When Lord Macaulay’s Education Policy came into being in 1854 through Woods’ Dispatch, the modern education was now thrown open to all the Indians irrespective of Caste, color, religion and gender. Dalits too began sending their children to schools, but hostility followed. Caste Hindus opposed the Dalits’ move violently. At places, their houses were burnt, crops destroyed for sending their children to schools. Caste Order proved mightier than the Crown. Finally, the Indian Education Commission 1884 recommended the opening of Separate/Special schools for Dalits. Such schools were opened all over India – and in several thousand schools are in practice even today. But, by the turn of the 20^th Century, a debate started to desegregate schools. Annie Besant wrote an article on the subject. Ms. Besant’s article was reproduced by Dr B R Ambedkar, and latter, published in his “What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables”, Vol. 9, pages 3-7]. Following is the text of Ms. Besant’s article:

The Uplift of the Depressed Classes

By Annie Besant [Indian Review, February 1909 edition]

In every nation we find, as the basis of the social Pyramid, a large class of people, ignorant, degraded, unclean in language and habits, people, who perform many tasks which are necessary for Society, but who are despised and neglected by the very Society to whose needs they minister. In England, this class is called the ‘submerged tenth’, forming, as it does, one-tenth of the total population. It is ever on the verge of starvation, and the least extra pressure sends it over the edge. It suffers chronically from under-nutrition and is a prey to the diseases which spring therefrom. It is prolific, like all creatures in whom the nervous system is of a low type, but its children die off rapidly, ill-nourished, rickety, often malformed. Its better type consists of unskilled labourers, who perform the roughest work, scavengers, sweepers, navvies, casual dock-labourers, costermongers; and into it, forming its worst type, drift all the wastrels of Society, the drunkards, the loafers, the coarsely dissolute, the tramps, the vagabonds, the clumsily criminal, the ruffians. The first type, as a rule, honest and industrious; the second ought to be under continued control, and forced to labour sufficiently to earn its bread. In India, this class forms one-sixth of the total population, and goes by the generic name of the ‘Depressed Classes’. It springs from the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, conquered and enslaved by the Aryan invaders, ….  It is drunken and utterly indifferent to cleanliness, whether of food, person or dwelling; but marriage is accompanied with some slight formality, children are kindly treated, and there is very little brutality, violence, or criminality. Criminal communities, such as hereditary thieves, live apart and do not mingle with the scavengers, sweepers, husbandmen and the followers of other simple crafts who make up the huge bulk of the depressed. They are gentle, docile, as a rule industrious, pathetically submissive, merry enough when not in actual want, with a bright though generally very limited intelligence; of truth and the civic virtues they are for the most part utterly devoid – how should they be anything else?- but they are affectionate, grateful for the slightest kindness, and with much ‘natural religion’. In fact, they offer good material for simple and useful through humble civic life.

“What can be done for them by those who feel the barbarity of the treatment meted out to them, by those who feel that the Indians who demand freedoms should show respect to others, and give to others a share of the consideration they claim for themselves?”

“Here, as everywhere, education is the lever by which we may hope to raise them, but a difficulty arises at the outset, for one class of the community, moved by a noble feeling of compassion and benevolence, but not adding thereto a careful and detailed consideration of the conditions, demands, for the children of the pariah community admission to the schools frequented by the sons of the higher classes, and charges with lack of brotherhood those who are not in favour of this policy.  It becomes, therefore, necessary to ask whether brotherhood is to mean leveling down, and whether it is usual in family to treat the elder children and the babies in exactly the same way. It is a zeal not according to knowledge – and not according to nature – which would substitute equality for brotherhood and demand from the cultured and refined that they should forfeit the hard-won fruits of the education of generations, in order to create an artificial equality, as disastrous to the progress of the future as it would be useless for the improvement of the present. The children of the depressed classes need, first of all, to be taught cleanliness, outside decency of behaviour, and the earliest rudiments of education, religion and mortality. Their bodies, at present, are ill odorous and foul with the liquor and strong-smelling food out of which for generations they have been built up; it will need some generations of purer food and living to make their bodies fit to sit in the close neighborhood of a schoolroom with children who have received bodies from an ancestry trained in habits of exquisite personal cleanliness, and fed on pure food-stuffs. We have to raise the Depressed Classes to a similar level of physical purity, not to drag down the clean to the level of the dirty, and until this is done, close association is undesirable. We are not blaming these children, nor their parents, for being what they are; we are stating a mere palpable fact. The first daily lesson in a school for these children should be a bath, and the putting on of a clean cloth; and the second should be a meal of clean wholesome food;  those primary needs cannot be supplied in a school intended for children who take their daily bath in the early morning and who come to school well-fed.

“Another difficulty that faces teachers of these children are the contagious diseases that are bred from first; to take one example, eye-disease, wholly due to neglect, is one of the most common and ‘catching’ complaints among them. In our Panchnama schools in Madras, the teachers are ever on the alert to detect and check this, and the children’s eyes are daily washed and disease is thus prevented.  But is it to be expected that fathers and mothers, whose daily care protects their children from such dirty diseases should deliberately expose them at school to this infection?

“Nor are the manner and habits of these forlorn little ones desirable things to be imitated by gently-nurtured children. Good manners, for instance, are the result of continual and rigid self-control, and of consideration for the comfort and convenience of others; children learn manners chiefly by imitation from well-bred parents and teachers and, secondarily, by suitable precept and reproof. If, at the school, they are to be associated with children not thus trained, they will quickly fall into the ways which they see around them. For, until good habits are rendered fixed by long practice, it is far easier to be slipshod than accurate, to be careless than careful. Ought the children of families in which good manners and courtesy are hereditary, to be robbed of their heritage, a robbery that enriches no one, but drags the whole nation down? Gentle speech, well-modulated voice, pleasant ways, these are the valuable results of long culture, and to let them be swamped out is no true brotherhood…

“In England, it has never been regarded as desirable to educate boys or girls of all classes side by side, and such grotesque equalizing of the unequal would be scouted. Eton and Harrow are admittedly the schools for the higher classes; Rubgy and Winchester are also schools for gentlemen’s sons, though somewhat less aristocratic. Then come a number of schools, frequented chiefly by sons of the provincial middle class. Then, the Board schools, where the sons of artisans and the general manual labour classes are taught; and below all these, for the waifs and strays, are the ‘ragged schools’; the name of which indicates the type of their scholars, and the numerous charitable institutions. A man in England who proposed that ragged school-children should be admitted to Eton and Harrow would not be argued with, but laughed at. Here, when a similar proposition is made in the name of brotherhood, people seem ashamed to point out frankly its absurdity, and they do not realize that the proposal is merely a violent reaction against the cruel wrongs which have been inflicted on the Depressed Classes, the outcry of an awakened conscience, which has not yet had time to call right reason to guide its emotions.  It is sometimes said that Government schools pay no attention to social differences; therein they show that they are essentially ‘foreign’ in their spirit. They would not deal so with the sons of their own people, though they may be careless of the sons of Indians, and lump them all together, clean and dirty alike. It is very easy to see the differences of ‘tone’ in the youths when only the sons of the cultured classes are admitted to a school, and it is to the interest of the Indians that they should send their sons where they are guarded from coarse influence as Englishmen guard their own sons in England.”