Opinion Best of Both Sides: Long live Mahatma Macaulay
His argument was based on economic viability and intellectual returns
Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay. (Source – Wikimedia Commons) With the onslaught on the “Macaulay mindset”, the vilification of Lord Macaulay has returned. He is, by implication, called a cultural enslaver. His admirers are derided as “Macaulay Putra” and for having “internalised inferiority”. The “mindset” theorem suggests that English-educated Indians are traitors to an imagined civilisational essence. Yet, few critics have read the primary text that grounds this outrage: Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education (1835). Selective quotations over two centuries have ensured that his arguments are understood only through subterfuge.
In 1813, the British parliament ordered the East India Company to spend at least Rs 1 lakh annually “for the revival and promotion of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories”. This mandate split British officials. Orientalists argued in favour of Sanskrit and Arabic education. Anglicists, led by Macaulay, argued that funds must support education aligned with economic modernity, empirical science and universal knowledge. This debate has been reduced to a language issue. Macaulay demonstrated, using accounts from Calcutta, that Sanskrit and Arabic colleges required stipends to attract students, while English schools drew fee-paying students voluntarily. His argument was based on economic viability and intellectual returns.
The distortion was led by NCERT books, which claimed Macaulay sought to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. Bipan Chandra used this quote as proof of cultural subservience. Sumit Sarkar repeated it. Students were never shown the full paragraph that reads: “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.”
This sleight of hand is reminiscent of the Ashwatthama episode. Lord Krishna instructs Yudhishthira to declare “Ashwatthama is dead”. Yudhishthira does so, muttering “the elephant” under his breath. The visible and concealed truth coexist. Mythology often treats such misdirection as a divine sanction when the cause is deemed righteous.
The second quote routinely weaponised against Macaulay is: “… a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”. Yet, the same Minute contains a line, “A country once superior in knowledge to the nations of Europe,” referring to Egypt, which had declined. He notes that the West was “in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the Crusades”. He observes that “almost everything that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans”, and he lists Thucydides, Plato, Cicero, and Tacitus as intellectual superiors. He famously argues: “The languages of Western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.” That was not a claim of racial hierarchy. It was a statement about how languages that carry modern science and philosophical knowledge transform societies.
Before coming to India, Mahatma Macaulay had some idea of caste. In his July 10, 1833, speech in the House of Commons, he was worried: “The worst of all systems was surely that of having a mild code for the Brahmins who sprang from the head of the Creator, while there was a severe code for the Sudras, who sprang from his feet. India has suffered enough already from the distinction of castes.” That’s the reason I love scholar D Shyam Babu’s coinage of “Mahatma Macaulay”. It recognises that English disrupted caste-based social hierarchies. It reassigns moral authority to the figure who initiated the first structural breach in caste’s history.
English didn’t merely replace Sanskrit. It diluted caste. Sanskrit preserved hierarchy. English entered India without ritual barriers. It opened access to science, law, administration, and global imaginations. What caste society refused Dalits, English offered. Sanskrit pretends to defend authenticity while smuggling caste codes back into public discourse.
The Ashwatthama analogy completes the picture. Deception is legitimised for Dharmic urgency. Only a Mahatma like Macaulay can imagine Punjab better than the England of his grandfathers. Ashwatthama is dead. Long live Mahatma Macaulay.
Prasad is affiliated scholar, Mercatus Center, George Mason University. Gautam is a doctoral candidate, Department of English, University of Delhi
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