The first selection a speech on the India bill of 1833 and expresses his view of the
achievements and goals of the British Empire in the East. Between 1834 and 1838 he lived
in Calcutta and served on the British "Supreme Council for India". His
"Minute on Education, " from which the second selection below comes, touches on
the relation of Western and Indian civilizations.
Education and the English Empire in India
I feel that, for the good of India itself, the admission of natives to high office must
be effected by slow degrees. But that, when the fulness of time is come, when the interest
of India requires the change, we ought to refuse to make that change lest we should
endanger our own power, this is a doctrine of which I cannot think without indignation.
Governments, like men, may buy existence too dear. "Propter vitam vivendi perdere
causas," ["To lose the reason for living, for the sake of staying alive"]
is a despicable policy both in individuals and in states. In the present case, such a
policy would be not only despicable, but absurd. The mere extent of empire is not
necessarily an advantage. To many governments it has been cumbersome; to some it has been
fatal. It will be allowed by every statesman of our time that the prosperity of a
community is made up of the prosperity of those who compose the community, and that it is
the most childish ambition to covet dominion which adds to no man's comfort or security.
To the great trading nation, to the great manufacturing nation, no progress which any
portion of the human race can make in knowledge, in taste for the conveniences of life, or
in the wealth by which those conveniences are produced, can be matter of indifference. It
is scarcely possible to calculate the benefits which we might derive from the diffusion of
European civilisation among the vast population of the East. It would be, on the most
selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed
and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their
own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were
performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too
ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men
is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting
wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, would make it an useless and
costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from being our customers in
order that they might continue to be our slaves.
Are we to keep the people of India ignorant in order that we may keep them submissive?
Or do we think that we can give them knowledge without awakening ambition? Or do we mean
to awaken ambition and to provide it with no legitimate vent? Who will answer any of these
questions in the affirmative? Yet one of them must be answered in the affirmative, by
every person who maintains that we ought permanently to exclude the natives from high
office. 1 have no fears. The path of duty is plain before us: and it is also the path of
wisdom, of national prosperity, of national honor.
Source
From Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Speech in Parliament on the Government of India
Bill, 10 July 1833," Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, selected by G.M. Young
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 716-18
On Indian Education
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?
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.
What then shall that language be? One-half of the Committee maintain that it should be
the English. The other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question
seems to me to be, which language is the best worth knowing?
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 was 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.
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 the 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
historical 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.
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 preeminent
even among the languages of the west. It abounds with works 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. 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 would be the most useful to our native subjects.
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 universal confession, there are no books
on any subject 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 [note: a horse shoer]
-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.
We are not without experience to guide us. History furnishes several analogous cases,
and they all teach the same lesson. There are in modem times, to go no further, two
memorable instances of a great impulse given to the mind of a whole society,-of prejudices
overthrown,-of knowledge diffused,-of taste purified,-of arts and sciences planted in
countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous.
The first instance to which I refer, is the great revival of letters among the Western
nations at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that
time almost every thing that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the
ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction
has hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of Cicero and Tacitus; had they
confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island; had they printed nothing
and taught nothing at the universities but Chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and Romances in
Norman-French, would England have been what she now is? What the Greek and Latin were to
the contemporaries of More and Ascham [note: English humanists of the 16th century] our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more
valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanscrit literature be as
valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors. In some departments,-in History, for
example, I am certain that it is much less so.
In one 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 of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them
by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
Source
From Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian
Education," Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, selected by G. M. Young (Cambridge MA:
Harvard University Press, 1957), pp-721-24,729.
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