In March 2023, I attended a literature festival in Chandigarh where one of the speakers, Sankrant Sanu, author of The English Medium Myth: Dismantling Barriers to India’s Growth, spoke about the need for higher education to be conducted in regional languages. He asserted that there are many intelligent people in India who don’t have access to early English education and are thus excluded from further studies in Medicine, Law, and Engineering.
Sanu’s thinking does not exist in isolation. It is a consequence of a widely viewed statement by the prime minister that states that India must separate itself from the Macaulay Mindset, set itself free from the colonial trap and bring back its own cultural and educational foundations.
So, what is this Macaulay Mindset, and what did Thomas Babington Macaulay say on that fateful day in 1835 that his statement to this day is referred to as the Macaulay Minute? He said that, “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” He also stated that his goal was to create “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
The beginnings
According to many, he did just that. While the crux of the current debate in India appears to be around culture and education, some of it does have to do with language – the English language. In a debate moderated by Rajdeep Sardesai last November, William Dalrymple stated that India has been quite pragmatic in what it has kept of its colonial past – keeping English because it is useful as a unifying language across the country.
But before all of this, before Macaulay’s tone-deaf statement and well before our realisation that the colonial mindset had seeped into our DNA and must be extricated or else, in the late 1700s and the early 1800s, East India Company officials in India did debate whether education in India should be in traditional languages – Persian, Sanskrit and Arabic – or in English. British officers who supported the former approach were referred to as Orientalists and those who postulated for English, Anglicists.
Dalrymple stated in the aforementioned discussion hosted by Sardesai that his ancestors, present in Calcutta at the time, were decidedly Orientalists.
The Anglicists won the debate, supported by Macaulay’s argument. They propagated what they called the Downward Filtration Theory, where a small group would learn the ways of the colonists and filter them down.
This was followed by a more formal “The Dispatch of 1854, on General Education in India”, sent to the Indian Government by Sir Charles Wood. In this dispatch, there was an explicit statement that Oriental Literature was not to be neglected, but European learning was to be cultivated, that English was the medium for higher departments for the few; the vernacular languages for the many. The Dispatch also asserted that religious neutrality must be maintained and the main purpose of this push on education was to create a higher class of public servants, and for the pursuit of education for its own sake. There is also a specific statement – Female education to be especially fostered.
All this sounds more than positive but by the late 19th Century, English had become the de facto language of administration, higher education and the Law.
Many Indians aspired to learn the language, to join the civil services, and to study law. As Ramachandra Guha stated in an article in The Telegraph titled “A Question of English”, the rush to study English was not imposed. He wrote, “In the 1920s, Gandhi and Tagore argued in print about whether a love for the English language betrayed a colonised mindset. The Mahatma thought it did, whereas the poet, a prophet of a rooted cosmopolitanism, argued that Indians could glory in the illumination of lamps lit in languages and cultures other than their own.”
The resistance
In 1914, the British Government passed the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, which was mostly driven by a conversation around “British subjects everywhere.” In other words, the British government had no interest in anything Banerjee and his peers were asking for. They had a need to transfer Indians across their empire seamlessly to serve as soldiers, merchants, clerks and labourers.
And yet when Surendra Nath Banerjee (1848–1925), a nationalist leader of his time, who passed the ICS exam in London in 1859, and studied law in 1874, began asking the British rulers for greater Indian participation in government, self-rule, and constitutional reform, he was soundly rebuffed. Banerjee argued that Indians were British subjects and should have equal rights within the Empire after 1858.
The Act of 1914 indirectly gave Nationalists like Banerjee what they wanted but it created a critical issue in white settler colonies such as Australia, Canada and South Africa. These countries wanted racial exclusion and were going to keep the brown people out, no matter their education, no matter the Status of Aliens Act and no matter their proficiency in the English language. This was very well tested by Bhai Gurdit Singh and the Komagata Maru incident. The Alien’s Act gave the ship’s passengers the right to disembark in Vancouver and settle in Canada as citizens of the Commonwealth.
Predicting what was to come, these former British colonies came up with a set of rules that specifically blocked Indians. The Canadians created the Continuous Journey Rule (1908), which required migrants to arrive in a continuous journey from their home country. The Canadian government then forced the Canadian Pacific shipping line to cease passenger service between Calcutta and Vancouver.
Australia had created a dictation test (1901), which, if administered in English, most Indians would pass. But the fine print in the rule was that it could be administered in any European language of the immigration officer’s choosing.
Canada later adopted a similar rule where it also asked incoming Indians to read a passage in a European language of the immigration officer’s choosing.
Canada also instituted a cash requirement (1908) of $200 that each migrant had to carry in order to enter the country. European immigrants were required to carry only $25.
The three hundred and seventy-six passengers on the Komagata Maru were denied entry into Canada. They languished on the ship for three months, with dwindling water and food and then set sail for India, proving that the Aliens Act was a farce.
India, in its effort to shed its colonial hangover, must realise that its rulers were playing a zero-sum game that could only be won by the colonisers. If Indians had insisted on keeping to only their languages, they would have been shut out of lucrative educational opportunities and jobs. Choosing to learn English and all that it made available gave many what they needed to lead India’s independence movement.
At the same time, for Surendra Nath Banerjee, who despite embracing English, passing the ICS exam and studying law was shut out of practising either, the rulers controlled access and kept him out.
It was a different time with different dynamics. Language today should serve our purpose. English in India unites a country with dozens of different regional languages. As many have said, English in India is its own language, often blended in with words and phrases from the local parlance – and that’s how it should stay. For our part and the government’s, is it easier to teach more and more young people English and bring them into classrooms that provide access to all fields or to set them apart?
Ultimately, what is it about the language that either pushes you forward or holds you back? What is it about your understanding of language that helps you embrace the world or push it away?
Priya Hajela is the author of Ladies’ Tailor (HarperCollins India, 2022). She is currently working on two forthcoming books – a work of historical fiction set during the British period, and a nonfiction account of the Sikh Gurus.
