The article first appeared in The Hindu on March , 2025.
The Prime Minister’s recent remarks on Macaulay and the “mindset of slavery” have revived an old discomfort many of us have carried but rarely articulated. How much harm did Macaulay do? What did he deprive Indians of? And what mindset changes are needed today?
When Macaulay wrote his famous 9,000-word minute in 1835, the goal of the British government was not to create an education system for the Indian public but to carve out a small English-educated class to assist the administration, interact with British officials, and work as intermediaries. A century later, this experiment produced what critics called “Macaulay’s children”, though in truth, these were Indians who used English to get things done, not people who lost their Indianness to it…