In educational matters he had very definite ideas which is now becoming
more fully appreciated. English schools were at that time not only
regarded as the only efficient medium for instruction. While my father's
subordinates sent their children to the English schools intended for
gentle folks, I was sent to the vernacular school where my comrades were
hardy sons of toilers and of others who, it is now the fashion to
regard, were belonging to the depressed classes. From these who tilled
the ground and made the land blossom with green verdure and ripening
corn, and the sons of the fisher folk, who told stories of the strange
creatures that frequented the unknown depths of mighty rivers and
stagnant pools, I first derived the lesson of that which constitutes
true manhood. From them too I drew my love of nature. When I came home
accompanied by my comrades I found my mother waiting for us. She was an
orthodox Hindu, yet the "untouchableness" of some of my school fellows
did not produce any misgivings in her. She welcomed and fed all these as
her own children; for it is only true of the mother heart to go out and
enfold in her protecting care all those who needed succour and a
mother's affection. I now realise the object of my being sent at the
most plastic period of my life to the vernacular school, where I was to
learn my own language, to think my own thoughts and to receive the
heritage of our national culture through the medium of our own
literature. I was thus to consider myself one with the people and never
to place myself in an equivocal position of assumed superiority. This I
realised more particularly when later I wished to go to Europe and to
compete for the Indian Civil Service, his refusal as regards that
particular career was absolute. I was to rule nobody but myself, I was
to be a scholar not an administrator.