Macaulay, English, and the Myth of Colonial Liberation

Rebuttal to When RSS-Modi Attack Macaulay and English, They Attack Upward Mobility of Dalits, Shudras, Adivasis

Follow-Up to Macaulay, Macaulayputras, and their discontents

A new orthodoxy has taken hold. It claims that criticising Macaulay or colonial education is an attack on Dalit, Shudra, and Adivasi mobility. English, we are told, was not a colonial instrument but a liberatory gift. Macaulay is recast as an unintended ally of social justice. This view is wrong. More than that, it is historically careless and civilisationally corrosive.

The Core Error

The mistake is simple: confusing survival within a system with vindication of that system. No serious person denies that English became a tool of mobility in modern India. No serious person denies Ambedkar’s mastery of English or its role in courts and constitutional politics. But to leap from this fact to the claim that Macaulay was therefore justified is a category error. People adapt to power structures to survive them. That does not sanctify those structures. To argue otherwise is like saying famine roads liberated peasants because some learned masonry while starving. Adaptation is not endorsement.

Macaulay Was Explicit

There is no need to guess Macaulay’s intentions. He stated them plainly. He dismissed Indian knowledge as inferior. He wanted to create a small class:

“Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

This was not emancipation. It was an imperial staffing strategy. Colonialism first destroys local systems, then forces the colonised to climb the ruins using the conqueror’s tools. Later usefulness does not erase original contempt.

Why the ‘English as Dalit Liberation’ Frame Is Offensive

This argument rests on a hidden premise: that Indian civilisation itself had nothing to offer the oppressed. That Sanskritic, Bhakti, Sufi, vernacular, and subaltern traditions were only chains, never resources. That dignity had to arrive from Europe, validated by empire. This is not progressive. It is colonial logic, recycled. Social reform and anti-caste critique long predate Macaulay. They were uneven and contested, but they were alive. Colonialism did not create critique; it monopolised it and declared everything else obsolete.

Ambedkar Was Not Macaulay’s Vindication

Invoking Ambedkar to defend Macaulay is intellectual laziness. Ambedkar worked through the colonial structure because it existed. He did not endorse Macaulay’s civilisational judgement. Tactical brilliance is not philosophical alignment. To weaponise Ambedkar against critiques of colonialism is to misunderstand him.

The Elitism of English

Colonial education did not democratise English. It concentrated it. For over a century, English remained confined to a narrow elite. That remains largely true. The celebration of English ignores harder questions:

• Why vernacular education was underfunded

• Why translation movements were abandoned

• Why indigenous institutions were dismantled instead of reformed

Colonialism created a bottleneck, then congratulated itself when a few escaped through it.

Civilisations Are Not Placement Offices

The final tell is the purely economic defence: jobs, mobility, markets. These matter. But a civilisation is more than a ladder of incomes. It is a shared memory, a moral vocabulary, and languages capable of carrying law, poetry, science, and dissent. Colonialism attacks that foundation first. Economic adaptation comes later as damage control. Praising the latter while ignoring the former is praising the crutch and forgetting the broken leg.

The Mughal Contrast

The Mughals were conquerors and often brutal. But they ruled within the subcontinent’s civilisational space. They did not declare Indian knowledge worthless or impose epistemic subjugation. The British ruled from outside and recoded value itself. That difference matters.

The Point

Criticising Macaulay is not nostalgia. It is civilisational clarity. English is now an Indian language, and its utility is real. But utility does not rewrite history. We did not need epistemic humiliation to become modern. To say otherwise is to mistake survival for salvation.