THE STORY OF THE SCHOOLS
A tourist who goes the round of Madras must surely be impressed with
the numerous signs of its educational activity. Apart from the
multitude of juvenile schools in every part of the crowded city, the
number of academic institutions is large, and educational buildings
are amongst the most prominent of its edifices. Our tourist, putting
himself in charge of a guide at the Central Station for a drive along
the beautiful Marina, sees a number of academic buildings on his way.
The Medical College is just outside the station yard. The classic
facade of Pachaiyappa's College for Hindus peeps at him gracefully
across the Esplanade. The Law College lifts its Saracenic towers above
him as he passes by. Across the road he sees the collection of
miniature domes and spires and towers that surmount the various
buildings that make up the far-famed Christian College. Driving along
the Marina he sees the Senate House of the Madras University
surmounted by its four squat towers; farther on he sees the staid
Engineering College, and the still staider Presidency College, and,
beyond, the whitewashed buildings of Queen Mary's residential College
for Women; and on his way back by the Mount Road he sees the
Muhammedan College, with its little white mosque and its spacious
playing-fields in the heart of the city. There are yet more colleges
in Madras; and there are also numerous large schools, some of which
are attended by more than a thousand pupils.
Yes, the educational activity in Madras is great; and it is
interesting to reflect that it is a development from very small
educational enterprises in the days when Madras was young.
The initial enterprise was small indeed. The first school in Madras
was the little "public school for children, several of whom are
English", which the French Capuchin priest, Father Ephraim, opened in
his own house in White Town very soon after Madras came into being.
His pupils were mostly Portuguese or Portuguese Eurasians, the
children of Portuguese subjects who had come from Mylapore and who,
for purposes of trade or commerce, had settled down within the English
Company's domain. His English pupils must have been children of the
very few of the Company's civil or military employees that were
married, or of the still fewer English free settlers. Father Ephraim,
who according to accounts was a really learned man, charged no fees,
yet was deeply interested in the welfare of his scholars; and the
little school must have supplied a great want in those far-off days.
It is interesting indeed to think of that little 'public school;' for
the room in the priest's house was the scene of the very first
beginning of what are now the mighty educational activities of
Madras--an earnest, moreover, of the great things that the Roman
Catholic Church was going to do in the way of education, both for boys
and for girls, in South India.
Father Ephraim's school continued to prosper under his successors, and
in the seventeenth century it was transferred, as a poor-school, to a
building in the grounds of what is now the Roman Catholic Cathedral in
Armenian Street; and in 1875 it was put under the control of the
brothers of St. Patrick, an Irish order of educational monks, and it
became St. Patrick's orphanage. Later the brothers transferred
themselves and their orphanage to the spacious park--Elphinstone
Park--on the southern bank of the Adyar River, the premises which they
occupy still.
For some thirty years the Company took no part in educational work,
and the children of Madras were left entirely to Father Ephraim's
care. Then for two years a certain Master Patrick Warner was the
Company's temporary chaplain of Madras--a conscientious and
uncompromising Protestant minister who wrote some long letters to the
Directors in England denouncing the laxity of the conduct of the
Company's employees and deploring the influence that Roman Catholic
priests had been allowed to obtain in Fort St. George. Finally, he
went back to England, with the threat that he was going to interview
the Directors on various matters pertaining to Madras; and that he
succeeded in making himself heard is to be seen in the fact that in
the following year the Directors sent a Protestant schoolmaster out to
Madras. The letter in which they notified the appointment to the
Governor in Council at Fort St. George was assuredly inspired by
Master Patrick Warner's undoubtedly high-minded representations. They
wrote that, as there were now in Fort St. George 'so many married
families,' they were sending out 'one Mr. Ralph Orde to be
schoolmaster at the Fort ... who is to teach all the Children to read
English and to write and Cypher gratis, and if any of the other
Natives, as Portuguez, Gentues (Telugus),[4] or others will send their
Children to School, we require they be also taught gratis ... and he
is likewise to instruct them in the Principles of the Protestant
religion.' Mr. Ralph Orde arrived by the same ship which brought the
letter, and his arrival (1677) is another notable event in the history
of education in Madras. It was the first beginning of Government
education--the laying of the first stone in what is now such a vast
edifice.
[Footnote 4: In modern Madras the great majority of the Hindu
residents are Tamils; but in the beginning there were very few Tamil
immigrants, and the Hindu residents were nearly all of them Telugus
(Gentoos).]
In appointing a schoolmaster, the Directors meant to do their best for
education in their rising city; for they had [5]engaged no mean
dominie on a menial's pay. In choosing Mr. Ralph Orde they chose a
good man, and they paid him accordingly. He was to dine at the General
Table, and his salary was to be L50 a year, which in those days was no
small sum--more than the salary of some of the Members of Council.
Perhaps, indeed, they got too good a man for the post; for after five
years of educational work in Madras, Mr. Orde complained that his
schoolmastering had been 'much prejudicial to my health,' and he asked
to be relieved of his duties and to be appointed to a post in the
Company's civil service instead. His request was granted. A new
schoolmaster was appointed; and as a 'Civilian' Mr. Orde worked with
such success that in two or three years he was sent to Sumatra to be
the Chief of a factory that he was to found on the west coast of the
island. The ex-schoolmaster would, perhaps, have risen to be Governor
of Madras, but it would seem that life in the East had really been
'much prejudicial to his health,' for he died in Sumatra ten years
after his first arrival in Madras.
In 1688, by virtue of the Company's Royal Charter, a Corporation of
the City of Madras came into being, and it was among their delegated
duties that they should build a school in Black Town for the purpose
of teaching 'Native children to speak, read, and write the English
Tongue, and to understand Arithmetic and Merchants' Accompts.' Three
years later, however, Elihu Yale, Governor of Madras, complained to
the Corporation that, although they had been empowered to levy taxes
on the citizens, they had not so much as thought about building a
school, and had neglected various other civic responsibilities. The
Company--rightly or wrongly--sought to justify their inaction with the
excuse which the Corporation of Madras has--rightly or wrongly--made
for civic inaction so many times since, namely that 'no funds' had
been assigned to them by Government for the works that they were
called upon to undertake. As for taxation, they remarked that the
people in Black Town had not been schooled to civic taxation; and it
is true that any ruthless collection of taxes might have meant
wholesale departures from the city, or at any rate a serious check to
further immigration. So the municipal school for Native children never
came into being.
Meanwhile the Company's free school in White Town, started by Mr.
Orde, continued its work under Mr. Orde's successors; and elementary
instruction was imparted therein to a heterogeneous crowd of
children--English, Eurasians, and Indians--Christians and Hindus.
Eventually the school was put in charge of the chaplain of St. Mary's
Church in the Fort, and the chaplain and his churchwardens agreed in
thinking that such education was not of the kind that a Church should
control, and that it was rather their duty to institute in Madras a
residential free-school for poor Protestant children of British
descent, which should be conducted on the lines of the many 'charity
schools' in England; and in 1715, with the approval of the Directors,
'St. Mary's Church Charity School' was founded. The event is of
particular interest; for St. Mary's Church Charity School developed
later into the 'Male Asylum'--the institution which has done so much
for boys and girls for so many years, and which, after changing its
habitation on various occasions, is now comfortably housed in spacious
premises in the Poonamallee road.
The year 1715 is noteworthy on another account. St. Mary's School
having been founded solely for the benefit of children of European
descent, the native children who had attended the Company's day-school
were deprived of education. The Society for the Promotion of Christian
Knowledge undertook to supply the want, by establishing schools in
Madras for the special benefit of Indian children; and the year 1715,
therefore, is the date which marks the first beginning of the
educational work that English Protestant missionary societies have
done in India. The Society found themselves unable to take up the work
immediately themselves; so they applied to the vigorous Danish
Lutheran Mission at Tranquebar, which was then a Danish settlement;
and a Danish minister was sent to Madras to set things going.
In the course of time Madras had become a much more habitable city
than it had been in its first beginnings, and a much more possible
place of residence for European women. The Company's employees,
therefore, were more and more disposed to matrimony; and, as already
related, the Directors, believing that married men made steadier
employees, had from early times encouraged the nuptial humour by
sending out from England periodical batches of well-connected young
women as prospective brides for employees who lacked either the means
or the inclination to take a trip home to choose partners for
themselves. The number of European fathers and mothers, therefore, in
Madras was continually increasing; and for the education of their
children, as also for that of children of well-to-do Eurasians, there
was need of a different kind of education than the various
free-schools supplied. Home education, with or without paid tutors and
governesses, probably served its turn with some, but it was certain
that sooner or later the private school would come into being.
We are unable to say when the first private school in Madras was
started; but an advertisement in one of the issues of the _Madras
Courier_, in 1790, shows that a private school for boys was started in
that year; and it was probably the first. The enterprising
educationist was Mr. John Holmes, M.A., who opened the 'Madras
Academy' in Black Town for the instruction of boys in 'Reading,
Writing, Arithmetic, History, the use of the Globes, French, Greek,
and Latin.' Other towns in the Madras Presidency had their English
residents, so Mr. Holmes offered to accommodate 'a few Boarders;' and
the offer was found so convenient that certain parents wanted
accommodation for their girls as well as for their boys. Mr. Holmes
was willing to receive all the pupils that he could get; for in an
advertisement two months later he announced that he was going to move
to a larger house in which 'apartments will be allotted for the Young
Ladies entirely removed and separate from the Young Gentlemen.'
The Madras Academy was eminently successful; but the mixed boarding
school was not its most commendable side; and in the following year an
enterprising lady-educationist announced that she was opening in Black
Town a 'Female Boarding School,' in which her young ladies would be
'genteelly boarded, tenderly treated, carefully Educated, and the most
strict attention paid to their Morals,' and the school was to be
conducted as far as possible 'in the manner most approv'd of in
England.' The enterprising lady-educationist was a Mrs. Murray, who
had been a mistress in the Female Asylum. Her syllabus of education
was of a more feminine sort than that which was followed at the Madras
Academy; for, as announced in the prospectus, it included 'Reading and
Writing, the English language and Arithmetic; Music, French, Drawing
and Dancing; with Lace, Tambour, and Embroidery, all sorts of Plain
and Flowered needle-work.' The two syllabuses are interesting
reminders as to what were the usual subjects of education for European
boys and girls a century and a half ago.
Schools, therefore, were available for children of every
class--European and Indian, rich and poor; but the schools for
Indians, conducted either by missionaries or by indigenous teachers,
were of an elementary kind; and, apart from Oriental studies in
indigenous institutions, there was little or nothing in the way of
higher education for Indians either in Madras or anywhere else in
India. This condition was altered, however, during the governorship of
Lord William Bentinck, the magnanimous if not brilliant
governor-general whose term of office lasted for seven years, from
1828 to 1835.
During this period everything favoured educational progress in India.
There was peace in England and there was peace in India. It was a time
of great educational developments in England, as is manifested by the
fact that within this period the London University and Durham
University were opened, and the great British Association for the
Advancement of Science was established. Such conditions in England had
their influence in India, and the more so because Lord William
Bentinck was ardent for progress. The opening of the Madras Medical
College in 1835 was one of the signs of the times. During Lord William
Bentinck's term of office education in India was reformed. Macaulay,
afterwards Lord Macaulay, was an Indian official at the time, and he
penned a notable report on education in India, in which he belittled
vernacular learning and asserted that the Government of India would do
well to discountenance it altogether, and to introduce western
learning and the study of English literature into all schools under
Government control, and to make it a rule that the English language
was to be the only medium of instruction. Whether or not Macaulay's
views were correct, they were adopted by the Government of India, and
Lord William Bentinck issued in 1835 a resolution in accordance
therewith, in which he sought to secure the people's acceptance of
English education for their children by notifying that a knowledge of
English would in future be necessary for admission into Government
service. Government service is particularly coveted in India, and the
resolution encouraged the foundation of schools of a good class in
which special attention would be given to the study of the English
language; and within a few years a number of important educational
institutions had been founded in different parts of India.
In South India the Madras Christian College, called originally 'The
General Assembly's Institution,' was first in the field. It was
founded in 1837, by the Rev. John Anderson, the first missionary that
the Church of Scotland sent out to Madras. The name of the founder is
preserved in the 'Anderson Hall' in one of the college buildings; but
the remarkable progress of the institution has been very specially due
to the untiring energy of the Rev. Dr. Miller, whose statue stands on
the opposite side of the public road. Dr. Miller was Principal for a
number of years, and now (1921) at a great age the venerable
educationist is living in retirement in Scotland.
In 1839, two years after the foundation of the Christian College, the
Roman Catholic Bishop in Madras, Dr. Carew, founded St. Mary's
Seminary, which after forty-five years became St. Mary's College, and
which is now represented by St. Mary's High School for Europeans and
St. Gabriel's High School for Indians.
Two years later, in 1841, the Presidency College had its beginning, in
a rented room in Egmore. At its foundation it was not a Government
institution, but was a public school under the control of governors,
who were chosen from among the leading Europeans and Indians in
Madras, with the Advocate-General as their first president. It was
styled 'The High School of the Madras University,' and it was the
founders' intention that when a college department had been added, the
institution should be called the 'Madras University,' and should apply
for a charter. In the sixties, however, the Madras Government was
considering a scheme of its own for a University of Madras, whereupon
the governors of the 'University High School' transferred their school
to the Government, who called it the 'Presidency College.' The
Presidency College continued to work in the rented building until
1870, when the building that it now occupies was publicly opened by
the Duke of Edinburgh.
[Illustration: UNIVERSITY SENATE HOUSE]
Pachaiyappa's College, a well-known Hindu institution, had its first
beginning in 1842. Like the other colleges in Madras, it began as a
school; the school was called 'Pachaiyappa's Central Institution,' and
was located in Black Town. The present buildings were opened in 1850
by Sir Henry Pottinger, an ex-governor of Madras, amid a large
gathering of leading European and Indian residents; and for a number
of years the annual 'Day' at Pachaiyappa's College was an important
social event. Pachaiyappa was a rich and religious Hindu, who made his
money as a broker in the Company's service, and who died more than a
hundred years ago leaving a lakh of pagodas--some 3 1/2 lakhs of
rupees--for temple purposes. The trustees neglected the provisions of
the will, whereupon the High Court assumed control of the funds,
which under the Court's control rose to the value of nearly Rs. 7 1/2
lakhs. The original amount was set apart for the fulfilment of the
terms of the will, and the surplus was assigned to educational
purposes in Pachaiyappa's name.
[Illustration: PACHAIYAPPA'S COLLEGE.]
The education of girls shared in the development; for in 1842 the
first party of Nuns of the Presentation Order was brought out from
Ireland, and a convent, with a boarding school and an orphanage,--the
'Georgetown Convent' of to-day--was established in Black Town. The
'Vepery Convent School' and some of the other successful convent
schools in Madras are controlled by nuns of the same Order.
Education in India was given further impetus in the time of Lord
Dalhousie. During his term of office (1848-1856) the present system of
education, under a Director of Public Instruction, was introduced, and
Government was empowered to make liberal educational grants, and to
establish universities. The despatch in which the educational
developments were announced has been called 'the intellectual charter
of India.'
[Illustration: DOVETON PROTESTANT COLLEGE]
Various institutions in Madras are representative of this later
development. A Government 'Normal School'--which has grown into the
'Teachers' College' of to-day--was established in 1856, to increase
the number and the efficiency of indigenous teachers; and the Madras
University was incorporated in 1857, for the control and the
development of higher education. Of large high schools still
existing, the Harris High School in Royapettah was founded by the
Church Missionary Society in 1856, for the education of Mohammedan
boys, and was named after Lord Harris, who was Governor of Madras at
the time; and the Hindu High School, in Triplicane, was founded in
1857. Doveton College, Vepery, for Anglo-Indian boys was opened in
1855. It owes its existence to a wealthy Eurasian, Captain John
Doveton, who obtained his Captaincy in the service of the Nizam of
Hyderabad, and who left a large sum of money to an earlier
institution, the Parental Academy, which was afterwards called Doveton
College in the deceased officer's honour. Within later years
philanthropic and enterprising Indians have done much for education,
and numerous schools both for boys and for girls have been established
by their efforts.
An educational building of curious interest is the office of the
Director of Public Instruction, in Nungumbaukam. It is commonly known
as the 'Old College'. In the masonry of a large arch at the entrance,
as well as on another arch within, quaint designs have been
introduced--mysterious faces, and flags, and strange geometrical
figures. The house was the property of a wealthy Armenian merchant
named Moorat, who died more than a hundred years ago; and it may be
supposed that the quaint designs were after the nature of family
memorials. In the early part of last century the Armenian merchant's
son sold the building to Government, who used it as a 'College for
Junior Civilians.' Hence the designation 'Old College'; but the name
does not mean that it was a building in which young civilians were
trained, but means that it was a building in which there were
'colleagues' in residence, or, in other words, that, the 'General
Table' having been dissolved, the 'College' was a mess-house for
junior civilians. Later, its large hall was for many years a
recognized assembly-room for amateur concerts, amateur dramatic
entertainments, and other occasions of social reunion. The quaint
devices on the gates are still preserved, and the name of the old
'College' still survives; but the associations have gone. Not even as
a ghost does the long-robed Armenian merchant tread the floors; the
junior civilians, with their ancient pranks and their antiquated
jests, have departed; in the great hall the lilt of the song and the
frenzy of the fiddles for the dance and the amateur mouthings of the
drama are heard no more. A multitude of turbanned clerks are pouring
forth the blue-black ink from their pens; schoolmasters haunt the
portals to press their claims for educational grants for their own
particular schools; and the click of a chorus of typewriters is the
only music that is borne upon the breeze.
I have told the story of the schools. It is creditable to Madras; for
great things have been done since that first little 'public school'
was opened in the Fort.