Lord Macaulay's lasting effect on Indian society is captured in this extract from his infamous "Minute on Indian Education":
"We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population,"
Can there be a more chilling elucidation of deep colonization?
There is a small and prosperous class of Indians who continue to benefit from Macaulay's vision. There is a Hindi phrase that is rife in India's heartland about such people: "Angrez to chale gaye. Aulad chodd gaye".
The polite translation is "The English left a long ago but left there children behind"" but the translation misses the true color and invective inherent in the Hindi phrase.
As I write this post I am acutely aware that I belong to the tribe of Macaulay's Children. People who owe their station in life partly due to their fluency and proficiency in English.
My father's English too was good but his deepest expression was in his mother tongue Hindi which he was very good at. He was a private poet and his poetry was in Hindi.
My Hindi alas! is poor. I was schooled in the South where they had long ago decided that when it came to foreign languages they much preferred English to Hindi.
I am still ribbed by my uncles about a letter in Hindi that I, at the age of twenty five, wrote to my grandfather. A few weeks ago I asked my uncle to pull it out of his collection and read it again. Just to check. It was not just bad, it was deeply embarrassing.
I am still ribbed by my uncles about a letter in Hindi that I, at the age of twenty five, wrote to my grandfather. A few weeks ago I asked my uncle to pull it out of his collection and read it again. Just to check. It was not just bad, it was deeply embarrassing.
As I grow older and perhaps wiser, I realize that in gaining all the advantages of English being the language I think in, I have lost immensely.
I had lost the ability to communicate at the deepest level. The ability to communicate to the gestalt around me and perhaps the gestalt within me. Simply put my communication channel is now confined to a sliver of the society around me and I am condemned forever to seek literary and cultural stimulation in ethos that are in essence alien to my deepest nature.
If I could write in Hindi than perhaps I would be a good writer and go well beyond the stilted efforts that you dear reader, giving in to sporadic bouts of generosity, tolerate. If could write in Hindi than perhaps the books that have been rattling inside my brain and my computer (I am at work on two works of fiction that I have not been able to bring to any sort of satisfactory conclusion for years now) would have found expression driven by a deeper communion with the milieu I live in.
But then again, as far as my writing goes, it might be a case of "naach na jaane angaan tedha" that is "those who can't dance blame the dance floor" or to capture the essence of the saying in the somewhat more straightforward idiom of English "excuses are the last refuge of mediocrity". Or as my friends in Bollywood would pithily put "Pappu can't dance saala".
Enough said about me.
Do I have anything to say about the current hullabaloo about the deep set bias in the selection process for the civil services for not just the language of English but the world view that an education in English entails? Now that is a deep one. Such indoctrination was the intent behind Macaulay's edict and now six generation later the indoctrination still retains its potency.
I believe there are no shortcuts to producing antidote to such indoctrination. It takes time and an even deeper phenomenon.
Many of us who got into the IITs in the seventies were Macaulay's children. We deprived many a budding genius just through the fact that the Joint Entrance Exam for the IITs those days included a test of English. However despite this test in English there were geniuses who was not schooled in English but who got through because of their immense superiority when it came to maths and physics, the other two JEE subjects and the ability to quickly learn what was needed to past muster in English. And I can wager a substantial sum of money that in the decades of the sixties, seventies and the eighties most IITians who went on to make substantial hardcore contribution in the fields of science and technology were these geniuses who overcame the English handicap and nearly all of Macaulay's children went on to figuratively speaking "sell soap" laying waste our sterling education in science and technology.
A couple of decades ago English was dropped from the JEE. That has brought it it's own set of problems. Now the corridors at IIT are haunted not just by Macaulay's children but also by coaching class superstars whose ability to slog at the coaching classes falls well short of any originality of thought and action.
However the genius still get in and it is still the genius that makes true use of the education. And here to, as in all walks of life, the production and nurture of one genius is enough to justify the existence of thousands of cookie cutter carpetbaggers.
And if real merit finds its way to the IITs than I am sure it finds it way to the IIMs and the civil services.
I believe that the true antidote to any form of indoctrination and injustice is, as it has been through the ages, merit. Real, pure merit. The rest is just one form of injustice and indoctrination replacing another.
But then again, as far as my writing goes, it might be a case of "naach na jaane angaan tedha" that is "those who can't dance blame the dance floor" or to capture the essence of the saying in the somewhat more straightforward idiom of English "excuses are the last refuge of mediocrity". Or as my friends in Bollywood would pithily put "Pappu can't dance saala".
Enough said about me.
Do I have anything to say about the current hullabaloo about the deep set bias in the selection process for the civil services for not just the language of English but the world view that an education in English entails? Now that is a deep one. Such indoctrination was the intent behind Macaulay's edict and now six generation later the indoctrination still retains its potency.
I believe there are no shortcuts to producing antidote to such indoctrination. It takes time and an even deeper phenomenon.
Many of us who got into the IITs in the seventies were Macaulay's children. We deprived many a budding genius just through the fact that the Joint Entrance Exam for the IITs those days included a test of English. However despite this test in English there were geniuses who was not schooled in English but who got through because of their immense superiority when it came to maths and physics, the other two JEE subjects and the ability to quickly learn what was needed to past muster in English. And I can wager a substantial sum of money that in the decades of the sixties, seventies and the eighties most IITians who went on to make substantial hardcore contribution in the fields of science and technology were these geniuses who overcame the English handicap and nearly all of Macaulay's children went on to figuratively speaking "sell soap" laying waste our sterling education in science and technology.
A couple of decades ago English was dropped from the JEE. That has brought it it's own set of problems. Now the corridors at IIT are haunted not just by Macaulay's children but also by coaching class superstars whose ability to slog at the coaching classes falls well short of any originality of thought and action.
However the genius still get in and it is still the genius that makes true use of the education. And here to, as in all walks of life, the production and nurture of one genius is enough to justify the existence of thousands of cookie cutter carpetbaggers.
And if real merit finds its way to the IITs than I am sure it finds it way to the IIMs and the civil services.
I believe that the true antidote to any form of indoctrination and injustice is, as it has been through the ages, merit. Real, pure merit. The rest is just one form of injustice and indoctrination replacing another.
3 comments:
Absolutely brilliant and truly resonated with me. As a fellow Macaulay's child, I have the added disadvantage of not being even able to write in my mother tongue (such as it is, because that itself is Mamil, a mix of Malayalam & Tamil),since I have studied only English and Hindi. My Hindi was pretty good and gramatically correct, as I had the advantage of a UP neighbour, with whom I conversed only in Hindi.Also, the standard that I had to submit myself to was very high - Premchand's "Gaban" was the book we had for Hindi Lit. But disuse has now rendered even my Hindi to Mumbai Hindi which is as low as it can get.
The paradox is that I really detest everything else about Macaulay and his white-skinned children.
Go on slogging at the works of fiction, bro. I am sure it will come out soon. You have only to look 2 desks away for inspiration!
Keep writing - you are brilliant. As Shakespeare would say, what's in a language - good writing by any other name - "Gadhya, Padhya" - is still great reading.
Sunder
Precisely , why should acquiring knowledge be dependent of language... as noted about the IIT JEE mandated tests in English language similarly the entire higher education system has been messed up and reserved only for Macaulay's children's.
A weavers son instead of becoming a textile engineer , or an iron smith's son instead of becoming a metallurgist ended up becoming a clerk !! Why?
Arrey Ashoke:
It is almost as if we read two different paragraphs. I was struck by the "to enrich ..conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population". To me he shows both foresight and generosity of spirit. Three points are clear: Macaulay saw the importance of the scientific revolution in generating prosperity; he was willing to share the benefits of the scientific revolution with the Indian masses; and he was confident that the Indian masses could be taught science if their vernacular was enriched with the right vocabulary. Not a shred a racism in this whole para. It is us, who have failed to live up to Macaulay's vision. In the early eighties, I was always dismayed by the fact that Hoechst (who were a client at that time) could print their instructions for veterinary medicine in 17 languages while the government was forfeiting the agricultural extension grants from the WB for lack of spending. Hardly surprising considering that Mrs. Gandhi's minister of education was her aunt Shiela Kaul who was more concerned about Mrs. Gandhi's choice of sarees than about the huge educational need in India. Everyone in India now realizes that this is a knowledge based economy. It is just such a tragedy that all advanced learning in India - medicine, business, law etc. is only offered in English. This was not Macaulay's vision.
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