Just Like That | English, and India's legacy of languages

As we emerge from Macaulay’s legacy, we are still adrift from our mother tongues and retain a sense of heenta or inferiority to our own languages.

Kenyan Nobel Laureate professor Wangari Maathai once told me that it was only the colonial rulers who truly understood the importance of a language. That is why it is the first thing they took away. In India, the undisputed architect of this colonial policy was Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), who, in 1834, joined the Supreme Council to govern India. His policy to impose English on the “natives” was so spectacularly successful that the British could well have put his statue in the canopy at India Gate!

We should respect all our languages, for there is perhaps no other country in the world which has a linguistic heritage as rich as ours. (Photo by Idrees MOHAMMED / AFP)(AFP)

Interestingly, Macaulay almost did not succeed in his mission. The Committee of Public Instruction set up by the British had been deadlocked for some time because it was divided five against five. One set of five members wanted education in India to be based on what was then recognised as classical languages — Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic; the other five wanted elementary education to be in the “vernacular” languages with English coming in at the higher levels. The linguistic destiny of India fell into the lap of Macaulay when he was made the president of the Committee in January 1835 to break the impasse.

He took little time to do so. On February 2, 1835, he recorded his infamous Minute on Education, and in one rhetorical flourish, rubbished the entire civilisational heritage of India. Macaulay was convinced that English was the language of a superior civilisation and that the culture of the natives was not only primitive but beyond redemption. How could the British teach at public expense, he asked, “medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier — astronomy which would move laughter in the girls at an English boarding school — history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long — and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.”

It was the most uninformed caricature of the achievements and refinements of the great Indian civilisation. Macaulay knew that his absolute and superficial condemnation could be challenged by the researched appreciation of some of his own previous peers, such as Sir William Jones, Sir John Shore and others, who had founded the Asiatic Society. In 1786, Jones declared that “the Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure: More perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.” But Macaulay couldn’t care less because his real intent was different: “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern: A class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect.”

He succeeded beyond his wildest imagination, for he already had powerful allies among the ruled. On December 11, 1823, the great Sanskrit scholar and reformer, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, wrote a petition to governor-general Lord Amherst against the teaching of Sanskrit: “The Sanskrit language”, he wrote, “so difficult that almost a lifetime is necessary for its perfect acquisition, is well known to have been for ages a lamentable check on the diffusion of knowledge.” In time, what did emerge was an English-speaking elite, largely restricted to the administrative and professional classes and an army of clerks who knew rudimentary English. The Webster's dictionary still defines a babu as “a native clerk who writes English”. The writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee wrote caustically in 1873: “The babus will be indefatigable in talk, experts in a particular foreign language, and hostile to their mother tongue... (they) will consume water at home, alcohol at friends’, abuses at the prostitutes’ and humiliation at the employers”.

This is not a diatribe against English, an international language we could benefit from, but a background to how it came to play such a dominant role in post-colonial India.

As we emerge from Macaulay’s legacy, we are still adrift from our mother tongues and retain a sense of heenta or inferiority to our own languages. There is also the new danger that we may fall into the trap of pitting one Indian language against another. The answer to this threat is to respect all our languages, for there is perhaps no other country in the world which has a linguistic heritage as rich as ours.

Pavan K Varma is author, diplomat, and former Member of Parliament (Rajya Sabha). The views expressed are personal