On the Education of the People of India/Chapter 7
CHAP. VII.
The Political Tendency of the different Systems of Education in use in India.
There can be no dispute as to what our duty as the rulers of India requires us to do. But it has been said, and may be said again, that whatever our duty may be, it is not our policy to enlighten the natives of India; that the sooner they grow to man’s estate, the sooner they will be able to do without us; and that by giving them knowledge, we are giving them power, of which they will make the first use against ourselves.
If our interest and our duty were really opposed to each other, every good man, every honest Englishman, would know which to prefer. Our national experience has given us too deep a sense of the true ends of government, to allow us to think of carrying on the administration of India except for the benefit of the people of India. A nation which made so great a sacrifice to redeem a few hundred thousand negroes from slavery, would shudder at the idea of keeping a hundred millions of Indians in the bondage of ignorance, with all its frightful consequences, by means of a political system supported by the revenue taken from the Indians themselves. Whether we govern India ten or a thousand years, we will do our duty by it: we will look, not to the probable duration of our trust, but to the satisfactory discharge of it, so long as it shall please God to continue it to us. Happily, however, we are not on this occasion called upon to make any effort of disinterested magnanimity. Interest and duty are never really separated in the affairs of nations, any more than they are in those of individuals; and in this case they are indissolubly united, as a very slight examination will suffice to show.
The Arabian or Mahommedan system is based on the exercise of power and the indulgence of passion. Pride, ambition, the love of rule, and of sensual enjoyment, are called in to the aid of religion. The earth is the inheritance of the Faithful: all besides are infidel usurpers, with whom no measures are to be kept, except what policy may require. Universal dominion belongs to the Mahommedans by Divine right. Their religion obliges them to establish their predominance by the sword; and those who refuse to conform are to be kept in a state of slavish subjection. The Hindu system, although less fierce and aggressive than the Mahommedan, is still more exclusive: all who are not Hindus are impure outcasts, fit only for the most degraded employments; and, of course, utterly disqualified for the duties of government, which are reserved for the military, under the guidance of the priestly caste. Such is the political tendency of the Arabic and Sanskrit systems of learning. Happily for us, these principles exist in their full force only in books written in difficult languages, and in the minds of a few learned men; and they are very faintly reflected in the feelings and opinions of the body of the people. But what will be thought of that plan of national education which would revive them and make them popular; would be perpetually reminding the Mahommedans that we are infidel usurpers of some of the fairest realms of the Faithful, and the Hindus, that we are unclean beasts, with whom it is a sin and a shame to have any friendly intercourse. Our bitterest enemies could not desire more than that we should propagate systems of learning which excite the strongest feelings of human nature against ourselves.
The spirit of English literature, on the other hand, cannot but be favorable to the English connection. Familiarly acquainted with us by means of our literature, the Indian youth almost cease to regard us as foreigners. They speak of our great men with the same enthusiasm as we do. Educated in the same way, interested in the same objects, engaged in the same pursuits with ourselves, they become more English than Hindus, just as the Roman provincials became more Romans than Gauls or Italians. What is it that makes us what we are, except living and conversing with English people, and imbibing English thoughts and habits of mind? They do so too: they daily converse with the best and wisest Englishmen through the medium of their works; and form, perhaps, a higher idea of our nation than if their intercourse with it were of a more personal kind. Admitted behind the scenes, they become acquainted with the principles which guide our proceedings; they see how sincerely we study the benefit of India in the measures of our administration; and from violent opponents, or sullen conformists, they are converted into zealous and intelligent co-operators with us. They learn to make a proper use of the freedom of discussion which exists under our government, by observing how we use it ourselves; and they cease to think of violent remedies, because they are convinced that there is no indisposition on our part to satisfy every real want of the country. Dishonest and bad rulers alone derive any advantage from the ignorance of their subjects. As long as we study the benefit of India in our measures, the confidence and affection of the people will increase in proportion to their knowledge of us.
But this is not all. There is a principle in human nature which impels all mankind to aim at improving their condition: every individual has his plan of happiness: every community has its ideas of securing the national honour and prosperity. This powerful and universal principle, in some shape or other, is in a state of constant activity; and if it be not enlisted on our side, it must be arrayed against us. As long as the natives are left to brood over their former independence, their sole specific for improving their condition is, the immediate and total expulsion of the English. A native patriot of the old school has no notion of any thing beyond this: his attention has never been called to any other mode of restoring the dignity and prosperity of his country. It is only by the infusion of European ideas, that a new direction can be given to the national views. The young men, brought up at our seminaries, turn with contempt from the barbarous despotisms under which their ancestors groaned, to the prospect of improving their national institutions on the English model. Instead of regarding us with dislike, they court our society, and look upon us as their natural protectors and benefactors: the summit of their ambition is, to resemble us; and, under our auspices, they hope to elevate the character of their countrymen, and to prepare them by gradual steps for the enjoyment of a well-regulated and therefore a secure and a happy independence. So far from having the idea of driving the English into the sea uppermost in their minds, they have no notion of any improvement but such as rivets their connection with the English, and makes them dependent on English protection and instruction. In the re-establishment of the old native governments they see only the destruction of their most cherished hopes, and a state of great personal insecurity for themselves. The existing connection between two such distant countries as England and India, cannot, in the nature of things, be permanent: no effort of policy can prevent the natives from ultimately regaining their independence. But there are two ways of arriving at this point. One of these is, through the medium of revolution; the other, through that of reform. In one, the forward movement is sudden and violent; in the other, it is gradual and peaceable. One must end in a complete alienation of mind and separation of interests between ourselves and the natives; the other in a permanent alliance, founded on mutual benefit and good-will.
The only means at our disposal for preventing the one and securing the other class of results is, to set the natives on a process of European improvement, to which they are already sufficiently inclined. They will then cease to desire and aim at independence on the old Indian footing. A sudden change will then be impossible; and a long continuance of our present connection with India will even be assured to us. A Mahratta or Mahommedan despotism might be re-established in a month; but a century would scarcely suffice to prepare the people for self-government on the European model. The political education of a nation must be a work of time; and while it is in progress, we shall be as safe as it will be possible for us to be. The natives will not rise against us, because we shall stoop to raise them: there will be no reaction, because there will be no pressure: the national activity will be fully and harmlessly employed in acquiring and diffusing European knowledge, and in naturalising European institutions. The educated classes, knowing that the elevation of their country on these principles can only be worked out under our protection, will naturally cling to us. They even now do so. There is no class of our subjects to whom we are so thoroughly necessary as those whose opinions have been cast in the English mould: they are spoiled for a purely native regime; they have every thing to fear from the premature establishment of a native government; their education would mark them out for persecution: the feelings of independence, the literary and scientific pursuits, the plans of improvement in which they indulged under our government, must be exchanged for the servility and prostration of mind which characterise an Asiatic court. This class is at present a small minority, but it is continually receiving accessions from the youth who are brought up at the different English seminaries. It will in time become the majority; and it will then be necessary to modify the political institutions to suit the increased intelligence of the people, and their capacity for self-government.
The change will thus be peaceably and gradually effected: there will be no struggle, no mutual exasperation; the natives will have independence, after first learning how to make a good use of it: we shall exchange profitable subjects for still more profitable allies. The present administrative connection benefits families, but a strict commercial union between the first manufacturing and the first producing country in the world, would be a solid foundation of strength and prosperity to our whole nation. If this course be adopted, there will, properly speaking, be no separation. A precarious and temporary relation will almost imperceptibly pass into another far more durable and beneficial. Trained by us to happiness and independence, and endowed with our learning and our political institutions, India will remain the proudest monument of British benevolence; and we shall long continue to reap, in the affectionate attachment of the people, and in a great commercial intercourse with their splendid country,[1] the fruit of that liberal and enlightened policy which suggested to us this line of conduct.
In following this course we should be trying no new experiment. The Romans at once civilised the nations of Europe, and attached them to their rule by Romanising them; or, in other words, by educating them in the Roman literature and arts, and teaching them to emulate their conquerors instead of opposing them. Acquisitions made by superiority in war, were consolidated by superiority in the arts of peace; and the remembrance of the original violence was lost in that of the benefits which resulted from it. The provincials of Italy, Spain, Africa, and Gaul, having no ambition except to imitate the Romans, and to share their privileges with them, remained to the last faithful subjects of the empire; and the union was at last dissolved, not by internal revolt, but by the shock of external violence, which involved conquerors and conquered in one common overthrow. The Indians will, I hope, soon stand in the same position towards us in which we once stood towards the Romans. Tacitus informs us, that it was the policy of Julius Agricola to instruct the sons of the leading men among the Britons in the literature and science of Rome, and to give them a taste for the refinements of Roman civilisation.[2] We all know how well this plan answered. From being obstinate enemies, the Britons soon became attached and confiding friends; and they made more strenuous efforts to retain the Romans, than their ancestors had done to resist their invasion. It will be a shame to us if, with our greatly superior advantages, we also do not make our premature departure be dreaded as a calamity. It must not be said in after ages, that “the groans of the Britons” were elicited by the breaking up of the Roman empire; and the groans of the Indians by the continued existence of the British.
We may also take a lesson from the Mahommetans, whose conquests have been so extensive and so permanent. From the Indian Archipelago to Portugal, Arabic was established as the language of religion, of literature, and of law; the vernacular tongues were saturated with it; and the youth of the conquered countries soon began to vie with their first instructors in every branch of Mahommedan learning. A polite education was understood to mean a Mahommedan education; and the most cultivated and active minds were every where engaged on the side of the Mahommedan system. The Emperor Akbar followed up this policy in India, Arabicised Persian was adopted as the language of his dynasty; and the direction thereby given to the national sympathies and ideas greatly contributed to produce that feeling of veneration for the family which has long survived the loss of its power. This feeling, which in Europe would be called loyalty, is common to those who have been brought up in the old learning, but is very rarely found in connection with an English education. The policy of our predecessors, although seldom worthy of imitation, was both very sound and very successful in this respect. If we adopt the same policy, it will be more beneficial to the natives in proportion as English contains a greater fund of true knowledge than Arabic and Persian: and it will be more beneficial to us in proportion as the natives will study English more zealously and extensively than they did Arabic and Persian, and will be more completely changed by it in feeling and opinion.
These views were not worked out by reflection, but were forced on me by actual observation and experience. I passed some years in parts of India, where, owing to the comparative novelty of our rule and to the absence of any attempt to alter the current of native feeling, the national habits of thinking remained unchanged. There, high and low, rich and poor, had only one idea of improving their political condition. The upper classes lived upon the prospect of regaining their former pre-eminence; and the lower, upon that of having the avenues to wealth and distinction re-opened to them by the re-establishment of a native government. Even sensible and comparatively well affected natives had no notion that there was any remedy for the existing depressed state of their nation except the sudden and absolute expulsion of the English. After that, I resided for some years in Bengal, and there I found quite another set of ideas prevalent among the educated natives. Instead of thinking of cutting the throats of the English, they were aspiring to sit with them on the grand jury or on the bench of magistrates. Instead of speculating on Punjab or Nepaulese politics, they were discussing the advantages of printing and free discussion, in oratorical English speeches, at debating societies which they had established among themselves. The most sanguine dimly looked forward in the distant future to the establishment of a national representative assembly as the consummation of their hopes all of them being fully sensible that these plans of improvement could only be worked out with the aid and protection of the British Government by the gradual improvement of their countrymen in knowledge and morality; and that the re-establishment of a Mahommedan or any other native regime would at once render all such views impracticable and ridiculous. No doubt, both these schemes of national improvement suppose the termination of the English rule: but while that event is the beginning of one, it is only the conclusion of the other. In one, the sudden and violent overthrow of our government is a necessary preliminary: in the other, a long continuance of our administration, and the gradual withdrawal of it as the people become fit to govern themselves, are equally indispensable.
Our native army is justly regarded as the pillar of our Indian empire; and no plan of benefiting either the natives or ourselves can be worth anything which does not rest on the supposition that this pillar will remain unbroken. It is therefore of importance to inquire how this essential element of power is likely to be affected by the course of policy which has been described. The Indian army is made up of two entirely distinct parts; the English officers, and the native officers and men. The former will, under any circumstances, stand firm to their national interests: the latter will be animated by the feelings of the class of society from which they are drawn, except so far as those feelings may be modified by professional interests and habits. The native officers rise from the ranks; and the ranks are recruited from the labouring class, which is the last that will be affected by any system of national education. Not one in five hundred of the boys who are instructed in the Zillah seminaries, will enlist in the army. If the Sepoys are educated anywhere, it must be in the village schools; and the organisation of those schools will be the concluding measure of the series. The instruction given to the labouring class can never be more than merely elementary. They have not leisure for more. But, such as it is, they will be indebted for it to us; and as it will form part of a system established and superintended by ourselves, we shall take care that it is of a kind calculated to inspire feelings of attachment to the British connection. After this, the young men who enlist in the army will become imbued with the military spirit, and moulded by the habits of military obedience. I leave to others to judge whether this training is calculated to make better and more attached, or worse and more disaffected, soldiers than the state of entire neglect, as regards their moral and intellectual improvement, in which the whole class are at present left. I never heard that the education given in the national schools unfitted the common people of England for the ranks of the army; although the inducements to honourable and faithful service, which are open to them after they enter the army, are much inferior to those which are held out to our Sepoys.
Religious instruction forms no part of the object of the Government seminaries. It would be impossible for the State to interfere at all with native education on any other condition; and this is now so well understood, that religious jealousy offers no obstruction to our success. The general favour with which English education is regarded, and the multitudes who flock to our schools, prove this to be the case. The Brahmins, it is true, ruled supreme over the old system. It was moulded for the express purpose of enabling them to hold the minds of men in thraldom; and ages had fixed the stamp of solidity upon it. Upon this ground they were unassailable. But popular education, through the medium of the English language, is an entirely new element, with which they are incapable of dealing. It did not enter into the calculation of the founders of their system; and they have no machinery to oppose to it. Although they have been priest-ridden for ages, the people of India are, for all purposes of improvement, a new, and more than a new, people. Their appetite for knowledge has been whetted by their long-compelled fast; and aware of the superiority of the new learning, they devour it more greedily than they ever would have done Sanskrit lore, even if that lore had not been withheld from them: they bring to the task, vacant minds and excited curiosity, absence of prejudice, and an inextinguishable thirst for information. They cannot return under the dominion of the Brahmins. The spell has been for ever broken. Hinduism is not a religion which will bear examination. It is so entirely destitute of any thing like evidence, and is identified with so many gross immoralities and physical absurdities, that it gives way at once before the light of European science. Mahommedanism is made of tougher materials; yet, even a Mahommedan youth who has received an English education is a very different person from one who has been taught according to the perfect manner of the law of his fathers. As this change advances, India will become quite another country: nothing more will be heard of excitable religious feelings: priestcraft will no longer be able to work by ignorance: knowledge and power will pass from a dominant caste to the people themselves; the whole nation will co-operate with us in reforming institutions, the possibility of altering which could never have been contemplated if events had taken any other course; and many causes will concur to introduce a more wholesome state of morals, which, of all the changes that can take place, is the one in which the public welfare is most concerned.
There has been a time at which each of the other branches of the public service has particularly commanded attention. The commercial, the political, the judicial, the revenue departments, have in turn been the subject of special consideration; and decisive steps have been taken to put them on a satisfactory footing. My object will be sufficiently attained if I succeed in producing a conviction that the time has arrived for taking up the question of public instruction in the same spirit, and with the same determination to employ whatever means may be requisite for accomplishing the object in view. The absence of any sensible proof that increased taxation is attended with any proportionate benefit to India, has long been extremely disheartening both to the natives and to the European public officers serving in that country.[3] The entire abolition of the transit duties, and the establishment of an adequate system of public instruction, would furnish this proof, and would excite the warmest gratitude of every body who from any cause feels interested in the welfare of India. The interest of a single million sterling [4], in addition to what is already expended, would be sufficient to answer every present purpose as far as education is concerned. Even on the narrowest view of national interest, a million could not be better invested. It would ensure the moral and intellectual emancipation of the people of India, and would render them at once attached to our rule and worthy of our alliance.
- ↑ The present trade with India can give no idea of what it is capable of becoming: the productive powers of the country are immense: the population of British India alone, without including the native States, is more than three times that of all the rest of the British Empire. By governing well, and promoting to the utmost of our power the growth of wealth, intelligence, and enterprise in its vast population, we shall be able to make India a source of wealth and strength to our nation in time to come with which nothing in our past history furnishes any parallel.
- ↑ The words of Tacitus are, “Jam vero principum filios liberalibus artibus crudire, et ingenia Britannorum studiis Galloriun anteferre, ut qui modo linguam Romanam abnuebant, eloquentiam concupiscerent. Inde etiam habitus nostri honor et frequens toga. Paulatimque discessum ad delinimenta vitiorum, porticus et bal- nea et conviviorum elegantiam; idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur cum pars servitutis esset.”
- ↑ A large proportion of the land in the Bengal and Agra Presidencies is held tax-free; but, although nothing can be more unreasonable than that persons who benefit by the protection of the Government should contribute nothing to its support, and throw the whole burden on the rest, it is impossible at present to induce the natives to view the subject in this light. Their invariable answer is, that while it is certain that some will be worse off, they see no reason to suppose that they will themselves be better off if the exempted lands are brought under contribution.
- ↑ The Parliamentary assignment of ten thousand pounds a year still remains to be accounted for to the Committee of public instruction, from July 1813 to May 1821, with compound interest up to the date of payment.