RANDOM MUSINGS

Ananda Coomaraswamy, one of the greatest intellectuals of modern India, put forth ideas about Indian education that are relevant even today. He wrote that education, as devised by the English, was a striking blow to “almost every ideal informing the national culture“. What, then, are the essentials from the Indian point of view that are so important to preserve, according to Coomaraswamy?

1. The almost universal philosophical attitude of Indians.
2. The sacredness of all things (the antithesis of the European division of life into “sacred” and “profane”). In India, this was never so; religion idealises and spiritualizes life itself rather than excludes it.
3. The true spirit of religious toleration, as illustrated continually in Indian history.
4. Etiquette.  
5. Special ideas in relation to education, such as the relation between teacher and pupil (guru-shishya parampara or traditions); memorizing great literature; music as an important carrier of individual and national culture; learning not to become a mere road to material prosperity; and the extreme importance of the teacher’s personality.
6. The basis of ethics in the principle of altruism, founded on the philosophical truth: “Thy neighbour is thyself.”
7. Control of action and thought; concentration; and capacity for stillness.

For Coomaraswamy, national culture was the only vantage point from which a person can take a wider view of other cultures. Education should not divorce the “educated” from their past nor raise an intellectual barrier between them and the “uneducated”. The two great Indian epics (Mahabharata and Ramayana) and Puranas have been the great medium of Indian education for the transmission of national culture and the basis of real character building. Modern English education ignores and destroys this. “The story of Arjuna focusing on the bird’s eye embodies the culminating ideal of the nation,” says Coomaraswamy. The object of education must be to make good Indian citizens, and this is possible only by using the national culture and the national languages (literary, musical, and artistic) as the medium of instruction.

After independence, ignoring primary education led to a huge variety of schools with little coordination, limited relevance to Indian conditions, and poor attempts to ground pupils in Indian history and culture. The future citizens of India grew up with little in common, sometimes sharing the minimum of memories and values with their parents. Secularism also damaged our education greatly. Classifying the most wonderful philosophies and metaphysics available in our Vedas, Upanishads, Darshanas, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Bhagavad Gita, Puranas, and countless other texts as “religion” and then excluding them from study at the school level has been the single most important cause of the lack of pride in our culture.

Coomaraswamy says: A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West, the past or the future… Of all Indian problems, education is the most difficult and most tragic. Our acceptance of both the English language as the major medium of instruction and secularism as the guiding principle of our curricula clearly manifests as a “colonial consciousness,” where we still parrot colonial stories about our religions, castes, science, and history instead of developing an indigenous understanding.

Instead of questioning whether religions or the caste system really exist in India; whether India was primitive scientifically and technologically before the colonials came; and whether the invading “Aryans” existed, we simply swallowed all the colonial stories and perpetuated them even stronger. Today, our social and cultural fabric seems to be an inextricable mess. Hopefully, the new education policies will address some issues that Coomaraswamy worried about more than a century ago.