HISTORY OF EDUCATION IN INDIA

The work traces the genesis and the growth of education in India through various socio-economic and political changes over a period of 5,000 years from 3000 B.C. to 1999 A.D. In ancient India, education, which emerged out of the Indian religious scriptures, contributed most to the development of a prosperous civilization and culture in the sub-continent. In medieval times the Muslim rulers replaced the existing systems of education by introducing their own education to meet the growing needs of a Muslim administration and of a Muslim community. And, when the British replaced the Muslims as rulers, they also instituted their own system of education to meet imperial requirements. The Hindu learning, which survived in the bordering Hindu kingdoms in medieval India, almost perished under the impact of Western learning. However, the Western education gave birth to a group of enlightened Indians who were able to free India from alien rule and since 1947 began to administer the country with the educational ideas and institutions left by the British, and despite occasional attempts by them to adjust the colonial system of education to Indian conditions, the hopes and aspirations of the nascent Indian nation remained unfulfilled and became further aggravated by the globalization of the Indian market in the last decade of twentieth century. Based on a careful and meticulous use of religious scriptures in ancient India to contemporary Persian work in medieval India, and of archival sources and private papers in modern India, the book is deemed to be the first authentic and comprehensive account of history of education in India.