A Dubious Quotation, A Controversial Reputation:

The Merits of Lord Macaulay

Koenraad Elst discovers through a wrong quotation attributed to Lord Macaulay how right the anglicizer of Indian culture was, or at least how right his intentions were, subjectively.

1. Macaulay the Terminator

In Hindu nationalist circles, the name Macaulay is synonymous with cultural estrangement of Hindus from Hindu civilization, starting with their linguistic assimilation into the global Anglophone community. "Macaulayites", anglicized Hindus, are named together with Muslims, Missionaries and Marxists as the irreconcilable enemies of Hindu Dharma, the "4M". The rot allegedly started with Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), member of the governing council of the East India Company from 1834 to 1838, who successfully advocated the replacement of the native languages with English as the medium of education. He formulated his policy proposal in his Minute on Indian Education, delivered in Kolkata on 2 February 1835. The Governor-General of India, 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 the magnitude of the disaster Macaulay allegedly wrought, his critics like to quote this appreciation by his biographer G.D. Trevelyan: "A new India was born in 1835. 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 quote

Along with the Minute, other statements by Macaulay have been culled from his speeches and letters in order to prove the evil colonialist designs behind his education policy. Not only Hindu nationalists, but generally Hindu and generally nationalist sources frequently quote the following musings supposedly uttered by Lord Macaulay in Parliament:

"I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person 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 would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of 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 if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we 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 him on the same subject had indeed been delivered in Parliament, but in 1833. However, I discovered this anomaly only later in the course of the debate. What first made me suspect the spuriousness of the quotation, was not any external information but a close reading of its utterly cynical contents, quite imaginable in 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 will normally present it as beneficial. This was especially true for that particular stage of colonial expansion, when the "imparting of civilization" and the "abolition of slavery" had become commonplace justifications for the colonial enterprise. British imperialists liked to think of themselves as bringers of light in the darkness of the primitive societies which they were about to rule and transform. Yet, here we get to hear Macaulay brutally calling for the wilful destruction of a civilization which he praises to the skies and acknowledges as superior to that of Britain itself.

So, I challenged my Hindu correspondents to give a reliable reference for this strange quotation. In the age of the internet, they had no problem coming up with a great many seemingly authoritative sources for Macaulay's damning statement. Among the highly varied instances of its use, we may mention numerous 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 the Planning Commission of the Government of India; and even a speech by the President 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. Kalam fiddled for a moment with the keyboard and mouse of his laptop. (*) The President quoted Macaulay's 1835 speech in British Parliament, 'I do not think we would ever conquer this country (India), unless we break the very backbone of 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 if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their 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 be a 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 of Macaulay's speeches, though such published collections exist (e.g. Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, selected by G. M. Young, 1957; Speeches and Documents on Indian Policy, 1750-1921, edited by A. Berriedale Keith, 1922; Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay by George Otto Trevelyan, 1876). It is unlikely that they ever will, and they could have realized as much by carefully rereading the one source to which all the extant instances of this quotation can apparently be traced.

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, who is a thief. (etc.)"

Now things are becoming clearer. The "quotation" is introduced with the qualifier: "His words were to this effect." So there you have it: Macaulay never said this. The alleged quotation came into being as a mere paraphrase, and as we shall see, not even a very faithful one. It is given in that form in Niti (April 2002, p.10), a periodic publication of the Hindu nationalist association Bharat Vikas 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 all these quotings: The Awakening Ray, vol.4, no.5, published by The Gnostic Center (USA).

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

The whole point about the Macaulay phenomenon is that for all the limitations of his Eurocentric perspective, he was quite well-meaning. He thought he was doing Indians a favour by relieving them of their superstitious native culture and introducing them to a more advanced culture. In this quotation, by contrast, he is falsely made to sound deliberately destructive and cynical. Those who are used to denouncing Lord Macaulay may get a kick from blackening him, and I've noticed how some internet polemicists dismissed all evidence of the quotation's spuriousness as irrelevant, for "true or false, it correctly brings out the destructiveness of Macaulayism". They are herewith advised to sobre up, to discard this nonsense, and to spread the true story to the very people from whom they learned this false quotation. Using spurious evidence, even in the service of a good cause, is bound in the end to do more harm than good.