Before he set out to write history, Thomas Babington Macaulay created it, as
legal member of the Supreme Council of India. But the same emotional trait that
endeared him to the British public and its ruling class—a cocksure belief in
his conclusions—marred his ethnocentric Feb. 2, 1835 “Minute” on education on the subcontinent.
The son of a former governor of Sierra Leone, the
35-year-old Macaulay hadn’t planned on extensive foreign service. But as he
considered the career alternatives available to someone with his background—a
law practice that he had dropped in favor of the far more interesting pastimes
of politics and writing, along with a family business whose reverses had forced
the sale of a Gold Medal he had won at Cambridge—he suddenly found that the chance
to effect international change dovetailed nicely with a salary that would allow
him to devote more of his energy to writing.
For Macaulay personally, the most significant result
of his four years in India (1834-1839) was the income he put aside
that eventually enabled him to embark on his epic History of England from the Accession of James the Second. For
Indian colonists and their descendants, the most important consequence was his
advocacy of a Western education (including study of the English language). Both
results were highly problematic.
In a prior post, I noted that Macaulay, for all his prejudices, was an extraordinarily
vivid historian. He was also a highly influential one: The famous third chapter
of his History, a survey of English
society in the year 1685 that analyzed such matters as population, cities,
classes and tastes, pioneered a form of social history that provided a model
for Henry Adams’ History of the United
States in the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and, at
greater length, Frederick Lewis Allen’s account of the Roaring Twenties, Only Yesterday.
But Macaulay’s interest in social history and mores
really did not extend much beyond the Mediterranean SEa. He did not have the boundless
curiosity of a Montaigne or Sir Richard Burton in learning about unfamiliar
races or nations.
Although Macaulay quietly rejected the fierce
Evangelical piety of his father, he did not dispense with one of the principal
consequences of that faith: the urge to spread the benefits of Western (and, to
be precise, British) civilization abroad. By his lights, he wanted to help colonials—and, to be fair, he genuinely foresaw a day when India would be
independent.
But it never seems to have bothered him that, from a
position of power, he would be forcing millions of people to learn a language
not their own. He was not responding to an Indian plea that English be taught,
but superimposing it from without.
Indeed, in the unlikely phenomenon of British Orientalists—a group of British
East India Co. bureaucrats trained in the local languages and culture of the
subcontinent—an alternative existed that took full cognizance of the
ancient religious and cultural traditions of classical India.
Somehow, Macaulay didn’t get their message. He
responded in his “Minute” with the kind of sweeping, cast-all-doubt-aside
statement that has made his History suspect in our time as an unbiased source:
“I have never found one among them [Orientalists] who could deny that a single
shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India
and Arabia.”
That kind of statement makes Macaulay practically a
bull’s eye for those academics who deride Dead White European Males.
As in his histories, the politician-bureaucrat sought,
in Indian law and education, “uniformity where you can have it; diversity where
you must have it; but in all cases certainty.” To replace what a number of
observers at the time felt to be an inefficient welter of legal rules on the
subcontinent, he drafted the Indian Penal Code, which was finally enacted in 1862, three years
after his death.
I would be the last to argue against a system simple
and logical to use. The problem comes when the proponent of a system can’t
imagine another lying outside his own experience.
That was precisely the case with Macaulay. Peter
Gay’s Style in History (1974) summarizes pretty neatly the problems
that so many historians of our day have had with the man nicknamed “The Beast”
(for his ugliness) by fellow Cambridge students: “He professes to detest—and,
worse, he really detests—what he is too limited to grasp: the subtler points of
philosophy, the mysteries of poetry, the sheer historical interest of
personages or causes he does not find sympathetic.”
At the same time, several huge problems exist when
Macaulay’s “Minute” and the circumstances surrounding it are examined:
*He did not
know Sanskrit. Indeed, his opportunity to learn the language was lost when
his Sanskrit-English dictionary fell overboard in his voyage to his new
assignment, forcing him to learn Portuguese.
*His
perspective was that of the ruler, not of someone seriously interested in a
different culture. His arrival in India was quite agreeable: Not only did
he receive a 15-gun salute when he set foot on the beach, but, he also noted, “I
traveled the whole four hundred miles between this (Ootacamund) and Madras on
men's shoulders.” He read European classics avidly during this time. Indian
arts, science and theology? Not on his radar.
*His policy
pronouncements had practical consequences. Governor General William
Bentinck accepted Macaulay's contentions, writing a year later that "the
great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European
literature and science among the natives of India." As a result, two Orientalists
retired from the Committee of Public Instruction, shifting the balance toward
the Anglicists who favored English instruction.
A people that sees its language extirpated is
halfway toward having not just their heritage but also their existence
discounted and even annihilated. Macaulay may have found such receptiveness to
his blithe dismissal of Indian languages and customs because the British
government had already been doing so closer to home, in Ireland. For six
centuries, one of the aims of British policy was to destroy the Irish language,
which the occupiers of the island widely regarded as a bulwark of attachment to
all things Irish.
In our own lifetime, other intellectuals have
elicited opprobrium for remarks as ill-considered as Macaulay’s about ethnic or
racial groups’ cultural achievements. Novelist Saul Bellow got into some
trouble for a 1988 interview with The New
York Times Magazine in which he asked flippantly, “Who is the Tolstoy of
the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read them." Samuel
Eliot Morison arrogantly wrote, in The
Oxford History of the American People, that the Famine Irish contributed “surprisingly
little to American economic life, and almost nothing to American intellectual
life.”
But the difference with Macaulay was that his views
would not only inform internal policies in a single colony, but also foreign
policy across the Atlantic, by two statesman enthralled as much by his
worldview as his writing style. Winston Churchill used Macaulay’s rhetorical devices in the speeches and other writings
that won him a Nobel Prize for Literature. Theodore Roosevelt was even more enthusiastic, hailing Macaulay’s
“eminently sane and healthy mind” as well as his “wholesome spirit and
knowledge of practical affairs.” In a private letter, he noted: “Of all the
authors I know[,] I believe I should first choose him [Macaulay] as the man
whose writings will most help a man of action who desires to be both efficient
and decent, to keep straight and yet to be of some account in the world.” Hyperkinetic
TR read Macaulay’s immense History all
the way through a number of times, including during the 1904 election.
Another aspect of Macaulay appealed to these two
leaders, however: his justification of a worldwide imperium centered on an
Anglo heritage and democratic values. Even before his projection of American
power beyond North America, T.R. had written The Winning of the West. Churchill, highly reluctant to see India
become independent, called his own epic narrative A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
Those who argue that British imperialism was a net
plus to colonial peoples can point to the economic advantage they hold in a
world where the de facto language of international commerce is business.
(English has also became the language of choice in communicating scientific
discoveries, as discussed in Michael D. Gordin’s article “Absolute English” for Aeon.)
But such a view is morally myopic, failing to
recognize that the element of self-interest that has obtained in imperial
enterprises even more than in normal international affairs. Across the maddeningly
diverse Indian subcontinent, Macaulay believed, the only hope was in “an
enlightened and paternal despotism.” Time has proven how easily paternalism can
shade into dominance when it comes to a “backward” colony and its allegedly
“civilized” conqueror.
In an 1833 speech in Parliament, Macaulay hailed
Britain’s “pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism,” in an “imperishable
empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.” Our…our…our…our. Might made right,
especially to deal with subjugated people on “our” terms.
Edward Said’s controversial 1978 study, Orientalism, surely overstated the case
when it claimed that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient,
was… a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” But Macaulay,
through his “Minute” on Indian education, provided the late Columbia University
scholar with one of the most devastating bits of evidence in his indictment
against the West.
