A meaningful biography

In India, authors of biographies of men/women great and small tend to fall in love with their subjects and end up writing hagiographies. Glenn Khargonkor’s biography of Dr. Ramdas Pai, chancellor of Manipal University and progenitor of the globe-girdling Manipal Education and Medical Group (MEMG), which under his quiet stewardship has metamorphosed into India’s #1 education multinational with highly-respected colleges of professional (medical, engineering) education in Malaysia, Dubai, Nepal, and Antigua (West Indies), is an exception to this rule.  This oeuvre is a biography with a difference, because while at one level it documents the histories of the founding fathers of MEMG — the legendary Dr. T.M.A. Pai (1898-1979) and his son Ramdas —  at another level it is a concise history of Indian education. Manipal and Beyond: Ramdas Pai and the Landscape of Indian Education also narrates the history of steady destruction of the subcontinent’s education system by the “colonial power”, and subsequently by post-independence India’s self-aggrandising neta-babu brotherhood, a floodtide which the late T.M.A. and Ramdas Pai spent the better parts of their lives to resist, with some measure of success.  As recently as 1821, G.L. Pendergast, a member of the Bombay Presidency Council, observed that “there is hardly a village, great or small, throughout our territories, in which there is not at least one school, in the larger villages more”. Citing an official survey of 1826, Khargonkor writes that in the early 19th century, the number of primary-secondaries in the Madras Presidency (11,575) were twice the number in England (for a comparable population), with the average length of schooling in England being a mere one year (1835) as against 5-15 years in India.  The first important revelation this biography-cum-social history makes is that education in pre-British India was almost entirely privately funded. Parents and households in every strata of society valued education and were prepared to pay for it. Scholars and teachers established gurukuls — often in their homes — and schooled children in languages, math and sciences, with rich households paying more and poorest children performing household chores to pay for their education. Thus an informal system of cross-subsidisation is an ancient tradition in the subcontinent, as are scholarships awarded to poor and meritorious students by rulers and merchants. This legacy of the ‘beautiful tree’ of education that flourished into the 19th century was destroyed by meddling merchants of the East India Company, and overbearing upper class Britons (including Lord Macaulay who penned his famous minute (1835) decreeing a system of education to train clerks for the empire) schooled in British private schools, who were completely ignorant about the pathetic state of public education back home in Britain. The sin of recklessly uprooting the beautiful tree of Indian education was compounded by “pitiless taxation” of the people and particularly the peasantry, by imperial Britain. In Case for India, the highly-respected American historian Will Durant (1885-1981) cites several conscientious British officials (Catheart Wilson, Herbert Spencer and H.M. Hyndman) who protested that taxation in British India was twice…