Musalmans to Hindus being about two to one, the proportion of Musalman to Hindu children receiving domestic instruction being rather less than one to four. This disproportion is explained by the fact already stated that a very large majority of the humblest grades of Native society in this district are composed of Musalmans, such as cultivators of the ground, day-laborers, fishermen, &c., who are regarded by themselves as well as by others, both in respect of condition and capacity, as quite beyond the reach of the simplest forms of literary instruction. You may as well talk to them of scaling the heavens as of instructing their children. In their present circumstances and with their present views, both would appear equally difficult and equally presumptuous. Those who give their children domestic instruction are zemindars, talukdars, and persons of some little substance; shop-keepers and traders possessing some enterprize and forecast in their callings; zemindars’ agents or factors (gomashtas) , and heads of villages (mandals), who know practically the advantage of writing and accounts; and sometimes persons of straitened resources, but respectable character, who have been in better circumstances, and wish to give their children the means of making their way in the world. Pundits, too, who intend that their children should pursue the study of Sanscrit begin by instructing them at home in the rudiments of their mother tongue; and Brahmans who have themselves gone through only a partial course of Sanscrit reading, seek to qualify their children by such instruction as they can give for the office and duties of a family priest or spiritual guide.
The instruction given in families is still more limited and imperfect than that which is given in schools. In some cases I found that it did not extend beyond the writing of the letters of the alphabet, in others the writing of words. Pundits and priests, unless when there is some landed property in the family, confine the Bengali instruction they give their children to writing and reading, addition and subtraction, with scarcely any of the applications of numbers to agricultural and commercial affairs. Farmers and traders naturally limit their instructions to what they best know, and what is to them and their children of greatest direct utility, the calculations and measurements peculiar to their immediate occupations. The parents with whom I have conversed on the subject do not attach the same value to the domestic instruction their children receive which they ascribe to the instruction of a professional school-master, both because in their opinion such instruction would be more regular and systematic, and because the teacher would probably be better qualified.
It thus appears that, in addition to the elementary instruction given in regular schools, there is a sort of traditionary knowledge of written language and accounts preserved in families from father to son and from generation to generation. This domestic
