The School Under the Tree

There is a particular kind of grief that comes from realising something was taken from you before you were born — taken so quietly, and replaced so completely, that you grew up never knowing it existed. That is the grief The Beautiful Tree leaves you with. And it is worth sitting with.Dharampal was a Gandhian historian who spent decades inside British colonial archives—in Madras, in London, in Edinburgh—retrieving documents that had been quietly left to gather dust. What he found was not a story of Indian backwardness that colonialism came to correct. It was the opposite. Before British rule, India had a living, breathing education system: pathshalas, madrasas, and gurukulas spread across virtually every village, teaching children reading, writing, arithmetic, astronomy, law, and medicine. The system was not elite. It was not exclusionary. In the Tamil-speaking districts of the Madras Presidency, children of weavers, farmers, and those we now call the Scheduled Castes made up over 84 per cent of school-going students. The twice-born were the minority.What makes this book unlike anything else written on the subject is its armour. Dharampal did not build his case on nationalist feelings. He built it on the colonial administration’s own records—official dispatches, district surveys and collectors’ reports. These are British officers, writing to their superiors in London, describing what they actually found. No one can dismiss these as romanticised memories. Gandhi had made a version of this claim at Chatham House in 1931 and was publicly challenged to prove it. He went to prison before he could. Dharampal spent the decades that followed finding the proof..The destruction of this system was not dramatic. There was no announcement, no bonfire of schools. It was fiscal. India’s indigenous education had survived for centuries because the political structure was decentralised - up to 80 per cent of revenue in Bengal and Bihar was assigned locally, and a substantial portion of that flowed directly to temples, teachers, physicians, and scholars. When the British centralised revenue collection, that funding stream was simply redirected into their own treasury. Teachers were not dismissed. They were just never paid again. The schools did not close by decree. They suffocated. Then, by the 1830s, local textbooks were replaced by foreign curricula - Aesop’s Fables in place of the Ramayana—designed not to educate but to produce clerks for the colonial machine. The goal, as one colonial architect put it, was a class ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, morals and intellect’.This is where the book connects most urgently to the present. The decolonisation conversation today often stops at curricula—whose histories are taught, which languages are valued. Dharampal forces a deeper question: how was replacement made possible? The answer was not persuasion. It was the severing of the financial and community roots that had sustained indigenous learning for centuries. True civilisational independence—what some are now calling Swatantra, the shift from political freedom to intellectual freedom—cannot happen by adding a few chapters on the Vedas to an existing syllabus. It requires understanding what conditions made the original tree grow and deliberately rebuilding it.This book is for those who feel that something essential is missing from their education but cannot quite name what it is. It is for students, educators, and anyone working in the decolonisation space who want their conviction grounded in evidence, not just emotion. It is for the young Indian who is tired of being handed the story of their civilisation through someone else’s archive. Read it, follow its footnotes, and then ask the harder question: not what was lost, but what it would actually take to rebuild the conditions under which that knowledge once flourished. That is the real work of this generation. Dharampal has given us the roots. What grows next is up to us.

The School Under the Tree

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