It is said that numbers don’t lie but it must be acknowledged that they don’t reveal the truth either. In the interstices between the historical contexts and the ideological usages of data lies a fertile space for the recognition and comprehension of the power relations implicated therein. In the age of mis/information, it becomes vital to understand the processes by which information is transformed into meaning. Looking at the following works— The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in Eighteenth Century by Dharampal and “Education for Women” by Geraldine Forbes— I will try to demonstrate this process of the narrativization of data and the datafication of narratives.

As Dharampal points out, much of Indian historical knowledge has been derived from the accounts of foreigners (8). Even the name of the modern nation-state of India derives etymologically from the western renditions of the land beyond the Sindhu River. This buffer between lived experiences and knowledge production has led to a divergence towards the extremes when it comes to talking about Indian history; either India is devalued as a primitive, backward, feudal-type society that was modernized by the colonial influence or it is glorified as an eternally benevolent ‘dharmic’ civilization (73). But these tendencies are not be ignored for their ideological biases and statistical inaccuracies, rather, due to their position in the discursive formations of the location of India’s present and the directions of its future, it becomes all the more important to study how these narratives are justified by data in the scientific-rationalist discourse. One can find instances of both of these in Dharampal’s study of Indian Indigenous education in Eighteenth century.

The bulk of the data in the concerned sections of the essay deal with that of the Madras Presidency from 1822 to 1825. It must be noted that this was a socioculturally sensitive time, especially regarding the state of education, as the withering indigenous education was churning and clashing with the increasing influence of British colonial education. The indigenous education system, also known as ‘Shiksha’, was disseminated through ‘pathshalas’, ‘gurukulas’, and ‘madrassas’. It contained of three parts: ‘sila’, ‘samadhi’, and ‘prajna’ (18). Sila was concerned with precepts, ethics, meaningful action, and the practicing of right action, speech, and livelihood. Samadhi dealt with wholeness, calmness, unification, and concentration achieved through the right effort and mindfulness. Finally, prajna is related to the processes of insight and understanding, the realization of interdependence and interbeing through right view and intentional thinking (“Threefold”). These were the theoretical tenets but these were put into practice by a collaboration between the state and community.

Dharampal argues that this was possible because the Indian society and polity were non-centralized. Following Charles Metcalfe and Henry Maine, it is posited that the ‘village’ resembled the ‘state’ and that these village-states wielded an authority that allowed them to utilize much of the resources within its limits, such as medical care, local police, and education. To bolster this narrative, the data from the records of Mughal rulers is utilized; only 5% of all revenue collected during Jahangir’s reign went to the central treasury and even at its extreme during the reign of Aurangzeb it only capped at 20% (74). All these observations led the early British bureaucrats and scholars in India to consider the state of the Indian education system to be better than that of their contemporary Britain. For instance, William Adam in his first report observed that there were about 1,00,000 schools in Bengal and Bihar in the 1830s. Similar comments are made by Thomas Munro and G.L. Prendergast about the state of education in the Madras Presidency and Bombay Presidency respectively (18).

But, as the British power strengthened at the administrative level, their approach to Indian knowledge systems also diversified. Dharampal categorizes these approaches into broadly three kinds: Indological, Orientalist, and Missionary.

The Indological kind focused on studying the judicial and administrative past of India so as to legitimize and pass off the new colonial policies as an extension to and not a disruption of previous governmental practices. The second kind, born out of the Scottish Enlightenment, learning from the decimation of native knowledge bodies in the Americas, wanted to preserve the “precious knowledge” of India, its arts and sciences, and its cultural and social practices. Adam Fergusson, one of the foremost proponents of the Orientalist bent, said “The man who can bring light from India into this country in a few years hence may make of himself of great consequence.” Similarly, Prof Manochie called the ‘Hindoos’ as “that celebrated people from whom Moses received his learning and Greece her religion and arts.” Finally, the Missionary strain was complicit with or actively supported the Christianisation of Indians, using education as a way to lay the foundation for the organic catalysis of this process. William Wilberforce, one of the supporters of this approach, commented on using education “so that Indians would, in short become Christians without even knowing it” (15-16). More often than not, these three strains intersected and clotted into individual strategies.

As mentioned above, these two views clashed and churned in the early 19th century. The 1813 debate in the House of Commons in the British Parliament on the “religious and moral improvement” of India was important both on a political level as well as in defining the dominant outlook which saw the present conditions of India as something that needed ‘improvement’ (which was often synonymous with Anglicization). Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s Letter to Lord Amherst in 1823 reflected the views of the new Indian intelligentsia which pushed for English education as a pathway to reformation of social evils. This was brought into legislation by Macaulay’s “Minute of Indian Education” delivered in a parliament session in 1835. Yet, like the diversified approach to Indian education, the reaction to these developments was also not unitary. Many British bureaucrats and scholars spoke against the increased influence of the British which they saw as weakening the existing education systems of India. For example, A.D. Campbell, collector of Bellary, comments on the increasing lack of state funding for education institutions as they moved under British control, and how the centralization of funds was disrupting educational progress (80). This move towards economic centralization dismantled the ‘district fund’ focused indigenous economy and with it went the stability of their education systems. It is at this contextual stage that the British administration collected the data on education.

At this stage (early 1800s), Dharampal concludes that the Indian indigenous education system was better than the British one in every aspect including the content, duration, environment, attendance, and dedication of the teachers (20). The only aspect in which the indigenous system lagged behind was in the matter of the education of girls and women. Dharampal doesn’t delve deeper into it but it is a question worth exploring. A turn to Forbes’ essay on women’s education before returning to the data would prove helpful.

Forbes identifies four main obstacles. First, the superstitions and customs which actively discouraged women’s education. William Adams, in his 1836 report on the state of education in Bengal, comments upon the belief that women getting educated would lead to the death of their husbands, and how, in a patriarchal setting where the woman was dependent on her husband, getting educated would be tantamount to committing suicide (84). Second, the caste barriers among Hindus and the zenana system in elite Muslims would prove a thorn in the practical functioning of a school. Third, the practice of child marriage or merely a very young age of marriage meant that the incentive for educating girls was reduced and many girls who were enrolled would eventually drop out. Finally, even the ones who continued to study despite domestic barriers weren’t able to dedicate themselves to their study, especially with regards to higher education, because of the draining nature of their household work.

These barriers, eventually, were weakened and overcome with support from various ideological directions alongside state support in the latter half of the 19th century. Yet the common thread among all of them was how none of them focused on women as individuals and instead saw their education as playing a role in a larger narrative. The liberals wanted educated women so as to be good companions for their husbands. The social reformists wanted women to be educated so they can act as a catalyst in the social reforms they proposed. The missionaries saw women as a way to make their conversions organic; to domesticize, internalize, and pass on Christian values and rituals as a naturalized tradition. Even Wood’s Dispatch of 1854— which reshifted the focus of Indian education from a select few acquiring higher learning to the vast masses gaining primary education— included the education of both sexes as one its aims, yet, in line with the prevalent narratives, it too sees women’s education as a way through which “a far greater proportional impulse could be imparted to the educational and moral tone of the people than by education of men” (88-89).

The Calcutta School Society in 1816, the Calcutta Juvenile Society in 1819, and the Church Mission Society were instrumental in bringing education for women. J.E. Drinkwater Bethune’s Hindu Balika Vidyalaya was significant as it was a relatively secular institution yet the fact that most of the women here belonged to the lower castes reflects upon the upper caste/class prejudice against educating women. People like Pandita Ramabai funded her institutions such as the Sharada Sadan by taking money from Christian missions, books, and lecture tours across Britain and America, often against resistance from the Hindu traditionalists as well as reformists.

On the other hand, there were many attempts at imparting education for women within the folds of traditional practices. Mataji Maharani Tapaswini was one such figure, whose Great Mother Kali school, used a separate syllabus and separate classrooms for women, aiming to educate them “on strictly national lines in the hope that they might regenerate Hindu society” (96). This conservatism was seen even in some Western orientations such as that of the Theosophical Society championed by Annie Besant who urged a return to a ‘golden age’, fixing Durga as the ideal woman, and seeing British education as something that would ‘unsex’ the women (91).

All of these institutions used the number of enrolments, caste-wise distribution, number of conversions, etc., to gain further funding, and thus, indirectly, propagate their ideology as the right way. This ties into how narratives are datafied and how data bolsters certain narratives against others, often overlooking the unreliability of numbers and the methodological fuzziness that is smoothed out when presented in a tabulated form. Even in the data set acquired from Madras Presidency from 1822 to 1825 which forms the core of Dharampal’s argument, it must be noted that the data was received indirectly through the collectors of the respective districts. The biases associated with it are many. For instance, a collector who has been established in his constituency for a long time would form associations with the place and would exaggerate the achievements of his own efforts. On the other end, many of the collectors were new appointees, meaning they did not have enough time to be acquainted with the areas under their jurisdiction and hastened the process for convenience rather than accuracy. Not to mention, in addition to this, the rudimentary and disorganized state in which documentation and data collection was in early 19th century colonial India.

Yet a statistician’s concern with the unreliability of data is not the same as the concern of a cultural study. The concern of a cultural analysis would be on how this data, a historical record however unreliable, has been utilized in the formation of ideological narratives. Given below is a selection of the data:

At first glance, it seems to debunk the idea of Brahminical hegemony in education. How could the Brahmins hold a monopoly over education when the schools were dominated by Shudras and other castes? Indeed, this data and Dharampal’s narrative regarding it have been utilized to push this narrative in both popular and academic discourse, in the past as well as increasingly in the present (see Kakkar, Dey, Saxena, and Gopal). For instance, Ankur Kakkar, Professor of Indic Studies at Indus University, uses this data to show that the idea of ‘Brahminical Hegemony’ is a “persistent leftist dogma.” Saumya Dey, Professor of History at O.P. Jindal University, describes Brahminism as “bogey”. The academic validity and authenticity of the sources of these instances may be questioned, yet the number of views and discussions in the comments sections are an indicator of the role of such works in the wider cultural discourse.

But, I argue, that a deeper look into this data, which Dharampal himself offers (and which has been conveniently overlooked by those using it to push the narrative of a glorious dharmic India), exposes the fault lines on which these numbers precariously stand. First, the case of proportionality, where even though the numbers of Brahmins are dwarfed by that of Shudras and Other Castes, it must be acknowledged that when related to the proportion within the population, the former outdo the latter many times over. Secondly, when one sees the data for higher education, which is most instrumental for the creation of the academic discourse and specialized professions, the dominance of Brahmins becomes much more visible, especially in the fields of ethics, theology, metaphysics, and law (35). Thirdly, and most revealingly, the fact that these data belong to public schools, whereas most of the education in those times was carried out privately, the data for which is difficult to acquire. In the few instances in which it was acquired, such as in the fledgling presidency of Madras, more than half of those privately tutored belonged to Brahmin and Vaishya castes. In other more established districts, such as Madurai, it is estimated that those privately tutored were 4 to 5 times more than those studying in schools (both 42). In addition to private tutorship, the system of Agraharams, which was mostly exclusive to the Brahmins was another way in which education was imparted beyond the fold of the organized school systems (76).

From these arguments, in particular, one could problematize the narrative-data complex employed to underplay the role of caste in the history of education in India, and, in general, conclude how it is imperative to study the cultural contexts and ideological narratives revolving around any form of data, especially in our age of mis/informational excess, to sustain a bias-acknowledging perspective of the past in order to move towards an inclusive, balanced future.

.    .    .

Works Cited:

• Dey, Saumya. “That Bogey called Brahminism.” Indiafacts, Feb 14, 2020, https://indiafacts.org.
• Dharampal. The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century, Other India Press, 2000.
• Gopal, Pingali. “Demystifying the ‘superior’ status of Brahmins…” The Hans India, Oct 3, 2021, https://www.thehansindia.com.
• Forbes, Geraldine. “Education for Women.” Women and Social Reform in Modern India, Volume 1, edited by Sumit Sarkar and Tanika Sarkar, Permanent Black, 2007.
• Kakkar, Ankur. “Did Brahmins have a Monopoly on Education?” Centre for Indic Studies, Indus University, Aug 11, 2020, https://cisindus.org.
• Saxena, Pankaj. “Did Brahmins Monopolize Knowledge in Ancient India?” Indica, June 14, 2021, https://www.indica.today.
• “The Threefold Training (Sila, Samadhi, and Prajna).” Zen Awakened, https://zenawakened.com.