India, Once Upon a Time

I’m repeating the same above message below for those who can’t see…

LORD MACAULAY’s ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT 2 FEBRUARY 1835
“I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a begger, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people such caliber, that I don’t think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage and therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their selfesteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

So What Macaulay has Done?

Lord Macaulay’s infamous Minute on Indian Education, a treatise on imposing English-language education on India, anticipated many of the same arguments.

Macaulay’s text was openly racist…

I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia… the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England… We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language… The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.

… shrewdly imperialist…

What we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth… If there should be any opposition among the natives to the change which I recommend, that opposition will be the effect of our own system. It will be headed by persons supported by our stipends and trained in our colleges. The longer we persevere in our present course, the more formidable will that opposition be.

… but also, in passages on building economic strength and destroying religious superstition, very prescient:

There is now in [Russia] a large educated class, abounding with persons fit to serve the state in the highest functions, and in no wise inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of Paris and London… And how was this change effected?… by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that information within his reach…[C]an we reasonably and decently bribe men out of the revenues of the state to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass, or what text of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?

source from SepiaMutiny