Macaulay wanted the government to spend money only on imparting western education and not on oriental education. He advocated the shutting down of all colleges where only eastern philosophy and subjects were taught. The commercialisation of education which has become rampant in India today has its seeds sown under Macaulay, and it has only grown ever since. Macaulay was the first person in the history of the Indian education system who made financial resources the centre of educational activities. Thomas Babington Macaulay, a legal member of the Council of India and a British parliamentarian, gave his important minute that changed the entire course of education. Macaulay can be credited with laying foundations for treating education as a ‘sector’. Thus the most important aspect of the development of an individual, education will now have to prove its worth to satisfy its position as an important ‘sector’, whose investment will purely depend on the return. Public Education still follows the same ‘return’ policy; the requirements of the return being the ‘creation of a class of people who can efficiently do the job’; something that is stressed in the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 as well.

Macaulay had a strong belief in treating things according to their ‘worth’. In the contemporary sense, the word ‘worth’ has transformed into ‘scope’. People now think in terms of which branch of education will land them in a more proximate job. Macaulay assumed it was foolish of the public commission to provide stipends to Arabic and Sanskrit students when a huge cluster was ready to pay willingly to receive English education, making it profitable. Macaulay then said the famous line, which liberalised the whole of the Indian education sector way before the 1990s. Macaulay in his speech said,”On all such subjects (matters related to education), the state of the market is the decisive test.” He commoditised education. And modern day scenario has proved that ‘market’ is actually the most decisive factor that decides ‘what type of education will be promoted’.

An eighth standard CBSE student is introduced to Lord Macaulay’s ‘educational history’ through a social sciences chapter called ‘Civilising the ‘native’, educating the nation’ in an attempt to introduce the student to education critically. Under one of the sections in the chapter, ‘Grave errors of the east’, the student is introduced to the British scholar Thomas Babington Macaulay. The chapter mentions Macaulay’s disregard for oriental studies and briefly mentions the English Education Act of 1835 that followed his important minute. Following this introduction, there is rarely any assessment of the multidimensional effect that Lord Macaulay’s other identities (parliamentarian, occidental thinker, etc.) had, and still have, on the lives of people who receive education in India. Macaulay’s arguments were in direct contradiction to the decisions of the Committee of Public Instruction, appointed by the British Parliament. The committee took major decisions in education before 1835. Macaulay alleged that the committee had not used the scope given by the parliament in the charter in the most efficient ways. It paved way for a trend of amending an education system in reaction to previous policies.

Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru laid down the base in 1950s for the technological boom of the country by increasing the stake of public sector in technological aspect of industrialisation and gave rise to a class of people studying engineering. These people grew economically stable by the second half of the 1990s and thus associated careers relating to lifestyles (fashion designing, interior designing) were also promoted. Dalits and OBCs, claim that they are on the receiving end, in education systems but what is evident after around 150 years of its establishment is that the upper castes have been most active participants of the sector. The participation of Dalits and OBCs in new liberal colleges, like Ashoka University, O.P Jindal, IITs, IIMs, etc., is a point to ponder. This systemic social backwardness, makes Dalit’s and OBC’s proper participation as they lack social and economical capital to participate in it. Therefore, to say that a certain population is being liberated through this English education system would be a claim on loose ends.

Macaulay tried to prove that it is completely rational and logical to adopt a foreign language to strengthen your culture, if your own mode of communication is not strong enough. For certifying this, he recalled the story of British adopting the language of Thucydides and Plato and the language of Cicero and Tacitus, because they believed that everything “worth reading was contained in the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans”. Macaulay said that when a nation of high intellectual attainments (Britain) undertakes to superintend the education of a nation, completely ignorant (Indian Subcontinent), the learners are absolutely to prescribe the course, which is to be taken by the teachers. He implied that the students of this landmass are incapable of choosing a correct curriculum for their development, as they are not knowledgeable or qualified enough. And thus, deprived a student of the Indian Subcontinent any share of contribution in what they learned and how they learned while also imposing on students a difficult and unknown curriculum. As pointed out in NEP 2020 and also in general practice, our education system has till date has been unable to provide students any stake in the education process.

The first Indian government formed a commission to draft an educational policy. The Kothari commission was formulated and was assigned with the job of creating a new national policy on education in 1964. The commission submitted its report in 1966, and in 1968, with most of its points approved, it became the first education policy of independent India. The idea was to infuse our constitutional values into our education system and to make men and women ‘perfect’ for the job. According to the constitutional framework, the curriculum was also designed keeping in mind the neutrality. The advocates of the Hindu past from then to now have the same claim that this secularisation process is actually a distortion of facts, that they are teaching about our golden past but do not give a correct account of how did that past end. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) lived in India just for four years, from 1834 to 1838. Yet he left unerasable footprints on Indian soil. Today, many English-educated Indians deride Macaulay, perhaps for giving that language to them and what they also call the ‘un-Indian’ English culture. Only very few who are also English-educated admire him occasionally. Those who criticise Macaulay come from all schools of thought: extreme right, extreme left and centrist liberals. The vast numbers of Indians who are outside the English-speaking milieu – food producers, such as the Shudra, Dalits and Adivasis, who work in the fields – do not think about Macaulay. For them, their local languages – Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarathi or tribal languages and so on – are the medium of instruction in schools and colleges.

The English language, with its global accessibility, is too far away from them. Yet, Macaulay also has admirers among Dalits and OBCs who feel that English is a language of liberation and have taken to it as a way of progressing in life and in their careers. The new National Education Policy 2020 somewhat demoting the status of English by giving a priority to Indian languages for the first few years of school education, the issue becomes pertinent. Are Macaulay and his ideas irrelevant and un-Indian? Is Macaulay’s presence fine in private English medium schools but not good for government-run schools, where the poor children study? During the days of Jawaharlal Nehru, the so-called ‘anti-national Macaulay’ English education has been confined to expensive private schools, where only very rich Dwijas could afford to educate their children. Even rich Shudra landed gentry did not send their children to good English medium schools. Many Dwijas, in fact, preferred to send their children to Christian missionary schools. Macaulay’s admirers and detractors are able to speak and write in the English language; they were educated either in Indian English medium schools, colleges, universities or institutions like IITs and IIMs or foreign universities.

There was hardly any modern college before Macaulay that used Sanskrit and Persian as the medium of education until 1834. Anyway, education in Sanskrit and Persian was meant for the Hindu Dwijas (Brahmin, Bania, Ksatriya, Kayastha and Khatris) and Muslim feudal lords, who perhaps were either Pathans or Arabs or Dwijas who converted. Unlike the Christians, Muslims never allowed the non-Muslim Shudras and Dalits into their schools. Some Dwijas – mainly Brahmins – managed the system of education in Persian, in collaboration with rich Muslims. But that did not help them with employment, even when it was the official language, because the bureaucracy and legal systems were dominated by Brahmins.

Actually the earliest missionary teaching of the English language to Dwija children was started in 1817, as a private affair, by William Carey (1761-1834) in association with Rajarammohan Roy in Culcutta. He came to India in 1793 and died here in 1834, the year in which Macaulay arrived. Carey established the Serampore College in 1818, the region’s first degree college in the English language. Indian Muslim feudal lords refused to send their children to English medium schools at the cost of their Persian and Urdu education, the Brahmins of Bengal and Kerala had no such inhibitions. They were among the earliest to do so, setting aside Sanskrit education. The ideological attack on Macaulay did not lead to a total divorce from the English language. Among the ruling classes, whatever is their ideological and political position, their children are educated in English medium schools. Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has broken the myth that Macaulay’s English is anti-national or un-Indian. He has decided to introduce English as the medium of instruction in all government schools. When the same Macaulayputras tried to oppose it, the rural productive masses responded by saying, “You hypocrites, send your children to Sanskrit medium schools, but our children need to study in English.” Now the diabolical nature of Hindutva is all around us. A time has come to abolish the two-language nation – one English speaking and the other in their mother tongue – and see that all Indians speak and write only in English. Regional languages can be used for local purposes. Macaulay and his ideas have to be re-evaluated in light of the modern world.