were acquired ‘solely with a view to the transaction of business’,
that ‘nothing whatever is learnt except reading, and with the
exception of writing and a little arithmetic, the education of the
great majority goes no farther.’
The question of content is crucial. It is the evaluation of
content which led to indigenous education being termed ‘bad’
and hence to its dismissal; and, in Gandhiji’s phrase, to its
uprooting. Yet it was not ‘the mere reading and writing and a
little arithmetic’ which was of any consequence in such a
decision. For, school education in contemporary England, except
in the sphere of religious teaching, covered the same ground,
and probably, much less thoroughly. As mentioned earlier, the
average period of schooling in 1835 England was just about one
year, and even in 1851, only two. Further, as stated by A.E.
Dobbs, ‘in some country schools, writing was excluded for fear of
evil consequences.’
While the limitless British hunger for revenue—so forcefully
described by Campbell—starved the Indian system of the very re-
sources which it required to survive, its cultural and religious
content and structure provoked deliberate attempts aimed at its
total extermination. It was imperative to somehow uproot the
Indian indigenous system for the relatively undisturbed
maintenance and continuance of British rule. It is the same
imperative which decided Macaulay, Bentinck, etc., to
deliberately neglect large-scale school education—proposed by
men like Adam—till a viable system of Anglicised higher
education had first been established in the country.
In 1813, this bold intention was publicly and powerfully
expressed by William Wilberforce when he depicted Indians as
being ‘deeply sunk, and by their religious superstitions fast
bound, in the lowest depths of moral and social wretchedness.’^90
T.B. Macaulay expressed similar views, merely using different
imagery. He commented that the totality of Indian knowledge
and scholarship did not even equal the contents of ‘a single shelf
of a good European library’, and that all the historical
information contained in books written in Sanskrit was ‘less
valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridge-
ment used at preparatory schools in England.’^91 To Macaulay, all
Indian knowledge, if not despicable, was at least absurd: absurd
history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology.