Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/271

Rh school-books are employed by the Hindus of Bengal, and Hindi school-books by the Hindus of Behar; but although Urdu is more copious and expressive, more cultivated and refined than either, and possesses a richer and more comprehensive literature, Urdu school-books are wholly unknown. It is the language of conversation in the daily intercourse of life and in the business of the world, and it is the language also of oral instruction for the explanation of Persian and Arabic, but it is never taught or learned for its own sake, or for what it contains. It is acquired in a written form only indirectly and at second-hand through the medium of the Persian, whose character it has adopted and from which it has derived almost all its vocables, and it is employed as a written language chiefly in popular poetry and tales and in female correspondence, and often also in the pulpit. The absence of Urdu schools for the Musalman population, corresponding with the Bengali and Hindi schools for the Hindus, may explain, in some measure, the greater degradation and ignorance of the lower classes of Musalmans when compared with the corresponding classes of the Hindu population; and the first step to their improvement must be to supply this defect.

Second.—Except in those cases in which the Musalmans resort to Bengali and Hindi schools. Persian instruction is the only substitute for vernacular instruction. Those Musalmans and Hindus who have received a Persian education have nearly the same command of the Persian as a written language that educated Englishmen have of their mother tongue. They acquire it in their earliest years at school, in after-life they continue to read the works it contains for instruction or amusement; they can conserveconverse [sic] in it, although it is not so employed in general society; and they employ it as the means of communication in the private correspondence of friendship and in the written transactions of business. It is occasionally the language of the pulpit in the celebrations of the moharram; it is the language of the long established manuscript Akhbars or Intelligencers of the native courts, and of the printed newspapers of modern times addressed to the educated classes of society; and the employment of a less worthy medium in composition is generally considered inconsistent with the dignity of literature and science, philosophy and religion,—more as the relaxation than the exercise of an instructed mind. The Persian language, therefore, must be pronounced to have a strong hold on native society.

Third.—There is no connection between the Bengali and Sanscrit schools of Bengal, or between the Hindi and Sanscrit schools of Behar; the teachers, scholars, and instruction of the common schools are totally different from those of the schools of learning,—the teachers and scholars being drawn from different classes of society, and the instruction directed to different objects. But this remark does not apply to the Persian and Arabic schools,