Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/131

Rh Few persons in the district are qualified for the occupation even of a common clerk or writer. Some of the strangers bring their families with them, but by far the greater number leave them in their native district, and consider themselves as undergoing a species of banishment. The small farmers are very timid and totally illiterate. Five or six families commonly unite under one chief man, who settles the whole of their transactions with their landlords, and to whose guidance they entirely surrender themselves. Throughout the district the most opulent merchants and landholders have no better habitations than the huts constructed of straw mats precisely of the same form and appearance as those of the lowest peasantry, but in greater number and larger dimensions.

Rangpur has on its frontier Nepal, Bhootan, Cooch Behar, Assam, and the country of the Garrows from which it is separated, not by large rivers, lofty mountains, or any other natural landmark, but by imaginary and ill-defined boundaries.

Indigenous Elementary Schools.—In the absence of Dr. Buchanan’s account of the state of education, the answers made by the canoongoes of the district to the circular inquiries of the General Committee in 1823 afford some information on which apparently dependence may be placed. The information thus given to the Committee was communicated in a singularly ill-digested form; but after comparing the various statements which it includes, it would appear that in fourteen out of nineteen sub-divisions of the district there were no elementary schools whatever, and that, in the remaining five, there were ten Bengalee schools and two Persian ones for elementary instruction. In some of the sub-divisions having no common schools, parents, to supply the want of them, either employ teachers in their own houses in whose instructions the children of neighbouring families are allowed to participate, or themselves instruct their own children. The employment of a private tutor and still more parental instruction would appear to be very common. In some instances Hindoos are mentioned as teachers of Persian schools, and Mahomedans of Bengalee ones. In these schools the monthly payment for the instruction of one boy is from two to four and eight annas and even one rupee. The number of boys in one school did not exceed twelve, and there was sometimes as small a number as three taught by one master. In this district the boys are described as attending school from their seventh or eighth to their fifteenth year. The canoongoes almost uniformly speak of the advantage which the district would derive from the encouragement given to education by Government.

Indigenous Schools of Learning.—Hamilton on the state of learning in this district says that a few Brahmans have acquired sufiicient skill in astronomy to construct an almanac, and five or six Pundits instruct youth in a science named Agam, or magic,