British Legacy Of India Part 2

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“Every village had its schoolmaster, supported out of the public funds; in Bengal alone, before the coming of the British, there were some 80,000 native schools - one to every four hundred population. Instruction was given to him in the "Five Shastras" or sciences: grammar, arts and crafts, medicine, logic and philosophy. Finally the child was sent out into the world with the wise admonition that education came only one-fourth from the teacher, one-fourth from private study, one-fourth from one's fellows, and one-fourth from life.”

(Will Durant, Story of Civilization: Our Oriental Heritage, p.556-557).

EDUCATION IN PRE COLONIAL INDIA

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Teaching (in Pre British India) was done largely on a monitorial system, which was copied in England in the first few decades of the nineteenth century where it was known as the Madras system.

S. Nurullah and J.P. Naik, A History of Education in India, Macmillan, Bombay, 1951.http://www.ggdc.net/Maddison/articles/moghul_2.pdf


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..as late as 1820, "there are very few villages in which one or many public schools are not to be found...that the students learn in them all that is necessary to their ranks and wants...namely, reading, writing and accounts." Abbe J. A. Dubois (author of ‘Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies’)


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'This edition of mine and the translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India, .....it is the root of their religion and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has spring from it during the last three thousand years.'

Fredrich Max Mueller.http://www.gosai.com/chaitanya/saranagati/html/vedic-upanisads/india-indology_2.html

WESTERN INDOLOGIST: THE MOTIVE

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"India has been conquered once, but India must be conquered again and that second conquest should be a conquest by education…the ancient religion of India is doomed, and if Christianity does not step in, whose fault will it be?"

Fredrich Max Mueller.http://www.gosai.com/chaitanya/saranagati/html/vedic-upanisads/india-indology_2.html


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I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic…. I have read translations ……I have conversed with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues.….. I have never found one among them who

could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. .. all the historical information which has

been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859): On Empire and Education http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1833macaulay-india.html


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“We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect.”Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859): on Minute on Indianhttp://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/topic_4/macaulay.htm


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For many years under the British, only Christian missionaries or the British Government could own the printing media. http://www.indpride.com/Kum.%20B.%20Nivedita.html

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…that literacy in British India in 1911 was only 6%, in 1931 it was 8%, and by 1947 it had crawled to 11%....

….in 1935, only 4 in 10,000 were enrolled in universities or higher educational institutes. In a nation of then over 350 million people only 16,000 books (no circulation figures) were published in that year (i.e. 1 per 20,000).

The Colonial Legacy - Myths and Popular Beliefshttp://india_resource.tripod.com/colonial.html

LITERACY IN BRITISH RULED INDIA

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“Today (1931) India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago….. because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out.”

Mahatma Gandhi, at Chatham House, London, October 1931.

GANDHI ON LITERACY IN BRITISH RULED INDIA

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Mahatma Gandhi, wrote in the "Harijan”

"That Indian education made Indian students foreigners in their own country. The Radhakrishnan

Commission said in their Report (1950); "one of the serious complaints against the system of education which has prevailed in this country for over a century is that it neglected India's past, that it did not provide the Indian students with a knowledge of their own culture. It had produced in some cases the feeling that we are without roots, and what is worse, that our roots bind us to a world very different from that which surrounds us".

GANDHI ON LITERACY IN BRITISH RULED INDIA

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“Three universities were set up in 1857 in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, but they were merely examining bodies and did no teaching. Drop-out ratios were always very high. They ….. produced a group of graduates with a half-baked knowledge of English, but sufficiently Westernized to be alienated from their own culture…..the great mass of the population had no access to education and, at independence in 1947, 88 per cent were illiterate… at independence only a fifth of children were receiving any primary schooling.”

Prof. Maddison “The Economic and Social Impact of Colonial Rule in India” http://www.ivarta.com/columns/OL_060206.htm

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…the British built modern cities with modern conveniences for their administrative officers. But it should be noted that these were exclusive zones not intended for the "natives" to enjoy…


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… Consider that in 1911, 69 per cent of Bombay's population lived in one-room tenements (as against 6 per cent in London in the same year)… After the Second World War, 13 per cent of Bombay's population slept on the streets. As for sanitation, 10-15 tenements typically shared one water tap….


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“The single city of Manchester, in the supply of its inhabitants with the single article of water, has spent a larger sum of money than the East India Company has spent in the fourteen years from 1834 to 1848 in public works of every kind throughout the whole of its vast dominions.”John Bright in the House of Commons, June 24, 1858, The Colonial Legacy - Myths and Popular Beliefshttp://india_resource.tripod.com/colonial.html

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“The roads and tanks and canals which Hindu or Mussulman Governments constructed for the service of the nations and the good of the country have been suffered to fall into dilapidation; and now the want of the means of irrigation causes famines.”G. Thompson, "India and the Colonies," 1838, cited in The Colonial Legacy - Myths and Popular Beliefshttp://india_resource.tripod.com/colonial.html

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“How do we weigh smug claims about the life-saving benefits of steam transportation and modern grain markets when so many millions, especially in British India, died along railroad tracks or on the steps of grain depots?” Mike Davis, author of ‘Late Victorian Holocausts’ and political, activist.

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Railways will afford the means of diminishing the amount and the cost of the military establishments…... I know that the English millitocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. Works of Karl Marx: The Future Results of British Rule in IndiaLondon, Friday, July 22, 1853http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm

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"We, the English, ignorantly assumed that the ancient, long civilized people of India, were a race of barbarians who had never known what justice was until we came among them, and that the best thing we could do for them was to upset all their institutions as fast as we could, among them their judicial system, and give them instead a copy of our legal models at home... John Dickinson, in his book "Government of India Under a Bureaucracy"http://www.hinduwisdom.info/European_Imperialism.htm

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"We are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race in India.”

Lord Mayo (1822 - 1872)http://www.hinduwisdom.info/European_Imperialism.htm

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Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) in A Hundred Years of Rule

“The chronic want of food and water, the lack of sanitation and medical help, the neglect of means of communication, the poverty of educational provision, the all pervading spirit of depression that I have myself seen to prevail after over a hundred years of British rule make me despair of its beneficence.”

The Manchester Guardian, Friday 2 October 1936.http://www.hinduwisdom.info/European_Imperialism.htm

TAGORE ON BRITISH RULE

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….For all the irrigation projects, the great engineering achievements and the famous imperviousness to bribes of the officers of the Indian Civil Service, the Raj (British) nevertheless presided over the destruction of India's political, cultural and artistic self-confidence as well as the impoverishment of the Indian economy. Why India's Rise is Business As UsualBy William Dalrymple, Aug. 02, 2007http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/printout/0,29239,1649060_1649046_1649026,00.html

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“It might have been supposed that the building of 30,000 miles of railways would have brought a measure of prosperity to

India. But these railways were built not for India but for England; not for the benefit of the Hindu, but for the purpose of the British army and British Trade. …. Their greatest revenues come, not as in America, from the transport of goods (for the British trader controls the rates), but from the third-class passengers – the Hindus; but these passengers are herded into almost barren coaches like animals bound for the slaughter, twenty or more in one compartment.

American Historian Will Durant, in his book - A Case For India: http://www.hinduwisdom.info/European_Imperialism.htm

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The railroads are entirely in European hands, and the Government refuse to appoint even one Hindu to the Railway Board. The railways lose money year after year, and are helped by the Government out of the revenues of the people. All the loses are borne by the people, all the gains are gathered by the trader. So much for the railways.

American Historian Will Durant, in his book - A Case For India: http://www.hinduwisdom.info/European_Imperialism.htm

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Winston Churchill

“India is merely a geographical expression.

It is no more a single country than the Equator.”

India: From Midnight to Millennium, by Shashi Tharoorhttp://www.math.iitb.ac.in/~jkv/readings/india.html

BRITISH VIEW OF INDIA AS A NATION

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“The first and most essential thing to be learned about India, is that there is not and never was an India possessing according to European ideas any sort of unity, physical, social, political, or religious: no Indian nation, no people of India of which we hear so much”. Sir John Strachey (1823-1907), British Indian civilian, on the opening page of his well-known book, “India”.

BRITISH VIEW OF INDIA AS A NATION

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….Every Anglo-Indian publicist assiduously proclaims that India is not a country but a collection of countries, which have as little or as much in common with one another, either in race or history.....The orthodox official view is, in any case, there never was such an animal as Indian, until the British rulers of the country commenced so generously to manufacture him with the help of their schools and their colleges, their courts and their camps, their law and their administration.” Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932) in, The Soul of India, 1911. p. 84-98

INDIAN VIEW OF INDIA AS A NATION

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“…Bharatvarsha is not physical name, but a distinct and unmistakable historic name...... The limit of Bharatvarsha extended in those days even much further than the present limits of India. The unity of India was neither racial nor religious, nor political nor administrative. It was a peculiar type of unity, which may, perhaps, be best described as cultural.”Bipin Chandra Pal (1858-1932) in, The Soul of India, 1911. p. 84-98


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“It is about time we recognize that we are not a nation in the European sense of the term, that is, we are not a fragment of a civilization claiming to be a nation on the basis of accidents of history which is what every major European nation is. We are a people primarily by virtue of the continuity and coherence of our civilization which has survived all shocks.”

Girilal Jain, (1924-1993), Former Editor of The Times of India.


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James Ramsay MacDonald (1866 – 1937), Prime Minister of the UK.

“India from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, from the Bay of Bengal to Bombay, is naturally the area of a single government. One has only to look at the map

to see how geography has fore-ordained an Indian Empire. Its vastness does not obscure its oneness; its variety does not hide from view its unity…..Political and religious traditions have also welded it into one Indian consciousness. This spiritual unity dates from very early times in Indian culture….The realms of Chandragupta and his grandson Asoka embraced practically the whole peninsula…

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“India circled by seas and mountains, is indisputably a geographical unit, and as such rightly designated by one name. Her type of civilization, too, has many features which differentiate it from that of all other regions of the world; while they are common to the whole country in a degree sufficient to justify its treatment as a unit in the history of the social, religious, and intellectual development of mankind.”

Vincent Smith (1848-1920), historian, in his book Early History of India.

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James Ramsey MacDonald (1866 -1937), Prime Minister, UK

"The Hindu from his traditions and religion regards India not only as a political unit naturally the subject of one sovereignty, but as the outward embodiment, as the temple - nay even as the Goddess Mother of his spiritual culture. "India and Hinduism are organically related as body and soul.”

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….the idea of a nation-state was an 18th century creation of the West. It is the cultural identity that has helped India stay together. The British did not do it for the love of India. It was here that the West started to colonize what was to become the Third World, a shameless process of systematic exploitation without any moral or religious justification.

Guy Sorman- The Genius of India ('Le Genie de l'Inde'), p. 197.