Macaulay and Indian education

Education, the chapter says, became a tool for creating a class of Indians who would serve British interests.

Before that, India had many kinds of education: pāṭhaśhālās, madrasās, vihāras, and many forms of apprenticeship (learning a skill by working with a master), passing on practical knowledge along with cultural values.

And they were not rare. British reports themselves recorded hundreds of thousands of village schools (100,000 to 150,000 in Bengal and Bihar alone up to 1830) teaching reading, writing and arithmetic, in a system the reports called "so economical ... and at the same time so simple and effectual".

The turning point was Thomas B. Macaulay's 1835 'Minute on Indian Education'.

Macaulay admitted he had "no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic", and then declared that "a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia".

Notice the order of those two statements. The judgement is passed by someone who has just said he cannot read the works he is judging.

His stated aim was to create a class of Indians who would be "Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect".

A few British Orientalists argued that Indian students should study in their own languages, but Macaulay's policy won. Traditional schools slowly disappeared, English became a language of prestige, and lasting gaps opened between English-educated elites and everyone else. The new system also supplied clerks and minor officials at a fraction of the cost of British staff.