By
Mani Shankar Aiyar
(Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in Parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009.)
On November 17, our Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing an audience saturated with Western education in the English language, accused his listeners of displaying “a mentality that seeks to enslave people because of their exposure to Western education”.
The Prime Minister then went on to trace their bondage to a “British parliamentarian” called Thomas Babington Macaulay, who, in 1835, launched his fusillade to “destroy the Indian education system from its roots”. The PM’s speechwriter should have alerted him that it was not Macaulay the “parliamentarian” but Macaulay the Law Member of the Governor-General-in-Council who had worked his mischief through his infamous 1835 Minute on Education, with its notorious goal of leaving us “Indian in appearance” but “English in their minds” (as the PM paraphrased Macaulay in Hindi).
To revert from Modi’s Hindi paraphrase to Macaulay’s own words, his Minute on Education, wrote Macaulay, was aimed at building “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect”. To what extent did he succeed? The first part of his prediction proved indubitably correct: 200 years on, we Indians remain “Indian in blood and colour”. But as for the second part, it was an Inner Temple lawyer who became a Mahatma and then a “seditious fakir” who, when asked what he thought of “Western civilization”, retorted: “I think that might be a good idea!”
We accepted the language and the education, but never became English “in taste, opinions, morals or intellect”. And as for Macaulay’s further assertion that “a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole literature of India and Arabia”, Swami Vivekananda turned Macaulay on his head to teach Hindu civilisation to the West with soaring oratory in rousing, erudite English, as did Sri Aurobindo, who praised the English language as the best available instrument to convey the subtlety and nuances of Hindu spiritual thought and experience.
Macaulay’s Minute
For all his bigotry, racism, and snobbery, Macaulay put into his Minute two compelling arguments for Indians to accept an education in English. First, the remarkable ability already demonstrated by the Indian “ruling class” to learn English and “discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language”. He contrasted this with the “European foreigner” in the “literary circles” of the continent who would not be able to “express himself with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos”.
Second, Indians’ education in Sanskrit or Arabic was not fetching them gainful employment in an age when English was “likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East”.
Macaulay’s proposal on English-medium education for Indians was hotly contested by the East India Company’s British Orientalists, both in the Governor-General’s Council in Calcutta and the Board of Control in London. They had long held that Indians should be educated in their native tongues, focusing on Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic.
The strongest contemporary critics of Macaulay were not Indians but two eminent Britons—James Mill the historian, who pressed for Indians to be educated in their “own mother tongue”, and his son, the famed political philosopher, John Stuart Mill, who dismissed Macaulay as “a coxcombical dilettante litterateur”.
There was such a strong colonial pushback against Macaulay’s proposed education policy that but for the backing of a key ally in London, Macaulay’s Minute might have been thrown in the dustbin by the colonisers themselves. It was not so much because the angrez wanted it but because native Indians from the time of Raja Rammohan Roy insisted that the education policy of the East India Company be radically changed to give Indians the fruits of Western learning through education in English.
India and multilingualism
The simple fact that escapes our PM’s mind is that most Indians, then or now, are multilingual and multi-cultural. Knowledge of English never meant the erasure of the mother tongue, or the culture and heritage associated with it.
Our freedom fighters, whether Hindu, Muslim, or other, were fluent in the English language, but they were also steeped in their mother tongues and usually one or more other Indian languages to communicate with the masses. This remains true in our post-Independence era of Hinglish, the most common lingua franca of most Indians, modified regionally to read Benglish, Tamlish, Gujlish, Urdish, etc.
I love a suggestion I have recently come across that Indian English should not be spelt English but Inglish with an I, to indicate that it is English as spoken in India!
When a handful of Macaulay’s schools and colleges in Bengal revolutionised education by admitting all castes and religions without discrimination, English-language teaching grew so rapidly that just 22 years later, universities were simultaneously established in Calcutta, Delhi, and Madras in 1857—ironically the very year of India’s First War of Independence.
Alas, the Muslim elite were sulking at being ousted from the throne of Delhi which they had occupied for the previous 666 years (1192-1858). They refused to go to these and other colonial educational institutions, considering their traditional Islam-based education in madrasas as infinitely superior to the base Western education of the colonising kafirs (shades of Modi!).
So, while Hindus all over the country flocked to these new centres of learning, the Muslim community as a whole remained half a century behind the Hindus in modern education.
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan tried to rectify this in the late 19th century with the English-medium educational institutions he established in Aligarh, principally for the elite Muslim ashrafi, in the teeth of being called a heretic by the clerical orthodoxy.
But the 50-year “backwardness” in education haunted Muslim political spokespersons and eventually led through separate electorates to Partition.
Muslim education gap
In his address, Modiji described the Indian National Congress as the “Muslim League-Maoist Congress”, but he might have reflected that had the Muslim community as a whole taken to Westernised education in English as avidly as the Hindus did, the 50-year gap in educational attainment that yawned between the Hindu and the Muslim communities may not have resulted in the Muslim demand for compensation in political representation through separate electorates that later morphed into the demand for Partition.
We in Bharat are learning the hard way of how “educational and social backwardness” has become the fulcrum of electoral politics. Had we, during the freedom movement, understood the demand for adequate political representation for Muslims as compensation for educational backwardness, as we now have with regard to OBCs, the distrust of our main religious minority might have been bridged to leave us at Independence with a united, not a truncated, Hindustan.
Now, I do not expect a busy man like the PM to research such minutiae before opening his mouth. But as I was, for nearly five years, the speechwriter for a previous Prime Minister, I do think the main duty of a speechwriter is to get gaffes attributed to the speechwriter so that they do not reflect on the Prime Minister.
For when, as in the present case, a PM starts spouting on his own, and ends up claiming that the pushpak of the Ramayana proves that Hindus long ago knew all about avionics, and, at the inauguration of a modern allopathic hospital, thunders that Lord Ganesha’s elephant trunk demonstrates the ancient Hindu knowledge of “plastic surgery” (he meant “organ transplantation”, but let that go for he is, after all, a non-biological PM), it is the PM who gets laughed at.
At the end of his rant, the enduring image that remains is of Modi as an inverted Macaulay: as bigoted in regarding Hindu civilisation as superior to any other; as convinced of Hinduism as the sole saviour as Macaulay was about Christianity; and quite as adamant in believing that a single shelf of ancient Hindu texts on a Banaras library shelf being worth more than all the wisdom of the West!
Courtesy:Frontline