Page:A Nation in Making.djvu/178
of a Universities Commission, which, when its personnel was first announced, did not include a single Hindu member. Yet the Hindus had the largest interest in the educational problems that were to be considered. I raised a vigorous protest in the columns of the Bengalee against this ostracism of the Hindu element. The organs of Indian public opinion were unanimous in this view, and as the result Mr. Justice Gurudas Banerjee was subsequently added as a member of the Commission.
The report was submitted in less than five months' time, whereas the Education Commission of 1882 had taken eighteen months to make their recommendations; and the report itself was a startling performance. It would be no exaggeration to say that it convulsed educated India from one end of the country to the other. The report was felt as a menace to the whole system of higher education in India. It reversed the policy of the Education Commission of 1882. It recommended: (1) The abolition of the second-grade colleges (and they formed the bulk of the colleges in Bengal); (2) the abolition of the law classes; and (3) the fixing of a minimum rate of college fees by the Syndicate, which really meant the raising of the fees. In order to raise the standard of efficiency the area of high education was sought to be restricted.
The feeling against Indian lawyers, which the report of the majority disclosed, was open and undisguised. To do away with the law classes' said the report, will in many cases increase the expense of the law students' education; but the central school will have the scholarships; and, even if the net result should be to diminish the number of lawyers in India, we are not certain that this would be an unmixed evil.' The aversion to law and lawyers is a permanent feature of the official mind in India, and found ex- pression on an important occasion in the columns of the Pioneer, which commented unfavourably on the fact that the legal element predominated among the nineteen signatories to the scheme of post-war reforms submitted by nineteen elected members of the Imperial Legislative Council. It is worthy of remark that the Commissioners themselves admitted that the effect of their proposals would be to narrow the popular basis of high education, and to restrict its area.
It need hardly be said that Mr. Justice Gurudas Banerjee recorded a strong dissent, traversing the points to which I have referred. A vigorous agitation was set up against the recommenda- tions contained in the report. A Town Hall meeting was organized;