The Maharajah’s English Tutor
The Raj’s control of India’s princely states was never absolute, as the British-appointed tutor to the last maharajah of Travancore discovered.
In 1877 H.E. Sullivan, the British representative at the court of the Travancore maharajah, ventured into somewhat delicate territory: the education of the state’s young princes. As was later recorded, he ‘condemned’ the existing arrangements as offering mere book learning, without ‘training up and forming’ the children’s minds. What the British agent wanted, instead, was for the princes to be in the regular company of a ‘man of enlightened liberal views’, ‘not only in school’ but on their ‘rides and walks and travels’, so that ‘education, in its highest sense, would be going on constantly’. A ‘native’ master would not do, for:
Natives of India are not gifted with the same powers of influencing the dispositions and controlling the wills of their pupils (especially if the latter are of high rank) as are Europeans.
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