Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/192

132 into families of wealth and property, and they perceive that, without a knowledge of writing and accounts, their daughters will, in the event of widowhood, be incompetent to the management of their deceased husbands’ estates, and will unavoidably become a prey to the interested and unprincipled. The Mahomedans participate in all the prejudices of the Hindus against the instruction of their female offspring, besides that a very large majority of them are in the very lowest grades of poverty, and are thus unable, even if they were willing, to give education to their children. It may, therefore, be affirmed that the juvenile female population of this district, that is, the female population of the teachable age or of the age between fourteen and five years, without any known exception and with so few probable exceptions that they can scarcely be taken into the account, is growing up wholly destitute of the knowledge of reading and writing. Upon the principle assumed in Section I in estimating the total population, it will follow that the juvenile female population of the whole district is eight times that of Nattore or 134,336; that is, in the single district of Rajshahi there is this number of girls of the teachable age growing up in total ignorance.

Of the total female population, 61,428 are of adult age or above fourteen years; and according to the above-mentioned estimate it will follow that the adult female population of the whole district is eight times that of Nattore or 491,424. It would have been more conformable to the customs of the country to have fixed twelve instead of fourteen as the adult age of females, the former being the age at which married girls are usually taken to their husbands’ houses, but the latter was preferred in order to obtain similar data for comparison between the different corresponding divisions of the male and female population. If we take into account the early age at which married females leave the parental roof, it will appear probable that there are in this district alone at least half a million of adult females; and with the views which are generally and justly entertained in European society of the influence exercised by the female sex upon the character of their offspring, it would be an object of importance to ascertain the amount of cultivation possessed by this important class. The total absence of means for their instruction in early life and the strong prejudices directly operating against their instruction, sufficiently prove what the answer to such an enquiry must be. Although my information is necessarily imperfect, nothing that is known leads me to suppose that there are many, if any, exceptions to the general character of extreme ignorance. It has already been stated that zemindars, for the most part, instruct their daughters in the elements of knowledge; and for the reasons there assigned, instances sometimes occur of young Hindu females who have received no instruction under their parents’ roof taking lessons, at the instigation of their parents and brothers, after they