How Ambedkar and Nehru’s Words Debunk Modi’s Prejudiced Understanding of the 'Macaulay Mindset'

Prime Minister Modi’s fulminations on the Macaulay mindset were virulently expressed in his Ramnath Goenka lecture on November 18, with Modi urging to uproot that mindset in the next decade. He alleged that British Parliamentarian Thomas Babington Macaulay’s minutes on education of 1835, prescribing English as a medium of education in India uprooted it from its own roots and created a set of people who in appearance were Indian but thought like the British.

Modi claimed that India’s traditional education system taught to take pride in our culture, imparted skill along with learning and Macaulay successfully broke that system and India paid the price for centuries to come.

He claimed that our uncritical reliance on the western world for getting models of governance and innovation was responsible for discarding Mahatma Gandhi's 'Swadeshi philosophy', which he asserted was the foundation of the independence struggle.

“This mindset,” Modi remarked, “ led to a tendency where imported ideas, imported goods and imported services were all considered superior.”

A glance at those remarks of Modi on the so-called “Macaulay mindset” constitutes a purely motivated exercise devoid of a nuanced understanding of what Macaulay wrote about India and did by introducing in our country English education and Indian Penal Code.

Modi’s utter fallacious and hollow understanding of Macaulay’s role with respect to India can be thoroughly exposed by revisiting what Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar wrote about Macaulay.

Nehru on British reluctance to introduce English

In his monumental book “Discovery of India”, Nehru wrote that in eighteenth century India “Ram Mohan Roy and others studied English privately. There were no English schools or colleges outside Calcutta and the government's policy was definitely opposed to the teaching of English to Indians.”

He wrote that the emergence of opinion among British authorities was opposed initially and against that backdrop, only a few missionary schools started teaching in English.

It was against that background that Nehru remarked in Discovery of India that “…teaching of English was embodied in Macaulay's Minute on Education of February, 1835”. However, he proceeded to state that “If the British Government in India was reluctant to teach English to Indians, Brahmin scholars objected even more, but for different reasons, to teach Sanskrit to Englishmen”.

“When Sir William Jones, already a linguist and a scholar, came to India as a judge of the Supreme Court, he expressed his desire to learn Sanskrit. But no Brahmin would agree to teach the sacred language to a foreigner and an intruder, even though handsome rewards were offered,” Nehru wrote with anguish.

He went on to add that, “Jones ultimately, with considerable difficulty, got hold of a non-Brahmin Vaidya or medical practitioner who agreed to teach, but on his own peculiar and stringent conditions. Jones agreed to every stipulation, so great was his eagerness to learn the ancient language of India. Sanskrit fascinated him and especially the discovery of the old Indian drama. It was through his writings and translations that Europe first had a glimpse of some of the treasures of Sanskrit literature.”

It was because of his exposure to Sanskrit because of a non-Brahmin that treasure of Sanskrit was opened up to the western world. “To Jones, and to the many other European scholars,” Nehru acknowledged “India owes a deep debt of gratitude for the rediscovery of her past literature”.

Just as a British scholar could rediscover India’s vast reservoir of Sanskrit literature because he learnt Sanskrit in India, the exposure of Indians to English literature and others writings on liberal thoughts owing to their mastery of English language also enabled them to eventually to fight against British rule and make India free. Hence, Modi’s understanding of English and ideas obtained through that language on liberalism and democracy appears to be highly prejudiced and lopsided.

Mahatma Gandhi who was deeply imbued with the spiritual message of Bhagavad Geeta never read its original Sanskrit version but its English translation “Song Celestial” rendered by Edwin Arnold. Gandhi was educated in the English medium but emerged as a foremost fighter against the British regime for our independence. While remaining proficient in English he was exceptionally excellent in Gujarati, his mother tongue, which he employed to author some of his seminal essays and books which then were translated to English.

What Modi is doing while rejecting the Macaulay mindset without factoring immense benefits reaped by acquiring proficiency in English, is akin to throwing the baby with the bathwater.

Nehru wrote in the Discovery of India that the youth of India could understand the contemporary history of Britain of the nineteenth century because of English education. Then he remarked, “ Their days and nights were eloquent “eloquent with the stately declamations of Burke, with Macaulay's long-rolling sentences; discussions centred upon Shakespeare's drama and Byron's poetry and above all upon the large-hearted liberalism of the nineteenth century English politics.”

Ambedkar on Macaulay

It is educative that it was B.R. Ambedkar who located Macaulay in a different context when he wrote in his book “Pakistan or Partition of India” in 1946 that, “The first thing the British did was to displace gradually the Muslim Criminal Law by another of their making, until the process was finally completed by the enactment of Macaulay’s Penal Code”.

BJP and Modi who talk ad nauseum about uniform civil code should happily accept Ambedkar’s observations that Muslim criminal law prevailing in India was jettisoned and in its place a uniform criminal code was introduced by Macaulay. That code was historic in the sense that all Indians were governed by secular laws governing criminal offences.

On August 21, 1955 a meeting of the Working Committee of Scheduled Castes Federation was called in Bombay (now Mumbai) by Ambedkar, who was its president. Through a resolution adopted by the Federation, Ambedkar expressed that the method of Satyagrah for liberation of Goa would not work because Portuguese rulers there employed extremely brutal methods to suppress the Satyagrahis.

In that context Ambedkar wrote that some British leaders acknowledged the right of Indians to have their self government and against that backdrop he stated in the above resolution, the “…principle of self government was enunciated by Macaulay as far back as 1833” and went on to quote his words “that the Indians were not barbarians. The Indians have a distinct civilisation and culture of their own. They, therefore, should be given the right to govern themselves”. But in the case of Goa,” Ambedkar noted, “ the Portuguese Government did not agree on the question of freedom of Goa”.

Such nuanced understanding of Nehru and Ambedkar is of paramount significance to critically evaluate Macaulay and not completely debunk his work as has been done by Modi.

S N Sahu served as Officer on Special Duty to President of India K.R. Narayanan.

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