Can the Indians read yet? They can't solve the simplest problems from our elementary school.

India's primary scourge, as should be clear from what has preceded, is its poverty. The standard of living of its millions of people is among the lowest in the world. Its second scourge is its ignorance.

In the south of the state of Hyderabad, on the central Deccan plateau, not far from the railway line connecting Bombay with Madras, lie the villages I had chosen to measure the level of development of the rural population. I did not want to choose villages in Bengal or Madras, because many there are below average, nor those in states such as Mysore or Travancore, because thanks to the progressive policies of the ruling princes, they are exceptionally advanced. The villages of Hyderabad, as I had heard in Delhi and Bombay from people whose good faith had been proven to me in other matters, represent a good average. Let us take a closer look and see what such an Indian village represents in terms of intellectual development.

The teacher and his little school

In the first two villages I arrived at after letting the train depart again without me, as in the jungle of Bihar, there was no school. In the third village there was. I reasoned that it couldn't be difficult to find the school building because, I assumed, it would be the only one in the village built of stone.

I was mistaken. There was a small stone building, but when I walked inside, it turned out to be a storage room belonging to the local zamindar. A fat man dressed in European clothes, apparently the zamindar's representative, came rushing over and said he would notify his master, who would be very happy to welcome me into his house. I had had enough of the zamindar castles and asked where the school was. The man looked at me in surprise. "Why would you want that?" his swimming yellow eyes seemed to say. At my insistence, he finally pointed hesitantly to something I had already seen and which looked to me to be a disused hut.

“Is that the school?” I asked suspiciously.

“Yes, and if you want my opinion, the guy who lives there is crazy.”

Go, go, he encouraged me by moving his arm, see for yourself.

As I walked toward the hut, I expected to see an old man, a tired, disillusioned idealist. There was no one in the hut. It consisted of four corner posts, thin curved tree trunks, and a roof of reeds and hanging grass. One side had a wall made of woven twigs. There was no floor. In the sand lay a small board with a piece of chalk attached to it by a string, apparently a slate. There were no benches or chairs, only a kind of desk, with beetles crawling over it.

“Hello,” said a friendly voice behind me. I turned around and found myself face to face with a smiling young man. I guessed he was in his twenties, but it turned out he was only nineteen. He was wearing European trousers and a yellow nylon shirt over them. He had shiny black curly hair. Still smiling, he said in perfect English:

“Perhaps you are just looking for some shade. If it is the school you are interested in, I am the schoolmaster.”

For a moment, I was confused. This neatly dressed, modern young man was so different from the poor villagers I had met among the huts and low mud houses, dressed in gray rags, that I wondered if it was a joke. The young man laughed heartily and said:

"You are just like everyone else. You're wondering what someone wearing a nylon shirt is doing in this filthy hut village, and deep down you think I'm crazy. Come with me, I think I still have a few bottles of beer, and if you're even half as thirsty as I am right now, you'll be very thirsty indeed."

[The school teacher] told me about the village and the work [he and his wife – also a teacher] did there. There were three hundred and eight inhabitants.

(…)

Of those three hundred and eight, six could read. Of those six, four could write fluently, while the other two wrote “phonetically,” i.e., as it was pronounced in their dialect (...) For all the others, written letters were just hooks and lines.

“Who are the six who can read?”

"The zamindar, his two representatives in the warehouses where he collects his share of our farmers' harvests; then the policeman; then a Sikh from Calcutta who transports goods by truck, mostly for the zamindar; and a gurkha from Assam, who used to serve in the British army and now guards the zamindar's castle with his gun.

“So none of the actual villagers.”

(…)

I wanted to ask him what had brought him here. He could have worked in a city; there was a shortage of teachers everywhere and he could have earned extra money by giving private lessons to children from wealthy families. I didn't need to ask. He said:

"Our government is looking for teachers, thousands of them, and it supports those who want to become teachers, but the training takes place in a city. After staying in the city, many boys from the countryside find it difficult to return to their village in the jungle. They have become accustomed to living in a real house and going to the movies in the evening. The cities are benefiting from this, but it means that little of the progress made in recent years is visible in rural areas. I don't know exactly how many, but many of the schools that our Nizam has established are not yet schools because there are no teachers for them. (…) I now... well... we did come back after all.”

[He] didn't smile. There was seriousness in [his] eyes. There was silence for a moment. Then the young man suddenly stood up and said, “Come with me, and you'll understand better what I have to say.”

How much debt?

We walked outside. In front of the houses, men sat here and there in the sand, thin brown figures in grimy, completely worn-out dhotis. One was busy weaving a mat, another was cutting a handle for some kind of tool with a knife, and a third was storing wool in bales. At the well in the small square, three women were filling their jugs. They wore saris, one yellow, the other two red, but all three garments were completely discolored and frayed, like the men's dhotis.

“Let's go sit with that man with his mat,” said the young man. “It won't be long before a few more join us. You should talk to those people, I'll be your interpreter. Test them. Find out what they know. That's why you came to this village, isn't it?”

I felt that here I could say and ask whatever I wanted. This had not been the case in previous conversations I had had elsewhere, with other, mostly sentimental-patriotic intermediaries.

We crouched down in the sand and everything went as the young man had predicted. Other men approached, shyly, hesitantly, but the young man beckoned them closer and greeted them warmly. From the sparkle in the men's eyes and their happy, somewhat nervous grins, I could tell that they loved the young man.

I asked the men their names. They were able to give them promptly. Then I told them mine and had them repeat it. This caused a cheerful commotion, because what they made of it! I had them tell me about their fields and their harvests, about the monsoon rains, then about the railroad line that ran six kilometers away. Yes, they had all been on the train before, one to Hyderabad, the other three to an old temple near Madras, a famous place of pilgrimage for Hindus, the young man explained to me.

Then I asked how long they had had to work to pay for that train journey. They were confused. The young man clarified the question with gestures toward the fields, counting on his fingers, pointing into the distance and back. The men sat thinking for a while. Then they looked helplessly at the young man.

“They don't know,” he said softly to me.

I asked them where they had gotten the money. The answer came promptly: the zamindar. Had they gone to the zamindar for more money before? Oh, yes, often. Then I asked the first one:

“How much do you owe the zamindar?”

“I don't know,” he said hesitantly.

There was surprise in his tone. It seemed to him to be a strange question. I asked him how he could return the money if he didn't know how much it was. The zamindar came to inspect the harvest, he said, and ordered how much he should have. “Do you always give him what he asks for without complaint?”

The man became frightened. The schoolteacher had to intervene to reassure him that I had nothing to do with the matter, that he could say anything in complete safety. “No,” said the man timidly, “sometimes I tell the zamindar that it's too much, sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn't.” The fear had not left his eyes.

“Talk about something else,” said the schoolteacher softly, “or else they’ll go away.”

Maths exam

I thought back to the maths problems from my primary school days. “You go to the market,” I said to the man who had been to Hyderabad, "and you have ten mangoes to sell; they offer you two annas each for the six largest and half an anna for the four smallest, which are also a little rotten. You agree, but you decide to eat one of the small mangoes yourself. How much money will you bring home?"

The man sat staring ahead with a fixed gaze. After a while, he said, as if apologizing, “Mangoes, even large ones, are not worth two annas here.”

“No,” I said cheerfully, “but tourists don't know that. I once paid four annas for a mango.”

That made the men laugh cheerfully. I repeated the question slowly, and now all four of them sat staring straight ahead. One of them made lines in the sand in his mind. Then they began to talk among themselves, then to argue, gesturing wildly.

“They can't do it,” said the young man quietly. “They can add and subtract, but not both at the same time. I'll split the question for them.”

He did so. Six times two annas made twelve annas. The young man had them write it down with lines in the sand. Four small mangoes and you eat one, then three remain. Three times one and a half annas makes one and a half annas. They got it. I asked:

“If you go to buy a buffalo and you are ten rupees short...”

They nodded. They knew that.

“The merchant says: it's okay, you can pay me the ten rupees later, but you have to pay me three rupees interest per year.”

“No merchant would do that for three rupees!” they laughed loudly.

“Five rupees then. Five rupees every year. How much will you owe that man after six years?”

They didn't know. Again, the teacher came to the rescue, had them draw the ten rupees with lines in the sand, then six times five rupees, and then they could add it up.

General silence...

Without transition, I asked, “What is Paris?”

It took a long time before one of the men cautiously asked if it was something they ate in the non-vegetarian restaurants in the cities.

“How come you don't have to harness buffaloes to a truck? Does it drive by itself?”

“Motor!” they shouted.

“What is that, a motor?”

General silence.

“Does an engine always keep pulling? Doesn't anything ever happen to it?”

“Water!” they cried. “It needs water. The Sikh fills it at the well.”

“So the car runs on water?”

After some hesitation, they answered: yes.

“And the train?”

“An oven!” they said. “Big oven, fire.”

“How can fire pull a train?”

Silence.

“If we lay branches here and light them, those branches won't move forward. How come the train does move forward?”

No answer. Did they know about steam? No answer either. Had they ever seen a big ship? Yes. How did it move? Engine! With water? They assumed so.

“Has anyone ever sent anything by post?”

Yes, a parcel, a wedding gift for a family member. Did they have to pay to send that parcel? Yes, stamps on the parcel, stamps cost money.

“Who was that money for?”

After some discussion, they agreed that it was for the postmaster. Did they have to pay taxes? Yes, definitely. Who was that money for? They hesitated, looking shyly at the schoolteacher. He encouraged them.

“For the leaders,” they said.

“What do those leaders do with it?”

Again, they hesitated. Did the leaders use it to buy nice clothes, good food, big houses? Yes, they thought.

“There is a policeman in the village. He protects you from criminals. Who pays the policeman?”

“The leaders.”

“With what money?”

“Oh, leaders have lots of money, drive big cars!”

I pointed to the horizon and asked, “If you keep walking in that direction, India will end at some point. What is beyond India?”

“The sea.”

“That way?”

One said, “Also the sea,” but the others disagreed. And that way? I pointed to the north. “High mountains,” said one of the men. “Behind them?” No answer.

Questions without answers

“How come an airplane doesn't fall out of the sky?”

“Wings! Just like birds!”

“Birds have to flap their wings, otherwise they fall down. Why don't planes have to flap their wings?”

After discussing this, they timidly asked me if I was sure that planes didn't flap their wings occasionally. They flew high, so it was difficult to see.

“If you stand tilted to one side, you fall over. Why?”

They looked at me in surprise.

“Because you're leaning to one side. You have to stand straight, otherwise you'll fall.”

“Why do you always fall to the ground? Why not into the air?”

“How is that possible?” they asked, half angry. “Falling upwards!”

“Is the moon attached to something?”

“I don't know, sahib.”

“Why doesn't it fall out of the sky?”

No answer.

“Where does the sun go when it disappears in the evening?”

“It goes to sleep.”

“They say that the earth is always spinning.”

They laughed and said:

“That can't be, otherwise we would have to spin too. We don't spin.”

“What are clouds?”

“Rain! Lots of clouds, lots of rain, good harvest!”

“Where do the clouds come from?”

“There, sea, monsoon!”

“How do those clouds get there?”

After a somewhat awkward silence, one of the men said:

“We pray, sahib, and scatter jasmine petals at the statue in the temple, then the clouds come. Sometimes they don't come, but we don't always live well...”

“There is a lot of water in the streams. Where does it come from?”

They thought it was another strange question.

“In a stream there is water, sahib, sometimes there isn't, then the land dries up, but then there is again. If there were never any water, there would be no stream either.”

“Would it be good or bad to cut down all the trees in the country?”

They had never thought of that before.

“We cut down trees when we want to cultivate land...”

“If all the trees are cut down, they say, the rains wash away the fertile topsoil and what remains is blown away by the wind. The land then becomes barren.”

They did not understand that.

“Under the sand, there will be more sand, sahib, won’t there?”

“That’s not good sand,” said the schoolteacher. “Nothing can grow on it because it doesn’t contain any rotten leaves. Those rotten leaves have to come from the trees. That’s why you can’t cut down all the trees, otherwise the land will become a desert.”

General silence.

“What is the North Pole?”

Silence.

“What is the UN?”

No answer. Who was Hitler? Nothing. There were two very large countries in the world that were not good friends, and some said that war would come of it. Pakistan? ventured one of the men cautiously. Pakistan was Muslim, and Hindus and Muslims did not get along with each other well.

“Is Russia in America? Or America in Russia?”

They didn't know the names.

“Come on,” said the teacher softly, “that's enough.”

People say I'm crazy...

He stopped me in front of his little house. Softly, almost sadly, he said, “Do you understand now why (…) I had to come back? The people in this wilderness are poor, good animals. In many countries, people say, ‘People must become better.’ Here, people must first learn to become human. Isn't it a wonderful task to help them do that?”

Painfully, he said, “People say I'm crazy...”

Young man, they have many beautiful decorations in Delhi, some as big as a hand. I've seen them in parliament on fat bellies wrapped in tuxedos, but you deserve the biggest and most beautiful of them all, because you're not the type to run around the cart shouting excitedly; you stand in line.

1. This is a translation of an article titled “Kunnen de Indiërs al lezen?” (Can the Indians read yet?), which was published in the Belgian Catholic newspaper De Week voor Belgisch Congo, on February 19, 1956. 
2. The article is part of a weekly installment which ran from November 1955, to June 1956, wherein the well-known Flemish writer Aster Berkhof (1920-2020; pseudonym for Lodewijk Paulina Van Den Bergh) recounted his trip around Asia, which he undertook in the summer of 1955. A significant part of this series is dedicated to India, on which 14 articles were published in 15 weeks. This is most of article 5/14.
3. The series of articles was later compiled in the form of a book titled Haveloos India (“Ragged India”), published in Antwerp in 1960, wherein this article is titled “Waarom valt de maan niet van de hemel” (pp. 42-58).
4. All emphases are original to the text.