Opinion Indian nationalists learnt from Macaulay to give it back to them. What we must learn from it

The great dismissal

Macaulay’s “Minute on Education” was not merely an administrative memo; it was a cultural manifesto that privileged English over indigenous languages and Western knowledge over Eastern learning. Macaulay’s position was unambiguous and provocative. He argues that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” With startling confidence, he dismissed Sanskrit and Arabic learning as containing nothing comparable to European science, literature or philosophy. Indian historical texts, he claimed, were “less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.”

He proposed using public funds to teach English, and not to support traditional Sanskrit and Arabic colleges. The English Language, he argued, “Stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West” and provides access to “all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations.”

The famous “Filtration Theory”

However, most controversial was Macaulay’s explicit acknowledgement of colonial education’s limitations and purposes. He wrote, “It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of people.” Instead, British Education policy should “form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions of whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” This “downward filtration theory” assumed that educating an elite class in English would eventually benefit the masses. That elite would then “refine the vernacular dialects of the country” and make them “fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”

Complex and contested legacy

Macaulay’s Minute was officially adopted in March 1835. Its consequences have been profound and contradictory. On one hand, English education created a very class that would eventually challenge British rule. Indian nationalists, educated in English, used the language and liberal ideas they learned to argue for Independence. English remains today a unifying language across India’s linguistic diversity. It has also become a gateway to global opportunities.

On the other hand, the policy created deep cultural fissures. Indigenous knowledge systems in medicine, astronomy, mathematics and philosophy were marginalised as backward superstition. Regional languages were neglected, creating hierarchies of linguistic prestige that persist even today.

Macaulay’s ghost

Nearly two centuries later, Macaulay’s ghost haunts every debate about the National Education Policy, about whether science should be taught in English or regional languages, about the place of Sanskrit in the modern curriculum, and whether Indian universities should climb global rankings designed around Western paradigms.

His minutes force us to ask uncomfortable questions: Can we reclaim the indigenous systems without romanticising them? Can we engage with global scholarship without cultural self-negation? How do we balance linguistic diversity with the practical advantages of a common language? The irony is that Macaulay, who wanted to create India “English in tastes and in opinions,” helped create a nation that would eventually reject British Rule, often using the very tools of language, law and liberal philosophy he had helped disseminate.

His legacy is neither purely positive nor purely negative. It is, like colonialism itself, a complex inheritance that we continue to negotiate, one that shapes our education system and our linguistic politics. As we debate education reform today, we should do well to remember both Macaulay’s arrogance and his pragmatism, to acknowledge the real damage done by denigrating indigenous knowledge while recognising the genuine limitations of education systems that had become ossified and disconnected from students’ global aspirations.

The challenge for 21st-century India is to create an education system that is neither slavishly Western, nor defensively insular, one that takes the best from all traditions while remaining rooted in India’s pluralistic reality. Without this, the decolonisation of education becomes hollow rhetoric.

The writer is a Chevening Scholar (Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, UK Government), pursuing Social Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Views are personal