[WSJ] Fortunately for India, English isn’t going anywhere. More than 1 in 10 Indians speak it to some extent.

 

Western Education Has Lifted India

Modi foolishly denounces Thomas Babington Macaulay, who encouraged the teaching of English on the subcontinent.

By Sadanand Dhume

Dec. 3, 2025 5:38 pm ET

India’s prime minister is mad at an Englishman who died more than 150 years ago. In recent weeks, Narendra Modi has taken aim at Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), a scholar and statesman best known in India for introducing the country to Western education.

“Macaulay broke our self-confidence,” Mr. Modi said in a speech in New Delhi last month. “He instilled an inferiority complex within us.” A week later, while hoisting a flag at a prominent new Hindu temple in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, Mr. Modi reupped his charge that “Macaulay laid the foundation of mental slavery in India.”

Mr. Modi’s criticism of Macaulay may make for useful political theater, but the prime minister is dead wrong. Far from hurting India, Macaulay helped it enormously. If not for access to Western education, India today would probably look less like an aspiring global power and more like an outsize backwater. And if not for the English language, which links educated Indians from vastly different backgrounds, tensions between the politically dominant Hindi-speaking states that account for about 45% of the country’s population and the rest of the country would be harder to manage.

The current debate can be traced to 1835, when the dominant power in India was the London-headquartered East India Co. That year, Macaulay won an argument among company officials about the best language in which to educate Indians. He wanted the British to support education in English and cease funding schools that taught in Sanskrit and Arabic.

In India, the case against Macaulay is built on a combination of misinformation and selective outrage. A widely circulated WhatsApp message claims erroneously that Macaulay gave a speech before the British Parliament in which he vowed to “break the very backbone” of India by replacing its “ancient education system.” Macaulay made no such speech, according to the Hansard archives, which hold historical parliamentary records. He wasn’t even in Britain at the time it was allegedly made.

Some of the animus directed at Macaulay is based on things he really said. Macaulay laid out the case for English education as a civilizing mission, which some Indians understandably find offensive. “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,” he said. He also said that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

Some Indians use these statements to caricature Macaulay as a cartoon villain. The reality is more complex. Macaulay was a self-made man elevated to the pinnacle of Britain’s ruling class, thanks to his precocious intelligence and scholarly brilliance. Before he was 8, he had completed an outline of world history and a poem in the style of Sir Walter Scott . He reportedly knew seven languages, including ancient Latin and Greek.

A man of his time, Macaulay didn’t question the cultural and intellectual preeminence of Britain. But this didn’t make him unsympathetic to Indians. On the contrary, he thought it was England’s duty to quicken Indian progress. In his biography of Macaulay, Bombay-born author Zareer Masani notes that Macaulay compared India with Russia, still something of a feudal backwater at the time, but one that, in Macaulay’s view, was catching up with advanced Western European nations.

Macaulay hoped that India would foster an educated class that could match the best in the world. He believed that Indians exposed to Western education could gradually improve native languages by infusing them with modern concepts, including scientific terminology. While this may sound condescending today, at the time it was a broad-minded position. For a 19th-century racist, it would have been impossible to imagine an Indian who was “English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Unblinded by prejudice, Macaulay saw potential in Indians at a time when this was relatively rare.

If not for Macaulay, India today might be very different. Those who point to Japan or China as examples of countries that have modernized without widely adopting English misunderstand India. Compared with India, Japan and China are much more linguistically homogeneous. India houses more than a dozen major languages. If you’re a Punjabi speaker who wants to open a bank account in Kannada-speaking Karnataka, your best bet is to do it in English.

Over time, Hindi, the predominant north Indian language, has become more widely understood across the country. But making it the sole national language would set up perpetual conflict with non-Hindi speakers, who resent the idea of being dominated by the economically laggard Hindi belt. In a pan-Indian context, English is an equalizer, not an oppressor.

Fortunately for India, English isn’t going anywhere. More than 1 in 10 Indians speak it to some extent. In the higher reaches of professional, commercial and intellectual life, fluency is common. The ghost of Macaulay may face criticism in modern India, but his legacy is in no danger of disappearing.

 

来源：https://www.wsj.com/opinion/western-education-has-lifted-india-388889e5?mod=hp_opin_pos_5

 

 

more on Thomas Babington Macaulay

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Babington-Macaulay-Baron-Macaulay