The Tragic Story of How Britain Destroyed India's Ancient Universities

You've heard the story about Nalanda burning. Hundreds of thousands of manuscripts, a fire that supposedly raged for months. And yes, that happened, around 1193 CE. But that fire was Bakhtiyar Khalji's cavalry, not the British.

So that is not the crime this video is about, and it is the wrong century entirely. The real crime happened in daylight. On paper. Signed, dated, minuted, and filed, by the very government that committed it. In the 1820s and 1830s, the British surveyed India's education system before they dismantled it. 

Thomas Munro ordered a survey in Madras Presidency in 1822, carried out by collector A. D. Campbell between 1823 and 1825. A parallel survey ran in the Bombay Presidency in the mid-1820s. And in Bengal and Bihar, a former missionary named William Adam produced three increasingly detailed reports between 1835 and 1838 on the orders of Governor-General Lord William Bentinck. 

What they counted did not fit the colonial story. Adam's reports estimated roughly 100,000 functioning village schools across Bengal and Bihar alone, close to a school per village. These were pathshalas, gurukulas, and madrassas: community-funded, decentralised, and embedded in village life. 

The Madras caste data was even more inconvenient, showing that so-called lower castes and Shudras formed a large share, and in many districts a majority, of students. The men sent to confirm Indian educational poverty accidentally disproved it, in writing. Then it was buried. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay's Minute on Education, dated 2 February 1835, declared a single shelf of a European library worth the whole literature of India and Arabia, a judgement he made while admitting he could not read a word of Sanskrit or Arabic. His stated goal was to form a class of interpreters, Indian in blood but English in taste and intellect. 

Five weeks later, on 7 March 1835, Bentinck signed the English Education Act, redirecting government funding toward English and European instruction. The village schools were not mostly state-funded, so the Minute did not defund them directly. They starved instead. 

The Permanent Settlement of 1793 and later land-revenue systems hollowed out the local patrons, temple endowments, and gentry who paid the schoolmasters, while every job that mattered now required English. Demand collapsed from below as funding shifted above. Nobody had to order the schools closed. 

They simply stopped making sense to attend. The receipts sat in colonial archives for over a century until the Gandhian researcher Dharampal pulled them back out and published The Beautiful Tree in 1983. The title comes from Gandhi's speech at Chatham House in London on 20 October 1931, where he argued that the British had uprooted the beautiful tree of Indian education and left it to perish. 

This is the forensic story of how a distributed knowledge network was erased on paper, and why the same fight over who controls access to learning is unfolding again in the age of AI and digital education.

On 19 June 2024, a new campus of Nalanda University was inaugurated in Rajgir, Bihar. The bricks can be rebuilt. The question is whether the idea behind them survives.