Dharampal and leaves of his ‘Beautiful Tree’ : Vanam Jwala Narasimha Rao

Dharampal and leaves of his ‘Beautiful Tree’

Vanam Jwala Narasimha Rao

The Pioneer (27-05-2020)

A WhatsApp message from my 74-year-old relative-friend, and a brilliant non-practicing attorney, TVS Rao, quoting ‘Glorious India’, revealed interesting and astonishing facts about India in the field of education. This triggered interest in me to further probe about the genesis of those harsh realities and connected facts. The result is knowing about the book ‘Beautiful tree’ written by Dharampal.   

The WhatsApp message among other things mentioned that, the then Governor of Madras Presidency, Thomas Munro, in March 1826 submitted a report to the British Government in India about the existence of one primary school for every thousand population in India. The report also mentioned that, only 24% of students in these schools comprised of Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas whereas the so-called Shudras constituted a Lion’s share of 65%! That shattered the general impression widespread then, that the Brahmins dominated the education field.

Later the Britishers conducted a nationwide survey to confirm the report. They wondered to find that traditionally every village temple was sponsoring a school, Gurukul or Mutt. On an average 35% of the revenue free land in a village belonged to the temple. The temple rituals, festivals, fee for the teachers were paid out of this income from the land. Apart from this, the village temples served as nuclei of important social, economic, artistic and intellectual functions. They were the library for not only Scriptures, Vedas and Upanishads but also local literature inscribed on palm leaves.

Britishers found that sending a child on the ‘fifth day of the fifth month of fifth year’ was widely believed to be an auspicious day in those days. Some temples even provided ‘Anna Prasad’ to the students. Every family used to send a boy for at least three years till he learnt to read, write and do basic calculation. Subsequently he would learn the trade of his family tradition. Girls were normally taught at homes.

Then came Thomas Macaulay who completely destroyed the age-old Indian Education System. Britishers introduced English education system in high schools. The fee was high and only few well to do families could afford it. The literacy rate of India dropped beyond expectations.

            ‘Beautiful Tree’ was a book written by Dharampal on this subject. Volume 3 in the book contains a chapter on indigenous education in the eighteenth century in India.  He took up a job in British Library just to unearth the survey report or Britishers. When he finally found the hidden report, he wrote the book. Essentially, Britishers found the education system of India to be a ‘Beautiful Tree’. So, they found out the roots of this tree and uprooted it!

            Dharampal who lived between 1922 and 2006 was a great Gandhian thinker, historian and political philosopher from India. His pioneering historical research, conducted intensively over a decade, led to the publication of works that have since become classics in the field of Indian studies. His major work entitled ‘The Beautiful Tree’, the Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century published in 1983, provides evidence from extensive early British administrators’ reports of the widespread prevalence of educational institutions in many parts of India like the Bengal and Madras Presidencies as well as in the Punjab.

The Beautiful Tree completely demolished the myth that the Brahmins kept all the education for their own caste, and that Shudras were kept in darkness and illiteracy. Yet, the myth is still repeated. It is not enough to unearth the truth, it also has to be broadcast, and nobody should get away with pretending it isn't there.

In the introduction to the book it was mentioned that: the situation in India in 1800 is certainly not inferior to what obtained in England then; and in many respects Indian schooling seems to have been much more extensive (and, it should be remembered, that it is a greatly damaged and disorganised India that one is referring to). The content of studies was better than what was then studied in England. The duration of study was more prolonged. The method of school teaching was superior and it is this very method which is said to have greatly helped the introduction of popular education in England but which had prevailed in India for centuries.

School attendance, especially in the districts of the Madras Presidency, even in the decayed state of the period 1822-25, was proportionately far higher than the numbers in all variety of schools in England in 1800. The conditions under which teaching took place in the Indian schools were less dingy and more natural. The teachers in the Indian schools were generally more dedicated and sober than in the English versions.

The only aspect, and certainly a very important one, where Indian institutional education seems to have lagged behind was with regard to the education of girls. Accounts of education in India do often state that the absence of girls in schools was explained, however, by the fact that most of their education took place in the home.

Some decades after Dharampal’s work was published, James Tooley a British educationist was given a copy of “The Beautiful Tree” by an old book vendor in the old city of Hyderabad. While researching private schools in India for the World Bank, and worried he was doing little to help the poor, Tooley wandered into the slums of Hyderabad's Old City.

Shocked to find it overflowing with tiny, parent funded schools filled with energized students, he set out to discover if schools like these could help achieve universal education. That opened up new doors for Tooley who was already working on cost-effective quality education with specific focus on the developing countries. The result was his book titled “The beautiful tree: a personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves” published in 2009. Tooley started working on how the old educational system in India was financed. He also worked simultaneously on how educational system evolved in Great Britain.

In his preface to the book, Dharampal mentioned that a major part of the documents reproduced in the book pertain to the Madras Presidency Indigenous Education Survey. The Beautiful Tree is not being presented with a view to decry British rule. Rather, it is the continuation of an effort to comprehend, to the extent it is possible for this author, through material of this kind relating to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the reality of the India of this period: its society, its infra-structure, its manners and institutions, their strengths and weaknesses.

An attempt has been made in the preface to situate the information on the indigenous Indian education of the period in its temporal context and, with that in view, brief mention is made of the state of education in England until the beginning of the nineteenth century.

According to the author Dharampal, the title of this book has been taken from the speech which Mahatma Gandhi had made at Chatham House, London, on 20 October, 1931. He had said: “the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and the, ‘beautiful tree’ perished.