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for children—often orphans—of company employees and servants: at Madras in 1715, Bombay in 1719, and Calcutta in 1731. The schools grew in attendance, then multiplied, and became centres of access to English, with attached printing presses and libraries. It was clear to anyone that English influence and power were growing massively throughout the eighteenth century: not surprisingly, ambitious Indian parents increasingly tried to obtain for their children a knowledge of English, to share in this growth. Around 1780 the raja of Ramnad (Ramanathapuram) sent his own son to Schwartz’s missionary school at Tanjore (Thanjavur), south of Madras. Schwartz’s schools were being supported by all the main powers in the region: the English Company, the Muslim Haidar Ali and nawab of Arcot, and the Hindu raja of Tanjore.46

The market soon responded. By the turn of the century, ‘mushroom’ schools were growing up in all the centres of English power, but especially round Calcutta. The teachers, ‘the broken down soldier, the bankrupt merchant and the ruined spendthrift’,47 were in it mostly for the money, but they included respectable British ladies, such as one Mrs Middleton of Dinapur, outside Patna, and even the celebrated Baptist missionary William Carey of Serampore. They were aimed at prosperous Indians, and the fees charged were high. Nevertheless, the attitudes of the teachers were increasingly patronising. Writing to a military officer on the first day of 1801, the Reverend D. MacKinnon revealed his motives:

… I could not discover one particle of classical taste, of the knowledge of mathematical truth, or of genuine moral or religious principle in any class nor in any individual of the human species born and educated in Hindostán or even in all Asia. The dark race appeared and do appear to me, buried in darkness, moving like mere mechanism and utterly void of those sentiments which dignify and ennoble our species and entitle us to claim kindred with the Gods.

All my speculations were at last reduced to two simple propositions.

1. That the natives of India cannot be illuminated by their own languages, nor by the Books now existing in those languages.

2. That therefore they must be enlightened by the acquisition of other languages & by reading Books capable of forming their taste & of teaching them useful & solid knowlege as well as genuine moral and religious principles.

So long ago as the year 1787 after preaching a Sermon on Christmas Day on the field of battle of Kudjuah … I seriously resolved to try the effect of my own feeble efforts. I compiled a Grammar of the English language of which the rules & instructions were written in the Persian language & character. This Book was published in 1791 at the expence and risk of the Proprietors of the Calcutta Gazette Messrs Harington & Morris. I also was at the trouble & expence of causing a Version of the Grammar to be made into the Bengal-language, but that version was not printed.

You will smile when I mention, that when I resolved to make this effort, I formally applied to Government for permission to let in day-light on the Natives of this country. But I mention it, to observe & testify with gratitude, that in all my applications public and private to Government and respectable Individuals, I met with decided encouragement & approbation.

It is but too true that these efforts have not as yet produced any visible effect; altho I can produce instances of Individual natives who have acquired a competent knowlege of the English language by the help of my Grammar…48

As the actions of the East India Company were more and more subjected to scrutiny and control in London, these attitudes—often shared by such influential reformers as Charles Grant, William Wilberforce and James Mill—were becoming the motive force of policy. In 1813 the House of Commons resolved that ‘it is the duty of this Country to promote the interests and happiness of the native inhabitants of the British dominions in India, and that measures ought to be introduced as may tend to the introduction