Is Macaulay a Villain or a Champion of Social Justice?

In recent years, Thomas Babington Macaulay has been recast as a principal villain in contemporary Hindutva discourse. His alleged misdeeds are said to lie in the educational system he inaugurated – an arrangement portrayed as having crippled Hindu civilisation until its supposed recent “liberation.” It is doubtful that most of Macaulay’s detractors have read his writings; even among those who have, selective quotation is the norm. At the other end of the spectrum stands another constituency that elevates Macaulay to the status of a pioneer of social justice. Both these narratives obscure more than they illuminate. A historically grounded assessment requires a closer look at the pre-colonial educational landscape and at what Macaulay actually argued.

The pre-colonial educational context

Before indicting Macaulay, it is essential to understand the state of indigenous education in early nineteenth-century India. The observations of the collector of Bellary, recorded in the 1820s and often cited approvingly by scholars such as Dharampal, are instructive. He noted that Telugu and Kannada instruction depended heavily on literary forms of the language that bore little resemblance to the vernaculars actually spoken:

“The natives therefore read these (to them unintelligible) books to acquire the power of reading letters… but the poetical is quite different from the prose dialect… Few teachers can explain, and still fewer scholars understand… Every schoolboy can repeat verbatim a vast number of verses of the meaning of which he knows no more than the parrot which has been taught to utter certain words.”

In short, comprehension was minimal; rote memorisation was paramount. Many teachers themselves lacked understanding of the texts they taught.

The subject matter was similarly circumscribed. Campbell has recorded that students from “manufacturing castes” studied works aligned with their sectarian traditions, while Lingayat students studied texts considered sacred. Beyond religious material, instruction included rudimentary accounting and memorised lists – astronomical categories, festival names, and the like. The renowned Amarakosha was used largely for its catalogues of synonyms, including names of deities, plants, animals, and geographical divisions.

Caste and educational access

The sociological profile of teachers and students further reveals the exclusivity of the system. Frykenberg, in his seminal work on education in South India, noted that Brahmins dominated the teaching profession in the Telugu region, while Vellalas did so in Tamil areas. Students overwhelmingly came from upper castes.

Frykenberg explains that hereditary occupations, the sacralised exclusivity of high-caste learning, and the financial burden of even modest fees made education virtually inaccessible to the majority. A fee of three annas a month was beyond the reach of many “clean caste” families, let alone the “unclean” – Paraiyar, Pallar, Chakriyar, Mala, Madiga and other communities who constituted close to half the population. Even within the classroom, caste segregation was strictly maintained.

If this was the state of affairs in the comparatively less feudal, ryotwari regions of South India, the situation in North India –dominated by zamindari and entrenched feudal relations – can only be imagined. The conclusion is unavoidable: before the advent of British rule, formal education was functionally restricted to privileged groups.

Re-reading Macaulay’s minute

Against this backdrop, Macaulay’s 1835 minute must be understood. His rhetoric was undoubtedly steeped in imperial arrogance, and he dismissed Indian literary and scientific traditions with unwarranted disdain. Yet the substantive debates of the era did not concern the desirability of mother-tongue instruction; that idea had virtually no advocates at the time. The controversy revolved around whether Sanskrit, Arabic, or English should serve as the medium for higher education.

Macaulay argued that:

“All parties seem to be agreed… that the dialects commonly spoken… contain neither literary nor scientific information… until they are enriched from some other quarter.”

He noted further that despite the state’s investment in printing Sanskrit and Arabic works, these books remained unsold, while English books were in high demand. Thousands of folios filled warehouses, unsought and unused. Meanwhile, the School Book Society sold English texts in large numbers and even made a profit.

His infamous proposal to create:

“a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”

must be read in conjunction with his expectation that this class would subsequently transmit modern knowledge into the vernaculars, rendering them, over time, suitable for mass education. Whether this expectation was realistic or sincerely held is debatable, but the stated logic is unambiguous: English was intended as a bridge for elite modernisation, not the permanent medium of education for India’s masses.

The greater tragedy lies not in Macaulay’s intention but in the fact that, 190 years later, vernacular languages have still not been fully equipped to serve as robust vehicles of modern scientific knowledge.

Elite demand for English education

It is also historically erroneous to claim that English education was imposed against the wishes of the populace. In the Madras Presidency particularly, demand for English education was strong. The 1839 petition signed by seventy thousand individuals, including Gazulu Lakshminarasu Chetty, Narayanaswami Naidu, and Srinivasa Pillai, explicitly requested that English education be introduced without delay. Their petition asserted:

“If diffusion of Education be among the highest benefits and duties of a Government, we, the people, petition for our share… We ask advancement through those means which will best enable us… to promote the general interests of our native land.”

Similarly, the Wood’s Despatch of 1854 – the so-called Magna Carta of Indian education—stated unequivocally that education should be available irrespective of caste or creed and reiterated the expectation that Indians themselves would carry modern knowledge to the masses through vernacular languages.

Practice: Liberal principles, exclusionary outcomes

Despite the ostensibly universal language of the 1839 petition, the actual practice in Madras was exclusionary. The standards set for admission to higher education ensured that only the highest castes could qualify. The rhetoric of liberalism facilitated an elite project: by advocating “higher branches of knowledge,” the curriculum implicitly excluded those without prior linguistic and cultural capital. Thus, liberalism provided a vocabulary for political demands while simultaneously enabling the marginalisation of the very groups whose support had made those demands politically effective.

Dalit entry into schools frequently required direct resistance to entrenched social norms. The well-documented case of Father Anderson, who was pressured to expel two Dalit boys yet refused to do so, illustrates the uphill struggle faced by marginalised communities across the region.

Did Macaulay promote social justice?

The British educational system, however limited in intent, did expand opportunities for groups previously excluded from formal learning. The evidence is overwhelming: literacy and access to education grew significantly during colonial rule, whereas pre-colonial systems were highly restricted. But this expansion was an unintended byproduct of administrative rationalisation and economic modernisation – not a deliberate project of social justice.

Macaulay himself was no egalitarian. His speeches against the Chartists in Britain reveal his deep opposition to universal suffrage. He famously declared:

“The essence of the Charter is universal suffrage… If you grant that, the country is lost.”

He compared extending rights to working-class Britons to opening granaries during a food shortage – an act he described as turning “scarcity into famine.” His analogy to starving Indian peasants begging for grain, whom he would refuse even “a draught of water,” reveals a worldview firmly rooted in class privilege and imperial paternalism.

Conclusion

Macaulay was, unquestionably, an imperialist dedicated to advancing British interests and the interests of his own class. His project sought to cultivate an Indian elite that would perpetuate colonial governance and ideology. That elite did emerge, and it is this class – not Macaulay – that bears responsibility for failing to democratise education and modern knowledge.

To depict Macaulay either as the destroyer of an egalitarian indigenous utopia or as a hero of social justice is historically unsustainable. He was neither. He was an articulate functionary of empire whose policies interacted with existing social hierarchies in complex ways – sometimes reinforcing them, sometimes inadvertently weakening them.

The real question is not whether Macaulay failed India, but whether India’s own elites failed to fulfil even the limited emancipatory possibilities that colonial modernity, however imperfectly, made available.

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