Dr G. W. Leitner

Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner (1840 to 1899) was a Hungarian-born Orientalist and educator who helped found the University of the Punjab at Lahore. He is remembered in Punjabi memory for one book, his 1882 report on indigenous education, which records in an official's voice what the post-annexation school system did to the older schools of the Punjab, Gurmukhi schools among them.

Wikipedia gives his birth at Pest on 14 October 1840 and his death at Bonn on 22 March 1899. Government College, Lahore was set up on 1 January 1864 and he became its principal that year. The Tribune says he was the first Principal of Panjab University College and became the first Registrar of the University of the Punjab, which was established on 14 October 1882. In England he founded the Oriental Institute at Woking in 1883.

Key moments

• 1882: the Government of India printed his History of Indigenous Education in the Panjab since Annexation and in 1882. In its preface he writes that, despite the best intentions of public-spirited officers, the true education of the Panjab "was crippled, checked, and is nearly destroyed", and that "our system" and not individual officers stood convicted of worse than official failure.
• He argues that Urdu and then English were welcomed as a route to government employment, and that "education was first degraded by us from an object of mental and moral culture" to a means for purely worldly ambition. That sentence is sometimes quoted as if it were a boast. In context the "us" is the British administration, and it is an indictment.
• On religious teachers he writes that, looking on Maulvis, Pandits and Gurus as possible leaders of disaffection, the government treated them and their learning with suspicion.
• On the Sikhs: he describes the rise of Sikhism, and with it of Gurmukhi schools, as the vernacular protest against a priestly monopoly of learning. He notes that Gurus still taught the Granth to thousands of Sikh boys in Gurmukhi, but that Punjabi was considered barbarous and was not used by the government for elementary teaching.

What he is remembered for. The Dawn newspaper reports that he opposed British education policy in the Punjab and argued that Punjabis should be taught in their mother tongue, and that his statue survived the post-independence removals and still stands at the gate of the Old Campus of Punjab University. For the Panth his report is a colonial official's own record of the decline of the gurdwara and village schools that had taught Gurmukhi.