Macaulay and the Medium of Instruction in India

The reason I decided to send my reactions, my comments, to a wider Indian audience than just to the author of the essay entitled “Macaulay, Again”, written in Marathi, is that the process Macaulay’s Minute started almost two hundred years ago – to be precise in 1835 -- has been being re-enacted and continued with even greater vigor in today’s India.

(A) First, I want to congratulate the author for writing the article in Marathi and to express how gratified I am for the language chosen as the medium.

(B) Second, I want to get one reaction out of my system right away even though the sentence that has triggered my reaction is only incidental, rather tangential, to the essay: “{The British} gave us a unified law and order” – my informal translation.  I have heard and read such a sentiment so often that it has jaded me, made me weary and sick.  I may humbly point out that such an assertion absolutely makes no sense.  Every society, civilization, or nation has law and order.  No society, worth the name, can last or persist even for a few decades without law and order, let alone for centuries.  (Somalia may be lawless, Nigeria or Sudan may be lawless; but they have been in the midst of a civil war).  So there are Mosaic Law, Manu's Law, Hammrabbi's Law, Sharia Law, etc.  Some of us may not like these systems of law, and they may be unjust or oppressive; but they are “law and order”, nonetheless. 

As far as the law and order being “unified” or consistent throughout the political entity, let me say that all strong empires do that.  Romans, Arabs, and Turks did that in their empires; and, I am sure, it was so in Ashoka’s Mauryan empire too, which by the way extended into today’s southern and eastern Afghanistan, known as Gandhara in ancient India.  Witness Ashoka’s inscriptions all over South Asia.  

I am not presenting these comments in any particular order.  They are mostly “general”; however, they are fully applicable to the present-day Indian situation: 

1.     There seems to be great confusion caused by the use of the Marathi word “saahitya” to mean both “lalit vaangmay” (creative/imaginative – a poor choice of words in English – literature or “belles lettres” (in French) and  “shaastra/ vidnyaan-vishayak likhaan ”, meaning discursive, ratiocinative writing related to science and technology.  I do not know what word Macaulay used in his Minute on Education; but if he did use the word “literature” to mean two quite different animals, then he is the father of this confusion.  It has sadly continued in the present essay and, maybe, in India even today. 

2.     If, on the other hand, we restrict the use of the word “saahitya” to consistently mean only “lalit vaangmay” (creative or imaginative literature), then Sanskrit had plenty of it.  But, the Chair of the General Committee of Public Instruction, T.B. Macaulay, had no inkling of it because, as he himself confessed, he did not know Sanskrit or Arabic (and, I bet, not Persian/Farsi, either).  He had, however, no excuse for this ignorance because Sir William Jones had already translated Kalidasa’s Shakuntala; and Goethe, the German poet, who died three years before the date of the Minute, was familiar with it.  In fact, in my judgment, just three Sanskrit plays -- Bhasa’s one-act-play Urubhanga, Shudraka’s The Little Clay Cart, and Shakuntala -- are superior to the entire “imaginative” literature, say, created in the U.S. from before its birth to this date.  In this sense of literature or saahitya (lalit vaangmay), it never becomes “kaal-baahya” or outdated.  A classic is forever.

3.     As far as science and modern knowledge (technology) are concerned, they can be taught and promoted in any language.  If (and when) you do not have this specialized knowledge in your mother tongue, it can be translated (Incidentally, I learned Math, Physics and Chemistry in Marathi when I was in high school).  In other words, one needs to separate, distinguish between, the two issues -- the medium of instruction and the content of instruction, bhaashaa and vidyaa.

4.     If superstition is parading as science or “knowledge” in any country or at any time, it (undha-shraddhaa) can be challenged and demolished in any language.  Our Maharashtrian reformers did just that.

 5.  The essay states that Macaulay was aware of the difficulty (the expense, perhaps) of teaching English to the large native population of Indians.  (a) He, therefore, proposed to train a small group of Indians in English who could act as a link, an intermediary, between the British and their subjects.  (b) He also said the old (ancestral) languages need to be preserved (and nourished) as a duty even when a new language is learned (“navee bhashaa shiktanaa aplyaa junyaa bhaashaanche jatan karane aaple kartavy aahe”).  I applaud both these ideas.

6.     There also seems to be confusion between “education” and “training”.  In my view, they are not the same.  In order to get jobs, we train.  In order to be “cultured”, we educate.  If employment were the (only) goal of education, no body would study liberal arts and humanities.  Maybe, that is the reason hardly any of my younger relatives have majored in those subjects.

7.     Another related issue that bothers me is that most of these English-medium trained/educated younger relatives of mine have perhaps not read (to take just some examples) even ten sonnets, a couple of classic plays and a few outstanding novels in English.  And, if I am right, what good is their English medium except for a narrowly utilitarian purpose?  (By the way, following the lead of Sanskrit rhetoricians, I use the word “poetry” very broadly to cover all the genres of imaginative or creative literature).