Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/190

Vedantic, both highly reputed, and both apparently profound in the branches of learning to which they have devoted themselves. I might add also the medical professors who are venerable men and highly respected by all around them for their learning within their own peculiar range as well as for their general character. There are others who occupy a middle rank; but the majority of the Pundits are superficial men and I have reason to think would be so judged by competent persons amongst their own countrymen—that is, superficial compared with the highest existing standards of native learning, although all in general know well what they profess to know. In this district the poetry of the drama appears to be almost wholly neglected. I found only one instance in which the Mahanataka and that alone is read; whereas in some other districts dramatical literature is more generally and more fully studied, the Mahanakata being usually succeeded by Sakuntala, Kautuka Sarvaswa, Hasyarnava, Venisanhar, Murari, &c. In rhetoric, the Srutabodha and Kavyachandrica; the former on prosody and the latter on the rules of poetical composition and both in general use elsewhere, are not read in this district. In law, Menu and the Mitaksara, which are studied in other parts of Bengal, are here known only by name; and we have seen that logic, to which by general consent the highest honors are given in Bengal, has here only two professors, of whom one is scarcely worthy to be so ranked. Not only is learning low, but it is retrograding. One village that has two schools of learning (No. 9) had from ten to twelve within the recollection of one of the Pundits, and there has been no corresponding increase elsewhere within the district. The diminution is attributed to the breaking up of the great zemindaries and the withdrawal of the support which their owners gave to the cause of learning and of the endowments which they established. I have already mentioned the comparatively refined tone of feeling and character which the cultivation of Hindu learning appears to give to its possessors; and the effect in some measure extends to their families, for the children of Brahman-pundits are in general bright-looking and intelligent, modest and polite. The system of learned instruction also has a principle of diffusiveness in the gratuitousness with which the instruction is bestowed, but that principle operates only within the pale of the brahman caste, except to a limited extent in favor of Vaidyas, and beyond those limits none of the humanizing influences of learning are seen in the improved moral and intellectual character or physical condition of the surrounding humbler classes of society. It seems never to have entered into the conceptions of the learned that it was their duty to do something for the instruction of those classes who are as ignorant and degraded where learning abounds as where it does not exist; nor has learning any practical influence upon the physical comforts even of its possessors, for their houses are as