Macaulay’s Minutes: History of the Introduction of English  in India

The question of language has always been a bone of contention for India. This problem started when English was introduced into the education system by the British, to produce native individuals who can work on behalf of the British. There is a very intense story, an incident behind the introduction of English and the main character of that story was Thomas Macaulay, the man whose minutes of education changed the faith of the country forever.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, Source: Quint

Many men come and go but only a few can leave behind their imprint that is remembered forever. Often, they happen to be good people who made a name for themselves by winning hearts. Then there is the antagonized population, the radicals, too cold to be sentimental, not to be beseeched by emotions but with the practicality of winning. Such men decorate the history of British colonisation in India.

The subject of this story is not about a specific man, antagonised or anything, it's about an incident that changed the original native identity of the country forever. A certain man had a huge role to play in doing so. That man was Thomas Macaulay, and the incident was his Minutes on Indian Education, sanctioned, stamped, and published in 1835.

British in the past had strategised a lot, planning, plotting, and debating, on how to rule a country as vast and distinctly diverse as India. By the 1800s, the dawn of the Mughal empire was quite clear, ready to be done and dusted with and hence, the British started to brainstorm a way to rule the country on their own, by their terms and language. Persian, Urdu, and Hindi were the language of the court and the common tongue of the vast uncivilised population of the countryfolk. Age-old religious studies were being taught in universities streamlined in Vedic languages like Sanskrit, which were a no match on the face of new physical sciences as being taught in the West.

The perplexion of the British officers increased and hence a special person had to be hired who would study the mess of situations of the Indian colony and would produce the best practical way possible. That’s how Thomas Macaulay comes into the picture. Macaulay was a celebrated British officer in England, feared and admired for his spectacular radical and in-depth thinking and solution generation. He arrived in India in 1834, as the president of the General Committee of Public Instruction, and as per his reputation, presented a solution within a year.

It had come under the scrutiny of Macaulay that if India as a colony is ever expected to achieve productive success for the empire then it must learn the coloniser’s language, along with their ways. It was enough to coordinate or interpret, the need of the hour was to facilitate and innovate. Hence Macaulay suggested that from the start of the succeeding month, the British government must start investing in building the infrastructure of English education, colleges, and schools that would teach English and other physical and natural sciences, breaking away from the redundancy of the orientalist perspective.

Excerpt from Macaulay's Minutes, Source: edupreek

Orientalist education, which is the native way of learning and teaching religion and philosophy was considered outdated and of no value. By implanting an English education, the British sought to invest in producing Indians who would represent British interests. They would be Indian only in look, but English in taste, idealogy, interests, and manners. The British were taking the white man’s burden seriously, making illusionary concepts of their own, degrading the native, and shaming the culture and traditional values of Indians. However, as mentioned before, Macaulay was a radical economist, he didn’t care about India’s culture and its fading originality. For him, progress only mattered and English was considered the only way through which such progress can be acquired.

All such decisions regarding the resurrection of the Indian education system were published in what is popularly known as Macaulay’s Minutes. His words became a line of stone. To colonise the body, colonising the mind was important and injection of English in the bloodstream of Indians was the systematic way of colonising the mind. That’s what happened, even after independence, Indians were not able to detach English wholly. However, this English was not the strategised English that Macaulay wished to impose. It was India’s very own version, grasping the good from colonisation, its unique and resilient, just like India herself.