Let Me begin with a confession. I am one of those products of Macaulay’s education system that the Prime Minister denounced while delivering the Ramnath Goenka Memorial lecture last week. he said that thomas Babington Macaulay had created an education system for India that was designed to turn Indians into little brown English people who would be Indian in name only. Absolutely true. I went to a girls’ school that was modeled wholly on English public schools. We spoke only English, read only English literature and poetry and knew very, very little about our own country.
It was people of my kind who ruled India after the British packed up their bags and went home. We continued perpetuating the colonial mindset till Narendra Modi became Prime Minister. Before he came along political leaders, high officials, police officers, judges and the men who became generals in the Indian army all came from that same old ‘colonial’ breed. This did not change in the time of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s first Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, because he was totally seduced by the wiles and ways of us colonial types. It is a good thing that us lot are now in the garbage bin of history. But, has the Prime Minister noticed how deeply colonial everything else remains under him?
How colonial governance persists in official power
Days after he delivered his lecture, the BJP government in Maharashtra issued written instructions ordering officials to stand when they spotted an MP or an MLA. I commented on this on ‘X’ and was deluged with posts from Hindutva types who said this was a valid order because elected representatives of the people take precedence over unelected officials. Why? Are they not supposed to be servants of the people? Is this attitude not a product of that colonial mindset? Does it not make elected officials think of themselves as rulers?
There are other examples of colonial governance that the Prime Minister appears not to have noticed. Why should unelected Governors of our states need to live in palaces in the most expensive residential areas of state capitals? This colonial attitude to housing has a trickle-down effect that is quite remarkable so in rural parts the Collector also lives in palatial accommodation. He is so powerful and so far away from the concerns and problems of rural people that they hesitate to approach him for anything. And yet it is to him they must go if they want to open a small shop in the village or start a small business. there are no collectors in the United Kingdom and never have been. It is a colonial post that should have been abolished decades ago. Most collectors are trained in colonial governance when they join the Indian Administrative Service.
Why India’s schools still neglect its civilization
Colonial governance is not the only thing that perpetuates the ‘colonial mindset’. the best Indian schools continue to use English as a medium of instruction, and it is to these schools that our political leaders and high officials send their children. Indian literature, music, poetry, philosophy and languages are still taught in these schools as if they were inferior. The only change that has come is that instead of Indian children aspiring to be little brown English people, they aspire to be little brown American people. Parents who can afford to send their children abroad for higher education now choose American colleges over British ones and they return Indian in name only.
Personally, I believe that learning english is no bad thing because the world has become such a small place. English is the lingua franca of today’s world, and this is unlikely to change soon. It is the curriculum of Indian schools that needs to change so that our children learn about India’s stupendous contribution to the civilisation of the world. Why is it that with most of our major states governed by BJP chief ministers, school curriculums in government schools continue to teach the same old stuff they were taught when my kind of colonial types ruled India.
Why do we continue to produce Macaulay’s children who speak english as their first language that they learn in elite private schools? If they attend government schools, they usually end up being linguistically disabled in English as well as their native tongue because teachers cannot teach either well. Hindutva is the ideology of today but instead of dwelling on such high things as civilisation, it restricts itself to spreading religiosity.
Most adherents of Hindutva that I have met speak passionately these days about how they have finally become ‘proud Hindus’. Sadly, when they say this, they generally mean that they have become more religious and go on more pilgrimages than before. they like to spout Sanskrit shlokas and quote the Bhagavad Gita but that is the extent of their knowledge of India’s civilisation. they are as dismal a bunch as the Macaulay’s children that I grew up with.
For things to really change you need institutions that are led by real historians (not pamphleteers), philosophers, scientists, scholars, linguists, writers and thinkers. these are the people that have been alienated by the religiosity and hate mongering of those who lead the hindutva movement. These are people whose alienation is rooted in their conviction that Modi is allergic to ‘intellectuals’. they stay away from the colonial bungalows in Lutyens’ Delhi in which the Prime Minister, his ministers and officials live in homes where British officials once did.
