the present work. The reports, while never sufficiently analysed, have
often been quoted in most works on the history of education in India.
- W. Adam: Ibid, pp.6-7. Incidentally the observation that every village
had a school was nothing peculiar to Adam. As mentioned earlier, many
others before him had made similar observations, including Thomas
Munro in his evidence to a House of Commons committee. Munro had
then observed that ‘if civilization is to become an article of trade’ between
England and India, the former ‘will gain by the import cargo.’ As
symptomatic of this high state of Indian civilisation, he also referred to
‘schools established in every village for teaching, reading, writing and
arithmetic.’ When Thomas Munro made this statement he already had
had 30 years of intensive Indian experience. (House of Commons Papers:
1812-13, Vol .7, p.131). - See Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: some
contemporary European accounts, pp.143-63, for an account of this old
method. - This, as may be noticed, was quite at variance with the Madras
Presidency districts where Persian was not only studied little, but the
students of it were mainly Muslims. Interestingly, Adam mentions
(p.149) that amongst the Muslims ‘when a child...is four years, four
months, and four days old’, he, or she is on that day usually admitted to
school. - History of Indigenous Education in the Panjab since Annexation and in
1882 (Published 1883, Reprinted, Patiala, 1973). - The idea of their being divinely ordained was really a much older
English assumption. In A Brief Description of New York Formerly called
New-Netherlands, published in 1670, referring to the indigenous people
in that part of North America, Daniel Denton observes: ‘It is to be
admired, how strangely they have decreast by the Hand of God, since the
English first settling of those parts; for since my time, where there were
six towns, they are reduced to two small villages, and it hath been
generally observed, that where the English come to settle, a Divine Hand
makes way for them, by removing or cutting off the Indians either by
wars one with the other, or by some raging mortal Disease.’ (Reprint
1902 p.45) - See letter of Dr H. Scott to Sir Joseph Banks, President, Royal
Society, London, dated 7.1.1790 in Indian Science and Technology in the
Eighteenth Century, p.265. - First published in New York Daily Tribune, August 8, 1853; also
recently quoted by Iu.I. Semenov ‘Socio-economic Formations and World
History,’ in Soviet and Western Anthropology, edited by Ernest Gellner,
- Current Anthropology, Volume 7, No. 4, October 1966, pp.395-449,
Estimating Aboriginal American Population, by Henry F. Dobyns. - Writing as early as 1804, William Bentinck, the young Governor of
the Madras Presidency, wrote to the President of the Board of Control,
Lord Castlereagh, that ‘we have rode the country too hard, and the
consequence is that it is in the most lamentable poverty.’ (Nottingham
University: Bentinck Papers: Pw Jb 722). In 1857-58 a military officer
wrote to Governor General Canning, ‘it may be truly said that the
revenue of India has hitherto been levied at the point of the bayonet’ and
considered this to be the major cause of the Mutiny. (Leeds: Canning
Papers: Military Secretary’s Papers: Misc. No.289). - International Affairs, London, November 1931, pp.721-739; also
Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol.48, pp.193-206.