MACAULAY’S MINUTE-1835

MACAULAY’S MINUTE-1835

Lord Macaulay (landed in India on June 10, 1834), the Law Member of the Governor General’s Executive Council was also appointed President of Committee on Public Instruction. Asked to interpret the implications of the section concerning education in the Charter Act of 1813, he presented a lengthy minute to Bentinck. A few extracts from his minute are given here. 

Macaulay’s Views on Indian and European Literature 

“A single shelf of a good European literature was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” 

“The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the west ...... Whoever knows 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 greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together ......... In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become language of commerce throughout the seas of the East.” 


About teaching through the media of Sanskrit and Arabic, he stated. “We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company of 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 the natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can we reasonably or 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 texts of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat ?” 

“It seems to be the opinion of some of the gentlemen who compose the Committee of Public Instruction that the course which they have hitherto pursued was strictly prescribed by the British Parliament in 1813 ......... It does not appear to me that the Act of Parliament can by any art of interpretation be made to bear the meaning which has been assigned to it. It contains nothing about the particular languages or sciences which are to be studied. A sum is set apart ‘for the revival and promotion of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories’. It is argued, or rather taken for granted, that by literature Parliament can have meant only Arabic and Sanskrit literature, that they never would have given the honourable appellation of ‘a learned native’ to a native who was familiar with the poetry of Milton ......... and the physics of Newton ......... ” 

“We want a class of persons Indian in blood and colour but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect". in morals and in intellect.” 

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