
prayers for the State. But they were almost universally
granted to learned or religious persons, who maintained a
school for one or more of the sciences, and taught therein
gratuitously; and though not expressed in the deed itself,
the duty of continuing such gratuitous instruction was
certainly implied in all such grants.^89