Indian History Trivia (8): The "Myth" of "Macaulay's Children"

Macaulay’s children & the rest

Gautam Adhikari
23 February 2013, 07:00 AM IST

27

I was reading a terrific biography of Macaulay by Zareer Masani when the apparition of a woman began to interrupt my concentration. It was the spirit of Mamata Banerjee.
But for Thomas Babington Macaulay, the 19th century imperial British law-maker, you probably wouldn’t be reading this column in English. In the 1830s, he led the charge of the Anglicists, who wanted to educate their native subjects in English. He was vigorously opposed by the those public policy thinkers, including James Mill and his son John Stuart, who believed that people learned best in their mother tongues.
Macaulay won. Vernaculars would be taught alongside English as the main medium of instruction, proclaimed the imperial educational policy of William Bentinck. Macaulay, who was full of what would today be called racist disdain for Indians in general and Bengalis in particular, saw the teaching of English as a channel for the transmission of European knowledge into Indian minds down to the wide mass of the population.
“Twenty years hence, there will be hundreds, nay thousands, of natives familiar with the best models of composition, and well acquainted with Western science,” he is quoted as predicting in Masani’s  erudite and delightfully gripping story of Macaulay’s life. Forty years on, the new policy had indeed produced “hundreds of thousands of natives who can appreciate European knowledge when laid before them in the English language”. A century and a half on, millions in India speak and read English.
Macaulay received enthusiastic support from Bengal’s cultural elite, led by Ram Mohan Roy. But he was strongly opposed by those who saw the introduction of English education as a threat to Indian culture and religions. That Indian side of the debate was never quite resolved. It continues right up to this day.
In imperial India, English fluency remained confined to the narrow native elite, wide enough in numbers to perform most administrative tasks in the McDonald’s-style franchise operation through which the British ruled the country. Today, that base is larger, with perhaps 80-100 million reasonably adept in their control over the language. But at less than 10 percent of our total population, it’s still the elite.
Enter Mamata Banerjee. And Narendra Modi. And Mulayam Singh Yadav. In short, all those political players who proudly display an almost Macaulay-like disdain towards Indians who use English as their main language of communication. And they are confident, to the point of arrogance in many cases, in adopting styles of political, social and cultural behavior that is alien to Macaulay’s cherished Western norms and practice.

Such thoughts floated across my mind while conversing in Kolkata recently with a senior member of the West Bengal government. Didi’s enemies were the “English-speaking elite” and a major Bengali newspaper, he said. Her support, on the other hand, came from Bengal’s villages and small towns, where people cared little for the snide comments of English speakers or of Bengal’s upper-crust, and declining, bhadralok class.
We, it so happens, spoke in English since we both were Macaulay’s children, as our class is sometimes described derisively in lofty intellectual circles by other children of the same linguistic ancestry. But he had made an important point.
Sixty years ago, in the early years of the republic, it would have been difficult to imagine the triumphant rise to power of political leaders like Mamata Banerjee and Narendra Modi. Democracy made that possible as it spread wide and struck deep roots across the nation. No longer does a leader have to be fluent in English, or adhere to Western norms of public behavior, or come from any superior class or caste to be elected to high office.
Yet, the Constitution of India, on which rests the democracy which has made the rise of the others possible and pushed Macaulay’s children on the defensive, was debated and written in English. It was framed by norms that emerged from the West in the modern era. B R Ambedkar, the chief drafter of the document, was an unabashed modernizer.  And, interestingly, Dalit intellectuals support English education to this day. Curious, isn’t it?

So, here’s a question: As democracy deepens, must we expect an onset of decline in the very republican norms embedded in the Constitution that upholds the idea of India?
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Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay,_1st_Baron_Macaulay

The Right Honourable The Lord Macaulay PC
Secretary at War
In office 27 September 1839 – 30 August 1841
Monarch	Victoria
Prime Minister	The Viscount Melbourne
Preceded by	Viscount Howick
Succeeded by	Sir Henry Hardinge
Paymaster-General
In office 7 July 1846 – 8 May 1848
Monarch	Victoria
Prime Minister	Lord John Russell
Preceded by	Hon. Bingham Baring
Succeeded by	The Earl Granville
Personal details
Born	25 October 1800 Leicestershire, England
Died	28 December 1859 (aged 59) London, England
Nationality	British
Political party	Whig
Spouse(s)	Unmarried
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Signature

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Friday, February 08, 2008

Indian History Trivia (8): The "Myth" of "Macaulay's Children"

It was the 3rd or 4th time this mail landed in my mailbox (through chainmail, exhorting one to send to all Indians - or as a plain forward by a friend) during last one week...

Lord Thomas Macaulay was supposed to have made this speech on Feb 2nd, 1835 to the British Parliament:

"I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief, such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than own, they will lose their self esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation."

Apart from the fact that this did not read like something an Englishman will write in 19th century ("break the very backbone", or "caliber" instead of "calibre"), and it was too much of an 'opaque' statement...

... And so, I did some googling to find the original text.

It is here:
Macaulay's Minute on Education, February 2, 1835

...apparently, Lord Macaulay did not ever make any such statement!!!

(though, such is the power of internet on the un-discerning consumers of information, that, as this news-item in The Hindu (Jan 18, 2008) shows, this quote is even displayed in the "Freedom Express" at platform No. 11 at the Chennai Central Railway Station!!!)

Macaulay made his speech when there was a raging controversy about how to use the Rs. 100,000/- that the British Government was spending on "educating the natives" in India.

The issue was: which language to use for this education.
On one side were the Orientalists, who favoured supporting native langauages - Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian. And on the other side were people like Macaulay, who favoured English, because, in his own condescending wisdom, he felt "that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."

... And that is how the legend/myth of "Macaulay's Children" was born.... A set of Indian elites, educated, indoctrinated and brainwashed through the the British education system... One article has a vivid description of this insidious system:

"His education system was originally designed to create a class of people who would be the intermediaries between the British rulers and the ruled natives. They would be indoctrinated through an education system to be Indians only in appearance - they would have complete belief in the good intentions of British rule and the philosophy of 'the white man's burden', thus making the task of ruling this vast country easier. They would, without question, believe that the British were there for the upliftment of the Indian people from centuries of ignorance and backwardness. Over a period of time, they would associate all things British with superiority - their physical appearance, their attire, their language, their culture, their religion.... The education system was to be a self-perpetuating one. Once indoctrinated, the converts would carry the torch. Incentives were built to ensure that the system spread reasonably far and wide..."

This (mis)understanding about the education system which the British introduced - and which supposedly continues to produce the "Macaulay's Children" - is rooted in this (selective) quote from Macaulay's "Minute":

"... We must at present do our best to form 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 tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect...."

Macaulay, of course, wrote/spoke this. But he said something more before and after this statement, which completely changes the meaning of the above quote (Please read the full quotation later in this post)

He was, apparently, a pragmatist in his own dispassionate way, even though his was a mindset of one who believed that he - and the British - represented a more evolved civilisation. His motives to create "a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern" was not aimed to create a submissive populace, but a nation which the British can trade with...

In a speech to the British Parliament on Govt of India Bill (1833), he had said:

"...It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us... To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, would make it an useless and costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from being our customers in order that they might continue to be our slaves.... Are we to keep the people of India ignorant in order that we may keep them submissive? Or do we think that we can give them knowledge without awakening ambition?..."
In the modern business parlance and cliché's, Macaulay was aiming to "create a market" through - one is tempted to say - "inclusive growth"!!

Given India's linguistic and ethnic diversity, his solution was to educate a set of elites - in English - who in turn, will help translating the Western knowledge in local language. And so, what he said was this:

"I feel... that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form 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 tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population."

The fact that, 150+yrs later, Macaulay's elite "interpreters" had forgotten/discarded their own native vernacular - and had createda class-system based on "proper" English - is, of course, a different story....
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Dr Pinaki Chakrabort (Navi Mumbai) says:

February 24,2013

British introduced English & spared no effort to ensure that a class of English-speaking breed was formed. This was not out of love for us Indians to progress in a fast-developing industrial world but to ensure their grip on this country. We should not blame Macaulay for what he did because what he did was for his country. 

  In the words of Prof Amartya Sen, the British ruled us in there layers – the ‘exoticist’, the ‘magisterial’ & the ‘curatorial’ (Ref his book “The Argumentative Indian”, pp 140-141