Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/504

 ancestors of the Aryan conquerors, or colonizers of North India, a thousand virtues which they had not, be led to cling more and more to what is really good in your own past, and to rest wherever you do not see a proved necessity for change, "in the statutes of the land that gave you birth."

There is one argument for beginning to produce something valuable and distinctive, which the Chancellor of this University has a special right to urge. It is indeed his bounden duty to ask you to rescue your University from its critics.

We have a maxim in our sacred books which is in consonance with your own Ethics, a subject to which the Cooral shows that you gave attention in very remote times:" Freely ye have received, freely give."

You have been drinking now for a generation at the fountains of European knowledge. It is time you should begin to give Europe something in return. The very smallest additions to the stores of the Western men of learning, coming from the people of Southern India, will be, I am sure, not only thankfully, but rapturously, received.

At present, they say to us: "You show us your machinery-your University, your schools, and much else. You are obviously spending a great deal of money upon what you describe as the 'Higher education', but where are your results ? If you tell us, that you get better Government officials, and that you have even taught some young men to abuse you in very fair English, in the newspapers, we reply, that is all very well if it assists or amuses you, but how does it help us how does it add to the stock of the world's knowledge? We freely grant that your English Orientalists and other men of science have done much, but there must be something wrong in the turn you have given to your higher education, if you have not succeeded m creating a desire on the part of the people of South India to learn, and to tell, more about themselves, and the country in which they live."

I confess that, when criticisms of that kind are made upon our work, I know not what to answer, unless it be to plead the hideousness of the anarchy and misrule, which preceded the firm establishment of English power in this part of India. With every year, however, that plea gets less valid. Will you not begin to help us to meet our critics, by telling Europe something worth knowing, which it does not already know ? Is that impossible? Has South India nothing of interest to tell? Surely the European workers have not exhausted all