THE QUESTION OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION.
There remains one vital aspect of the educational problem which was left
untouched by the Educational Resolution of 1904, and has been left
untouched ever since we entered three-quarters of a century ago on an
educational experiment unparalleled in the world's history--a more
arduous experiment even than that of governing the 300 millions of India
with a handful of Englishmen. Many nations have conquered remote
dependencies inhabited by alien races, imposed their laws upon them, and
held them in peaceful subjection, though even this has never been done
on the same scale of magnitude as by the British rulers of India. We
alone have attempted to educate them in our own literature and science
and to make them by education the intellectual partners of the
civilization that subdued them. Of the two tasks, that of government and
that of education, the latter is not by any means the easier. For good
government involves as little interference as possible with the beliefs
and customs and traditions of the people, whereas good education means
the substitution for them of the intellectual and moral conceptions of
what we regard as our higher civilization. Good government represents
to that extent a process of conservation; good education must be
partially a destructive, almost a revolutionary, process. Yet upon the
more difficult and delicate problems of education we have hitherto, it
is to be feared, bestowed less thought and less vigilance than upon
administrative problems in India. The purpose we have had in view is
presumably that which Dr. Ashutosh Mookerjee admirably defined in his
last address to the University of Calcutta as "the raising up of loyal
and honourable citizens for the welfare of the State." But is it a
purpose which those responsible for our Indian system of education have
kept steadily before them? Is it a purpose that could possibly be
achieved by the _laisser faire_ policy of the State in regard to the
moral and religious side of education? If so, how is it that we have had
of late such alarming evidence of our frequent failure to achieve it?
The divorce of education from religion is still on its trial in Western
countries, which rely upon a highly-developed code of ethics and an
inherited sense of social and civic duty to supply the place of
religious sanctions. In India, as almost everywhere in the East,
religion in some form or another, from the fetish worship of the
primitive hill tribes to the Pantheistic philosophy of the most cultured
Brahman or the stern Monotheism of the orthodox Moslem, is the dominant
force in the life both of every individual and of every separate
community to which the individual belongs. Religion is, in fact, the
basic element of Indian life, and morality apart from religion is an
almost impossible conception for all but an infinitesimal fraction of
Western-educated Indians. Hence, even if the attempt had been or were in
the future made to instil ethical notions into the minds of the Indian
youth independently of all religious teaching, it could only result in
failure. For the Hindu, perhaps more than for any other, religion
governs life from the hour of his birth to that of his death. His birth
and his death are in fact only links in a long chain of existences
inexorably governed by religion. His religion may seem to us to consist
chiefly of ritual and ceremonial observances which sterilize any higher
spiritual life. But even if such an impression is not due mainly to our
own want of understanding, the very fact that every common act of his
daily life is a religious observance, just as the caste into which he is
born has been determined by the degree in which he has fulfilled similar
religious observances in a former cycle of lives, shows how completely
his religion permeates his existence. The whole world in which he lives
and moves and has his being, in so far as it is not a mere illusion of
the senses, is for him an emanation of the omnipresent deity that he
worships in a thousand different shapes, from the grotesque to the
sublime.
Yet in a country where religion is the sovereign influence we have, from
the beginning, absolutely ignored it in education. It is no doubt quite
impossible for the State in a country like India with so many creeds and
sects, whose tenets are often repugnant to all our own conceptions not
only of religion but of morality, to take any direct part in providing
the religious instruction which would be acceptable to Indian parents.
But was it necessary altogether to exclude such instruction from our
schools and colleges? Has not its exclusion tended to create in the
minds of many Indians the belief that our professions of religious
neutrality are a pretence, and that, however rigorously the State may
abstain from all attempts to use education as a medium for Christian
propaganda, it nevertheless uses it to undermine the faith of the rising
generations in their own ancestral creeds? Even if they acquit us of any
deliberate purpose, are they not at any rate entitled to say that such
have been too often the results? Did not the incipient revolt against
all the traditions of Hinduism that followed the introduction of Western
education help to engender the wholesale reaction against Western
influences which, underlies the present unrest?
Few problems illustrate more strikingly the tremendous difficulties that
beset a Government such as ours in India. On the one hand, Indian
religious conceptions are in many ways so diametrically opposed to all
that British rule stands for that the State cannot actively lend itself
to maintain or promote them. On the other hand, they provide the ties
which hold the whole fabric of Indian society together, and which cannot
be hastily loosened without serious injury and even danger to the State.
This has been made patent to the most careless observer by the events of
the last few years that have revealed, as with a lurid flash of
lightning, the extent to which the demoralization of our schools and
colleges had proceeded. If any Englishman has doubts as to the connexion
in this matter of cause and effect, let him ask respectable Indian
parents who hold aloof from politics. They have long complained that the
spirit of reverence and the respect for parental authority are being
killed by an educational system which may train the intellect and impart
useful worldly knowledge, but withdraws their youths from the actual
supervision and control of the parents or of the _guru_, who for
spiritual guidance stood _in loco parentis_ under the old Hindu system
of education, and estranges them from all the ideas of their own Hindu
world[20]. That parents often genuinely resent the banishment of all
religious influence from our schools and colleges appears from the fact
that many of them prefer to Government institutions those conducted by
missionaries in which, though no attempt is made to proselytize, a
religious, albeit a Christian, atmosphere is to some extent maintained.
It is on similar grounds also that the promoters of the new movement in
favour of "National Schools" advocate the maintenance of schools which
purchase complete immunity from Government control by renouncing all the
advantages of grants-in-aid and of University affiliation. They have
been started mainly under the patronage of "advanced" politicians, and
have too often turned out to be mere hot-beds of sedition, but their
_raison d'être_ is alleged to be the right of Hindu parents to bring up
Hindu children in a Hindu atmosphere.
From the opposite pole in politics, most of the ruling chiefs in their
replies to Lord Minto's request for their opinions on the growth of
disaffection call attention to this aspect of education, and the Hindu
princes especially lay great stress on the neglect of religious and
moral instruction. I will quote only the Maharajah of Jaipur, a Hindu
ruler universally revered, for his high character and great
experience:--
My next point has reference to the neglect there seems to
be of religious education, a point to which I drew your
Excellency's attention at the State banquet at Jaipur on the
29th October, 1909. I must say I have great faith in a system
of education, in which secular and religious instruction are
harmoniously combined, as the formation of character
entirely depends upon a basework of religion, and the noble
ideals which our sacred books put before the younger generation
will, I fervently hope, make them loyal and dutiful
citizens of the Empire. Such ideals must inevitably have
their effect on impressionable young men, and it is perhaps
due to such ideals that sedition and anarchy have obtained
so small a footing in the Native States as a whole. In the
Chiefs' College Conference, held at the Mayo College in 1904,
I impressed upon my colleagues the necessity of religious
education for the sons of the chiefs and nobles of Rajputana,
and it should be one of the principal objects in all schools for
the Pandits and the Moulvies to instil in the minds of their
pupils correct notions as to the duty they owe to the community
they belong to and to their Sovereign.
In this respect the ruling chiefs unquestionably reflect the views which
prevail amongst the better-class Indians in British India as well as in
the Native States. The Government of India cannot afford to disregard
them. The Resolution of 1904, it is true, laid it down again definitely
that "in Government institutions, the instruction is and must continue
to be exclusively secular." But much has happened since 1904 to reveal
the evils which our educational system has engendered and to lend
weight to the representations made by responsible exponents of sober
Indian opinion in favour of one of the remedies which it is clearly
within our power to apply. Nor need we really depart from our
time-honoured principle of neutrality in religious matters. All we have
to do is to set apart, in the curriculum of our schools and colleges,
certain hours during which they will be open, on specified conditions,
for religious instruction in the creed in which the parents desire their
children to be brought up. There is no call for compulsion. This is just
one of the questions in which the greatest latitude should be left to
local Governments, who are more closely in touch than the Central
Government with the sentiment and wishes of the different communities. I
am assured that there would be little difficulty in forming local
committees to settle whether there was a sufficiently strong feeling
amongst parents in favour of a course of religious instruction and to
determine the lines upon which it should be given. Some supervision
would have to be exercised by the State, but in the Educational Service
there are, it is to be hoped, enough capable and enlightened
representatives of the different creeds to exercise the necessary amount
of supervision in a spirit both of sympathy for the spiritual needs of
their people and of loyalty to the Government they serve. It may be
objected that there are so many jarring sects, so many divisions of
caste, that it would be impossible ever to secure an agreement as to the
form to be imparted to religious instruction. Let us recognize but not
overrate the difficulty. In each of the principal religions of India a
substantial basis can be found to serve as a common denominator between
different groups, as, for instance, in the Koran for all Mahomedans and
in the Shastras for the great majority of high-caste Hindus. At any
rate, if the effort is made and fails through no fault of ours, but
through the inability of Indian parents to reconcile their religious
differences, the responsibility to them will no longer lie with us.
Another objection will probably be raised by earnest Christians who
would hold themselves bound in conscience to protest against any
facilities being given by a Christian State for instruction in religious
beliefs which they reprobate. Some of these austere religionists may
even go so far as to contend that, rather than tolerate the teaching of
"false doctrines," it is better to deprive Indian children of all
religious teaching. To censure of this sort, however, the State already
lays itself open in India. There are educational institutions--and some
of the best, like the Mahomedan College at Aligurh--maintained by
denominational communities on purpose to secure religious education. Yet
the State withdraws from them neither recognition nor assistance because
pupils are taught to be good Mahomedans or good Hindus. Why should it be
wrong to make religious instruction permissive in other Indian schools
which are not wholly or mainly supported by private endeavour? Is not
the "harmonious combination of secular and religious instruction" for
which the Maharajah of Jaipur pleads better calculated than our present
policy of _laisser faire_ to refine and purify Indian religious
conceptions, and to bring about that approximation of Eastern to Western
ideals, towards which the best Indian minds were tending before the
present revolt against Western ascendency?
Here is surely a question bound up with all the main-springs of Indian
life in which we may be rightly asked "to govern according to Indian
ideas." Can we expect that the youth of India will grow up to be
law-abiding citizens if we deprive them of what their parents hold to be
"the keystone to the formation of character"? Can we close our eyes to
what so many responsible Indians regard as one of the chief causes of
the demoralization which has crept into our schools and colleges? The
State can, doubtless, exact in many ways more loyal co-operation from
Indian teachers in safeguarding their pupils from the virus of
disaffection. It can, for instance, intimate that it will cease to
recruit public servants from schools in which sedition is shown to be
rife. It can hold them collectively responsible, as some Indians
themselves recommend for crimes perpetrated by youths whom they have
helped to pervert. But these are rigorous measures that we can hardly
take with a good conscience so long as our educational system can be
charged with neglecting or undermining, however unintentionally, the
fabric upon which Indian conceptions of morality are based. So long as
we take no steps to refute a charge which, in view of recent evidence,
can no longer be dismissed as wholly unfounded, can we expect education
to fulfil the purpose rightly assigned to it by Dr. Mookerjee--"the
raising up of loyal and honourable citizens for the welfare of the
State?"