omit Madras and Allahabad?] should be left free to open post-graduate classes and undertake research in every possible branch of human learning, without waiting for the economic development of our country and the wider extension of English among our people, (c) that both these things should be done out of the public purse, in contemptuous disregard of the state of our national finance, the needs of elementary and secondary education [and I may add, sanitation], and the paucity of the present private donors to our universities; and (d) that our existing high schools and colleges should be denied pecuniary support and left in their present state of inefficiency, till all the demands of the “research” universities are satisfied.
If so, Mr Mitra’s letter only reveals what was probably unknown to your readers before, the existence of a Micawberian school of thought among the temporary servants of the Calcutta University (post-graduate department). We here have an airy comparison of India with England—the immense size and population of our country, the small size of England, the large number of the universities in Great Britain, and the wide range of their activity,—but all this in blissful ignorance of the fact that the average national income in India is only one twenty-second of that in England. According to Mr. Mitra, state expenditure on the universities must depend on the country’s population and not on their wealth, nor on their preparedness to profit by higher and specialised teaching in a foreign tongue. The result of such Micawberian finance would be national bankruptcy and the revolt of the masses against a selfish parasite bhadralog class, monopolising the good things of the State.
Again, Mr. Mitra talks glibly of England, forgetting that the university problem there is different from that of India today, because there (i) the highest classes are taught and examined in their mother-tongue and (ii) the English secondary schools are (in most cases) so efficient and well-endowed that before the war-time rise of prices they hardly needed State aid, while the universities were not so well off. In India, on the other hand, a sound knowledge of a foreign tongue (English) is indispensably necessary to enable our boys to follow college lectures or undertake research (where English books and journals have to be consulted and the result written in English), and our schools are at present deplorably unable to teach English well and to give a thorough general education. Our attempt to imitate the universities of England at present would end in disaster to the true education of our people.
For instance, when an M. A., and P. R. S. (not in Chemistry or Botany or Sanskrit), in a carefully revised and corrected MS contribution sent to the press spells ‘caught’ as cought, ‘new-fangled’ as New-Fongled, makes a mess of the definite article, and writes “It is doubtful how little could have been accomplished, say at Calcutta, if the sound optimism of Micawber had Not deserted him,”— then one is inclined to exclaim in admiration, “Here is Micawberism triumphant in education!” though the impenitent Mr H R James would probably be confirmed by it in his heresy that something other than “research” (of the new Calcutta type) is more urgently required for the improvement of higher education in Bengal.
Mr. Mitra’s plea for chairs of Biology at the Calcutta University is still more delicious and will relieve the Bengal parent of a great anxiety. Notes on Botany dictated by old Mr. Bruhl in the Darbhanga Buildings and marginal analysis on Zoology by young Mr Maulick[1] in Ballyganj will “more than double” the wealth of India and also demolish our caste notions! This robust optimism is possible only in a Micawberian. After sixty years of lectures on the critique of Pure Reason, on Hume and Mill, we still see young Bengali graduates nursing the tiki (Hessian tie on the crown of the head) and Madras graduates painting their foreheads lest an Aingar should be mistaken for an Aiyar. The papers read at the Calcutta Astronomical Society have not affected the sale of the Gupta Press almanac. No, Sir, caste is undermined not by lecture-notes nor by doctoral thesises (even when written by Dr Ramdas Khan of the Calcutta school of research) but by the Great Eastern Hotel and Dias’s Goanese Restaurant (Patna). If the opening of a Biological department at the Calcutta University more than doubles the agricultural produce of the country, the Pusa, Lyallpur, Poona and Sabour agricultural colleges ought to be closed as costly superfluities. Or, stay! let the Calcutta University endow its chairs of Biology by means of a loan raised by hypothecating the increase of Bengal’s agricultural produce due to its researches. But spare us, O spare us, the doubling of examination fees, the compulsory purchase of unnecessary monopoly text-books, and the imposition of Chauth on all Matriculation schools. Here is Mr Micawber’s El Dorado, why, then, tax the parents?
Mr. Mitra imagines that the Rt Hon’ble Mr Fisher’s speech at the Education Section of the British Association “was meant for the rugged little fastnesses of Wales.” He has yet to know that the Association holds its annual meetings in different provincial towns (and even South Africa), but it is an all-England institution and the speeches delivered at its annual meeting are addressed to the whole country and not to the locality of the meeting. Curiously enough, while Mr Mitra would give a purely parochial application to Mr Fisher’s speech at Cardiff in 1920, he has no hesitation in using
- ↑ I cannot be accurate about the name of this gentleman but some of the papers noticed his engagement in anticipation of classes
