Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 14, 2025
Up to 1794, when at Mudnabati he opened the first primary school worthy of the name in all India at his own cost, and daily superintended it, there had been only one attempt to improve upon the indigenous schools, which taught the children of the trading castes only to keep rude accounts, or upon the tols in which the Brahmans instructed their disciples for one-half the year, while for the other half they lived by begging.
Recently, indeed, in Bengal these tols have been taken up by the Education Department, and their studies are being directed to certain fixed subjects. Another feature of the organisation of Hinduism, hitherto insufficiently noticed, has a still closer connection with this freedom of thought and fixity of practice.
There, in the capital of the last of the Hindoo kings, beside the leafy tols or colleges of a river port which rivals Benares, Poona, and Conjeeveram in sanctity, where Chaitanya the Vaishnaiva reformer was born, Carey might have attacked Brahmanism in its stronghold. A passage in his journal shows how he realised the position.
Without printed books and libraries and intercourse with kindred minds, there may be as many schools of thought as there are teachers. And all this study, be it remembered, has no necessary connection with the priesthood. Tols have no necessary connection with temples, or temples with tols. Hereditary priests are independent of Theological Schools.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking