Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his recent speech, advocated a ‘liberation’ from Macaulay and his legacy not just in our educational system, but also in our Weltanschauung. Here is an attempt to understand the Macaulay conundrum in India’s history.
Thomas Babington Macaulay is a completely unimportant and forgotten figure in Britain and in British history. He was a Whig politician of limited importance. His father, Zachary Macaulay, was a friend of former MP of the UK parliament William Wilberforce and is therefore mentioned occasionally in anti-slavery tracts.
From an Indian perspective, Wilberforce, while a worthy anti-slavery crusader, remains a bit of a dubious fellow. He wanted the East India Company to forcibly convert all Indians away from idolatry, polytheism and colourful “paganism” to austere Protestant Christianity. Fortunately for us, the mercenary, money-grubbing shareholders of the EIC ignored his suggestions and actually patronised Hindu temples and festivals until they were finally pressured into at least not providing open support to “heathen” traditions.
Macaulay’s Whig histories sit in British libraries today more or less unread and ignored. His poetry—occasionally good, as in The Lays of Ancient Rome with Horatio on the bridge is not taught in schools and is completely unacknowledged. His parliamentary speeches simply do not have the currency we attribute to Edmund Burke or Benjamin Disraeli. Even his once-popular biography, written by his nephew, GM Trevelyan, is now forgotten. Today, if you meet an English-speaking Londoner, mentioning Macaulay will likely get a quizzical look in response. Macbeth, Macduff, McDonald—they may know. But this descendant of Olaus is simply not there in the imagination or in the knowledge base of anyone.
Minute of Indian education
What about Macaulay and India? He didn’t come here in search of “adventure” or to collect booty from battles. He expressed himself quite clearly that he came to India to make and save money. And he was not going to do this by taking risks. He just wanted an inflated salary in a comfortable job. Macaulay had some good aspects to his personality. He loved Ooty (Ootacamund; Udagamangalam) and, at least from this writer’s perspective, was intelligent enough to dislike Calcutta (Kolkata).
Macaulay lucked out with his boss. Governor General of India at the time, William Bentinck, was an intelligent and interesting fellow. He wanted the EIC to invest at least a little bit of its looted money in educating Indians. Bentinck asked Macaulay to look into the matter. The result was Macaulay’s famous or infamous ‘Minute on Indian education’.
It’s a pretty aggressive and tendentious document. Macaulay had total contempt for Indian literature and for Middle Eastern writing in Persian or Arabic. He was supremely confident that English schoolgirls are better informed than Indian scholars. A believer in markets, he noted that upper-class Indians were willing to pay for English education, while no one would go to a Sanskrit or Arabic school without a scholarship. That market demand issue still haunts us.
Being a fiscal conservative, Macaulay was not in favour of the EIC supporting mass education. He advocated English education for a limited number of persons, and herein lies a thought which has caused great discomfort to Indians. Macaulay wanted to develop a group of elite brown British lookalikes and many believe that he was successful. We had, and probably still have, a deracinated, English-knowing elite. Macaulay, according to this school, has achieved a measure of success.
Another success deserves a little bit of attention. A British Council official observed that when a Shakespeare play was performed in Delhi, an elderly Bengali gentleman sitting in the row behind him was softly whispering every line. He knew the play by heart, something which, at least today, is extremely unlikely in a London theatre. During my boyhood, I remember South Indian gentlemen in their veshtis, coats and turbans enacting Merchant of Venice from memory. In Mumbai, eager Parsees adopted and adapted Shakespeare into Gujarati theatre and Hindi cinema.
In recent times, directors like Vishal Bhardwaj and Mani Ratnam have adapted works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen. Indentured labour came after Macaulay’s time, but it was clearly a part of the imperial project. Writers like VS Naipaul, a Trinidadian of Indian origin, and Salman Rushdie, a wandering cosmopolitan who is still a Mumbai-lover, are just two exemplars of Indian mastery of Macaulay’s controversial gift.
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Using English to reassert traditional thought
In fairness, Macaulay was not a racist or a eugenicist. He did not think that Indians were biologically or genetically inferior, even though in his time, we were clearly a conquered people. He wrote that the Indians of his day were childlike and compared them to Russians before Peter the Great’s westernisation efforts. He argued that just as Russians had “progressed” by becoming westernised, so too would Indians with a Western/English education. Macaulay was wrong about both Russia and India.
Despite knowing French quite well, Leo Tolstoy became a great supporter of the idea that the Russian peasant was innately noble and gifted. Fyodor Dostoevsky was a Slavophile of even greater intensity. The best Russian music composers created great operas rooted in Russian traditions. Today, philosophers like Alexander Dugin celebrate Russian “civilisation”.
It is not even clear that Peter the Great wanted Russians to imitate Western Europeans. He wanted the people to learn technical skills and the Western spirit of “efficiency”. Tsar Alexander I, the Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin, and the nationalist Vladimir Putin all agree with this. But all the way down from Peter through Catherine (who was actually of Austrian origin) till today, Russian leaders have never walked away from the idea of Russia’s uniqueness and in many respects its incompatibility with jejune, simplistic Western fashions.
Not so surprisingly, Indian intellectuals behaved just like their Russian counterparts. Even Raja Ram Rammohan Roy, who supported English education, was tireless in his efforts to reach back to the Upanishads. Indians learned English and a few were happy becoming Rao Bahadurs. But virtually all Indians with any intellectual heft actually used their newfound knowledge to insidiously “question” British rule, British hypocrisy, and the entire colonial/imperial edifice. And instead of discarding Indian scholarship, they went back to it with a new lens.
Gandhi did not know Sanskrit. He first read the Bhagavad Gita in English translation. But after first trying to be a “brown Englishman”, he changed and became the greatest opponent of the Empire. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan is an even more interesting example. In Vedantic traditions, a person is deemed an Acharya by writing commentaries on the Prasthana Traya—the Bhagavad Gita, the ten major Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras. This is because Adi Shankara wrote such commentaries. We count Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva and Vallabha as Acharyas, even though some of Vallabha’s works are lost. Radhakrishnan wrote commentaries in English, not in Sanskrit. Yet, most of us will still concede that Radhakrishnan was an Acharya. In this case, English did not become an instrument of deracination but a medium of reasserting traditional thought.
Medicine, literature and IPC
What then is right about Modi’s thoughts? He is correct in a very important way. We simply do not have enough Radhakrishnans. Instead, we have too many people who have heard of the contributions of Pythagoras and Newton, but are at a loss when asked to describe Aryabhatta’s achievements, and they have never heard of a great mathematician named Madhava of Sangamagrama. The same people tend to dismiss all our traditions as “backward” and “superstitious”. They have drunk the Kool-Aid of the West and think of all knowledge as analytical, separable, discrete and different.
Just consider medicine. The other day, I was describing my experience with stents in my heart to an orthopaedic surgeon. He confessed to me that he was quite uninterested in matters of cardiology. This Western approach of specialised scholarship goes against our integrative, synthetic approach. We start with the working assumption that rocks, plants, insects, animals and humans are interconnected. We are not fans of the approach that a scholar who studies plants should ignore insects. It is only in recent times, with ecology and environmental science becoming fashionable, that the West has started to recognise that the Indic approach has merit.
Indira Gandhi, in her famous speech at Copenhagen, quoted the Atharva Veda to illustrate the importance of why we should be gentle with the earth. In his own way, Modi is telling us pretty much the same thing: do not ignore a text that is a few thousand years old; they contain insights we can and should treasure. Writing some two thousand years ago, Tamil poet-saint Thiruvalluvar told us that if paddy fields have water, then the country prospers and the king is strong. Modi, a Thiruvalluvar fan, will relate to this as he fashions our economic and environmental policies.
Academics in our universities, who have not drunk the Western nectar but have chosen the Western poisons of Marxism and post-Modernism, dismiss the Atharva Veda and Thirukkural as intersectionally bad, hegemonic texts. They are perhaps the worst examples of Macaulay’s success in his experiment.
Apart from his foray into education policy, Macaulay also drafted the Indian Penal Code. We have recently changed the name of this statute, but curiously retained much of the content. There is an interesting facet to the IPC. Macaulay included a section on “conspiracy”. Trevelyan points out that this section is almost entirely derived from Macbeth. Lady Macbeth does not kill. She conspires; she instigates. Incidentally, it is this section of the IPC that General Zia Ul Haq used in Pakistan to hang his political opponent, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who probably died cursing Macaulay.
India’s linguistic heritage
Interestingly, Modi says he is not opposed to English. He understands that English drives our pharma achievements and all our hopes of technological progress. He just wants our magnificent and diverse linguistic heritage not to die out and our heritage sites not to become forgotten ruins.
Many of us have children and grandchildren who know little or no Indian language or, at best, have a poor working knowledge. I’ve argued with many people that trying to persuade middle-class and increasingly lower-class Indians not to send their children to English medium schools is a losing proposition. It is simply a non-starter. So, how do we preserve our languages, our collective memories and the seeds of our consciousness, to revert to the thoughts of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Dugin?
Thiruvalluvar tells us, “Kuzhal Inidu Yaazhal Inidu Enbar Tam Makkal Malalai Chol Keladavar”—those who claim that the music of the flute and the harp are sweet haven’t heard the prattling lisps of children. And should we not let them prattle and lisp in our own languages? This insight has given me an idea. Under the New Education Policy, why not make Indian classical and folk music a compulsory subject? In the south, children would automatically gain at least a passing acquaintance with Telugu, Kannada and Tamil and perhaps even a smattering of fast-disappearing languages like Tulu and Lambadi. In other parts of the country, children could get similar exposure. The children in my family have learned to appreciate the Indian-language literature primarily through Carnatic music. I really believe this will be both worthwhile and successful if pursued in schools.
Attacking Macaulay is fine. But let us also remember, as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee did, that these personalities are instruments of destiny. Our job is to move on, to create Sarvepalli Radhakrishnans, to preserve the magnificent lyrics of our composers, but also to write AI programmes and design modern drones. Modi instinctively seems to understand this challenge. And all of us, even if in different ways, need to think of ways of dealing with our complex, tortured history, which is peppered with ambiguity and nuance.
Jaithirth ‘Jerry’ Rao is a retired entrepreneur who lives in Lonavala. He has published three books: ‘Notes from an Indian Conservative’, ‘The Indian Conservative’, and ‘Economist Gandhi’. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)