The Beautiful Tree : Indigenous Indian Education In the Eighteenth Century

by Dharampal

Dharampal (1922–2006) was a great Gandhian thinker, historian and political philosopher from India. Convinced about the urgent need for an objective understanding about India’s past, before the onslaught of colonial rule, he decided to embark on an exploration of British-Indian archival material, based on documents emanating from commissioned surveys of the East India Company, lodged in various depositories spread over the British Isles. His pioneering historical research, conducted intensively over a decade, led to the publication of works that have since become classics in the field of Indian studies. This major work entitled "The Beautiful Tree" provides evidence from extensive early British administrators’ reports of the widespread prevalence of educational institutions in the Bengal and Madras Presidencies as well as in the Punjab, teaching a sophisticated curriculum, with daily school attendance by about 30% of children aged 6–15, where those belonging to communities who were classed as Shudras or even lower constituted a good number of students, and in some areas, for instance in Kerala, where Muslim girls were quite well represented.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17931651-the-beautiful-tree

https://archive.org/details/TheBeautifulTree-Dharampal

On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 12:32 AM Dagmar Wujastyk via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

Dear colleagues,

Can anyone point me to publications on literacy in precolonial India?

With thanks in advance,
Dagmar Wujastyk

Dr Dagmar Wujastyk
Associate Professor
History, Classics, and Religion
University of Alberta

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Nagaraj Paturi

Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.

Senior Director, IndicA

BoS, MIT School of Vedic Sciences, Pune, Maharashtra

BoS Kavikulaguru Kalidasa Sanskrit University, Ramtek, Maharashtra

BoS Veda Vijnana Gurukula, Bengaluru.

Member, Advisory Council, Veda Vijnana Shodha Samsthanam, Bengaluru

BoS Rashtram School of Public Leadership

Editor-in-Chief, International Journal of Studies in Public Leadership

Former Senior Professor of Cultural Studies,

FLAME School of Communication and FLAME School of Liberal Education,

Hyderabad, Telangana, INDIA.