An excerpt from Zareer Masani’s forthcoming biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay outlining the famous report that provided the basis for India’s modernisation
In 1832, a parliamentary Select Committee, of which Macaulay significantly had been a member, had concluded that not enough was being done to meet native Indian demand for the English language and its literature. [Governor General William] Bentinck had responded by appointing more Anglicists to the Committee of Public Instruction, chief among them Macaulay’s brother-in-law, Charles Trevelyan.
Trevelyan had already prepared the ground for a radical change in the Committee’s general orientation and funding policies. In the months before Macaulay’s arrival, he had been campaigning tirelessly, with a barrage of essays, letters and press briefings making the case for a grandiose scheme of comprehensive education, based on an alliance between English and the vernacular languages, which would eventually extend to every village in India and might even become a model for the rest of Asia. He had given his campaign a party political colour, attacking as ‘ultra Toryism’ the position of Orientalists who saw a continued role for classical Indian languages.
Condemning government subsidies to Calcutta’s Sanskrit College and its Muslim Madrassa, he asserted that ‘the youth of India are bribed, by the offer of excessive emoluments, to imbibe systems of error, which we all know to have been exploded, and their falsehood demonstrated years ago.’…
As the new President of the now evenly divided Committee on Public Instruction, Macaulay… made no secret of his pro-English views in private arguments and correspondence with the opposing faction. Addressing the Orientalist plea that people learned best in their mother tongue, he demanded of a retired British teacher with Orientalist sympathies: ‘Does it matter in what grammar a man talks nonsense? With what purity of diction he tells us that the world is surrounded by a sea of butter? In what neat phrases he maintains that Mount Meru is the centre of the world?’
Lampooning such unscientific Hindu creation myths, he asked whether the Orientalists would be willing to teach their own children astrology and accused them of double-standards. ‘The native population if left to itself would prefer our mode of education to yours,’ he asserted, citing their eagerness to pay for Western learning at private institutions, while having to be subsidised by government to do Oriental Studies. The Western-oriented Hindu College, after all, had been founded without any government support or subsidy, was funded entirely by donations from wealthy Indians like the Maharaja of Burdwan and housed in privately rented accommodation.
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In late January 1835, when the matter finally reached the Governor-General’s Council, Macaulay unleashed his famous Education Minute, adopting the arguments of the Westernizers and putting them forward with a rhetorical force which even Trevelyan could not match. The Minute was really a retrospective justification of a policy which had already been agreed in practice and successfully imposed by the Westernizers led by Trevelyan. … But the Minute, nonetheless, deserves its fame because it articulated a cogent, authoritative and highly persuasive ideological basis for what was to become a distinctively British sense of imperial mission. Almost two centuries later, though never acknowledged, its underlying principles remain the Bible of Anglo-American nation-building in the world’s trouble-spots.
The Minute began by brushing aside legalistic arguments that a change of policy would require fresh legislation and insisted that the Governor-General was just as free to reallocate educational grants as ‘to direct that the reward for killing tigers in Mysore shall be diminished . . .’ It then asserted that the Indian vernacular languages or mother tongues were at present demonstrably inadequate to the task of providing a modern higher education; hence the need for a foreign language, and which of these could be more suitable than English, ‘pre-eminent even among the languages of the West’, with a literature equal to that of classical Greece and offering unparalleled access to every branch of useful knowledge, past and present? If that were not enough, English was already the language of India’s ‘ruling class’, ‘spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of government’ and ‘likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East’.
With his characteristic love of sweeping comparisons and rhetorical exaggeration, Macaulay presented a stark contrast between the educational alternatives now on offer. Even among the Orientalists themselves, he remarked in a much-quoted dictum, he had found none ‘who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole literature of India and Arabia’.
Admitting his own ignorance of the languages he was dismissing, he maintained that he had read the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works in translation and conversed ‘with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues’.
He had concluded that ‘all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England’; and the position was the same in every other branch of knowledge.
Now in full flow, he demanded ‘whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier . . . astronomy which would move laughter in the girls at an English boarding-school... history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long . . . and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.’
The historian in Macaulay could not resist citing past precedents for how best to create a true Indian renaissance. The most obvious example, he claimed, was that of the revival of learning in Western Europe through the rediscovery of Greek and Latin literature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In a curious and logically flawed analogy, he equated the enlightening role of English in India with that of the classics in Europe, while lumping India’s own classical heritage with the primitive, ancient dialects of pre-Roman Europe. …
He dismissed as patronizing Orientalist concerns that English might be too difficult for Indians to grasp in sufficient depth. ‘There are in this very town,’ he pointed out, ‘natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language.’ He had himself heard ‘native gentlemen’ debating this very subject ‘with a liberality and an intelligence which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction’. Indeed, it would be difficult to find any European foreigner in the highest literary circles who could ‘express himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos’.…
Looking ahead to what practical shape the new Anglicist policy should take, Macaulay accepted, on grounds of cost and practicality, that the Indian masses could not be taught Hume and Milton in the kind of comprehensive educational system that campaigners like Trevelyan had envisaged. Instead, in its most famous words, the Minute set the objective of creating ‘a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’. This class of enlightened intermediaries would, in turn, revive and modernize vernacular languages like Bengali, Hindi and Urdu ‘to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population’.
Words such as these were to make Macaulay’s Minute the template of liberal imperialism across the world and one of the most important and controversial political documents of the nineteenth century. It outlined an imperial mission more ambitious and global than any since ancient Rome. India was to become the crucible in which the British Empire would create a new, modern, rational and scientific society, Indian in ethnicity but British in education, values, thinking and — most important of all — language.
Reproduced with permission from Random House India
MACAULAY
PIONEER OF INDIA’S MODERNISATION
Author: Zareer Masani
Publisher: Random House
Price: Rs 450
