Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026): Pathshalas and Patronage: Re-Examining Indigenous Education in Colonial India (Eighteenth–Nineteenth Century), October, 2026, pg , 12-32

This paper looks again at the facts collected by Dharampal in his book The Beautiful Tree (2000) about Indian education in the late 1700s and early 1800s. The book gives some big numbers about how many schools and students there were. But instead of taking those numbers as the final word on how big pre-colonial education really was, this paper goes back to the district-by-district data and looks at it from several angles: schools, home teaching, caste, gender, subjects taught, and money. This is a review of one book's documents, not a full systematic review — it only covers the seven original documents and the introduction printed in that one book. The picture that comes out is mixed, not one simple picture. Caste among students changed a lot from region to region. In some Tamil areas, more than eighty percent of students came from Soodra and other castes. In several Telugu districts, twice-born castes (Brahmin and Vysee) formed the larger group instead. Home teaching and private tutoring are recorded in only two of the twenty-one Madras districts, but where they are recorded, they were several times bigger than school attendance. This means that counting schools alone can give a false idea of how much learning was actually happening. Girls' education was rare almost everywhere, except in Malabar and the Jeypoor Zamindary, where it was noticeably higher. Large amounts of land revenue were given to temples, individuals, and institutions, but the book does not tell us exactly how much of this money was spent on education itself, as opposed to worship, charity, or medical care. This paper ends by pointing out which claims the evidence supports clearly, which ones it supports only weakly, and which questions it simply cannot answer.