Opinion Best of Both Sides: India must exorcise Macaulay’s ghost
Unthinkingly and needlessly, we started officially calling allopathy 'modern medicine', making Ayurveda, Siddha, etc, 'un-modern', for no fault of these indigenous medicinal systems
Is Macaulay to blame for the ‘colonial mindset’ or is he a convenient strawman in politics? (Illustration: C R Sasikumar) About a decade after Independence, there was a popular refrain that while the “White angrez” had been sent back, the “coloured angrez” were still around. Many would also add that while the angrez have gone, angreziat continues. “We, the people,” and the systems in India continued to be under colonial influence. Recognising this fact and analysing the impact of the BJP’s victory under Narendra Modi’s leadership in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, The Guardian commented, “Today, 18 May 2014, may well go down in history as the day when Britain finally left India.”
Little wonder, then, that PM Modi gave a clarion call to liberate India from the sinister influence of T B Macaulay, a symbol of colonial forces that almost compelled Indians to hate everything that was essentially Indian. On the one hand, promoters of Macaulay’s thinking created an acute sense of inferiority. On the other hand, they tried to divide Indians, and while leaving, they left behind a much more fragmented society.
Sadly, thanks to the inertia of rulers after Independence, the content of education mooted by Macaulay was allowed to continue for decades, only to be drastically altered with the new National Education Policy. It’s a fact that our entire discourse about knowledge traditions, including the history, content and conduct of education, smacked of a deep influence of Macaulay’s Minute. So much so that Mahatma Gandhi, in his 1931 speech at Chatham House, bluntly told the British how they had destroyed the Indianness of Indians. He said, “We have the education of this future state. I say without fear of my figures being challenged successfully, that today India is more illiterate than it was 50 or 100 years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root, and left the root like that, and the beautiful tree perished.” What the PM is calling for is re-nourishing the roots of this beautiful tree.
PM Modi’s critique of Lord Macaulay is not confined only to education. It is targeted at everything that reflects the colonial mindset. From the content of education to our model of public administration, from parliamentary procedures to courtroom mannerisms, there are several things that need to be liberated from colonial influence. PM Modi’s appeal to end the colonial impact in the next 10 years could also be seen as a sequel to his “Panch-Pran” appeal and his emphasis on promoting the mother tongue in education. It is important to note that PM Modi also said the government was not opposed to English as a language.
Pro-status quo elements often deny the continuing impact of colonialism. They would do well to take a closer look at our governance structure, our parliamentary practices and facets of the public sphere at large. Many may not know what happened in 1999. Till then, the budget used to be presented in Parliament at 5 pm to suit the London time. It was thanks to then PM A B Vajpayee that the practice was abandoned.
From referring to the district magistrate as district collector to addressing judges presiding over courts of law as “My Lord” to the robes a lawyer is expected to wear in the courtroom, there are several imprints of colonial rule we need to discard. This is because ideas of racial supremacy, leading to an all-pervading Eurocentricism, were the foundational ideas of most colonial powers.
Thanks to British rule, the sinister impact of this Eurocentric thinking could make quick inroads in our consciousness. As a result, indigenous became synonymous with inferior. More than reading and writing, we relished speaking English as it quickly gave us a pseudo-satisfaction of being from the elite classes. This made us hollow from within, and we started disrespecting not just our mother tongues but our mother culture as well. From climatically unsuitable three-piece suits to hygienically ill-advised Western-style multi-course lunches and dinners, we pushed everything traditional to the periphery. Unthinkingly and needlessly, we started officially calling allopathy “modern medicine,” making Ayurveda, Siddha, etc, “un-modern”, for no fault of these indigenous medicinal systems. Ironically, in severely famine-affected parts of rural India, children relished singing poems like “rain, rain go away”.
PM Modi’s call for liberating our thinking from the influence of Macaulay is not against all that is foreign. Gandhi had quite eloquently written on this issue in 1924 in Young India: “My Swa-raj (self-rule) is to keep intact the genius of our civilisation. I want to write many new things, but they must all be written on the Indian slate. I would gladly borrow from the West when I can return the amount with decent interest.”
The writer is a national executive committee member of the BJP
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