Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Shashi Tharoor took on the England-Macaulay debate, arguing that the language must be in keeping with India’s own ethos. The acclaimed author said that English has taken over the country and it is the colonial hangover that must be rejected – not the language itself.
“Thomas Babington Macaulayin his infamous Record of Indian Education of 1835, he proposed the creation of “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinion, morals and intellect”. His goal was not cultural upliftment but colonial convenience – a cadre of officials and collaborators who would serve the British Empire more effectively than the British themselves,” Tharoor wrote Indian Express on December 11.
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Tharoor’s remarks come in the context of Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticizing the legacy of Macaulay’s 1835 education reforms. Hindustan Times Leadership Summit (HTLS) 2025, last week PM Modi spoke at length about the lasting impact of Thomas Macaulay’s education policy, which he described as sowing the seeds of a “colonial mindset” or a “slavery mindset” in India.
Tharoor claims that Macaulay dismissed centuries of Indian learning with breathtaking arrogance, declaring that “a single shelf in a good European library was worth all the original literature of India and Arabia”.
“Yet history, like language, has a way of turning the tables. The language of the rulers was appropriated and used as their own; it was the class that Macaulay sought to create that became the vanguard Indian nationalism. And English, far from remaining an instrument of subjugation, has become a weapon of resistance,” he writes.
A Kerala Member of Parliament says Macaulay’s legacy was not just linguistic. An education system that inspired favored Western knowledge and denigrated Indian traditions, he writes.
“For much of the post-independence decades, Indian children were taught in English-medium schools Shakespeare but not Kalidasahe read the Bible (or at least the biblical stories) but not the Ramayana, he studied the greatness of Greece and Rome but remained ignorant of the Mahabharata… This was not the fault of English per se,” he says.
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The problem was – and remains – a mindset, writes Tharoor. “A konial hangover that equated English with superiority and Indian knowledge with curiosity. It is this mindset, not the language, that deserves the prime minister’s wrath,” he says.
Congress leader says English occupies a special place in contemporary India. “It is condemned by politicians who rail against colonial vestiges, even as rickshaw pullers scrape together school fees to send their children to third-class ‘English medium’ schools,” he writes.
We need to get rid of Macaulay thinking, not English.
English has indeed served India well, writes Tharoor. But he says it must no longer be the only medium through which we validate ourselves. Tharoor says that “we have to drop Macaulay’s thinkingnot the English language.”
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“Let us discard the thinking that separates us from ourselves. Finally, Macaulay gave us a tool. We turned it into a weapon, a bridge, a mirror,” he writes.
