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Cultural Imperialism & Thomas Macaulay
Minute
on Indian Education, 2 February 1835
(Lord
Macaulay was not only a well-known Victorian essayist, poet, and
historian but also a colonial administrator. A staunch Whig, he served in
the House of Commons, was a member of the Supreme Council of India, and
Secretary of War. Remembered in literary history as the author of the
History of England from the Accession of James the Second, and book reviews
for the Edinburgh Review, he is remembered in postcolonial studies for this
classic statement of
cultural imperialism.)
"The languages of Western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot
doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar
... We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters
between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in
blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in
intellect."
As it seems to be the opinion of some of the
gentlemen who compose the Committee of Public Instruction that the
course which they have hitherto pursued was strictly prescribed by
the British Parliament in 1813 and as, if that opinion be correct, a
legislative act will be necessary to warrant a change, I have
thought it right to refrain from taking any part in the preparation
of the adverse statements which are now before us, and to reserve
what I had to say on the subject till it should come before me as a
Member of the Council of India.
It does not appear to me
that the Act of Parliament can by any art of contraction be made to
bear the meaning which has been assigned to it. It contains nothing
about the particular languages or sciences which are to be studied.
A sum is set apart "for the revival and promotion of literature, and
the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the
introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the
inhabitants of the British territories."
It is argued, or rather taken for granted, that by
literature the Parliament can have meant only Arabic and Sanskrit
literature; that they never would have given the honourable
appellation of "a learned native" to a native who was familiar with
the poetry of Milton, the metaphysics of Locke, and the physics of
Newton; but that they meant to designate by that name only such
persons as might have studied in the sacred books of the Hindoos all
the uses of cusa-grass, and all the mysteries of absorption into the
Deity.
This does not appear to be a very satisfactory
interpretation. To take a parallel case: Suppose that the Pacha of
Egypt, a country once superior in knowledge to the nations of
Europe, but now sunk far below them, were to appropriate a sum for
the purpose "of reviving and promoting literature, and encouraging
learned natives of Egypt," would any body infer that he meant the
youth of his Pachalik to give years to the study of hieroglyphics,
to search into all the doctrines disguised under the fable of
Osiris, and to ascertain with all possible accuracy the ritual with
which cats and onions were anciently adored? Would he be justly
charged with inconsistency if, instead of employing his young
subjects in deciphering obelisks, he were to order them to be
instructed in the English and French languages, and in all the
sciences to which those languages are the chief keys?
The
words on which the supporters of the old system rely do not bear
them out, and other words follow which seem to be quite decisive on
the other side. This lakh of rupees is set apart not only for
"reviving literature in India," the phrase on which their whole
interpretation is founded, but also "for the introduction and
promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of
the British territories"-- words which are alone sufficient to
authorize all the changes for which I contend.
If the
Council agree in my construction no legislative act will be
necessary. If they differ from me, I will propose a short act
rescinding that clause I of the Charter of 1813 from which the
difficulty arises.
The argument which I have been
considering affects only the form of proceeding. But the admirers of
the oriental system of education have used another argument, which,
if we admit it to be valid, is decisive against all change. They
conceive that the public faith is pledged to the present system, and
that to alter the appropriation of any of the funds which have
hitherto been spent in encouraging the study of Arabic and Sanskrit
would be downright spoliation.
It is not easy to understand by what process of
reasoning they can have arrived at this conclusion. The grants which
are made from the public purse for the encouragement of literature
differ in no respect from the grants which are made from the same
purse for other objects of real or supposed utility. We found a
sanitarium on a spot which we suppose to be healthy. Do we thereby
pledge ourselves to keep a sanitarium there if the result should not
answer our expectations? We commence the erection of a pier. Is it a
violation of the public faith to stop the works, if we afterwards
see reason to believe that the building will be useless? The rights
of property are undoubtedly sacred. But nothing endangers those
rights so much as the practice, now unhappily too common, of
attributing them to things to which they do not belong.
Those who would impart to abuses the sanctity of
property are in truth imparting to the institution of property the
unpopularity and the fragility of abuses. If the Government has
given to any person a formal assurance-- nay, if the Government has
excited in any person's mind a reasonable expectation-- that he
shall receive a certain income as a teacher or a learner of Sanskrit
or Arabic, I would respect that person's pecuniary interests. I
would rather err on the side of liberality to individuals than
suffer the public faith to be called in question.
But to talk of a Government pledging itself to teach
certain languages and certain sciences, though those languages may
become useless, though those sciences may be exploded, seems to me
quite unmeaning.
There is not a single word in any public instrument
from which it can be inferred that the Indian Government ever
intended to give any pledge on this subject, or ever considered the
destination of these funds as unalterably fixed. But, had it been
otherwise, I should have denied the competence of our predecessors
to bind us by any pledge on such a subject. Suppose that a
Government had in the last century enacted in the most solemn manner
that all its subjects should, to the end of time, be inoculated for
the small-pox, would that Government be bound to persist in the
practice after Jenner's discovery?
These promises of which nobody claims the
performance, and from which nobody can grant a release, these vested
rights which vest in nobody, this property without proprietors, this
robbery which makes nobody poorer, may be comprehended by persons of
higher faculties than mine. I consider this plea merely as a set
form of words, regularly used both in England and in India, in
defence of every abuse for which no other plea can be set up.
I hold this lakh of rupees to be quite at the disposal of the
Governor-General in Council for the purpose of promoting learning in
India in any way which may be thought most advisable. I hold his
Lordship to be quite as free to direct that it shall no longer be
employed in encouraging Arabic and Sanskrit, as he is to direct that
the reward for killing tigers in Mysore shall be diminished, or that
no more public money shall be expended on the chaunting at the
cathedral.
We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund
to be employed as Government shall direct for the intellectual
improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is,
what is the most useful way of employing it?
All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the
dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India
contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are
moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some
other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work
into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the
intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the
means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by
means of some language not vernacular amongst them.
What then shall that language be? One-half of the committee
maintain that it should be the English. The other half strongly
recommend the Arabic and Sanskrit. The whole question seems to me to
be-- which language is the best worth knowing?
I have no
knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could
to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations
of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed,
both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency
in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental
learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have
never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a
good European library was worth the whole native literature of India
and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is
indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support
the oriental plan of education.
It will hardly be disputed,
I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern
writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any
orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanskrit
poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But
when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are
recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the
Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no
exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has
been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language
is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry
abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch
of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two
nations is nearly the same.
How then stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot
at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must
teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it
is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even
among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of
imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed
to us, --with models of every species of eloquence, --with
historical composition, which, considered merely as narratives, have
seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical
and political instruction, have never been equaled-- with just and
lively representations of human life and human nature, --with the
most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government,
jurisprudence, trade, --with full and correct information respecting
every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to
increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man.
Whoever knows that language has ready access to all
the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the
earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations.
It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that
language is of greater value than all the literature which three
hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world
together. Nor is this all.
In India, English is the language spoken by the
ruling class.
It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of
Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce
throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great
European communities which are rising, the one in the south of
Africa, the other in Australia, --communities which are every year
becoming more important and more closely connected with our Indian
empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or
at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the
strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English
tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native
subjects.
The question now before us is simply whether, when
it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages
in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject
which deserve to be compared to our own, whether, when we can teach
European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal
confession, wherever they differ from those of Europe differ for the
worse, and whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true
history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical
doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which
would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history
abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand
years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of
butter.
We are not without experience to guide us. History furnishes
several analogous cases, and they all teach the same lesson. There
are, in modern times, to go no further, two memorable instances of a
great impulse given to the mind of a whole society, of prejudices
overthrown, of knowledge diffused, of taste purified, of arts and
sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and
barbarous.
The first instance to which I refer is the great
revival of letters among the Western nations at the close of the
fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time
almost everything that was worth reading was contained in the
writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted
as the Committee of Public Instruction has hitherto noted, had they
neglected the language of Thucydides and Plato, and the language of
Cicero and Tacitus, had they confined their attention to the old
dialects of our own island, had they printed nothing and taught
nothing at the universities but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon and
romances in Norman French, --would England ever have been what she
now is?
What the Greek and Latin were to the
contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of
India. The literature of England is now more valuable than that of
classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanskrit literature be
as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors. In some
departments-- in history for example-- I am certain that it is much
less so.
Another instance may be said to be still before
our eyes. Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which
had previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our
ancestors were before the Crusades has gradually emerged from the
ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among
civilized communities. I speak of Russia.
There is now in that country a large educated class
abounding with persons fit to serve the State in the highest
functions, and in nowise inferior to the most accomplished men who
adorn the best circles of Paris and London. There is reason to hope
that this vast empire which, in the time of our grandfathers, was
probably behind the Punjab, may in the time of our grandchildren, be
pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement.
And how was this change effected? Not by flattering
national prejudices; not by feeding the mind of the young Muscovite
with the old women's stories which his rude fathers had believed;
not by filling his head with lying legends about St. Nicholas; not
by encouraging him to study the great question, whether the world
was or not created on the 13th of September; not by calling him "a
learned native" when he had mastered all these points of knowledge;
but by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest
mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that
information within his reach.
The languages of western Europe civilised Russia.
I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done
for the Tartar.
And what are the arguments against that course which seems
to be alike recommended by theory and by experience? It is said that
we ought to secure the co-operation of the native public, and that
we can do this only by teaching Sanskrit and Arabic.
I
can by no means admit that, when a nation of high intellectual
attainments undertakes to superintend the education of a nation
comparatively ignorant, the learners are absolutely to prescribe the
course which is to be taken by the teachers. It is not necessary
however to say anything on this subject. For it is proved by
unanswerable evidence, that we are not at present securing the
co-operation of the natives. It would be bad enough to consult
their intellectual taste at the expense of their intellectual
health. But we are consulting neither. We are withholding from
them the learning which is palatable to them. We are forcing on them
the mock learning which they nauseate.
This is proved by the
fact that we are forced to pay our Arabic and Sanskrit students
while those who learn English are willing to pay us. All the
declamations in the world about the love and reverence of the
natives for their sacred dialects will never, in the mind of any
impartial person, outweigh this undisputed fact, that we cannot find
in all our vast empire a single student who will let us teach him
those dialects, unless we will pay him.
I have now before me
the accounts of the Mudrassa for one month, the month of December,
1833. The Arabic students appear to have been seventy-seven in
number. All receive stipends from the public. The whole amount paid
to them is above 500 rupees a month. On the other side of the
account stands the following item:
Deduct amount realized from the out-students of English for the
months of May, June, and July last-- 103 rupees.
I have been
told that it is merely from want of local experience that I am
surprised at these phenomena, and that it is not the fashion for
students in India to study at their own charges. This only confirms
me in my opinions. Nothing is more certain than that it never can in
any part of the world be necessary to pay men for doing what they
think pleasant or profitable. India is no exception to this rule.
The people of India do not require to be paid for eating rice when
they are hungry, or for wearing woollen cloth in the cold season. To
come nearer to the case before us: --The children who learn their
letters and a little elementary arithmetic from the village
schoolmaster are not paid by him. He is paid for teaching them. Why
then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanskrit and Arabic?
Evidently because it is universally felt that the Sanskrit and
Arabic are languages the knowledge of which does not compensate for
the trouble of acquiring them. On all such subjects the state of the
market is the detective test.
Other evidence is not wanting,
if other evidence were required. A petition was presented last year
to the committee by several ex-students of the Sanskrit College. The
petitioners stated that they had studied in the college ten or
twelve years, that they had made themselves acquainted with Hindoo
literature and science, that they had received certificates of
proficiency. And what is the fruit of all this? "Notwithstanding
such testimonials," they say, "we have but little prospect of
bettering our condition without the kind assistance of your
honourable committee, the indifference with which we are generally
looked upon by our countrymen leaving no hope of encouragement and
assistance from them."
They therefore beg that they may be recommended to
the Governor-General for places under the Government-- not places of
high dignity or emolument, but such as may just enable them to
exist. "We want means," they say, "for a decent living, and for our
progressive improvement, which, however, we cannot obtain without
the assistance of Government, by whom we have been educated and
maintained from childhood." They conclude by representing very
pathetically that they are sure that it was never the intention of
Government, after behaving so liberally to them during their
education, to abandon them to destitution and neglect.
I
have been used to see petitions to Government for compensation. All
those petitions, even the most unreasonable of them, proceeded on
the supposition that some loss had been sustained, that some wrong
had been inflicted. These are surely the first petitioners who ever
demanded compensation for having been educated gratis, for having
been supported by the public during twelve years, and then sent
forth into the world well furnished with literature and science.
They represent their education as an injury which gives them a claim
on the Government for redress, as an injury for which the stipends
paid to them during the infliction were a very inadequate
compensation. And I doubt not that they are in the right.
They have wasted the best years of life in learning
what procures for them neither bread nor respect. Surely we might
with advantage have saved the cost of making these persons useless
and miserable. Surely, men may be brought up to be burdens to the
public and objects of contempt to their neighbours at a somewhat
smaller charge to the State. But such is our policy. We do not even
stand neuter in the contest between truth and falsehood. We are not
content to leave the natives to the influence of their own
hereditary prejudices. To the natural difficulties which obstruct
the progress of sound science in the East, we add great difficulties
of our own making. Bounties and premiums, such as ought not to be
given even for the propagation of truth, we lavish on false texts
and false philosophy.
By acting thus we create the very evil
which we fear. We are making that opposition which we do not find.
What we spend on the Arabic and Sanskrit Colleges is not merely a
dead loss to the cause of truth. It is bounty-money paid to raise up
champions of error. It goes to form a nest not merely of helpless
placehunters but of bigots prompted alike by passion and by interest
to raise a cry against every useful scheme of education. If there
should be any opposition among the natives to the change which I
recommend, that opposition will be the effect of our own system. It
will be headed by persons supported by our stipends and trained in
our colleges. The longer we persevere in our present course, the
more formidable will that opposition be. It will be every year
reinforced by recruits whom we are paying. From the native society,
left to itself, we have no difficulties to apprehend. All the
murmuring will come from that oriental interest which we have, by
artificial means, called into being and nursed into strength.
There is yet another fact which is alone sufficient to prove that
the feeling of the native public, when left to itself, is not such
as the supporters of the old system represent it to be. The
committee have thought fit to lay out above a lakh of rupees in
printing Arabic and Sanskrit books. Those books find no purchasers.
It is very rarely that a single copy is disposed of. Twenty-three
thousand volumes, most of them folios and quartos, fill the
libraries or rather the lumber-rooms of this body. The committee
contrive to get rid of some portion of their vast stock of oriental
literature by giving books away. But they cannot give so fast as
they print. About twenty thousand rupees a year are spent in adding
fresh masses of waste paper to a hoard which, one should think, is
already sufficiently ample. During the last three years about sixty
thousand rupees have been expended in this manner. The sale of
Arabic and Sanskrit books during those three years has not yielded
quite one thousand rupees. In the meantime, the School Book Society
is selling seven or eight thousand English volumes every year, and
not only pays the expenses of printing but realizes a profit of
twenty per cent. on its outlay.
The fact that the Hindoo law
is to be learned chiefly from Sanskrit books, and the Mahometan law
from Arabic books, has been much insisted on, but seems not to bear
at all on the question. We are commanded by Parliament to ascertain
and digest the laws of India. The assistance of a Law Commission has
been given to us for that purpose. As soon as the Code is
promulgated the Shasters and the Hedaya will be useless to a
moonsiff or a Sudder Ameen. I hope and trust that, before the boys
who are now entering at the Mudrassa and the Sanskrit College have
completed their studies, this great work will be finished. It would
be manifestly absurd to educate the rising generation with a view to
a state of things which we mean to alter before they reach manhood.
But there is yet another argument which seems even more untenable.
It is said that the Sanskrit and the Arabic are the languages in
which the sacred books of a hundred millions of people are written,
and that they are on that account entitled to peculiar
encouragement. Assuredly it is the duty of the British Government in
India to be not only tolerant but neutral on all religious
questions. But to encourage the study of a literature, admitted to
be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcated
the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course
hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that
very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly
preserved.
It is confirmed that a language is barren of useful
knowledge. We are to teach it because it is fruitful of monstrous
superstitions. We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false
medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We
abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public
encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting the
natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can we reasonably or
decently bribe men, out of the revenues of the State, to waste their
youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching
an ass or what texts of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the
crime of killing a goat?
It is taken for granted by the
advocates of oriental learning that no native of this country can
possibly attain more than a mere smattering of English. They do not
attempt to prove this. But they perpetually insinuate it. They
designate the education which their opponents recommend as a mere
spelling-book education. They assume it as undeniable that the
question is between a profound knowledge of Hindoo and Arabian
literature and science on the one side, and superficial knowledge of
the rudiments of English on the other. This is not merely an
assumption, but an assumption contrary to all reason and experience.
We know that foreigners of all nations do learn our
language sufficiently to have access to all the most abstruse
knowledge which it contains sufficiently to relish even the more
delicate graces of our most idiomatic writers. There are in this
very town natives who are quite competent to discuss political or
scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English
language. I have heard the very question on which I am now writing
discussed by native gentlemen with a liberality and an intelligence
which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public
Instruction.
Indeed it is unusual to find, even in the literary
circles of the Continent, any foreigner who can express himself in
English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many
Hindoos. Nobody, I suppose, will contend that English is so
difficult to a Hindoo as Greek to an Englishman. Yet an intelligent
English youth, in a much smaller number of years than our
unfortunate pupils pass at the Sanskrit College, becomes able to
read, to enjoy, and even to imitate not unhappily the compositions
of the best Greek authors. Less than half the time which enables an
English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles ought to enable a
Hindoo to read Hume and Milton.
To sum up what I have said.
I think it clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament
of 1813, that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or
implied, that we are free to employ our funds as we choose, that we
ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing, that
English is better worth knowing than Sanskrit or Arabic, that the
natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to
be taught Sanskrit or Arabic, that neither as the languages of law
nor as the languages of religion have the Sanskrit and Arabic any
peculiar claim to our encouragement, that it is possible to make
natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and that
to this end our efforts ought to be directed.
In one point
I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am
opposed. I feel with them that it is impossible for us, with our
limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people.
We must at present do our best to form a class
who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern,
--a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in
tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.
To that class we may leave it to refine the
vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with
terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to
render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the
great mass of the population.
I would strictly respect all
existing interests. I would deal even generously with all
individuals who have had fair reason to expect a pecuniary
provision. But I would strike at the root of the bad system which
has hitherto been fostered by us. I would at once stop the printing
of Arabic and Sanskrit books. I would abolish the Mudrassa and the
Sanskrit College at Calcutta. Benares is the great seat of
Brahminical learning; Delhi of Arabic learning.
If we retain the Sanskrit College at Bonares and the
Mahometan College at Delhi we do enough and much more than enough in
my opinion, for the Eastern languages. If the Benares and Delhi
Colleges should be retained, I would at least recommend that no
stipends shall be given to any students who may hereafter repair
thither, but that the people shall be left to make their own choice
between the rival systems of education without being bribed by us to
learn what they have no desire to know. The funds which would thus
be placed at our disposal would enable us to give larger
encouragement to the Hindoo College at Calcutta, and establish in
the principal cities throughout the Presidencies of Fort William and
Agra schools in which the English language might be well and
thoroughly taught.
If the decision of His Lordship in Council should be
such as I anticipate, I shall enter on the performance of my duties
with the greatest zeal and alacrity. If, on the other hand, it be
the opinion of the Government that the present system ought to
remain unchanged, I beg that I may be permitted to retire from the
chair of the Committee. I feel that I could not be of the smallest
use there. I feel also that I should be lending my countenance to
what I firmly believe to be a mere delusion. I believe that the
present system tends not to accelerate the progress of truth but to
delay the natural death of expiring errors. I conceive that we have
at present no right to the respectable name of a Board of Public
Instruction.
We are a Board for wasting the public money, for
printing books which are of less value than the paper on which they
are printed was while it was blank-- for giving artificial
encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics,
absurd theology-- for raising up a breed of scholars who find their
scholarship an incumbrance and blemish, who live on the public while
they are receiving their education, and whose education is so
utterly useless to them that, when they have received it, they must
either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives.
Entertaining these opinions, I am naturally desirous to decline all
share in the responsibility of a body which, unless it alters its
whole mode of proceedings, I must consider, not merely as useless,
but as positively noxious.
T[homas] B[abington] MACAULAY
2nd February 1835.
I give my entire concurrence to
the sentiments expressed in this Minute.
W[illiam] C[avendish] BENTINCK.
From: Bureau of
Education. Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781-1839).
Edited by H. Sharp. Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing,
1920. Reprint. Delhi: National Archives of India, 1965, 107-117.
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