November 15, 2004
Macaulay's MinuteHistory
An argument is raging in Pakistan about the reform of religious education in madrassas. Lord Macaulay's infamous Minute on Indian Education, a treatise on imposing English-language education on India, anticipated many of the same arguments.
Macaulay's text was openly racist...
I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia... the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England... We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language... The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.
... shrewdly imperialist...
What we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth... If there should be any opposition among the natives to the change which I recommend, that opposition will be the effect of our own system. It will be headed by persons supported by our stipends and trained in our colleges. The longer we persevere in our present course, the more formidable will that opposition be.
... but also, in passages on building economic strength and destroying religious superstition, very prescient:
There is now in [Russia] a large educated class, abounding with persons fit to serve the state in the highest functions, and in no wise inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of Paris and London... And how was this change effected?... by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that information within his reach...[C]an we reasonably and decently bribe men out of the revenues of the state to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass, or what text of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?
manish on November 15, 2004 08:32 AM in History · T·r·a·c·k·b·a·c·k address · Direct link · Email post
He also, as far as I recall, advocated scrapping arabic- and sanskrit-medium education in favor of (non-english) vernacular education. Few people would argue too much with that today...
do you think that this is something that we need for your article?
Nothing racist about Macaulay, who Whig that he was believed in racial equality. However, he did not believe that all cultures were of equal value. He found that people would pay money to learn English, and needed stipends to learn Sanskrit. The logical conclusion was that English should be taught and Sanskrit learning (which he felt was primitive and unscientific as a means of educating the people who would become the teachers of the Indian masses) should not be subsidized.
Hard to quarrel with that, especially when you realize that India, then and now, had no universal native language. Whatever the Hindus may think, English is the language that makes an Indian nation possible. And however silly some aspects of learning English have been for some Indians, the many scholars who have been educated since Macaulay's time owe him and his colleaques a debt of gratitude.
Also, Macaulay believed that the language we now know as Hindi could *only* become a language of education and literature if people learned English, and through it, European literature, and were able to make a then-unwritten vernacular into a living vehicle for cultural transmission. It is hard to argue with that -- since it is precisely the English-trained elite who turned Hindi into a literary language, not just a spoken one.
"since it is precisely the English-trained elite who turned Hindi into a literary language, not just a spoken one."
Wow.. There was no Hindi literature before British came? Which washing machine did you washed your brain out? Hindi literature was shining when English was still forming, Europeans did not know that shit should not be thrown on the streets and head on hair should be cleaned (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shampoo"
Babington, I admire your confidence - such confidence can only come to a person who knows little.