The merits of Lord Macaulay

8/14/2019 The merits of Lord Macaulay

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A dubious quotation, a controversial reputation: the merits of LordMacaulay

Koenraad Elst discovers through a wrong quotation attributed to LordMacaulay how right the anglicizer of Indian culture was, or at least how right

his intentions were, subjectively.

1. Macaulay the terminatorIn Hindu nationalist circles, the name Macaulay is synonymous with culturalestrangement of Hindus from Hindu civilization, starting with their linguisticassimilation into the global Anglophone community. "Macaulayites", anglicizedHindus, are named together with Muslims, Missionaries and Marxists as theirreconcilable enemies of Hindu Dharma, the "4M". The rot allegedly startedwith Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), member of the governingcouncil of the East India Company from 1834 to 1838, who successfully

advocated the replacement of the native languages with English as the mediumof education. He formulated his policy proposal in his Minute on IndianEducation, delivered in Kolkata on 2 February 1835. The Governor-General ofIndia, William Bentinck, approved the proposal on 7 March 1835, so that it

became the cornerstone of British-Indian educational policy until Independence(and remained largely in force after that as well). To impress upon us themagnitude of the disaster Macaulay allegedly wrought, his critics like to quotethis appreciation by his biographer G.D. Trevelyan: "A new India was born in1835. The very foundations of her ancient civilization began to rock and sway.Pillar after pillar in the edifice came crashing down."

1.1. A terrible quoteAlong with the Minute, other statements by Macaulay have been culled from hisspeeches and letters in order to prove the evil colonialist designs behind hiseducation policy. Not only Hindu nationalists, but generally Hindu andgenerally nationalist sources frequently quote the following musings supposedlyuttered by Lord Macaulay in Parliament:

"I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen oneperson who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country,such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we wouldever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation,which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that wereplace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indiansthink that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, theywill lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become whatwe want them, a truly dominated nation."

The quote is usually referenced as "Macaulay, British Parliament,1835". In that

year, Macaulay was actually in India, though other oft-quoted speeches by himon the same subject had indeed been delivered in Parliament, but in 1833.


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However, I discovered this anomaly only later in the course of the debate. Whatfirst made me suspect the spuriousness of the quotation was not any externalinformation but a close reading of its utterly cynical contents, quite imaginablein the private scheming of hard-nosed colonialists but rather out of style in the

setting of a parliamentary debate. Politicians who try to sell a policy willnormally present it as beneficial. This was especially true for that particularstage of colonial expansion, when the "imparting of civilization" and the"abolition of slavery" had become commonplace justifications for the colonialenterprise. British imperialists liked to think of themselves as bringers of lightin the darkness of the primitive societies which they were about to rule andtransform. Yet, here we get to hear Macaulay brutally calling for the wilfuldestruction of a civilization which he praises to the skies and acknowledges assuperior to that of Britain itself.

So, I challenged my Hindu correspondents to give a reliable reference for thisstrange quotation. In the age of the internet, they had no problem coming upwith a great many seemingly authoritative sources for Macaulay's damningstatement. Among the highly varied instances of its use, we may mentionnumerous Hindu websites including www.aryasamaj.org (in a review by B.D.Ukhul of the "Macaulayite" book The Myth of the Holy Cow by Prof. D.N.Jha), www.veda.harekrishna.cz, and many more; but also a document by thePlanning Commission of the Government of India; and even a speech by thePresident of India, as reported:

"While seated as the chief guest on the dais of the Jamia Millia Islamia's

auditorium and about to deliver his convocation address President A.P.J. Kalamfiddled for a moment with the keyboard and mouse of his laptop. (*) ThePresident quoted Macaulay's 1835 speech in British Parliament, 'I do not thinkwe would ever conquer this country (India), unless we break the very backboneof this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I

propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for ifthe Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater thantheir own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will

become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.'"-S. Zafar Mahmood,"Learning from the President", The Hindu, 2-9-2004.

The President of India, a good man and a top-ranking scientist, may seem to bea very authoritative source, but to a historian, even he isn't good enough.

Nobody so far has been able to trace this quotation to an original publication ofMacaulay's speeches, though such published collections exist (e.g. Macaulay,Prose and Poetry, selected by G. M. Young, 1957; Speeches and Documents onIndian Policy, 1750-1921, edited by A. Berriedale Keith, 1922; Life and Lettersof Lord Macaulay by George Otto Trevelyan, 1876). It is unlikely that they everwill, and they could have realized as much by carefully rereading the one sourceto which all the extant instances of this quotation can apparently be traced.


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1.2. But is it genuine?Consider the same quotation as it appeared in the Arsha Vidya Magazine,September 2004: "His words were to this effect: I have travelled across the

length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, whois a thief. (etc.)"

Now things are becoming clearer. The "quotation" is introduced with thequalifier: "His words were to this effect." So there you have it: Macaulay neversaid this. The alleged quotation came into being as a mere paraphrase, and as weshall see, not even a very faithful one. It is given in that form in Niti (April2002, p.10), a periodic publication of the Hindu nationalist association BharatVikas Parishad, Delhi, whence most of the Indian quoters have borrowed it.And this in turn has it from what appears to be the oldest traceable source of allthese quotings: The Awakening Ray, vol.4, no.5, published by The GnosticCenter (USA).

This Gnostic Center had most likely acquired its knowledge of Macaulay fromits Indian contacts, but unfortunately we have no information on that. At anyrate, the quotation's publication in an American medium certainly added to itscredibility among Indian readers, for that happens to be Macaulayism in action:accepting Western sources as a priori more reliable than Indian ones. From itssubsequent transposition to an Indian forum onwards, all those gullible Hindusand Congress secularists and India's Muslim president have sheepishlyswallowed it and relayed it to the next gullible audience.

The whole point about the Macaulay phenomenon is that for all the limitationsof his Eurocentric perspective, he was quite well-meaning. He thought he wasdoing Indians a favour by relieving them of their superstitious native culture andintroducing them to a more advanced culture. In this quotation, by contrast, heis falsely made to sound deliberately destructive and cynical. Those who areused to denouncing Lord Macaulay may get a kick from blackening him, andI've noticed how some internet polemicists dismissed all evidence of thequotation's spuriousness as irrelevant, for "true or false, it correctly brings outthe destructiveness of Macaulayism". They are herewith advised to sobre up, to

discard this nonsense, and to spread the true story to the very people fromwhom they learned this false quotation. Using spurious evidence, even in theservice of a good cause, is bound in the end to do more harm than good.

1.3. Macaulay the liberatorThe spurious quotation has mostly been used as an instrument of expressingnationalist hatred for a character deemed to have gravely damaged the integrityof India's native civilization. It may come as a surprise, then, that some Indiansare enthusiastic about Macaulay's historic mission. We don't even mean those

who are the embodiments of Macaulay's transforming impact on India, the"Macaulayite" secularist bourgeoisie, for they rarely discuss Macaulay and in


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certain contexts may even make the appropriate nationalist noises critical of theeducation reformer. The most explicit approbation for the English colonialimpact on India emanates from the so-called Dalit (low-caste) movement. Theydon't think very highly of the virtues of Hindu civilization and so they applaud

Macaulay's bold bid to uproot it.On 23 October 2004, I received this invitation circulated by a Dalit weblist:

"Join us to Celebrate Macaulay""Dear Friend,"(*) To begin with, toss the ros-gullas [a Bengali sweetmeat] in the Bay of thatBengal. Let seeds of renaissance sprout. Let us clear all the hurdles. Let us

battle with the self, and win over as well. Let us unlearn all we were taught sofar. Let us break free from the falsehood we are condemned in trust. Let us takea chance, and relish truthfulness. Let refreshing winds of reason excavate our

degenerated, malodorous existence. We are born as false people, with falseindices of reasoning, with false languages, false spirituality, with false histories.Our consciousness too, therefore, is false. We are victims of civilisational faults,as we missed, by civilisational disgrace, any standard of ethics, morality, andhence, we are historically programmed in living with falsehood. Worse still, we,as a civilization, find it almost pathologically, constrained to live as honest

people. Our intellectual insolvency, therefore, is civilisational.

"The fundamental challenge before all of us, therefore, is as how to createconditions where we can turn intellectually honest, and still exist. This onechallenge once clinched, it can unleash a renaissance in India where ethics,morality, and reason can gain a germinating ground. (*) our 'self' ought to begiven a jerk. And the jerk can be caused, like sex the first time in life, byspeaking the most fundamental truth hitherto unpronounced.

"This October 25 provides us that historic opportunity, where we can in areasonably discreet manner, turn honest for a few hours. The sure blissfulness inthose few hours may reprogram our 'Self' wherein intellectual honesty can be awelcome interlude, deleting the space the falsehood has occupied for ages.

"(*) India, on its own, never had, in at least our known history, the notion of the'Independence from foreign Rule', 'Rule of Law', or 'Every one Equal beforeLaw'. The India's indigenous system of education never dealt with sciences, thesciences that we possess today. It would probably never have been possible tounderstand modern sciences in Sanskrit, Arabic or Persian.

"Who conceived the first sperm of India's independence? Consider thefollowing: 'It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for usthat the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than illgoverned and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearingour broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performingtheir salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant

to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilized menis infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a


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doting wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, wouldmake it an useless and costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millionsof men from being our customers in order that they might continue to be ourslaves.' July 10, 1833 (25 years before India officially became a British Colony)

"Further: 'The laws which regulate its growth and its decay are still unknown tous. It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till ithas outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate oursubjects into a capacity for better government; that, having become instructed inEuropean knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand Europeaninstitutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will Iattempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day inEnglish history.' (July 10, 1833)

"On the question of 'Equality before Law', on July 10, 1833: "The power of

arbitrary deportation is withdrawn. Unless, therefore, we mean to leave thenatives exposed to the tyranny and insolence of every profligate adventurer whomay visit the East, we must place the European under the same power whichlegislates for the Hindoo. No man loves political freedom more than I. But a

privilege enjoyed by a few individuals, in the midst of a vast population who donot enjoy it, ought not to be called freedom. It is tyranny. In the West Indies Ihave not the least doubt that the existence of the Trial by Jury and of LegislativeAssemblies has tended to make the condition of the slaves worse than it wouldotherwise have been.'

"'Or, to go to India itself for an instance, though I fully believe that a mild penalcode is better than a severe penal code, the worst of all systems was surely thatof having a mild code for the Brahmins, who sprang from the head of theCreator, while there was a severe code for the Sudras, who sprang from his feet.India has suffered enough already from the distinction of castes, and from thedeeply rooted prejudices which that distinction has engendered. God forbid thatwe should inflict on her the curse of a new caste, that we should send her a new

breed of Brahmins, authorised to treat all the native population as Parias.'

"Should native Indians hold high offices? July 10, 1833: 'We are told that thetime can never come when the natives of India can be admitted to high civil and

military office. We are told that this is the condition on which we hold ourpower. We are told that we are bound to confer on our subjects every benefit --which they are capable of enjoying? No; --which it is in our power to confer onthem? No; -- but which we can confer on them without hazard to the perpetuityof our own domination. Against that proposition I solemnly protest asinconsistent alike with sound policy and sound morality. (*) I allude to thatwise, that benevolent, that noble clause which enacts that no native of ourIndian empire shall, by reason of his colour, his descent, or his religion, beincapable of holding office.'

"The above quotes are from Lord Macaulay's Speech in the British House ofCommons. The House was debating the Bill, which was enacted as The Charter


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Act 1833, or, The Government of India Act 1833, which sought for theestablishment of a Law Commission for consolidation and codification ofIndian Laws. Lord Macaulay eventually became President of India's First LawCommission, and drafted the IPC [Indian Penal Code]. While submitting the

draft of the IPC, Lord Macaulay maintains in his covering letter: 'It is an evilthat any man should be above the law, it is still a greater evil that the publicmind should be taught to regard as a high and venerable distinction the privilegeof being above the law.'

[Some further quotes used polemically will be brought up and discussed below.]

"Was Lord Macaulay wrong when he argued the following in his Minute: 'Iwould at once stop the printing of Arabic and Sanscrit books, I would abolishthe Madrassa and the Sanscrit college at Calcutta.' What would have beenIndia's fate, had Lord Macaulay been defeated?

"In 1813, the British Parliament made it mandatory that the East India Companyspend at least Rs. One Lakh annually on the education of native Indians. TheBritish officials were divided in two camps: one the powerful Orientalists, whowanted the indigenous system of education to continue, with Sanskrit, Arabicand Persian as media of instruction. The Anglicist camp, led by Lord Macaulay,argued for the European kind of modern education, with focus on modernsciences. Macaulay won, and the British-type of modern educational systemwas introduced in India.

"What if the indigenous education continued, with Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian

as media of instruction? Well, to most Indians, it may be a matter of conjecture.To some of us, India would have been most probably like Afghanistan, or atbest, the present day Nepal (*).

"Come on my scholar friends, wake up and arise. (*) Lord Macaulay was India'searliest Gandhi, if Gandhiji epitomized freedom movement, as it was he whoconceived independent India when Gandhi was not even born. (*)

"Thomas Babington Macaulay was born on October 25, 1800. We must beenlightened enough to take his anti-Hindu, anti-Caste views in the correct spirit.Let us celebrate the birth anniversary of one of the greatest philosophers this

planet has produced (*) Unveiling of Macaulay portrait: 07:57 p.m. sharp.Drinks and food to follow. At my (*) residence.

"Sincerely, (*)"

2. Benign intentions behind controversial statements

2.1. Macaulay the anglicizerAgainst my protestations about Macaulay's good intentions, a leading Hindutva

polemicist proposed the following certified quotations, exposing Macaulay's

"mean-spirited" and "diabolical" designs, and "which are clear in their purport:Macaulay wanted to use English as the means of dominating India".


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The first one of these statements is, however, not the best choice to proveMacaulay's maliciousness, though it is the one genuine quotation most used forthat very purpose. Here goes, from Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute onIndian Education, 2 Feb. 1935: "In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to

whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us,with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We mustat present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters

between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian inblood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, toenrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Westernnomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveyingknowledge to the great mass of the population."The problem is that this paragraph is mostly given in an incomplete version, up

to the word "*intellect". The sentence which follows changes the intentionexpressed considerably. In this case, this sentence is faithfully given, but thequoter is so accustomed to thinking the worst of Macaulay that he doesn't noticeits qualifying impact. Our Dalit host of the Macaulay anniversary celebrationhas correctly observed how it makes all the difference:

"Our lies about Macaulay. Was Macaulay attempting to create 'intellectualslaves' for the British Empire? Yes, if we just read the following: 'We must at

present do our best to form a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, butEnglish in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.' We, in a most

mischievous manner, present the above quote, twisted, taken out of context, andthus, present Lord Macaulay as a villain. No, if we read the full paragraph asoriginally available in his February 1835 Minute on Indian Education: 'It isimpossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the

people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpretersbetween us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian inblood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, toenrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Westernnomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying

knowledge to the great mass of the population.'"

So far, I had thought that Macaulay was well-intentioned but that he undeniablyhad wanted to anglicise India at least in language. But even this turns out to beunfair to him. In fact, he envisioned a modernization of the native languages,making them as fit as English for the conduct of modern affairs, thanks to thegood offices of the "interpreter" class which he set out to create. Even onlanguage he wasn't all that imperialistic, wanting to enrich and modernize ratherthan replace the native languages, assuring them a new lease of life in an age ofscience. As for replacing Indian taste/opinions/morals/intellect with their

English counterparts, he considered this a great boon to the Indians.


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2.2. Macaulay the prophet of free exchange and mutual benefitOur Dalit friend continues: "Our Caste-Hindu racism at work. We practise ourCaste-Hindu racism against Macaulay by using his following quote taken from

his Minute: 'A single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole nativeliterature of India and Arabia. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all thehistorical information which has been collected from all the books written may

be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools inEngland.'"

If this seems arrogant on Macaulay's part, we must consider that he merelywanted to give India the shock treatment of exposure to more advanced foreigninfluences which England itself had received to its own benefit a few centuriesearlier. For, as the Dalit Macaulayite continues:

"Consider Macaulay's rationalism! This is what he says about England in thesame Minute: 'The first instance to which I refer, is the great revival of lettersamong the Western nations at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of thesixteenth century. At that time almost everything that was worth reading wascontained in the writings of the ancient Greeksand Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instructionhas hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of Cicero and Tacitus; hadthey confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island; had they

printed nothing and taught nothing at the universities but Chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and Romances in Norman-French, would England have been what she

now is? What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More [Thomas--, 1478-1535] and Ascham [Roger --, 1515-68], our tongue is to the people ofIndia.' Macaulay held similar views about India and England. He wanted changeand modernity."

Further quotations are adduced which show how Macaulay, in the typicalclassical liberalism of his day, strongly believed in mutual benefit as a result offree exchange, in this case a free exchange of ideas unhampered byBrahminical-cum-Orientalist cultural protectionism: "From his Speech inParliament on the Government of India Bill, 10 July 1833: 'It is scarcely

possible to calculate the benefits which we might derive from the diffusion ofEuropean civilisation among the vast population of the East. It would be, on themost selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were wellgoverned and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that theywere ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working withour cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectorsand English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy,English manufactures. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitablethan to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting wisdom, which, inorder that India might remain a dependency, would make it an useless and

costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from beingour customers in order that they might continue to be our slaves.'"


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So, to convince his British colonialist audience, and no doubt also out of sincereconviction, Macaulay argued that British interests would be well served by the

policies he proposed,-- but precisely because these policies would first of allbenefit the natives. The more advanced (and Europeanized) the Indians became,

the more profitable it would be for Britain to trade with them.

2.3. Macaulay the superficial India expertMy Hindutvavadi friend also quoted from the Minute to prove that Macaulaydidn't know anything about the native civilization which he set out to transform:"He did not know either Sanskrit or Arabic about which he made derisive andcontemptuous comments. His objective was to exclude everything of Hinducivilization heritage from the Bharatiya education system. He had nothing butcontempt for Hindu culture and heritage: 'I have no knowledge of either Sanscritor Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of theirvalue. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works.I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their

proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learningat the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one amongthem who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worththe whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of theWestern literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committeewho support the oriental plan of education.'"

One cannot be an expert at everything. What sensible men do in the knowledge

of their limitations, is to rely on better-informed people. And on a directpersonal reading of the next best thing to the original writings, viz. thetranslations. That's not bad at all. So, Lord Macaulay was reasonably well-informed eventhough he was not an expert, or "Orientalist" as such AsiaticStudies adepts were called then (and in some languages still are, in spite ofEdward Said's attempt to blacken the term and twist its meaning; my own

business card quite wilfully describes me as an Orientalist). He had concludedthat most of it was irrelevant to a modern society. If some Western philosophercould be cited as testifying to the deep insights of the Indian classics, that wouldmake them fit as a topic for specialized study, and Macaulay never prevented anIndian from studying his traditional language and lore. But in devising acurriculum for the general public, and especially for the prospective elite classof native handmaidens to the Empire, preferential attention should be given tomore practical and modern subjects.

It could be argued, and I would in fact concur, that Macaulay's knowledge ofIndia was superficial and that he did injustice to the unique merits of Hinducivilization as preserved in its literate traditions. Which would redefine the

problem which Macaulay and his orientalizing opponents faced as one of"reconciling tradition with modernity", an issue continuously discussed since

then not just in India but also in other civilizational areas eclipsed by Westerndominance. I don't believe many of his contemporaries would have been


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competent to do justice to both concerns, to respect for tradition as well as therequirements of modernity, in devising a curriculum; but then we will neverknow, for Macaulay's impact was such that no more serious efforts were madein that direction. Japan achieved modernization through Japanese-medium

education, there is no reason why Indians couldn't have done the same thing. Itis only in recent years that Hindu organizations, now drawing upon thecompetences of the numerous Hindus who made it in Western societies asexperts in Western-originated fields like computer science, have set up schoolswhere quality training in modern disciplines is combined with a reasonablythorough education in traditional subjects.

That Western culture was deemed superior even by the advocates of Sanskrit-medium education in the Governor-General's council, is a mere statement offact, a description of the actually existing opinion among Macaulay'scolleagues. And from the viewpoint of 19th-century Europe, enthusiastic aboutthe liberating perspectives created by the scientificoutlook, it was in fact defensible. For just one example, heliocentrism wasindeed superior to the geocentrism professed in most of the relevant literaturefrom India and Arabia. (Yes, I know that Aryabhatta toyed with heliocentrismin the 6th century, but he wasn't followed and geocentrism remained thedominant paradigm in India.) To be sure, there were instances where this beliefin Western superiority was partly or wholly wrong by objective standards, e.g.Western medicine at the time was not always superior, as measured in itssuccess rate, to Ayurveda, which the British nonetheless tried to suppress, even

resorting to a book-burning campaign. Still, there seemed to be enough reasonsto believe that the new scientific method was superior, and that nothing veryimportant would be lost by discontinuing the native traditions and opting for theassimilation of India into the modern West. As for the occasional beneficialinsights or practices from ancient cultures, these would either be equalled by orindependently rediscovered by or incorporated into the scientific worldview.

2.4. Macaulay the Christian agentWhat about the Christian as distinct from the secular-modernist angle?Macaulay gave assurances that his policies would help to dehinduize theHindus, so that Christians as well as religious sceptics could hope for theHindus to join their own ranks: "His letter to his evangelist father is proof thathe was wrecking the education system as a means of advancing proselytization:'No Hindoo, who has received an English education, ever remains sincerelyattached to his religion. Some continue to profess it as matter of policy; butmany profess themselves pure Deists, and some embrace Christianity. It is myfirm belief that, if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be asingle idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. Andthis will be effected without any efforts to proselytise; without the smallest

interference with religious liberty; merely by the natural operation of knowledgeand reflection. I heartily rejoice in the prospect.'"


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Well, isn't that wonderful? Changing people's outlook simply by spreadingknowledge. Quite a few Hindus have recently come to the conclusion that thatvery procedure is the only way to solve their Islam problem: immersingMuslims in the scientific temper and helping them to see through the irrational

basis of their beliefs in Mohammed's deluded voice-hearing (a.k.a. the Quranicrevelation). Instil the scientific outlook and the darkness of superstition willrecede like snow under the sun.

Whether Hinduism amounts to superstition and Christianity to rational religionis a different question; that's where Macaulay's limitations as a child of his timeand his culture come in. Atheists in his country wanted Christianity to go downalong with Hinduism, Islam and all other religions. But the dominant tendencywas for the Churches to repackage their faith by incorporating some elements ofthe modern outlook and then ride the wave of triumphant colonization to

propagate their message as the natural religion of victorious modernity. At anyrate, in Macaulay's view as in that of most contemporaneous Christians, theHindoo would be all the better off for having been relieved of the deadwood ofhis religion. He really wanted the best for them.

2.5. Macaulay the racistFor another argument, Macaulay has also been exposed as a racist. A recentaddition to the Macaulay quotations doing the rounds of the internet discussionlists is the following one, purportedly taken from G.O. Trevelyan's Life andLetters of Lord Macaulay, p.258-259. The text is titled "The Races of Man" and

is quoted to show how Macaulay saw European conquest and Christianizationas the twin vectors of a natural and beneficial process:

"In whatever direction, then, we turn our eyes, in all the departments of humancivilization, have the White Races of Europe maintained their superiority overthe Brown Races of Asia. I come now to unfold the great law of historicaldevelopment, and I hold that there has been something like a regular succession-- may I not say a progression --, in the order in which the different Races -- theBlack, the Brown and the White -- have appeared to perform the part assignedthem in the great drama of human progress. (*) The great historic drama first

opens in the valley of the Nile. Thence it was transferred to Asia, when the greatAssyrian, Babylonian and Persian Empires succeeded the old Empires of thePharaohs; and at length to Europe, when the Macedonian and Roman came tosucceed the Asiatic.

"And since that time the destinies of the world, the destinies of civilization havebeen in the hands of the White Races. From that period the history of the Worldhas been, to a remarkable degree, an account of their development, progress andextension. The Black and the Brown sink into the shade, and the White Racesfill the foreground of the picture. And nothing in the future seems more certain

than that every foot of our globe, where climate does not present an insuperable


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same melancholy tragedy upon a larger scale, and in respect to, perhaps, anobler people. Where is now the great Mongolian race of Central Asia -- oncethe most powerful and warlike of the earth-whose reign was for centuries thereign of terror, and desolation for the rest of mankind? (*) Their glory is gone,

their sceptre is broken, their race is run, their mission ended. (*)"In conclusion, permit me to ask you, whether you do not recognise a certainlaw, a certain order, a certain progression in the succession in which the Racesof Men have appeared to perform the part assigned them? From that distantepoch, when human history first unfolds itself to view on the time-wornmonuments of the Nile to our own day and generation, do we not discover, fromcentury to century, from Continent to Continent, a gradual, but a certain onwardand upward movement? Has not the great tide of human civilization risen on thewhole?"

Doesn't that clinch the issue, proving what a racist Macaulay was, and inpassing also how the Christian mission was intimately interwoven with racism?This quote may yet have a great future as a classic in Indian nationalist polemic.Unfortunately, as so often with such tidily useful quotes, it's just too good to betrue. In fact, the Trevelyan page referred to carries a letter by Macaulaydetailing his study of Greek and Roman authors (admittedly a sign ofEurocentrism when this is what occupied the attention of an administrator inCalcutta), not this text. However, the text is a genuine one, only it was notwritten by Macaulay but by one Henry A. Washington, an American, in theApril 1860 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger. The connection with

Macaulay is that his obituary was carried in the same issue. At most, the textillustrates just how Macaulay's civilizing mission would have been interpretedin the race-obsessed American South.

But Macaulay's own outlook was slightly different. He believed that the equalityof Asians and Europeans was not a natural given, or was at any rate not the thenstate of affairs, but that it was just around the corner if only his own educational

proposals were implemented. Our Dalit source gladly quotes from Macaulay'sspeech in the House of Commons on 10 July 1833 to show us how he alreadyenvisioned India's independence:

"The destinies of our Indian empire are covered with thick darkness. It isdifficult to form any conjecture as to the fate reserved for a state whichresembles no other in history, and which forms by itself a separate class of

political phenomena. The laws which regulate its growth and its decay are stillunknown to us. It may be that the public mind of India may expand under oursystem till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we mayeducate our subjects into a capacity for better government; that, having becomeinstructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demandEuropean institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never

will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudestday in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths


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of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirousand capable of all the privileges of citizens, would indeed be a title to glory allour own. The sceptre may pass away from us. Unforeseen accidents mayderange our most profound schemes of policy. Victory may be inconstant to our

arms. But there are triumphs which are followed by no reverses. There is anempire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacifictriumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire ofour arts and our morals, our literature and our laws."

Look at that: more than a whole century before independence, Macaulay wasready to concede independence to India, on condition that it changed its culturefrom (what he considered to be) backward to civilized. He didn't see their raceas a lasting impediment. And he tried to convince even the avowedly selfish

promoters of colonialism that an enlightened self-interest would see the benefitsof a civilized and free India over a backward and dependent India.

3. Conclusion

3.1. Not malice but limited competenceThe above list of quotations only confirms my suspicions against the oneincriminating "quotation" so popular among Indian nationalists. On the onehand, we had non-primary sources for the quotation which I allege to bespurious. They may be the President of India and the Planning Commission, butthey are not primary sources. On the other, we now get a great many certifiedoriginal quotations, but the one which I had alleged to be spurious, is not amongthem. And they all allow me to stand by my position that Macaulay, for all hislimitations, was well-intentioned: he had contempt for Indian culture but wantedthe best for the Indian people, viz. to lift them up from what he considered to betheir backward traditions.

The whole corpus of quotations which we've seen in this discussion confirmsentirely that Macaulay was but a child of his time; that he was among the more

progressive and generous and benign among the colonizers; and that he wantedto benefit the Indians by helping them out of their inherited and into the modernworldview. None of it confirms that he was "mean-spirited" or "diabolical". The

quotations also confirm that unlike contemporaneous racists, he believed thatIndians had the capacity to become modern and self-governing.

Macaulay's known record does not contain any praise for India's "culture" (aterm then not normally used in its modern sense) which he then mischievouslyconsigned to destruction. He did not say anything "to that effect", as claimed bythe "quoter". On the contrary, he repeatedly said that to the best of hisknowledge, Indian culture was backward and inhumane and that it would be a

big favour to the natives if they dropped it in favour of English culture. He

generously wanted to share with the Indians the benefits of science and justice.It is a different matter that in his ignorance, he failed to acknowledge the merits


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of Hindu civilization. But ignorance is known to exist even in fair-mindedpeople.

As Napoleon said: never ascribe to malice what can be explained byincompetence. Macaulay's enthusiasm for science didn't include any familiarity

with ancient India's pioneering role in sciences such as mathematics andastronomy (though Hindus themselves should admit that this was bygone gloryand that the India of 1835 had fallen far behind in scientific knowledge let alonescientific creativity). Macaulay didn't know about the merits of Hinducivilization, and the rest follows from that ignorance, not from any destructiveintent. Too many Hindutva polemicists enjoy indulging in fairy-tale scenarios ofhistory, viz. as a struggle of evil-intentioned monsters versus, well, us. Withsuch silly schemes one will never understand real human history.

For example, what Moghul emperor Aurangzeb did to the Hindus may havebeen monstrous, but he sincerely thought he was doing good. Religion inparticular can twist man's subjective good intentions into motives forobjectively evil behaviour. As 1979 Physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberghas said: "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad

people can do evil; but for good people to do evil -- that takes religion." (FacingUp: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries, Harvard University Press 2001,

p.242) With better education about the irrationality of his belief system,Aurangzeb might have given up his Islamic zeal and become a benign ruler.This seems to confirm Socrates' view that ignorance is the cause of evil. In the

19th century, enthusiasm for modernization took the place of religion as theroad to salvation for many Europeans, often with the same tendency ofblindness towards the limitations of one's own worldview and the merits ofothers. Transposed to India, this became Macaulayism.

So, we have two views of the evils in history: one, foaming at the mouth, seesevil-intentioned monsters as the ultimate actors; while the other sees the moraland intellectual limitations of man as an overriding factor in effecting evil (ormore often, partly evil) results. Do look at the practical implications. What canyou do against monsters except slaughter them? By contrast, against ignoranceyou can try education.

3.2. Macaulay not a Dalit messiahIf anything can be said in reply to the new Dalit enthusiasm for Macaulay, itwould have to be along the following lines. Firstly, Macaulay was a

paternalistic-liberal member of a very class-conscious British establishment,and by no means on the radical-egalitarian wavelength of the Dalit activists. He

believed in the principle of equal opportunity and trusted that this would loosencaste discrimination in the long run, but there is no indication that he supportedactive governmental intervention in native Indian society. Any revolutionary

upheaval, even if organized from above, would disturb the colonial project ofprofitably incorporating India in the British Empire's globalizing economy. The


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