The Beautiful Tree — A Personal Journey into how the World’s Poorest People are Educating Themselves by James Tooley; Penguin India; Price: Rs.499; 302 pp
This ambitious effort is the outcome of perhaps the most important research into K-12 — especially primary school — education undertaken in recent times. In its revealing pages Dr. James Tooley, incumbent professor of education policy at Newcastle-upon-Tyne University, UK, unravels the mystery of how the poor in developing countries of the third world are struggling to educate their children despite being lumbered with dysfunctional government school systems characterised by obsolete pedagogies and curriculums, over-crowded classrooms, widespread teacher absenteeism, and thousands of textbook printing, teacher appointment and transfer rackets.
In developing countries around the world — especially India, Nige-ria, Kenya and even China — they are increasingly relying on private, for-profit education entrepreneurs routinely demonised by experts of the World Bank, international aid agencies, NGOs, Left parties, and fellow travelers who dominate the global academic discourse.
In The Beautiful Tree — A Personal Journey into how the World’s Poorest People are Educating Themselves, to give this transnational investigative travelogue its self-explanatory title, Tooley describes how following in the footsteps of British Indophile William Dalrymple (see review below) who had chanced upon valuable Persian manuscripts in an old (unnamed) bookshop in the Charminar area of Hyderabad, he too stumbled upon a valuable treatise titled The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century. Authored by T. Dharampal, a relatively unknown educationist in 1983, who but for Tooley’s discovery of his valuable historical research would have disappeared unsung into the footnotes of Indian history, the book begins with an extensive quote from Mahatma Gandhi about ancient India’s economical and inclusive education system which he described as a “beautiful tree” uprooted by the British. “The schools established after the European pattern were too expensive for the people… I defy anybody to fulfill a programme of compulsory education of these masses inside of a century. This very poor country of mine is ill able to sustain such an expensive method of education. Our state would revive the old village school master and dot every village with a school both for boys and girls,” Dharampal quoted the Mahatma as saying.
In a nutshell, the outcome of Tooley’s research into Indian education in the pre-British era is that “far from there being no schooling in India before the British brought their system, the figures show an abundance of preexisting schools and colleges”. For instance a minute (memorandum) of Sir Thomas Munro, governor of the Madras Presidency, written in the early 19th century documents that in 20 districts of the presidency, there were 11,575 schools and 1,094 colleges with 157,195 and 5,412 students enroled respectively. Ditto investigative reports from Bengal, Bombay and Punjab.
Even more remarkably and unreported, was that these schools and colleges were not only predominantly privately funded, but also inclusive in that they made provision for the education of children of the poorest and most socio-economically backward households — “a system funded almost entirely by student fees and plus, a little philanthropy,” writes Tooley. Indeed not only was Indian education doing fine, thank you, before the British arrived, its “economical teaching method” of peer-learning, aka the Madras Method, was “so much praised that it was imitated in England” (following its promotion by the Rev. Dr. Andrew Bell), and was widely responsible for the spread of literacy in Britain, reveals Tooley.
However, this body of evidence indicating that a smoothly-functional, privately funded education system existed in pre-British India was challenged by several British academics including Sir Philip Hartog, and more famously by Thomas Babbington Macaulay (1800-1859). In his famous minute of February 2, 1835, Macaulay consigned Indian education and scholarship to the scrapheap. “All the historical information which has been collected in all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England,” he pronounced laying the “foundations of the public education system that is still in place in India today,” writes Tooley.
With disastrous consequences as is now apparent. More than a century later as the Mahatma had presciently predicted, 21st century India hosts the world’s largest population of absolute illiterates, with over 350 million citizens unable to read and write their own names in any language. The country’s 1.25 million (Central, state and local) government primary and secondary schools are in a shambles, with abysmal learning outcomes. The education system’s only saving grace — the 82,000 government-recognised private primary-secondaries which have shaped India’s great middle class — are in bad odour with government, Supreme Court and the Left intelligentsia.
But while private schools for the middle class are tolerated and secretly admired by the establishment, hundreds of thousands of low budget, unrecognised private schools, to which the country’s aspirational poor are fleeing in increasing numbers, are beneath the contempt of government, the establishment and international aid agencies which are pouring billions of dollars into public education in India and other developing nations to help them attain the millennium development goal of education for all by the year 2015. The indigenous establishment is also unanimous: private schools and their proprietors are exploiters, ripping off the gullible poor by providing poor quality, spurious education and charging for it under false pretences.
Yet this is precisely the conventional wisdom that Dr. Tooley persuasively refutes. Citing facts, figures, examples and several commissioned research studies, he presents a compelling body of evidence that far from being the blood-sucking leeches of Leftist lore, and despite official discouragement and harassment, private education entrepreneurs are the only hope of the poor and underprivileged to equip their children with the knowledge and skills necessary to rise out of poverty. As such, they need societal encouragement and the attention of banks and micro-finance companies to improve their infrastructure and facilities, suggests Tooley.
Indeed that’s the only way that the uprooted Beautiful Tree that was India’s education system, can be made to flower again.
Dilip Thakore
Exotic journey
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple; Bloomsbury; Rs.499; 284 pp
A celebrated and avowed Indophile, William Dalrymple is the internationally acclaimed author of several India-centred books including a travelogue on Delhi, City of Djinns (1993), followed up with well-researched vignettes of forgotten Mughal history, White Mughals (2002) and The Last Mughal (2006). After almost a decade since he wrote The Age of Kali in 1998, comes this rich compilation narrating the histories, oral traditions and cultural practices threatened by urbanisation, literacy and appropriation by dominant social and religious trends in contemporary India.
In his search to rescue cultures from oblivion, Dalrymple bypasses mainstream towns and cities. Instead, in this literary oeuvre he has focused upon the cultural significance of pilgrimage centres such as Sravanabelagola, the sacred Jain site in Karnataka; the bucolic groves of northern Malabar around Kannur, home of theyyam dancers; the “sun-leached expanse of dry desert plains” of Pabusar, Rajasthan, where the bhopa read the phad, the folk and mythological tales of Pabuji. The anonymous narrator of the stories captures every changing landscape with verbal colour, whether of the deodar slopes of Kangra valley, “the planisphere of flat, green country”, or fertile floodplains and rice-paddies of Birbhum.
Clearly, India never ceases to captivate Dalrymple. He narrates expeditions over hills and plains recalling conflicting experiences, curious twists and conversations, vivid observations and perceptive insights in this non-fiction work which cuts across literary genres. It can be viewed as a travelogue, as each of the nine chapters spotlights remote classical locations. The hand-drawn map that prefaces the collection, reinforces this classification. Yet, says the author, the book was conceived as a “collection of non-fiction short stories, with each life representing a different form of devotion or a different religious path.” The focus therefore is not on the destination so much as on how the subcontinent’s ancient religions, faiths and rituals have been transformed by history.
Several of these real-life stories read like incredible fiction narratives. For instance the personal history of Lal Peri, a follower of the Sufi fakir Lal Shahbaz Qalandar of Sindh, recounts her flight from Bihar to Bangladesh and from there to West Pakistan, to escape communal riots and passions. Parallely, Lal Peri’s story also traces the history and metamorphosis of Islam in the subcontinent. Her faith and devotion fortifies her with invincible confidence. “No one knows if the Sufis of Sindh can fend off the chill winds of Wahabism that are currently blowing so strongly; but Lal Peri, for one, was certain that the mullahs would gain no following in Sehwan,” writes the author.
Even as Dalrymple positively showcases the religious pluralism of India, and tries to make sense of bizarre practices and religious traditions that provoke a Jain nun’s sallekhana (self-starvation regarded by Jains as the final renouncement and beginning of the next life), or Manisha Ma Bhairavi’s tantric shakti derived from Ma Tara on the cremation grounds of Tarapith, he can’t resist highlighting the exoticism of oriental India which still survives in a democratic and rapidly industrialising society. Like Marco Polo, the first European traveler to use a degree of realism to report on his explorations of the fabulous East, in his “search of the sacred”, Dalrymple too, spotlights cruel practices, notably the consecration of young girls to gods and godesses as temple prostitutes — a custom still prevalent in pockets of the Coromandel coast. And like Rudyard Kipling in Kim, he reworks the theme of a Buddhist monk in pursuit of dharma through the figure of Passang, a Tibetan exile in Dharmashala, India.
Dalrymple’s idea of modern India is focused upon its over-hyped material and technological development and its transformation into “the third largest economy in the world”. Though the obvious intent of Nine Lives is to explore the impact of this transformation upon “the diverse religious traditions of South Asia”, the narrative engages with individual lives being lived out within insulated social and caste groups. Deeply embedded religious sensibilities are not viewed in the perspective and context of an eclectic philosophy that transcends religion, faith and belief in contemporary India.
Jayati Gupta