CapitalistImperialistPig

I've already written a plethora of posts on the subject Zameer Masani's book on Macaulay( Macaulay: Pioneer of India's Modernization [Kindle Edition] ), but I have now finished and should sum up. I found the portrait of Macaulay and his times fascinating. Clever Tom, as he was known to his family and many others, was a prodigy. Much of his life was devoted to politics, and in an ages of speeches, he was a dominant force. Most of what he accomplished in life was by virtue of his speech or writing. He was an imperialist and a cultural chauvinist, but he saw himself as an agent of virtue. Born in modest circumstances, he died a wealthy baron. Some of his wealth was acquired as a result of very well paid service in India, but the bulk came from his writings, which were wildly popular in England, America, and Europe. Masani clearly approves of many Macaulay's actions in India, the most important of which were the establishment of open schools taught in English, the wri...

Perhaps no aspect of Macaulay's character is more surprising to the modern mind or more obnoxious to his enemies in India than his overt hostility to Indian religion and culture. It's also hard to imagine why this frank admirer of pagan Rome and Greece found superficially similar practices in India so offensive. Masani provides a clue: Though far from puritanical by Victorian standards, Macaulay was particularly outraged by what he considered the sexual immorality of Hindu iconography. His revulsion may well have been exaggerated by his own long suppressed sexuality. ‘Emblems of vice,’ he railed, ‘are objects of public worship. Acts of vice are acts of public worship. The courtesans are as much a part of the establishment of the temple, as much ministers of the god, as the priests.’ His greatest rage was reserved for the worship of Shiva, whose temple at Somnath Ellenborough was proposing to honour. Referring to the phallic cult of shivalingams, Macaulay declared: ‘I am asha...

It is a testimony to the far vaster scale of our planet in Macaulay's time that his voyage home from India took nearly six months. He chose his passage for comfort rather than speed, but in those days at the dawn of steam power, such long journeys still depended on the wind. When he traveled about in India, roads did not yet exist that could accommodate a carriage in the countryside.

Macaulay was a hypercritical person by temperament, a trait that combined with his talent for invective to be really useful in producing enemies, but it also carried many an argument for him. His chauvinistic attitudes were another obnoxious trait. He hated Versailles and considered it a vast waste of money. Italy didn't live up to his expectations, and the exteriors of its great cathedrals couldn't match Saint Paul's in London. When he got back to London he found the interior of Saint Paul's wanting by comparison with the Italians. It's very easy to see why the man would be resented in India. His bad tempered rhetoric was often turned on its literature, social organization, music, the character of the Bengalis - though the architecture did make an impression. Of course he was even more critical of most of his fellow Britons abroad. Even more obnoxious was the fact that he didn't bother to try to understand the literature and art that he dismissed so caval...

Macaulay's legal efforts were perhaps as significant as his educational. When he arrived, he found that Indian law was a jumble of older Islamic laws and fragments of British law. Different laws applied in different cities and different laws applied to different persons. Indians were effectively prevented from pursuing legal action against Europeans by a legal system that afforded the Europeans special privileges. The death penalty applied to many crimes including breaking a tea cup in another persons house, apparently even accidentally. A couple of his more controversial laws removed press censorship and established legal equality in civil law. The latter especially outraged his compatriots. He also designed an extremely progressive set of laws for the nation which were long considered a model of concision and simplicity. They were not enacted in his lifetime - mostly due to opposition from his countrymen - but according to Masani, still form the core of Indian law. Despit...

For Macaulay, an English education for India’s ruling elites had been only the first step in a far wider diffusion of modern learning to the largely illiterate mass of the subcontinent’s population. He had correctly predicted that the English language would be the key to success in a globalized knowledge economy. And he would almost certainly have lamented the fact that, almost two centuries later, Indian English, like medieval Latin in Europe, remains the preserve of the better of 10 per cent of the population who can afford to pay for it. He would probably have blamed the Indian state for its failure to provide free and equal access to English, in much the same way as he castigated the Orientalists of his own day for their backward-looking revivalism. Masani, Zareer (2012-11-16). Macaulay: Pioneer of India’s Modernization (Kindle Locations 3654-3660). Random House India. Kindle Edition.

Who were the "Orientalists" that Macaulay opposed, and what did they want? Well, mostly they were James Mill and his son John Stuart Mill, the noted philosopher. Here is Masani: ...And yet, the difference between their two positions was not so wide. Both agreed that government should promote some English teaching; the question was how quickly and extensively. Mill wanted efforts to be concentrated on a small elite of Indians who were already scholars of Oriental Studies and through whom knowledge would trickle down to the vernacular-speaking masses. Macaulay, on the other hand, wanted to use English as the medium for giving as many Indians as possible a Western education, responding to the aspirations of a rapidly expanding middle class and eventually of the entire population. Though not explicitly stated in his Minute, his ultimate goal was of an Indian empire whose citizens, like those of Rome, would become equal partners of their British mentors, with English, like Lati...

The British East India Company (EIC) began as traders, became free-booting mercenaries, and finally conquerors. Their ambition was to suck as much money as possible out of the territory. The company's bad behavior, and in particular it's role in exacerbating the catastrophic famine of 1770 attracted a lot of negative press in Britain. Mostly as a consequence, parliament took some tentative steps to reining in it's reckless rapacity. In particular, it set up a government "Board of Control" to oversee the EIC in India and required that the Company set aside some funds for "improving" the lives of Indians, including 100,000/yr rupees for educational work. These were the funds that were potentially available to the governor and his board, including Macaulay. It's worth noting that in England at the time, the government funds allocated for education were zero - it was a purely private enterprise. The powers of the board of control in Indian civil ...

As a reward for his critical work on electoral reform in England and in the anti-slavery cause, Macaulay was appointed to the board of control of the East India Company - a government appointed board tasked with oversight of the East India Company, which had lost some of it's autonomy after various outrages past. While there, he became interested in the work of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, who was then in London, and who had equally radical ideas on such then extreme ideals as the rights of man, racial equality, and women's rights, as well as his own radical take on religion. Roy died in London before Macaulay went to India, but many of Macaulay's policies, notions, and speeches appear to derive, at least in part, from Roy. According to Masani

He was a short and chubby youth with no athletic talent, a dedication to reading, and insufferably precocious – traits as certain to attract bullying in English public schools 200 years ago as today. He read, spoke and thought like an adult from the earliest ages. Naturally, school was utterly miserable for him. His mother was raised a quaker and his father was a strict and unsmiling evangelical. University was a new world. There he quickly attracted a crowd of intellectually minded admirers and became a debater of formidable skill. He was admitted to the bar, but quickly turned to politics, shifting his radically utilitarian politics to Whig. There he became a key advocate of radical political reform, championing the rights of Catholics, Jews, and the middle class, none of whom had the right to vote in those times. Like his father, he was ardently anti-slavery. He never married, but was utterly devoted to his younger sisters, especially two of them. Macaulay , by Zareer Masani ...

Swapan Dasgupta, writing in India Today , also takes on Masani. Excerpt: In view of the demonology over Macaulay, Zareer Masani's lucid and uncluttered biography of Macaulay-the first since Arthur Bryant's study in 1932-must fall into the category of revisionist history on two counts. First, Masani does not proceed on the assumption that the imperial system was a blot on the history of mankind and that its functionaries were little better than precursors of Hitler's SS. He treats Macaulay as a noble example of a gifted, if somewhat precocious, English Whig who, like many of his contemporaries, saw British rule in India as a mission. Masani has tried to evaluate Macaulay in the context of the value system of the early and mid-19th century, and not through the prism of the early 21st century's political correctness. Secondly, Masani has resisted the macabre temptation of hunting for an economic rationale to every policy initiative of the British Empire. Instead, he has st...

A not particularly friendly (or unfriendly) review here. Excerpt: Whereas Britain remembers Macaulay as the entertaining but misguided father of the Whig interpretation of history, which charted his country’s progress towards parliamentary democracy, Indian nationalists curse his legacy. During his four years as a colonial politician, they argue, he fastened the yoke of the English language onto India. Even today “Macaulay’s children” is a pejorative term for those he Westernised. In this brisk, well-written biography Zareer Masani comes forcefully to his defence.