The Schoolroom They Didn’t Tell You About: Caste and Colonial-Era Indigenous Education

Recovered History · Colonial Education · 1822–1838

The Schoolroom
They Didn’t Tell You About

What Company-Era Surveys Actually Found in India’s Village Schools – and What the Data Does Not Prove

By Tarun Goyal · Long Read

“The Brahmins and the Kayasthas nowhere forming more than 40% of the total.”
– William Adam, Third Report on the State of Education in Bengal, 1838

Preface

A Word on Terms, Before the Numbers

There is a popular claim, repeated often enough to feel like settled fact, that pre-colonial Indian education was a closed shop – that only Brahmins could read, that “gurukuls” admitted no one outside the twice-born castes, and that literacy itself was a caste privilege denied to the majority. The claim is usually made with total confidence and almost never checked against the actual colonial-era survey data that exists on the subject. That data is real, extensive, and considerably more interesting than either the myth or its opposite.

A terminological caution first. The documents this piece draws on – the Madras Presidency’s district-collector returns of the 1820s and William Adam’s three reports on Bengal and Bihar, submitted to the East India Company government between 1835 and 1838 – do not use the word “gurukul” in the idealised sense the term carries today. They describe pathshalas, vernacular village schools, and local tols and madrasas for higher learning. Treating “gurukul” and “pathshala” as interchangeable is itself a small distortion worth naming before we go further, since precision here is the whole point of the exercise.

Part I

Why the Company Went Counting Schools

The surveys were not conducted by anyone with a stake in flattering Indian civilisation. They followed a House of Commons debate in 1813 over the East India Company’s charter, and were carried out by administrators tasked with assessing whether – and how – the colonial state should intervene in native education. Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras, ordered the first major survey in June 1822: district collectors were told to record the caste of every student in every school they could find, sorted into four categories – Brahmin, Vaishya, Shudra, and “other castes” (broadly ancestral to today’s Scheduled Castes) – alongside Muslim students recorded separately. A decade later, the Bengal government commissioned William Adam, a Scottish former Baptist missionary, to conduct a similar survey of Bengal and Bihar. His second and third reports, covering the district of Rajshahi and later Burdwan, Beerbhoom, Moorshedabad, Tirhoot, and South Bihar, remain the most detailed caste-wise breakdown of indigenous schooling that exists for the period.

Part II · Madras Presidency, 1822–1830

What the Southern Returns Showed

A widely cited compilation of the 1825 Madras Presidency data recorded 11,691 schools and roughly 142,000 Hindu students. Of those students, historian Dharampal’s tabulation – drawing on the original collector returns – found that 78.5% were non-Brahmin. The district-level picture varied but told a consistent story:

District	Brahmin + Vaishya	Shudra	Other Castes	Muslim
Vizagapatam	47%	21%	20%	12%
Tinnevelly	21.8%	31.2%	38.4%	~8.6%

In Tinnevelly, non-Brahmin Hindu castes together accounted for close to seven in ten students. This is not a footnote-worthy anomaly; it is drawn from the district collectors’ own returns, compiled under a colonial administration with no evident motive to overstate lower-caste participation.

Part III · Bengal and Bihar, 1835–1838

Adam’s Numbers – More Granular, More Revealing

Adam’s first report estimated that Bengal and Bihar’s 150,748 villages contained roughly 100,000 schools – nearly one per village. His second and third reports went further, recording not just headcounts but the name, caste, and age of individual teachers, and the caste-wise breakdown of students district by district.

≤40%

Brahmin + Kayastha Share, Burdwan

The two literate-scribal castes together never exceeded this share of elementary school students in any of the Bengal districts Adam surveyed.

15–16%

Brahmin + Kayastha, Bihar Districts

In Tirhoot and South Bihar, the two castes’ combined share of students fell even lower than in Bengal.

~81%

Shudra Students, South Bihar

Shudra-caste students formed the overwhelming majority of native-school enrolment in this district, per Adam’s tabulated returns.

30+

Non-Brahmin Teacher Castes

Adam recorded teachers from over thirty caste groups beyond Kayastha, Brahmin, and Sadgop – including six teachers from the Chandal caste.

In South Bihar specifically, Adam noted that vernacular instruction was carried almost entirely by the Kayastha or “writer” caste. His own words on the district were direct:

“There are no brahman-teachers.” – William Adam, on South Bihar

The most granular figure comes from Burdwan district, where Adam’s tables recorded 61 students each from the Dom and Chandal communities – groups that later colonial and post-independence classification would place among the Scheduled Castes – a number nearly equal to the 126 Vaidya students recorded in the same district.

A Detail That Complicates the Missionary Comparison

Adam also surveyed missionary-run schools in the same districts. In Burdwan, only 4 Dom and Chandal students were enrolled in the area’s 13 missionary schools.
By contrast, 674 students belonging to what Adam described as “the sixteen lowest castes” were enrolled in native pathshalas in the same district – a ratio worth sitting with before assuming which institutions were more, or less, socially open.

Part IV

What This Data Does Not Prove

None of this means caste hierarchy was absent from pre-colonial Indian education, and treating it that way would be exactly the kind of overcorrection this piece is warning against. The same body of survey data shows a sharper skew once you move from elementary literacy to higher learning. In the medical and philosophical disciplines Adam catalogued, of 194 students recorded studying medicine, only 31 were Brahmin, 59 were Shudra, and 100 belonged to other castes – but in Metaphysics and Ethics, the traditionally Brahmin-coded disciplines, the numbers were closer (62 “other castes” students against 56 Brahmin), while Theology, Law, and Vedanta remained heavily concentrated among Brahmin and Kayastha households, per Adam’s own qualitative notes.

The Scholarly Pushback

Historian Poromesh Acharya, reviewing the same Adam data, argued that the Bengali pathshala system, despite its wide social base, still “contributed in perpetuating the hierarchical social structure and Brahminic hegemony over society” – pointing to curriculum content, teacher status hierarchies, and unequal treatment within mixed-caste classrooms that raw enrolment numbers don’t capture.
Broad-based attendance at the elementary level is not the same claim as an absence of caste hierarchy in what was taught, how long different castes typically stayed enrolled, or what social treatment looked like inside the schoolroom – questions the enrolment tables alone cannot answer.

The honest reading of Adam’s and Munro’s surveys is narrower than either popular version of this story: elementary vernacular schooling in early 19th-century Bengal, Bihar, and the Madras Presidency was demonstrably not a Brahmin monopoly, and non-Brahmin – often Shudra – students frequently formed the outright majority. Higher and theological learning remained considerably more concentrated among the traditionally literate castes. Both statements are supported by the same body of colonial-era data, and neither should be quietly dropped to make the other feel more complete.

“It seems as if every caste group is represented in the student population.”

– William Adam, describing Bengal’s elementary schools, 1838

✦ ✦ ✦

A Corrective, Not a Reversal

The value of Adam’s and Munro’s surveys is not that they settle the much larger argument about caste in Indian history – they don’t, and were never designed to. Their value is narrower and more useful: they are a hard data check on a specific, frequently repeated claim about who could read and who taught whom in early 19th-century India, and on that specific claim, the returns say something more complicated than the popular story allows.

Elementary literacy was broadly distributed across caste lines in the districts these surveys covered. That finding deserves wider circulation than it currently gets. It does not, on its own, tell us that caste hierarchy was benign, that higher learning was equally open, or that the treatment of lower-caste students inside these schools was equal to that of their Brahmin classmates. A single data point, however striking, is not a whole history – restoring it to the record means restoring the caveats along with it.

Read the original reports. The tables are more interesting than either side’s summary of them.

Principal Sources

William Adam, Reports on the State of Education in Bengal, 1835 & 1838 (ed. Anathnath Basu, Calcutta University Press, 1941) · Adam’s Reports on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Behar, 1835–38 (Home Secretariat Press, Calcutta, 1868) · School Books Archive digitised copy of Adam’s Reports · Dharampal, The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century – summary and tables (Centre for Indic Historical Studies) · Dharampal’s Findings: How the Beautiful Tree Was Uprooted · The Adam Report on Education in Bengal – annotated analysis (CIS Indus) · Poromesh Acharya, “Indigenous Education and Brahminical Hegemony,” in Nigel Crook (ed.), The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia (Oxford University Press, 1996) · G.W. Leitner, History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab Since Annexation and in 1882

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