In his Ramnath Goenka Lecture, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a trenchant critique of Thomas Babbington Macaulay and his baneful influence in modern India. In the process, he has reintroduced a theme in India’s public discourse that will continue to be debated for a long time. In India’s academic disciplines — history, psychology, political science, sociology and education — Macaulay is among the most heavily discussed figures of the British period of Indian history.
Modi made two interconnected claims. First, with its glorification of Western heritage and denigration of India’s civilisation, Macaulay’s “Education Minute” (1835) fundamentally transformed India’s education system. It broke India’s self-confidence (“aatma vishwas to tod diya”), entrenched a deep inferiority complex (“heen bhavna”), and created an enduring colonial mentality (“Ghulami ki mansikta”). Second, these tendencies were further strengthened after independence (“azadi milne ke baad aur bhi pukhta”). India’s economy, education, and aspirations started relying even more on foreign countries. Indigenous languages were consciously devalued. He would like this mentality to end by 2035, two hundred years after the adoption of Macaulay’s Education policy.
So how should we assess Macaulay’s role in India? To my mind, the question is not whether Modi is right. Rather, the right question is to what extent he is. Is he seeing a singular consequence where several existed, some negative and others positive?
Let us start with a brief analytic detour into history, without which we can’t answer the question posed above.
From Burke to Macaulay
As is well known, the East India Company (EIC) started as a trading firm in 1600. It began to acquire Indian territory in 1757, starting with Bengal. However, apart from amassing huge riches and enforcing brute military force to expand territorial possessions, the EIC was unsure about the ideology of rule. Edmund Burke, a leading political philosopher of the late 18th century and a parliamentarian, started the famous impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, the first Governor General of India (1775-1783), thus: “I charge … Warren Hastings, in the name of the Commons of England, here assembled, with High Crimes and Misdemeanors!— I charge him with Fraud, Abuse, Treachery, and Robbery!.”
Like some of the early British officers in Calcutta (now Kolkata), who learned Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, which were among the leading scholarly languages of the time, and set up the Asiatic Society to translate India’s texts into English, Burke was quite enamored of India’s civilisational standing and richness: “If I were to take the whole aggregate of our possessions (in India), I should compare it… with the empire of Germany.. The Nabob of Oude (prince of Awadh) might stand for the King of Prussia; the Nabob of Arcot I would compare .. to the Elector of Saxony. The Rajah of Benares might well rank with the Prince of Hesse..; and the Rajah of Tanjore … to the Elector of Bavaria”. And he emphatically added: “I challenge the world to show in any modern European book more true morality and wisdom than is to be found in the writings of Asiatic men in high trust.” Asiatic, in this passage, meant Indian.
As the EIC developed more elaborate plans for ruling India, the ideology of rule — why the British were, and should be, in India — was born in the 1810s. To train officers recruited for India, James Mill, an EIC official in London, published The History of British India (1817). Unlike Burke, Mill argued that the pre-British Indian history was an era of darkness and the British brought civilisational light into India.
As this ideological trope deepened, Thomas Macaulay was recruited as a high-ranking advisor to the British Governor General. He had done brilliantly at Cambridge and become a parliamentarian at a fairly young age, but as a leading biographer tells us, “Macaulay went out to India in 1834 almost penniless, and in debt to his brother-in-law. He returned to England, three and a half years later, a man of substance who would never again have to give a thought to his financial situation.”
The financial rewards were accompanied by some of the most consequential interventions in India. Macaulay understood that coercion and outright military occupation could not be a solid basis for rule. Stabilisation of power required the construction of political alliances and an ideological/cultural strategy aimed at making the ruled accept authority. A century later, in the writings of Antonio Gramsci, the latter idea came to be known as hegemony construction.
Macaulay argued that we should create “a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste,.. opinions, ..morals, .. intellect.” Modi’s translation of these words is apt: “dikhne mein bharatiya, mann se angrez”. And for the Indian literature, unlike Burke, Macaulay had the following to say: “I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. (But) I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
English thus became India’s medium of instruction in institutions of higher learning and in elite schools created thereafter. In Doon School, Dehradun (1835), La Martinier, Calcutta (1836), St Xavier’s College, Mumbai (1869), Mayo College, Ajmer (1875), etc, and in the less elitist Government Colleges in small towns, with British principals, Indians learned Milton and Shakespeare, ingested British and European history, and made short shrift of the history and classical texts of India.
But did these interventions create a widespread colonial mentality (ghulami ki maansikta) and a huge pro-British class?
Also read: Not just Nehru, even Hindutva stems from Macaulay legacy
Did Macaulay create only captive minds?
There is no doubt that many in India fully met this description. Let me give just two examples, a Muslim and a Hindu. In 1868, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, founder of what became Aligarh Muslim University, took his son for admission to the University of Cambridge. During his sojourn, this is what he wrote :
“It is nearly six months since I arrived in London… … Although I do not absolve the English in India of discourtesy and of looking upon the natives of the country as animals beneath contempt, …. I am afraid I must confess that they are not far wrong in their opinion of us. Without flattering the English, I can truly say that the natives of India, high and low, merchants and petty shopkeepers, educated and illiterate, when contrasted with the English in education, manners and uprightness, are as like them as a dirty animal is to an able and handsome man. The English have reason for believing us in India to be imbecile brutes…. All good things, spiritual and worldly, …, have been bestowed by the Almighty on Europe, and especially on England.”
In Bengal, the first province to get English education, some leading Hindu families were thoroughly anglicised. As a cultural psychologist, Ashis Nandy probed in detail about how the famous Aurobindo Ghose, who later founded the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, was raised:
“Aurobindo Ghose ..was the third son of his parents. The Ghoses were urbane Brahmos from near Calcutta… Father, a doctor trained in England. .. forbade his children to learn or speak Bengali; even at home they had to converse in English. Their dress and food, too were English. ….. Aurobindo was seven when his parents took him and two of his brothers to England and left them there. … The brothers were put under the tutelage of the Reverend and Mrs. Dewett, who were given strict instructions not to allow the children to make the acquaintance of any Indian or undergo any Indian influence. .. Aurobindo was exposed to the classical heritage of Europe, especially to Latin, Greek and English. He also began to write and publish poetry in Latin, Greek and English. Afterwards, he (studied in) King’s College, Cambridge, where, too, did brilliantly in the classics. He also dutifully learned French, some German and Italian.”
The key question is: were these the only effects of Macaulay’s intervention? Did the English language, and the instruction therein, create only “captive minds”, to borrow a term Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz used for the capture of Eastern Europeans by Communism? Did Macaulay’s education only create Indians suffused with self-loathing?
Also read: Why Dalits love Mahatma Macaulay
Partial truth
An answer to this question begins to show why Modi’s interpretation of Macaulay is only a partial truth presented as the whole truth. There were plural possibilities that the knowledge of English provided. Modi does not look at the multivalence of languages and cultures — or the quality of having many values and meanings that human agency can extract — even when an attempt to impose them might be made.
Let us look at two instances. MK Gandhi undoubtedly derived his commitment to Ahimsa from the Advaita tradition of Hinduism, which insisted that since all of us were children of God, no one should be killed. That is, if a Hindu killed a non-Hindu, it would be fratricide. For this idea, he certainly did not need English; Hindu texts were sufficient. But his autobiography makes it clear that three of the biggest influences on his idea of civil disobedience came from outside India, all of whom he accessed through English texts. These were: Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (1848), John Ruskin’s Unto This Last (1860), and Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894).
This kind of multivalence relates to another big idea that Modi’s formulation escapes. The West is not just a unitary West. The West also has an Other existing inside, but disagreeing with the official West. Gandhi’s proximity and love for the West’s Other are well known.
Similarly, Gandhi also broke up the ancient Indian tradition. He disowned that part which taught subjugation, picking that which taught compassion and love. He was a critical traditionalist, not simply a traditionalist. And on English and foreign influences, what he said can be described as cosmopolitan rootedness.
“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.”
Perhaps a bigger example comes from BR Ambedkar. His PhD education at Columbia University, conducted in English, exposed him to several ideas, which he used well in his political career and in the making of the Constitution. John Dewey was his political philosophy professor at Columbia. Dewey’s writings shaped a lot of his thinking, especially the idea that while political democracy was certainly desirable, a deeper democracy would have to be social — in that human beings should not only carry equal votes, but in social life, too, the practice of equality ought to prevail. For Dalits, it meant that having voting rights as well as electoral reservations was good, which Ambedkar was able to insert in the Constitution, but a truer democracy would also give them social equality, for which he fervently advocated, including in the Constituent Assembly and in his politics.
Significantly, the pursuit of Dalit welfare also led Ambedkar to reject Hinduism. Among the ancient Indian traditions, he admired only Buddhism, to which he converted towards the end of his life. He famously wanted the “annihilation of caste”. Ambedkar’s rejection of Hinduism did not stem from a blind internalisation of Macaulay, or from a colonial mentality. It was based on a reasoned internal, not Macaulay-inspired, assessment of how shabbily, according to him, the Dalits were treated by Hindu texts and practices.
A third example takes us to the second big point that Modi made. According to him, the colonial mentality deepened after independence in production, education and aspirations. His reference here is to Nehru. But does it make sense?
Nehru’s production system was based on central planning and import substitution, which effectively meant self-reliance and a de-linking from international trade and capital flows. If anything, it was anti-colonial to an extreme. When Manmohan Singh altered Nehruvian economic policy in July 1991, he argued that it was time to move beyond the East Indian Company syndrome. As for the education policy, one of the key Nehru initiatives was the creation of IITs. IITs indeed depended on foreign collaboration. But does Modi mean that IITs should not have been created? And did the aspirations of IIT graduates reflect a colonial mentality, or simply their use of engineering and science to advance their careers? Many of course ended up in the US, where they heavily pursued entrepreneurial fortunes. Macaulay’s children aspired to be officials and clerks, not entrepreneurs.
In short, it is beyond doubt that Macaulay’s intervention led to a colonial mentality in several sections of India. But especially because of the English language, it also led to a lot of unintended consequences. Languages and even cultures tend to be multivalent. Human agency uses it for all kinds of emancipatory purposes, as it especially did in the case of Gandhi and Ambedkar.
Ashutosh Varshney is Sol Goldman Professor of International Studies and the Social Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Brown University. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)