First Published: The Indian Express | 06 December 2025
Link: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/slavery-liberal-imperialism-macaulay-modi-ramnath-goenka-10404170/
The observations that Prime Minister Narendra Modi made on 19th century British lawmaker, Thomas Babington Macaulay, during the course of the sixth Ramnath Goenka Lecture, recently, has triggered a wide variety of commentary.
Modi had said that Macaulay’s minute in 1835, which led the then British administration to push English education in India, had created a mindset of cultural “slavery”. He also spoke how it uprooted India from its cultural foundations, and broke it’s “self-confidence and instilled a sense of inferiority.”
At a time when India’s bullish economic performance, its rich human resource, and promise of even greater prosperity have been linked, globally, to its English language foundation and felicity, these sharp remarks from Modi have somewhat surprised people. The world thinks India’s accidental encounter with English in the 19thcentury has actually propelled the nation into charmed destinies.
But, in the course of the same lecture, Modi clarified that his government was not opposed to the English language but “firmly supports Indian languages.” This may sound like a small concession to many, but Modi in his lecture had three nations as his reference points – Japan, South Korea and China. He said “they adopted many western practices but never compromised on their native languages.”
Pointing at these nations, their languages and cultures somewhat nudge one to ponder if India’s evolution would have been different had its history been different? But since the past cannot be altered, this question can at best remain a big ‘what if’ question of Indian history. One has to admit that it is always the ‘what ifs’ of history that churn and construct politics and nationalism, not so much the real happenings.
Also, the histories of the three nations Modi named have independently been very different than that of India, and the management of their linguistic and cultural heritage has seen many pleasant and terribly unpleasant trajectories. Therefore, as examples, they do not stand as absolute.
The arguments about English have never remained binary or flat in India during the freedom movement, and also long after Independence. The ideas of democracy, liberalism and the very idea of a modern nation, largely travelled through the English language and mingled with the regional languages to create an unexpected renaissance in every corner.
Even more important is the fact that English has at crucial junctures taken the pressure off our intensely diverse nation, especially when sub-nationalisms and caste divisions have threatened its integrity. For long, federalism has made English its ally too, and in a linguistic babel like India, it has been perceived as a less chaotic route to a more perfect union.
Whenever the south of India has resisted ‘Hindi imperialism’, English has presented itself as a democratic equalizer, and made communication possible between irreconcilable cultural and linguistic landscapes. Similarly, the most oppressed in India have seen English as a vehicle of deliverance from terrible caste-based iniquities. BR Ambedkar himself made this very clear, and dressed in a suit at all times when Congressmen were throwing their western garments into a bonfire. The regional Indian languages are very rich no doubt, but for Dalits they carry the registers of caste hierarchy, which English does not.
If one revisits history, and revisits Macaulay’s time, the introduction of English was not an easy decision. Not because Indians resisted it at the time, but it was the British Orientalists who clashed with Anglicists like Macaulay, and the then Governor-General of India Lord William Bentinck. While both Anglicists and Orientalists did not have qualms about the colonial or imperial project, their clash was about strategy; on how best to get through to the Indian masses and stabilize their administrative grip.
Macaulay’s brilliant biographer, Zareer Masani wrote how philosopher and political economist, John Stuart Mill, fully backed by the directors of the East India Company (India was still not directly under the British crown in 1835) wrote to the imperial government condemning the new policy because, “it was likely to provoke hostility from Indians who saw the promotion of English as a threat to their religions.” Mill had argued that even those Indians who embraced the new learning, “would acquire only a smattering of English, sufficient to get them government jobs.”
He insisted that people learned best in their mother tongues: “Indian vernaculars needed to expand their vocabulary by drawing on their classical roots in Sanskrit and Arabic. It was therefore the Orientalists, not Anglicists, who would best diffuse knowledge down to the Indian masses; and public money should not be wasted teaching elementary English to Indians who could pay for it themselves,” Masani paraphrased Mill’s argument. But Macaulay had insisted that the “stir in the native mind” to get English education was “certainly very great”.
If one looks at the history of Macaulay’s English education minute, and its later adoption as policy, it is clear that even before the arrival of Macaulay in India, as a law member of the Governor-General’s council, in 1834, Lord Bentinck had somewhat linked English education with social reform, and had established ties with radical Indian reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy.
English education in colonial India was first thought of as a tool for Evangelical Christianity, but it slowly wore the garb of “liberal imperialism” in the hands of Macaulay, who was a Whig party parliamentarian before he came to India. To be fair to Macaulay, he visualized English education as fulfilling an egalitarian cause. He was far more inclusive in his vision, argued his biographer Masani citing his parliamentary papers: “His ultimate goal was an Indian empire whose citizens, like those of Rome, would become equal partners of their British mentors...” Macaulay had little sympathy for Evangelical Christianity, and the “imperial proselytizing he had in mind was essentially secular, cultural and political,” Masani wrote.
It is important to note that by the time Macaulay came to India, it is important to note that the Bengali renaissance had already begun. The Brahmo Samaj had embarked on a project to reconcile European Enlightenment ideas with the spirit of the Upanishads. There was an attempt to blend the east and the west to arrive at a new progressive cultural formulation. The Calcutta Hindu College, founded in 1817, had already started teaching English and European science and literature. In fact, around the time, Raja Ram Mohun Roy had strongly opposed a new Sanskrit college in Calcutta on the grounds that it would perpetuate “ignorance rather than knowledge.”
Before Macaulay reached Calcutta to be on the Governor-General’s council, two encounters he had in Madras and Mysore immensely contributed to his English education mission. The perceived indolence, ignorance and pretensions of two pensioned royalty in Madras and Mysore convinced Macaulay that the British imperial agenda would be have been better served had they been given western training and exposure.
On the Madras prince, Macaulay wrote: “If the Nabob had been so brought up as to turn out an accomplished gentleman, and a good scholar, with his influence over Mahometans, with his immense wealth, and with his high birth, he would have been the most useful agent that our government could have had in the great work of civilizing the Carnatic. It is now, I am afraid, too late. He will kill himself, in all probability before he is thirty, by indulgence in every species of sensuality.”
On the Wodeyar king in Mysore, Macaulay wrote: “If he had been put under good tuition, if he had been made an accomplished English gentleman, what a different aspect his court would have exhibited… To give a person immense power, to place him in the midst of the strongest temptation, to neglect his education, and then degrade him from his high station because he has not been found equal to the duties of it, seems to me to be a most absurd and cruel policy… Whatever power I have shall be exerted to prevent the repetition of such fatal errors in future.”
Out of such exposure, inferences and ideological concern was born the minute for English education in 1835, which altered history for sure, but did not sink India or snuff out its culture because English remained the cultivation of the elite for the longest period, and even now. As Macaulay intended in the minute, it only created another class of Indians.###
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