{ "book_metadata": { "book_name": "History of Christianity in India: Source Materials", "book_author": "M. K. Kuriakose", "publisher": "Indian Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge", "published_on": "2011" }, "chunks": [ { "chunk_index": 1, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 122 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00146-86130c5b18fd03c149ea.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Macaulay’s Minute and Its Consequences", "chunk_data": "91. MACAULAY'S MINUTE ON EDUCATION (1835 A.D.)\nThomas Babington Macaulay's Minute of 2nd February, 1835, led to the adoption, a month later (7th March, 1835), of a government policy that henceforth public funds would be spent only on English education. The consequences of this decision were far-ranging, affecting many areas of administrative policy. It also gave impetus to Christian educational programmes. G. M. Young, ed., Thomas Babington Macaulay. Prose and Poetry. Cited in William Theodore de Bary, Sources of Indian Tradition, pp. 596-601.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": 2, "start_date": 2, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": 3, "end_date": 7, "time_display": "2 February–7 March 1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay", "G. M. Young", "William Theodore de Bary" ], "places": [ "India" ], "event": "Macaulay's Minute led the government to adopt an English-only policy for the expenditure of public education funds.", "tags": [ "Education", "Politics", "Christianity" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 2, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 122 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00146-86130c5b18fd03c149ea.webp" ], "chunk_title": "The Purpose of the Education Fund", "chunk_data": "We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund to be employed as government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing it?", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India" ], "event": "Thomas Babington Macaulay framed the education debate as a question about the most useful employment of public funds.", "tags": [ "Education", "Politics" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 3, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 122 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00146-86130c5b18fd03c149ea.webp" ], "chunk_title": "The Limits of Vernacular Languages", "chunk_data": "All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are, moreover, so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be effected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India" ], "event": "Macaulay argued that Indian vernacular languages were not yet adequate for advanced literary and scientific education.", "tags": [ "Education", "Language", "Colonialism" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 4, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 122 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00146-86130c5b18fd03c149ea.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Choosing the Language of Instruction", "chunk_data": "What then shall that language be? One-half of the committee maintain that it should be the English. The other half strongly recommended the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing?", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India" ], "event": "The education committee debated whether English, Arabic, or Sanskrit should be the principal language of instruction.", "tags": [ "Education", "Language", "Politics" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 5, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 122 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00146-86130c5b18fd03c149ea.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Macaulay’s Assessment of Oriental Learning", "chunk_data": "I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves, I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the Oriental plan of Education.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India", "Arabia" ], "event": "Macaulay compared European literature favorably with the Arabic and Sanskrit traditions in the education debate.", "tags": [ "Education", "Literature", "Colonialism" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 6, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 122, 123 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00146-86130c5b18fd03c149ea.webp", "raw\\pages\\00147-4a028b6d26b6d5d7e22b.webp" ], "chunk_title": "European Superiority in Knowledge", "chunk_data": "It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any Orientalist who ventured to maintain that Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded, and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historic 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 abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India", "England" ], "event": "Macaulay asserted the superiority of European literature and philosophy over Arabic and Sanskrit learning.", "tags": [ "Education", "Literature", "Colonialism" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 7, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 123 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00147-4a028b6d26b6d5d7e22b.webp" ], "chunk_title": "The Case for English Education", "chunk_data": "How, then, stands the case? 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 claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with work of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us; with models of every species of eloquence; with historical compositions, which, considered merely as narratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equalled; with just and lively representations of human life and human nature; with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade; with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man. Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India", "Greece" ], "event": "Macaulay presented English as the most valuable language for transmitting literature, philosophy, political thought, and science.", "tags": [ "Education", "Language", "Literature" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 8, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 123 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00147-4a028b6d26b6d5d7e22b.webp" ], "chunk_title": "English as a Global Language", "chunk_data": "Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australasia, communities which are every year becoming more important and more closely connected with, our Indian empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which should be the most useful to our native subjects.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India", "Africa", "Australasia" ], "event": "Macaulay argued that English was useful in India because it was the language of government, commerce, and expanding European communities.", "tags": [ "Education", "Language", "Politics" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 9, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 123, 124 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00147-4a028b6d26b6d5d7e22b.webp", "raw\\pages\\00148-8d7e43c48e1b372545d0.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Rejecting Oriental Knowledge", "chunk_data": "The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by the universal confession, there are no books on any subjects which deserve to be compared to our own; whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, whenever they differ from those of Europe, differ for the worse; and whether, when we can patronise sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India", "England" ], "event": "Macaulay opposed spending public money on Oriental systems of medicine, astronomy, history, and geography instead of European knowledge.", "tags": [ "Education", "Science", "Colonialism" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 10, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 124 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00148-8d7e43c48e1b372545d0.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Religion and State Education", "chunk_data": "All the declamations in the world about the love and reverence of the natives for their sacred dialects will never, in the mind of any impartial person, outweigh the undisputed fact that we cannot find, in all our vast empire, a single student who will let us teach him those dialects unless we will pay him. Why then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanscrit and Arabic? Evidently because it is universally felt that the Sanscrit and Arabic are languages, the knowledge which does not compensate for the trouble of acquiring them. On all such subjects the state of the market is the decisive test.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India" ], "event": "Macaulay argued that the lack of voluntary demand for Sanskrit and Arabic justified ending public financial support for their study.", "tags": [ "Education", "Language", "Politics" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 11, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 124 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00148-8d7e43c48e1b372545d0.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Answering the Orientalists", "chunk_data": "(Answering the claims of the Orientalists, he asserted): But there is yet another argument which seems even more untenable. It is said that the Sanscrit and Arabic are the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of people are written, and that they are, on that account, entitled to peculiar encouragement. Assuredly it is the duty of the British government in India to be not only tolerant, but neutral on all religious questions. But to encourage the study of a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. It is confessed that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We are to teach it because it is fruitful of monstrous superstitions. We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can 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?", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India" ], "event": "Macaulay rejected special state support for Sanskrit and Arabic on religious grounds while asserting governmental neutrality toward religion.", "tags": [ "Religion", "Education", "Politics" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 12, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 124, 125 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00148-8d7e43c48e1b372545d0.webp", "raw\\pages\\00149-b96145cd7b6bbdca496a.webp" ], "chunk_title": "The Possibility of English Scholarship", "chunk_data": "It is taken for granted by the advocates of Oriental learning that no native of this country can possibly attain more than a mere smattering of English. They do not attempt to prove this; but they perpetually insinuate it. They designate the education which their opponents recommend as a mere spelling book education. They assume it as undeniable, that the question is between a profound knowledge of Hindu and Arabian literature and science on one side and a superficial knowledge of the rudiments of English on the other. This is not merely an assumption, but an assumption contrary to all reason and experience. We know that foreigners of all nations do learn our language sufficiently to have access to all the most abstruse knowledge which it contains, sufficiently to relish even the most delicate graces of our most idiomatic writers. There are in this very town natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language. I have heard the very question on which I am now writing, discussed by native gentlemen with a liberality and intelligence which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction. Indeed it is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the continent, any foreigner who can express himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindus. Nobody, I suppose, will contend that English is so difficult to a Hindu as Greek to an Englishman. Yet an intelligent English youth, in a much smaller number of years than our unfortunate pupils pass at the Sanscrit College, becomes able to read, to enjoy, and to imitate, not unhappily, compositions of the best Greek authors. Less than half the time which enables an English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles ought to enable a Hindu to read Hume and Milton.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay", "Herodotus", "Sophocles", "David Hume", "John Milton" ], "places": [ "India", "England" ], "event": "Macaulay argued that Indians could attain advanced English proficiency and access sophisticated European literature and science.", "tags": [ "Education", "Language", "Literature" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 13, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 125 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00149-b96145cd7b6bbdca496a.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Macaulay’s Final Education Proposal", "chunk_data": "To sum up what I have said, I think it clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813; that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied; that we are free to employ our funds as we choose; that we ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing; that English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit or Arabic; that the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanscrit or Arabic; that neither as the languages of law, nor as the languages of religion, have the Sanscrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our engagement; that it is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly English scholars; and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India" ], "event": "Macaulay concluded that public funds should be directed toward English education rather than Sanskrit or Arabic instruction.", "tags": [ "Education", "Language", "Politics" ] } }, { "chunk_index": 14, "chapter_name": "91. Macaulay’s Minute on Education", "page_numbers": [ 125 ], "image_paths": [ "raw\\pages\\00149-b96145cd7b6bbdca496a.webp" ], "chunk_title": "Creating an Intermediary Class", "chunk_data": "In point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. 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. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms and science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.", "time": { "start_year": 1835, "start_month": null, "start_date": null, "end_year": 1835, "end_month": null, "end_date": null, "time_display": "1835" }, "meta": { "people": [ "Thomas Babington Macaulay" ], "places": [ "India" ], "event": "Macaulay proposed educating an intermediary class of Indians who would transmit English knowledge and improve the vernacular languages.", "tags": [ "Education", "Colonialism", "Language" ] } } ] }