INDIA'S EDUCATION ( A CULTURAL GENOCIDE)

Chapter 3 A page torn from a book

Let us take a look at the education model of India pre invasions and how it operated within the society. Shri Dharampal went to the British Museum and examined the reports and archives. He published a book called "The Beautiful Tree" where he discusses the education that prevailed in India before the rampant destruction. By 1820, the British had already destroyed the financial resources that supported our educational system, destruction that they had been carrying out for nearly twenty years. But still, the Indians persisted in continuing with their system of education. So, the British decided to find out the intricacies of this system. Therefore, a survey was ordered in 1822 and was conducted by the British district collectors. In the survey it was found that the Bengal presidency had 1 lakh village schools, in Madras, there was not a single village without a school, in Bombay, if the village population was near 100, the village had a school. Teachers, as well as students of all castes, were in these schools. The Brahmins accounted for 7% to 48% of the teachers, and the rest of the teachers in any district came from other castes. Further, all children had their education in their mother tongue.

This goes without saying that India had a very robust knowledge-sharing protocol in place which is evident by the presence of structures of universities and massive libraries such as Nalanda, Takshilla, Mithila, Telhara, Sharada Peeth, Vallabhi, Pushpagiri, Odantapuri, Vikramshila, Somapura, Bikampur, Morena Golden Triangle, Kanthalloor Sala, Jagaddala, Nadia, Nagarjuna Vidyapeeth. All of which offered scholars ample opportunities for knowledge gathering and idea exploration.

This however won't last because the human being is such a self-destructive creature that we have the potential to eradicate communities without a second thought, well about universities, Bakhtiyar Khilji destroyed the Nalanda University in 1202 AD. Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji was a Turkic invader.

He decided to destroy the roots of Buddhism and Ayurveda. As a result, Khilji set fire to the great library of Nalanda and burned around 9 million manuscripts. This again goes to provide more evidence that suggests that a man's ego in authority is extremely fragile and also once again we saw how political rulers, military personal, and religious leaders have burned books containing knowledge.

Books and libraries have been targeted by people of all backgrounds for thousands of years, sometimes intentionally and sometimes as a side-effect of war. In 213 B.C., Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang (more widely remembered for his terracotta army in Xian) ordered a bonfire of books as a way of consolidating power in his new empire. According to historian Lois Mai Chan, "His basic objective was not so much to wipe out these schools of thought completely as to place them under governmental control." Books of poetry, philosophy, and history were specifically targeted so that the new emperor couldn't be compared to more virtuous or successful rulers of the past. Although the exact amount of information lost is unknown, it is believed that the history genre suffered the greatest loss.

People saw knowledge as a way to change themselves, and the world, and so it became a far more dangerous commodity, no longer controlled exclusively by the elite. What better way to reshape the balance of power and send a message at the same time than by burning books?

Perhaps the most infamous book burnings were those staged by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who regularly employed language framing themselves as the victims of Jews. Similarly, when Mao Zedong took power in China and implemented the Cultural Revolution, any book that didn't conform to party propaganda, like those promoting capitalism or other dangerous ideas, was destroyed. More recently, the Jaffna Public Library of Sri Lanka—home to nearly 100,000 rare books of Tamil history and literature—was burned by Sinhalese Buddhists. The Sinhalese felt their Buddhist beliefs were under threat by the Hinduism of Tamils, even though they outnumbered the Tamils.

Even when the knowledge itself isn't prevented from reaching the public, the symbolic weight of burning books is heavy. "Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them as to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are," wrote John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, in his 1644 book Areopagitica. "Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature... but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself—" an idea that continues to be espoused in modern cultures, like in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

Forgive me for getting distracted and overly emotional sometimes, I feel strongly for the destruction of knowledge by men having deep insecurities about themselves. I cannot help but wonder why are authorities so devastated by a book. Let's hope I find a satisfying answer to that sometime, for now, we can get back to our topic.