English was certainly a lot easier for Indians to learn than Greek for an English schoolboy: ‘less than half the time which enables an English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles ought to enable a Hindoo to read Hume and Milton.’ Looking ahead to what practical shape the new Anglicist policy should take, Macaulay accepted, on grounds of cost and practicality, that the Indian masses could not be taught Hume and Milton in the kind of comprehensive educational system that campaigners like Trevelyan had envisaged. Instead, in its most famous words, the Minute set the objective of creating ‘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’. This class of enlightened intermediaries would, in turn, revive and modernize vernacular languages like Bengali, Hindi and Urdu ‘to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population’. Words such as these were to make Macaulay’s Minute the template of liberal imperialism across the world and one of the most important and controversial political documents of the nineteenth century. It outlined an imperial mission more ambitious and global than any since ancient Rome. India was to become the crucible in which the British Empire would create a new, modern, rational and scientific society, Indian in ethnicity but British in education, values, thinking and—most important of all—language. Read more at: firstpost/living/how-thomas-macaulay-educated-india-523146.html/2?utm_source=ref_article
Posted on: Sun, 29 Sep 2013 04:43:51 +0000
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