Yamuna Harshavardhana, VIDYĀ: Re-rootingthe Beautiful Tree. The Core Meaning and Purposeof Education.

Yamuna Harshavardhana’s book, VIDYĀ: Re-rooting the Beautiful Tree, aims to provide a comparison of the traditional education system in India and the one introduced by the colonial masters and unfortunately continued by the post-independence leaders. For this purpose, she draws on the pre-colonial system as depicted in the book entitled The Beautiful Tree by Dharampal. The book is organized in four sections consisting of a total of eleven chapters. The first section describes the meaning of education. She contends that the primary aim of education is to help realize the full potential of an individual. This she argues is possible only when education is grounded in dharma. She asserts that India is the cradle of systematic education. In second section, she asks many searching and interesting questions and provides deeper insights into the pre-colonial education system in India and compares it with the colonial system. In section three, she establishes a connection between dharma and the education system. Section four focusses on the transformation required in the extant system to rid it of the serious lacunae she finds in the colonial system thrust on India. The aim of the colonial system she claims was to produce a class of servile “educated” Indians who would remain loyal to colonial power.