How The British Fell 'The Beautiful Tree': Why Understanding That Is Relevant Today

The British Makeover of India: Indigenous Education and Languages Downgraded. Meenakshi Jain. Aryan Books International. 2025. Pages 408. Rs 716.

Historian Meenakshi Jain's meticulously researched book, The British Makeover of India: Indigenous Education and Languages Downgraded’ (Aryan Books, 2025), forms the second volume of a series that investigate the deep impact of the British colonial rule on India's foundational structures in different vital domains.

Following her earlier work on the colonial impact on the judicial system, this 400-page study delves into the still impactful effect of the British policies on India's traditional systems of education and the status of its diverse languages.

Structured into four distinct sections, the book details the debates and exigencies that shaped the colonial approach to indigenous education.

The book's substantial first section explores the East India Company's (EIC) initially ambivalent stance towards India's multifaceted indigenous educational landscape. This description of pre-colonial learning systems is meticulously constructed, drawing not only upon EIC reports but also incorporating insightful accounts from Indian scholars, such as U.Ve.Swaminatha Iyer's depiction of South India's Thinnai schools.

The narrative further illuminates the community-based financial structures that sustained these teachers, thereby alleviating the burden of fees for individual students.

A series of illustrative plates, sourced from the Victoria and Albert Museum, visually articulate diverse facets of these indigenous institutions, ranging from postural disciplines reminiscent of yogic asanas to the practice of traditional Indic gymnastic games. The pedagogical emphasis of these schools appears to have been directed towards grammar, the cultivation of exceptional memory, and arithmetic proficiency.

This section also astutely reveals the burgeoning tensions within influential segments of Indian society who increasingly sought access to English and scientific education.

The case of Raja Ram Mohan Roy is presented as a significant example; his 1823 critique of the EIC's establishment of a Sanskrit school, arguing it would perpetuate ‘darkness,’ has to be however contextualized within this growing demand for scientific knowledge.

History also witnessed similar appeals from the Madras Presidency elites for English and science, but they wanted it coupled with a simultaneous curriculum for the continued instruction of Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit.

Professor Jain highlights the observation of education historian Senthil Babu, suggesting that the trajectory of 19^th-century elementary education could have been significantly altered had Thinnai schools received official recognition. Though not mentioned in the book, such efforts were indeed undertaken, like those by Serfoji-II, the Maratha chieftain of Thanjavur, though they largely failed to gain traction.

Serfoji even tried to bring the knowledge of heliocentric theory into a Kuravanchi, a popular lyrical format as early as 1806.

He called the helio-centric theory ‘Huna Siddhanta’.

Similarly Ramalinga Vallalar established the 'Sanmarga Vidya Bodhini', a school for the students in southern India, a decade after the 1857 uprising, which incorporated a trilingual education system.

These endeavours, however, remained localised and did not evolve into broader movements. So the point that the author makes is quite an important point. Truly integral indigenous educational attempts to update the local systems were simply not encouraged by the colonial regime.

The British, in fact, adopted the 'National Society for the Provision of Education of the Poor' (connected with the Church in England) model in their own home which in turn was based on the 'Madras education system,' and then reintroduced it into India. However, upon its implementation, Andrew Bell ensured that the curriculum was confined to European texts for the dissemination of practical knowledge, while the Bible and Christian catechism remained central components of missionary and asylum school curricula (as noted by Indira Viswanathan Peterson in her 2012 work on Serfoji II).

Thus, the colonial system undeniably enacted a disruptive and destructive intervention upon India’s established indigenous educational framework.

The intellectual advancements of the Western Enlightenment became intertwined with the colonial agenda of civilising the populace. Yet, within this framework existed a secular admiration for the organisational structure of Indian education alongside an evangelical aversion to its inherent content.

The subsequent section meticulously details the methodical evangelical incursion into the sphere of education. This movement found a crucial catalyst in Charles Grant, who skilfully facilitated the entry and consolidation of missionaries within British-controlled territories.

Consequently, a concrete organisational structure began to take hold in strategically significant areas. For numerous missionaries, their evangelical pursuits in India provided an unprecedented elevation of their social status in England.

William Carey exemplifies this phenomenon. Originating from a humble background, lacking formal education and having been apprenticed as a shoemaker, he ascended to become a pivotal institution builder for the Protestant Church in India.

His proud embrace of his modest origins conveniently aligned with what would later become a central tenet of the Christian-colonial civilising mission – the notion of divine purpose arising from individuals of humble beginnings – despite the fact that this entire evangelical intrusion was largely financed by the surplus derived from colonial expansion and the drain of Indian resources.

This section clearly elucidates the strategic planning inherent in missionary institution building.

The second part of the book, which should be approached with impartiality, reveals the missionaries' comprehensive strategy aimed at de-Hinduising and evangelising the populace, with regional languages and Sanskrit being the primary targets.

Consequently, by 1858, the year the East India Company's rule ended and India came under direct British governance, the book reveals that 14 missionary societies were operating 500 schools in southern India alone, educating 38,607 students.

The book then turns its attention to various pivotal reports, revealing that the indigenous educational system, despite the mounting pressures that gradually constricted its vitality, maintained a resilient, albeit struggling, presence. While unable to adapt effectively to the shifting paradigms, this system possessed notable strengths: deeply rooted knowledge traditions, a decentralised and localised curriculum, community-based teacher sponsorship that minimised bureaucracy, cost, and capital investment.

However, it increasingly transitioned into serving as a preparatory stage for government or missionary-operated institutions. Even schools managed by non-governmental and non-missionary entities were compelled to adhere to a government-prescribed syllabus designed to serve the interests of the Raj. Consequently, vernacular curricula experienced a progressive decline, ceasing to function as effective vehicles for advanced scientific learning. The cumulative civilisational impact of these subtle yet profound changes proved deeply traumatic.

A significant insight that emerges with clarity is the parallel degradation of regional languages within the educational system alongside the marginalisation of Sanskrit. A national educational framework that once fostered a multitude of natural polyglots dwindled into isolated linguistic enclaves connected primarily by the colonially imposed language English, which itself became a marker of elitist power.

The fundamental aim of education in India had been liberation; in contrast, the objective of colonial education was control. These two aims were inherently divergent.

The colonial system systematically starved the indigenous educational system – deprived of funds, patronage, and deliberately left to stagnate. Conversely, the imposed educational system, while presented as a benevolent gift to the native population, engendered significant literacy inequality, a disparity that was not previously so pronounced.

Prior to this imposition, education and literacy were more evenly distributed across societal strata, fostering knowledge exchange based on reverence for learning, irrespective of caste or class.

U.Ve.Swaminatha Iyer (in an anecdote not included in the book) recounts one such instance within the indigenous system: Seshaiyengar, a Brahmin, eminent author, and tutor in a government college, regularly received instruction in classical Tamil literature and grammar from Arumugam Pillai, a member of the Kallar community, which the British had labeled a 'criminal caste.' This Arumugam Pillai was also highly skilled in traditional medicine. So the case that the book puts forth with copious amount of solid data is supported by evidence throughout India – in the recent history of every Indian village perhaps.

The book comes with primary reference materials and secondary reference materials – all explicitly shown. There are six appendices which include also the notorious minutes of Macaulay to G.W.Leitner’s Report on Indigenous Education in Punjab.

Ultimately, what renders this book so important to the present discourses in historiography of India is that is the crucial and major next step in the direction that historian Dharampal had shown.

It unveils colonialism not merely as a political or economic dominance, but as a meticulously conceived and forcefully implemented architecture imposed upon every society it subjugated. Colonised peoples, as a consequence, suffer a profound erosion of their self-esteem and their intrinsic understanding of their own past. In stark contrast to a natural exchange between civilisations, colonialism operates as a forceful imposition, one that insidiously infiltrates the very consciousness of those subjected to it. It forges its own historical narrative, leaving people, even after achieving political autonomy, in a state of civilisational subservience.

This is an inherently unnatural condition. The intricate frameworks and foundational matrices of a civilisation, especially one as ancient and yet as dynamically alive as India's, are the evolutes of millennia of organic societal and spiritual evolution. To tear up these deeply rooted structures, magnifying a few imperfections that inevitably exist in any civilisation, is an artificial act, a violent disruption of a people's natural progression. To then persuade them that such a destructive uprooting is somehow a civilisational benefit is an act of profound cruelty.

Therefore, this book stands as a rigorously researched, data-supported, and intellectually potent remedy – devoid of mere rhetoric or polemic – against the pervasive contagion afflicting India's collective consciousness: the insidious grip of deep-seated colonialism.

Deep colonialism has made the statement ‘British and missionaries brought education to India’ a collective axiom. Mahatma Gandhi intuitively rejected this and gave us the phrase ‘a beautiful tree’ as a fitting organic metaphor for indigenous education system. Dharampal made that phrase a very framework for decolonised historiography and made the vital first step.

Then there was the Nehruvian stagnation in which Marxist historiography, which also predicated itself on colonial worldview, perpetuated the myth of the tyranny of priestcraft monopolising education and the British being instruments of history, liberating the subjugated masses through the education they brought.

Dr. Meenakshi Jain has not only broken that self-imposed stagnation but has also produced a work that updates Dharampal's with meticulous hard-work and unassailable data. The project of decolonisation, a nation’s pursuit to understand its own self-worth and build on it, owe the historian-author a great gratitude.