A LETTER ON ENGLISH EDUCATION.[1]
To his Excellency the right honourable Lord Amherst, Governor General in Council.
My Lord,
Humbly reluctant as the natives of India are to obtrude upon the notice of government the sentiments they entertain on any public measure, there are circumstances when silence would be carrying this respectful feeling to culpable excess. The present rulers of India, coming from a distance of many thousand miles to govern a people whose language, literature, manners, customs, and ideas, are almost entirely new and strange to them, cannot easily become so intimately acquainted with their real circumstances as the natives of the country are them-
- ↑ It is well known that among those persons who laboured for the spread of English Education in this country Raja Ram Mohun Roy was one of the foremost. The old Hindu College owed its origin to the exertions of Sir Edward Hyde East, David Hare, and Ram Mohun Roy. After the establishment of the Hindu College there began the celebrated controversy between the ‘Orientalists,’ i. e. persons who were for the encouragement of the study of the oriental languages and against the introduction of English Education, and the ‘Anglicists,’ i. e. the advocates of English Education, of whom Ram Mohun Roy was one of the most prominent. This controversy raged for some 12 years or more till it was ended by the Resolution of Lord William Bentinck, of the 7th May 1835. It was at the first stage of this controversy, when the Orientalists had induced the Government to sanction the establishment of a Sanscrit College, that the above letter was written, the object of it being to protest against the proposed measure. It was owing perhaps to this agitation that the foundation stone of the building, intended for the Sanscrit College, was laid in the name of the Hindu College (February 1824,) and the Hindu College was located there together with the Sanscrit College.—Ed.
