11 SCHOOL-WORK

Chapter 11

SCHOOL-WORK

THERE are four attitudes towards educational work: that of the people at large, who desire learning, not usually for learning’s sake, but because that is the portal of Government preferment and commercial success; that of the priests and religious - conservative element, who oppose it tooth and nail as subversive of the old religious ideas and priestly power; that of the missionary, who finds therein his vantage-ground for familiarizing the intelligent and influential section of the people with the doctrines and ideals of the Christian religion; and that of the Government, which, indifferent alike to the motives of the missionary and the opposition of the Mullahs, requires educated young men for administrative posts, and believes that education eclipses fanaticism.

" Any parent sending his son to the mission school will be excommunicated’" was the fatwa of the Mullahs at Bannu when the mission school was inaugurated; the delinquent would be unable to get priestly assistance for marriage, for burial, or for the other rites so essential to a Muhammadan’s religious safety. But parents and boys alike were desirous of availing themselves of the advantages of the school, so the Mullahs relented, and said: " Let the boys go to school, but beware lest they learn English, for English is the language of infidelity, and will certainly destroy their souls." " But without English all the best Government appointments were unattainable, and their boys would have to be content with inferior posts and inferior pay; so pressure was again brought to bear on the Mullahs, and the fiat went forth: " Let the boys read English, so long as they do not read the Christian Scriptures, for the Christians have tampered with those books, and it is no longer lawful for true Muhammadans to read them."

Again a little patience and a little gaining of confidence, and the Mullahs tacitly retracted this restriction too, and now many of the most prominent Mullahs themselves send their sons to the mission school. The Muhammadan lads compete zealously with the others for the Scripture prizes, and in 1907 two Muhammadan officials gave prizes to be awarded to the boys who were most proficient in Scripture in the matriculation class. Sic tempora mutantur ! A significant occurrence was the visit of His Majesty the Amir of Afghanistan to the Islamic College at Lahore, when he made a speech, in which he reiterated the advice: " Acquire knowledge ! acquire knowledge ! acquire knowledge !" and went on to say that if they had been previously well grounded in their religion they need not fear lest the study of Western science might overthrow their beliefs or undermine their faith.

Thus most of the Muhammadan boys in our school have already studied the Qur’an in a mosque, and many continue to receive religious teaching from their Mullah while studying in school. Thus they enter school at an older age than the Hindu students, who, except in family life, take little count of their religion, and slight their priests. The danger is obvious: faith in the old order is lost, and there is nothing but a conceited and bumptious materialism to take its place.

Here it is that the mission school holds the advantage of the Government institution. The latter, in the endeavor to be impartial, excludes all religious teaching, and therewith loses the most valuable means of moral training. The mission school, on the other hand, gives special prominence to religious and moral training, which go hand-in-hand. " I prefer sending my son to the mission school," said a Muhammadan father to me once, " because he will be taught the religious incentives to moral conduct there, and I shall not be afraid of his character losing its moral balance." And this was said by a man thoroughly orthodox and zealous in his own religion. There can be no doubt that a far smaller proportion of the students in mission schools and colleges lose the religious instinct of their forefathers, and it is often the loss of this which results in moral instability and ruin.

" I never took an interest in studying my own religion till I was taught Scripture in the mission school," said a pupil to me ; and, of course, we encourage the boys not only to perform the religious duties inculcated by their own religion, but to study it thoughtfully, and see how far it satisfies the aspirations of their souls. A visitor to our school hostel of an early morning would find the Muhammadans saying their prayers and the Hindus their devotions, and we encourage this, and give facilities for it by setting apart places for its performance, because it is a terrible thing to take away a boy’s faith, even though it be a faith in a mistaken creed, and I think the man who has argued or bantered a young fellow out of his faith without bringing him to a higher faith has incurred a grave responsibility. The real enemy of the Christian faith is not so much Islam or Hinduism, but infidelity and a gross materialism.

It is not education that is to blame for the unrest, sedition, and materialism which threatens to engulf India, but the Government system of education has undoubtedly much to answer for. God is ignored in Government schools, prayer is proscribed, and the teachings of English socialistic and materialistic philosophers are poured into the capacious but untrained minds of the students. The result is mental intoxication and libertinism. India has always been religious to the core, and learning and religion have gone hand-in-hand. The result of their divorce is destructive to moral stability, and the Nemesis of the policy will pursue the country for years, even if, as is to be hoped, the policy itself be discontinued. When I first went to India I had a prejudice against mission schools, and protested against a medical missionary having to superintend one; but I have become convinced that the hope of India is in her mission colleges and schools, for it is in their alumni that we find young men who have been able to acquire Western knowledge without losing the religious spirit, learning without moral atrophy, mental nobility without a conceited mien and disrespect for their parents, and breadth of view without disloyalty and sedition. I should like to see the Government close all their schools and colleges except those for primary and technical education, and devote the money saved to the encouragement of private effort on lines more germane to the spirit of the country. The Indian student is an attractive personality and well worth sympathetic study, for he is the future of the country in embryo. The schoolboy has not yet lost the ancient Indian respect, even love, of the pupil to the master, and is therefore much more readily subjected to discipline than his English counterpart. His chief failing is his incorrigible propensity to what is known in English schools as "sneaking "; schoolboy honour and esprit de corps are being developed in mission schools, but have very little basis on which to build. " Please, sir, Mahtab Din has been pinching me." "Shuja’at ’Ah has stolen my book. " "Ram Chand has spilt the ink on my copy-book." If the master is willing to listen to tales of this kind, he will get a continuous supply of them all day long.

There are few boys who are not ready, by fair means or foul, to use a master for paying off a grudge against a fellow student, and as the schemes are often deeply laid and the schemers very plausible, the master has to be very much " all there," or, on the plea of maintaining discipline, he will be merely a tool in a personal quarrel. Once two or three of the senior students came to bring to me serious charges against the moral character of one of the junior masters. They were prima facie well substantiated by witnesses, but on further investigation it turned out that the whole affair had been engineered merely because the master had broken up an undesirable clique of theirs. Such habits have, of course, to be sternly repressed.

There is much greater diversity in the social status of the boys in an Indian school than in English schools. In the Bannu Mission School every class of the community is represented from the son of the rich landowner to that of the laborer, from the Brahmin to the outcast and not only do they get on well together, without the poor boy having to feel by taunt or treatment that he is unwelcome or despised, but I have often come across genuine acts of charity which have been done quite naturally and without any ostentation; in fact, they tried to keep it secret in more cases than one. Thus, a poor boy, unable to buy his books, has had them supplied to him by the richer boys in the class. In one case a poor boy was left quite destitute by the death of his father, and some of the boys arranged a small subscription month by month to enable him to remain at school. The Bannu school course commences in the infant class, where little toddles of five summers sit on grass-mats and learn their alphabet, to the big lads of eighteen in the fifth form, who are preparing for the matriculation of the Punjab University. Visitors are sometimes surprised to be told that many of the boys in this class are married and have children, but such is unfortunately still the case. At one time even much younger boys married, but a school law was passed that any pupil marrying under the age of sixteen would be expelled. Since then some twenty or more boys have had to leave because their parents, usually much against the boys’" will, insisted on getting them married below this age. But many marriages have been postponed, and there is a healthier public feeling against early marriage, and we hope that before long there will be no married boys in the school at all.

I place great importance on the influence of the school hostels. These are the boarding-houses where those students whose homes are in the remoter parts of the district reside, and the contrast between our raw material, the uncouth, prejudiced village lad, and the finished product, the gentlemanly, affectionate student who is about to leave us, is an object-lesson in itself. The boarders, though comparatively few in number, are really the nucleus of the school, and take a prominent part in matches and in school life in general quite out of proportion to their numbers. The missionary is constantly in contact with them, and they come to him at all seasons, till the relationship is more like that of a father to his family than of a master to his students. Such students leave the hostel with friendly feelings towards Christians and Englishmen, which show themselves in after-years in the hospitable and hearty reception which they accord not only to the missionary, but to others who may be visiting their village.

There is a swimming-tank attached to the hostel, and the boys bathe every morning except in the coldest winter months, when they bathe at the well, where the water is several degrees warmer. Woe betide the boy who is found asleep after sunrise! for should the manager come round and find him so, he is hauled out by two of the monitors, who, seizing him by hands and feet, toss him far into the swimming-tank before he quite knows whether he is dreaming or awake. A similar punishment is inflicted on a boy using foul language, who is thrown in, clothes and all, for purification from its stain. At one time visitors often got opportunities of seeing the punishment inflicted, but it is getting rarer now as the standard rises. A strange fragment of frontier boyhood was Amal Khan. He was brought down to us from Afghanistan by a friendly Sardar, who had taken an interest in him. He was only about eleven years old, but his father and most of his family had been killed in vendettas, and his ruling passion was to grow big and strong, buy a rifle, and go in quest of the murderers or their relatives. His gentle little face and winsome manner seemed so out of keeping with the cold bloodthirstiness of the remarks he used to make with the greatest naivete that he was looked on as a kind of curiosity. Later on, when he had made some acquaintance with Scripture, he used to like to hear the Gospel stories of the gentleness of Jesus the Good Shepherd, the miracles of compassion, the parable of the Good Samaritan, and such like ; but even then the passion for revenge seemed to dominate his little breast, and he finally went back to his village across the Afghan border in order to apply himself more seriously to the object of his fate.

Once a well-to-do Afghan brought down his three sons to place them in our hostel, and told me I might use any means I liked to discipline them, short of shooting them. He had evidently found them too much of a handful himself. They had been accustomed to run wild in a wild country, and any idea of sitting still in a classroom to learn lessons seemed to have never entered their heads. They seemed so accustomed to the use of knife and revolver that the other boys, Afghans though they were, came to ask me to take precautions for their safety. Finally, when I had to " discipline " them, and that was not before very long, they all three disappeared, and I never saw them till, some years later, I visited their village.

Once a Government civilian wrote asking me to take a young ward of court into my hostel. The account of him was not promising, as, though only sixteen, he had been turned out of two schools for misconduct. His family was of noble Afghan descent, but had been bereft of most of its male members owing to the wretched blood-feuds, and this boy was now the head of the family. Hoping to be able yet to save him and to make him a power for good instead of for evil, as he must by his position become one or other, I consented, and a day was appointed for his admission. The day passed, but the boy did not appear. I then got a letter from the officer responsible for him, saying that as he had just murdered his younger brother, the hope of his schooling must be abandoned.

Some of the masters of the little Government primary schools in the more remote parts lead very unenviable lives, specially if they happen to be Hindus. Their pupils often defy their authority, and they are afraid to chastise them. I have myself seen a boy allowed to sit in class with a loaded revolver in his belt. The unwillingness of the master to enforce his authority is excusable, yet, had he complained, he would merely have lost his place and his pittance. On another occasion I came upon a poor Hindu schoolmaster in a certain village who was about to send in his resignation. He had punished a boy for playing truant, and the father had just been round with a loaded rifle and dared him to touch his son again. In the mission school the work of the day commences with roll-call, at which a portion of Scripture is read by the headmaster, and the Lord’s Prayer repeated. During the latter the boys have to stand. They do not object to this, but I remember once a Hindu boy being accused of having become a Christian because he had shut his eyes and folded his hands during the prayer. He told me that many of the boys really joined in the prayer, and certainly they have got to value and appreciate prayer. On a Sunday evening the boarders come to my house to sing hymns from " Sacred Songs and Solos " and vernacular collections, and if I omit to offer the usual prayer at the close, they remind me of the omission ; they do not wish to go away without it.

Once, at a cricket-match with a rival school, when the issue of the game was hanging in the balance, and depended on the last man, who had just gone in, making four runs, a Muhammadan Afghan, one of the eleven, retired to a corner of the field and repeated the Lord’s Prayer, closing it with a petition for the victory of the school, and returned to find the winning run just made ! At meetings of the schoolboys among themselves it is not uncommon for prayer to be offered by one of the number, and at a farewell dinner given me in 1908 by some pupils a very beautiful and touching prayer was offered by an old Hindu student, now reading in the Lahore Medical College, and all the other Muhammadans, Hindus, and Christians stood up for it.

Missionaries were the first to open schools on modern lines, but at the present time Muhammadans, Hindus, and Sikhs are endowing their own schools and colleges on the most lavish scale, and teaching their own religions therein, just as the mission schools teach Christianity. This certainly has many advantages over the Government system, where religion is ignored. His Majesty the Amir of Afghanistan is alive to the necessity of keeping up with the times, and is founding a college on modern lines at Kabul, which will be the first step towards the foundation of an Afghan University. During his recent visit to India he selected a number of trained Muhammadan graduates from Lahore and elsewhere, who are to inaugurate the new scheme. He will, no doubt, encounter the opposition of some of the more fanatical Mullahs, who already look upon him as having been contaminated with many Western and heretical ideas ; but the ultimate result will be good, and the attempt shows that even for Afghanistan a new era is approaching. Perhaps it may not be long before a mission school at Kabul will receive the royal sanction. The following episode I relate in this place because it shows the striking contrast between the uneducated ghazi fanatic of the hills and young men of the same race and antecedents who have passed through the humanizing and civilizing influences of a mission school.

It is a lovely autumn afternoon in the little frontier town of Bannu. The trees round the recreation-ground between the city and cantonments are becoming sere and showing variegated tints of yellow and brown. There is an unusual crowd round the greensward which forms the station cricket-pitch, and as it is Friday, the Bannu market-day, a number of Wazirs and other hillmen who are coming to and from market stop for a few minutes to gaze on the scene that lies before them, and probably to wonder in their minds what mysterious ultimate object the Feringis have in the evolutions they are watching enacted, or whether it is some preliminary to military operations on their own hill fastnesses.

Turning to the recreation-ground itself, we find that it is a cricket-match between the garrison officers and the Mission High School students. The boys have been stealing a number of runs, and their score is beginning to draw on towards a century, when the officers put on a new slow bowler, and a succession of unwary batsmen fall victims to his wiles, and soon the innings is over with a score of eighty-eight. The officers begin to bat, and the score rises rapidly; then some good catches send several players back to the pavilion (here represented by some shady shisham-trees). The score reaches eighty -eight, and the last player goes in, a young fair-haired boy, the son of the slow bowler ; the winning run is made, and the boy caught at point next ball, and the innings is over.

Just one week has passed. Again it is market-day, but no tribesmen can be seen anywhere near the recreation-ground ; instead we see long lines of khaki-dressed native infantry, while sentries and patrols guard all the roads leading thereto, and all is silent as the grave. Then we see a long procession slowly, silently moving out of the fort, long ranks of native infantry Sikh, Pathan, and Punjabi Mussulmans with slow, measured tread and arms reversed ; then a gun-carriage surmounted by a coffin covered with the Union Jack and wreaths, the masterless steed, the mourners ; a group of sunburnt officers of the Frontier Force and some more troops bring up the rear. It is the funeral of a distinguished frontier officer, and the slow bowler of last Friday, now borne to his last resting-place, the victim of a dastardly ghazi outrage the day before.

Just facing the cricket -ground is a shady and flowery patch of ground, enclosed by a simple brick wall and containing a number of white tombstones. Here lie many gallant officers, military and civil some killed in action ; others, like the present Captain Donaldson, killed by religious fanatics in Bannu and the neighborhood while in the execution of their duties ; others, again, carried off by pestilence and disease. Here, too, in lowlier grass-grown graves, lie a number of the native Christian community. East and West, high and low, all gathered in one small plot, covered with the same Mother Earth to await their common resurrection so glorious in its expectations for some, so dread in its possibilities for others.

Here, just facing the now deserted cricket-ground, the long procession halts ; the chaplain, just arrived after a hasty drive of ninety miles from Dera Ismail Khan, begins to recite the solemn verses of the Burial Service, and the booted and spurred officers do their last brotherly service and shoulder their comrade’s coffin from the gun-carriage to the grave. The strains of the " Last Post" sound forth a shrill call to the sombre mountains round as the last rays of the setting sun fall slanting through the foliage on the faces of the mourners; some sharp words of command ring forth from a native officer; the troops wheel about, and all is solitude and silence.

Only the day before a new regiment was to arrive in Bannu, and, as the custom is, the station regiments were marching out with their band to welcome them in. At the head of the regiment a group of officers were riding, including the officer commanding the district, Colonel Aylmer, V.C., and his Brigade-Major, Captain Donaldson. Just beyond the fort the road narrows a little to pass over a culvert, and the officer on the outside of Captain Donaldson fell back a little to make room for him.

Behind that culvert a Mahsud Wazir was in hiding, determined to kill an infidel and gain a martyrdom in the most sensational manner possible, so that for many an evening in years to come the tribal bards might sing his praises round the camp-fires and in the village chaufea. Just as Captain Donaldson, now on the outside rank, came abreast of him, he sprang out ; a pistol shot rang through the air, and the officer fell mortally wounded. There was, of course, no escape for the Mahsud; bullet and bayonet at once disabled him, though he lived long enough to be hanged that afternoon. Our first feelings are those of horror at the enormity of the act killing a stranger who has never seen or injured him but who is worthy of our severer judgment, this young and ignorant soldier (for he had recently served in the Border Militia), thirsting for religious fame by a deed of daring, or the Muhammadan priest who had assiduously taught him that all Feringis were kafirs, and that to kill one of them, in no matter how dastardly a manner, was a sure passport to Paradise, and that eternal joys were awaiting him as the reward of the valor and righteousness of his deed? Here, at any rate, we see the two extremes the gentlemanly Afghan from the mission school, entering with zest and sport into the game of cricket with the officers, and, so far from feeling any resentment towards them, ready, if need be, to fight with them shoulder to shoulder in the common cause of humanity, under the same flag, and defend them with their own blood from the fanaticism of their fellow-countrymen ; on the other hand, the fanatical tool of the Mullah, who quails before his ex-cathedra denunciations, but is ready at his suggestion to meet a bloody death as a martyr in the cause of his religion. As an example of the former, I might mention Muzaffar Khan, an old student of the Bannu Mission School, who risked his life to save that of the Political Officer of the Tochi Valley, with whom he was on tour. While that officer was viewing a Muhammadan shrine a fanatic rushed out and ran a dagger into his body; but, quick as thought, Muzaffar Khan threw himself on the would-be murderer and dragged him back before he had been able to inflict a fatal wound. The ghazi was secured and hanged soon after, while the officer recovered, the stab having just missed a vital part, although it had pierced right through his body.

Yet, but for the mission school, Muzaffar Khan might have been the ghazi himself. Race and religion were the same, but their environments had been different.