Page:Calcutta Review Vol. II (Oct. - Dec. 1844).pdf/340

Rh throw him violently to the ground. Or, two boys are made to seize another by the ears; and, with these organs well out-stretched, he is made to run along for the amusement of the bystanders. Again, a boy is constrained to pull his own ears; and if he fail to extend them sufficiently he is visited with a sorer chastisement. Or, two boys, when both have given offence, are made to knock their heads several times against each other. Again, the boy who first comes to school in the morning, receives one stroke of the cane on the palm of the hand; the next receives two strokes; and so each in succession, as he arrives, receives a number of strokes equal to the number of boys that preceded him;—the first being the privileged administrator of them all. When a boy wants to go out, the common practice is to throw some spittle on the floor; if it dries up before he returns, he is punished with the cane; or if not, a boy hostile to him may, with or without the cognizance and connivance of the master, come and wipe it out in order to ensure his punishment. When, instead of teaching, the Guru mahashai or master betakes himself to the making or the copying of almanacks and horoscopes, as he constantly does, to eke out his scanty allowances; the boys, too, very naturally betake themselves to extraneous modes of diversion and employment, such as playing and pinching, chattering and frolic, waggery and abuse; but when, forgetting themselves too far, they become obstreperous, and the noise swells into tumult, the teacher is suddenly roused into red burning wrath, and gives vent to his uncontrollable fury in a crushing tempest of indiscriminate flagellation, intermingled with the loud sound of vituperative epithets, too gross and shocking to be recorded here.

No wonder that the Patshala, or vernacular school, should be viewed, as it uniformly is, as an object of terror by the young. The conductor of it is the ghost that haunts and scares the young. When a child misbehaves, the most severe and awe-inspiring threat of the mother is, “Call the Guru mahashai to take him to school.” Apart from its general influence in paralysing the intellectual and moral powers, this system of terror leads to many specific practices of a baneful tendency. It superinduces the habit of crouching servility towards the master in his presence, and the rendering of many menial and even dishonest services. To propitiate the dreaded tyrant, the boys are glad to prepare his hookah, to bring fire for smoking, gather flowers for his pujah, sweep his lodging, wash his brazen pots, cleave thick pieces of wood for fuel, &c. They are induced to go to the bazaar with their written plantain-leaves, and to give them to the shopkeepers as packing materials, in exchange for cowries,