The remedies that I would propose for these admitted evils, are two. In the first place, I would do away with the present system of Government inspection and put the primary schools of every district under the absolute control of the local committee, at the same time increasing the staff of the Deputy Inspectors, who would then be Deputies no longer—and the Sub-Inspectors. Not only, as has often been pointed out, are the Inspectors much too highly cultivated for the drudgery that devolves upon them, but in every country Government inspection has the inevitable result of raising the standard, which in primary schools is exactly what is not wanted. The effect of the Education Act of 1870 in England is vitiated by the same incurable tendency: the Board schools, which were intended for the poor, have gradually become suitable only for the lower middle classes, for whose benefit it was quite unnecessary that the whole community should be taxed. Secondly, the only character that I would allow to be taught in primary schools is the Nágari. This—to say the least—answers as well as any other for all the ordinary requirements of rural life, and it has the special advantage that it does not qualify for any kind of Government service. The Persian character would be taught, as now, in the pargana and tahsili schools, and boys who wished to learn it could proceed there, after undergoing the prescribed course of instruction in the primary school. It appears to me that nothing could be more equitable than this arrangement: Hindus would be gratified by having Hindi recognized as the basis of the vernacular, while the Muhammadan phase of the language would still retain the stamp of official currency.
As regards the language question, I have no patience with the continued use of the fantastic word Urdu. What people talk all over these provinces is Hindustani, which, when written, takes a Persianized form among Muhammadans and a Hindi form among Hindus. In both phases it has a Hindi basis, which cannot be got rid of even in the most artificial Urdu; on the other hand, a multitude of Persian words have been naturalized in its common vocabulary, which even in Hindi it would be pedantic to ignore. As it is already the general medium of intercourse throughout India, all Indian races may eventually be brought to accept it, and therefore the recognition of a multiplicity of spoken dialects as distinct literary languages is much to be deprecated. The best means of checking the growing divergence between Hindustani and the vernaculars of other parts of
