Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/301

Rh various degrees of instruction, but it was not easy to discriminate between them, and no attempt to do so was made in the districts of Moorshedabad, Beerbhoom, and Burdwan. In the city of Moorshedabad and in the districts of South Behar and Tirhoot such an attempt was made, and the result appears in the account given of the state of adult instruction in that city and in the Jehanabad and Bhawara thanas of those districts. That result is that beyond mere reading and writing, the instruction of the middle classes of native society extends first and principally to Bengali or Hindi accounts, next and to a much less extent to the Persian language, and lastly in a very limited degree to the English language. I met with only one person belonging to this class who devoted any portion of his attention to the cultivation of literature. His name is Kaliprasad Mukhopadhyaya the sherishtadar of the Magistrate of Beerbhoom. He is the author of a work in Bengali called Rasik Ranjan, describing the loves and adventures of Jaya and Jayanti. It is part in prose and part in verse, and contains about 380 pages. A copy is in my possession. The two remaining classes are sufficiently described by the designations already given to them as those who can merely read and write, and those who can merely decipher writing or sign their names. Nine women are found to belong to these two classes in the city of Moorshedabad and in thana Daulatbazar of the Moorshedabad district. In all the other localities of which a census was taken no adult females were found to possess even the lowest grade of instruction.

Third.—A knowledge of the number of instructed adults and of the nature and extent of the instruction they possess furnishes the means of estimating the amount of instrumentality existing in native society which, in a greater or less measure, may be made available for the improvement and extension of popular education. The following table has been constructed with a view to such an estimate:—