India should discard Macaulay mindset of slavery, not English language: Tharoor

Shashi Tharoor wades into English–Macaulay row, argues India should discard mindset of slavery, not the language

Congress Member of Parliament (MP) Shashi Tharoor has waded into the English–Macaulay debate, arguing that the language must align with India's own ethos. The acclaimed author said English has empowered the country, and it is the colonial hangover that must be rejected—not the language itself.

“Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his infamous 1835 Minute on Indian Education, proposed the creation of “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. His goal was not cultural upliftment but colonial convenience — a cadre of clerks and collaborators who would serve the British Empire more efficiently than the British themselves,” Tharoor wrote in Indian Express on 11 December.

Tharoor's remarks come on the context of Prime Minister Narendra Modi criticising the legacy of Macaulay's 1835 education reforms. At the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit (HTLS) 2025, last week, PM Modi spoke extensively about the lasting impact of Thomas Macaulay's education policy, which he described as sowing the seeds of a "colonial mindset" or "mindset of slavery" in India.

Tharoor argues that Macaulay dismissed centuries of Indian learning with breathtaking arrogance, declaring that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”

“Yet history, like language, has a way of turning tables. The language of the rulers was appropriated by the ruled and used as their own; the very class Macaulay sought to create became the vanguard of Indian nationalism. And English, far from remaining a tool of subjugation, became a weapon of resistance,” he writes.

The Kerala Member of Parliament says that Macaulay's legacy was not just linguistic. The education system he inspired privileged Western knowledge and denigrated Indian traditions, he writes.

“Well into the post-Independence decades, Indian children in English-medium schools learned Shakespeare but not Kalidasa, read the Bible (or at least Bible stories) but not the Ramayana, studied the greatness of Greece and Rome but remained ignorant of the Mahabharata… This was not the fault of English per se,” he says.

The problem was — and remains — the mindset, Tharoor writes. “A colonial hangover that equated English with superiority and Indian knowledge with quaintness. It is this mindset, not the language, that deserves the Prime Minister's ire,” he says.

The Congress leader says English occupies a curious place in contemporary India. “It is denounced by politicians who thunder against colonial residues, even as rickshaw-pullers scrape together tuition fees to send their children to third-rate “English-medium” schools,” he writes.

Indeed, English has served India well, Tharoor writes. But, he says, it must no longer be the only medium through which we validate ourselves. Tharoor says that “we must shed the Macaulay mindset, not the English language.”

“Let us discard the mindset that disconnects us from ourselves. In the end, Macaulay gave us a tool. We turned it into a weapon, a bridge, a mirror,” he writes.

Source: LiveMint
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