Knowledge of English propelled India’s breakthroughs in atomic power, area analysis, and medication
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The Prime Minister’s latest remarks on Macaulay and the “mindset of slavery” have revived an outdated discomfort many people have carried however not often articulated. How a lot hurt did Macaulay do? What did he deprive Indians of? And what mindset adjustments are wanted right now?
When Macaulay wrote his well-known 9,000-word minute in 1835, the aim of the British authorities was to not create an training system for the Indian public however to carve out a small English-educated class to help the administration, work together with British officers, and work as intermediaries. A century later, this experiment produced what critics referred to as “Macaulay’s children”, although in fact, these had been Indians who used English to get issues executed, not individuals who misplaced their Indianness to it.
My mother and father illustrate this properly. A century after Macaulay’s minute, they returned to work in British India after increased research overseas. Even so, they saved a deeply Indian residence, formed by their ancestral roots and household temple in Goa. Regardless of which colleges we, their youngsters, attended — elite, missionary, or authorities — our sense of id was anchored at residence. Indigenous pathshalas had continued alongside English-medium colleges all through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leaving cultural continuity intact. I too began education in a Municipal Marathi School, as my mother and father valued the mom tongue in early training. Later, I moved to 2 missionary-run ladies’ colleges, recognized for instilling self-discipline, constructing confidence, and English fluency. Our actual learnings got here from the Indianness of on a regular basis life, household traditions, tales, festivals, residence meals, the best way one behaved in public. My mother and father spoke Marathi at residence.
The college curricula within the Fifties had critical shortcomings. Almost lacking had been chapters protecting the depth of the Mauryan administration, Chanakya’s Arthashastra, or the vastness of the Indian state. South Indian historical past was ignored, leaving us to consider Indian historical past revolved round Delhi and the Gangetic plains. The focus was on nation constructing and the liberty wrestle, sidelining broader civilisational narratives similar to Partition and the trauma of displacement.
While we studied textbooks to go examinations, English books opened our minds to worlds past our on a regular basis expertise. Without query, information of English propelled India’s breakthroughs in atomic power, area analysis, and medication, all pushed by first-generation English-educated scientists who had been deeply Indian, however globally competent.
In each day life nonetheless, it was, and is even right now, pure to talk within the native language. In North India, we who joined the civil companies spoke in Hindi to Ministers, secretariat and subject employees, and public guests. In Maharashtra it was Marathi; in Tamil Nadu, Tamil; in West Bengal, Bengali. Not talking the State’s language was unacceptable and carried prices. Many Tamil officers posted in Maharashtra even mastered idiomatic Marathi to beat the “outsider” bias.
Not inferior
My contemporaries who joined the schools, medical schools, and scientific establishments carried no sense of inferiority. English made us all legible to the world, not alienated from ourselves. Because we spoke English properly, we may simply converse for India at conferences around the globe, needing no interpretation. The ease of transacting skilled dialogue with proficiency, removed from making us really feel “colonised”, made us shine.
But it was the subsequent era — like my youngsters — rising up within the Seventies and Eighties, that turned consciously anti-colonial of their studying of historical past. This shift was not unintentional. The NCERT textbooks within the Seventies intentionally positioned an emphasis on Indian social reformers, constitutionalism, and regional histories, giving youngsters a extra rooted and self-aware training. By the Nineties, youngsters realized Sanskrit compulsorily, learn Indian historical past extra totally, and grew up bilingual or trilingual. They travelled on public transport, performed cricket within the alleys, and absorbed Indian society in all its layers. Macaulay or no Macaulay, Gen Y developed a versatile id and the flexibility to speak with confidence.
Today, English fluency nonetheless issues however stays important primarily inside the company {and professional} circles. In the casual sector, which accounts for 90% of India’s workforce, English is only a sensible device, not a marker of id. Even so, everybody recognises that English fluency advances careers, whereas the dearth of it could hinder progress. Earlier, the dearth of publicity to spoken English was attributed to unequal alternatives at residence and in school. Now, Gemini and Siri fill these gaps, at the same time as Uber drivers within the Hindi belt desire listening to route instructions in English.
Yet practically 200 years after Macaulay, there’s a new-found eagerness to conflate English utilization with colonial loyalty. My contemporaries have begun deriding English dialog — typically even inside their very own households — for being “un-Indian”. Coming from these whose skilled success rests on English, that is galling. The Prime Minister didn’t name for the abandonment of English; if his phrases are misinterpret in that course, India will hurt itself.
Two chasms
Ignorance resulting in superiority, not inferiority, lives in two chasms which keep unfilled. Generations of Indians have learnt little about caste oppression. Jyotirao Phule and B.R. Ambedkar had been by no means taught in my era or for many years thereafter — leaving me and my youngsters (now of their fifties) blissfully unaware of the cruelty of caste. This hole was not Macaulay’s creation. It was (and is) the results of middle-class indifference to face uncomfortable truths.
The second chasm was created by Macaulay by urging the British to finish funding for Sanskrit and Arabic as “bounties to raise up champions of error” — a prejudice that delayed Sanskrit’s revival for 150 years, erased state help to Arabic, and ultimately pushed Urdu — an Indian language born of a Delhi dialect Khari Boli ( wrongly conflated with Islam) — into undeserved decline. The objective of revisiting Macaulay’s legacy shouldn’t be to fabricate new resentments. English stays a bridge, not a barrier; and with out query we should fill the historic and social gaps that Macaulay by no means created however that our mindsets have allowed to persist. Only if the Prime Minister’s phrases are learn as a name to deepen our information of India and shed pointless imitation of international life, the end result will likely be constructive. That is the one smart option to interpret the Prime Minister’s name.
Shailaja Chandra was previously Secretary, Government of India, and Chief Secretary, Delhi
shailajachandra1@gmail.com
Published – March 01, 2026 05:22 am IST
