Barely 15 percent of Indians were literate at decolonization
Evidence
Considering that barely 15 per cent of the population was in any sense literate by the time of decolonization, the failures of the system are obvious enough, and in some senses all of this literate segment of the population could be construed as some kind of ‘elite’, since even bare literacy did help in the long-term dynamics of social mobilities. In terms of decisive class privilege, however, which combined higher education with considerable property and/or income, the real ‘educated elite’ was a mere fraction of that 15 per cent. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 518
Categorization
- QUESTION: This literacy figure seems suspect — does it count by script (any Indian language) or specifically English literacy? Worth chasing the original census statistic.