Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limited All rights reserved. English education did not really achieve the goal intended by its first sponsors, the British. (istockphoto) Summary Indians embraced English for employment and enrichment, turning it into a powerful tool for colonial resistance In 1784, two white men joined forces to establish an English school in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu. John Sullivan was British representative at the court of the local rajah, while CF Schwartz was a missionary who worked for a long time in India. In promoting English education, they naturally had specific goals. Sullivan lamented how British officials depended on “self-seeking dubashes” (interpreters) for business. If the “chief natives” adopted English, however, these troublesome middlemen could be eliminated. What attracted Schwartz, meanwhile, was that Western education offered to break the “stubborn attachment” Indians had to their religion, helping the “spread of Christianity.” Higher-ups in London agreed. For them, English instruction promised another benefit: the inculcation of “native minds” with “respect for the British nation”. On the face of it, it was a perfect “win-win”. Except these figures did not include a key element: the motivations of Indians themselves. India’s involvement with English has been in the news a lot lately. This follows a recent speech by the Prime Minister, in which he cited the infamous Lord Macaulay and his colonial-era attempt to apparently “uproot Bharat from its own foundation” by creating a class of Indians who are brown in color but white in spirit. The result, the Prime Minister added, was a “sense of inferiority” about all things Indian, with a mindless ape of the West and a devaluation of local languages. To a serious extent this is true, in that English and what it represents has gained – and still holds – immense power in our country. For example, there remain patrician clubs where the dress code frowns on kurta-pajamas and permits brogues, but not Kolhapuri slippers. Fifty years after independence, Salman Rushdie could similarly claim that “Indian writers working in English” were producing “more important” work than those writing in our bhashas—a comment that certainly did not age well. That said, it is simplistic to assume that British scoundrels of Macaulay’s type landed here with wicked designs, and that Indians tragically succumbed to said designs. Because the fact is that the British became very dissatisfied with the way “natives” deployed English and subverted the colonizer’s grammar book for their own purposes. For example, Schwartz in Thanjavur hoped to spread Christianity via his school. Yet it was clear from the start that most pupils were simply learning English for “temporary welfare”. That is, they saw the language as a route to work and enrichment – money they then poured into temples and local institutions. Decades later, missionaries would find that Brahmins also read the Bible, viewing it not as a vehicle for spiritual rediscovery, but as that everyday thing: a textbook. Indians, in other words, did not passively stick to a script written by foreign puppet masters. They had agency and engaged selectively, and indeed strategically, with Western food. Take one of India’s earliest high-profile products of English education: the Thanjavur rajah Serfoji II (1777-1832) was taught directly by Schwartz. He spoke more than one European language, “radiated English poetry”, studied modern science, collected books from around the world, enjoyed Western music and even referred to his missionary teacher as his “father”. On the surface, Serfoji is a perfect example of brown complexion plus white culture. Yet the rajah never repented. In fact, he was a patron of temples and Vedic academies, inclined to distribute cows to Brahmins, possessed a magnificent collection of Sanskrit manuscripts and remained, as a disappointed European visitor put it, a “slave of Hindu superstition”. Naturally, he admired Western advances in medicine, technology, etc., and translated them into local languages. But it was a confident, calculated embrace of European ideas, without separating itself from the wider package we call cultural identity. But Serfoji was a prince. What about more ordinary men? While employment was one element in Indians’ zeal for English education, it does not tell the whole story. As the scholar Parimala V.Rao notes, of the 900 boys who graduated from English schools in Western India between 1824-36, less than 100 sought official posts. Yes, many white men offering English education thought they were creating an army of loyalist clerks to serve the Raj. Yet English also produced “political leaders, professional men and intellectuals”. One of the first systematic critiques of colonial rule emerged just six years after Macaulay’s views were aired. In 1841, a young man named Bhaskar Pandurang published a review, which surprised British imperialism for its racism, economic devastation, its religious agenda, and more. And he did it in the English language in an English newspaper; he seized Western weapons to attack Western power. Indians involved in teaching were also aware of the politics surrounding English education; they were not meek instruments of a colonial agenda. For example, the Bengali textbook writer Akshay Kumar Datta (1820-66) worked hard to bring modern science to his people. He acknowledged European technological superiority and criticized an Indian tendency to place too much faith in custom. But he was not ignorant of the context in which European science came to India; he could see his country’s political prostration. White men here, he declared, showed “greed”, “self-love and immense malice”. They embodied “humble instincts.” That is, even as he admired the West’s technical achievements and encouraged Indians to learn, this approval was neither unqualified nor total. Accepting value in English education was not tantamount to legitimizing colonialism. If that were the case, BG Tilak – a fiery nationalist if ever there was one – would have set up old-fashioned pathasalas, not the New English School and Fergusson College. None of this suggests that English was not disruptive; it drove patronage away from local knowledge systems and languages ​​in many places, and the damage has still not been repaired. It has also created a kind of anglicized Indian whose idea of ​​achievement is entirely Western; there are frameworks of thought that do alienate us from our own. Jawaharlal Nehru thought adopting English as “the official all-India language” was “humiliating”. Mahatma Gandhi was even more damning. Yet it is also true that English’s place in our history is not black and white. As for colonialism, we need only ask whether English achieved the goals intended by its first sponsors. It was expected that Western education would Christianize India. It failed. And if white figures in the 1780s thought English would make loyal subjects of “natives,” a hundred years later colored men from across the country gathered under the banner of the Indian National Congress to chart the course for anti-British nationalism. And they did it in English. Which explains why the status of this language in India remains: “It’s complicated.” Manu S. Pillai is a historian and author, most recently, of Gods, Guns and Missionaries. Get all the Business News, Market News, Breaking News Events and Latest News Updates on Live Mint. 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