XI
THE DESCENT OF DARKNESS
I
About 1800 before the British took charge of
India's education "each village had its own school."
A foreign observer speaking of indigenous village
educational institutions remarked about 1830, "my re-
collections of the village schools of Scotland do not
enable me to pronounce that the instruction given in
them has a more direct bearing upon the daily inte-
rests of life than that which I find given or professed
to be given in the humbler village school of Bengal"
On the authority of Max Muller, Keir Hardie stated
that prior to the coming of the British there were as
many as 80,000 schools in Bengal alone, there was
one school for every 400 persons, and that in most
villages, majority of the people could read and write.
Dr. Latiner, Director of Public Instruction in the
Punjab, also subscribes to this view,
Macaulay's famous minute on Education was a
frank plea for destroying indigenous education, in the
interest of British domination. "We must at present
do our best to form a class who may be interpreters
between us and the millions we govern—a class of per-
sons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste,
in opinions, in morals, in intellect."
In 1835 Lord Bentick published a resolution
which ran as follows: "His Lordship is of opinion that
the great object of the British government ought to be
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