“India’s Forgotten Educational Inheritance”, India Fact, Feburary 06, 2026
“‘…..I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully, that today India is more illiterate than it was fifty or a hundred years ago…..and the beautiful tree perished….’ (1)
When Mahatma Gandhi made this striking observation on the state of education in India in his speech at Chatham House, London, in October 1931, it was unsurprisingly met with scepticism in British intellectual circles. A lively written exchange with Sir Philip Hartog, a leading British educationalist of the time, soon followed. It reflected deep disagreements over the legacy of colonial educational policy.
Several decades later, Gandhi’s remarks would inspire Gandhian scholar Dharampal’s influential study, The Beautiful Tree (2). Drawing on British survey reports from the nineteenth century in regions such as Madras, Bengal, and Punjab, Dharampal argued that indigenous systems of education, while already in decline, compared favourably with the systems prevalent in England at the time on several important measures. These included the density of schools relative to population, duration of schooling, and participation of students from lower social and caste backgrounds……”
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