Orientalist-Anglicist Controversy
Background: The General Committee of Public Instruction
- Prior to the 1830s, the Orientalists dominated the General Committee of Public Instruction (GCPI), which had been created in 1823 to administer the Government’s education programme in Bengal.
- The GCPI consisted of ten members.
- Within the Committee, two rival groups had emerged: the Orientalists, led by H.T. Prinsep, who advocated encouraging Oriental literature; and the Anglicists, or the “English Party,” who favoured adopting English as the medium of instruction.
- This equal division within the Committee made effective functioning extremely difficult.
- With the appointment of Charles Trevelyan to the GCPI, resistance against Orientalist policies grew, eventually reaching an impasse over the allocation of the one lakh rupees provided for under the 1813 Act.
- Stalemates in Committee meetings became frequent, and both parties ultimately referred their dispute to the Governor-General in Council for a decision.
- Macaulay, the future brother-in-law of Trevelyan, was then appointed to break the stalemate.
Comparing the Viewpoints in the Debate
- To engage meaningfully with this debate, it helps to compare the underlying viewpoints from which each side’s arguments were constructed.
- The idea of “intellectual improvement” of the natives: the solution, in this view, lay in exposing Indians to Western knowledge via English, or to their own traditional knowledge in Sanskrit and Arabic.
- Patriarchal notions of doing what was “best for the progress of the natives”: this contrasted Macaulay’s idea of exposure to European sciences with Wilson’s idea of reviving native culture and knowledge, so as to make Indians more receptive to British culture and ethics.
- Economic considerations: whether to print English books already in demand, or to render Western knowledge in Oriental languages, which might have a better chance of being readily accepted and understood.
- Perspective of liberty:Macaulay’s liberal outlook allowed him to argue that giving Indians access to superior knowledge would free them from the shackles of irrationality, backward ideas, and superstition.
- Wilson, conversely, argued that introducing European sciences at the cost of withdrawing scholarships for native knowledge did not uphold the very principles of justice and liberty so dear to the British themselves.
Macaulay’s Minute on Education
- As a member of the Executive Council, Macaulay wrote his famous Minute on educational policy, dated 2 February 1835, and placed it before the Council.
- Macaulay firmly favoured the viewpoint of the Anglicist Party.
- He displayed great contempt for Indian customs and literature, famously declaring that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
- On the utility and claims of the English language, he wrote: “Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and handed [down] in the course of ninety generations. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East.”
- He cited the examples of the European Renaissance and of Russia, dwelling upon “the great impulse given to the mind of a whole society — of prejudice overthrown, of knowledge diffused, of taste purified, of arts and sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous.”
- Macaulay’s underlying aim was, arguably, to create a class of persons who should be “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” — in other words, to produce “brown Englishmen” capable of filling the lower cadres of the Company’s administration.
- The resulting “Macaulayian system” represented a systematic effort by the British Government to educate the upper classes of India through the medium of English.
- Educating the masses was never Macaulay’s aim — as he wrote in 1835: “It is impossible for us with our limited means to attempt to educate the body of the people.”
- Instead, he placed implicit faith in the “infiltration theory.”
- He believed English-educated persons would act as a “class of interpreters,” who would, in turn, enrich vernacular languages and literature, thereby allowing knowledge of Western sciences and literature to eventually reach the masses.
- A natural corollary of this theory was that the development of vernacular languages should proceed only as ancillary to the teaching of English.
Macaulay versus H.H. Wilson
Macaulay’s Arguments
- Evidence suggests that Macaulay’s arguments were largely an extension of Trevelyan’s thinking, and were constructed roughly as follows:
- The one lakh rupees in question were meant to be used not merely for “reviving literature in India,” but also for the “introduction and promotion of a knowledge of sciences” among the inhabitants of British territories — and, in Macaulay’s view, the latter objective was suffering from excessive emphasis on the former.
- The Government’s central aim of the “intellectual improvement” of natives — whom he considered “barbarous, superstitious and irrational” — could not, in his view, be achieved through the vernacular languages, which he held to have little intrinsic value, given that translating works from English into so many dialects was next to impossible.
- The same argument, he held, applied equally to Sanskrit and Arabic, making English the supposedly natural choice, offering “ready access to vast intellectual wealth.”
- His next argument challenged the Orientalist strategy of securing native cooperation by teaching Sanskrit and Arabic.
- Macaulay held that this was scarcely necessary, since natives themselves were already keen to learn English.
- He supported this claim by pointing out that while natives were willing to pay to learn English, they had to be offered scholarships merely to engage in traditional learning.
- He further appealed to the economic value of Western learning, which was sure to provide employment to natives, unlike Sanskrit and Arabic, which lacked the power to remunerate those who laboured to acquire proficiency in them.
- On this basis, he accused Orientalist policy of misleading students by encouraging them to study subjects of no practical value — citing, as evidence, a petition presented by students of the Sanskrit College, whose grievance concerned the futility of their education in terms of job prospects.
- He ultimately concluded that English should become the language of knowledge dissemination, and that scholarships for traditional languages should be withdrawn.
- The best the government could aim for, in his view, was to create a class of intermediaries between the wider population and the British — a class that would become the flag-bearers of English knowledge, virtue, and ideals.
H.H. Wilson’s Argument
- H.H. Wilson, an influential Orientalist, strongly rebutted Macaulay’s Minute, grounding his rebuttal in an ideology of “empire-of-opinion.” More specifically, he countered Macaulay’s arguments as follows:
- Withdrawing funding for scholarships at colleges teaching native knowledge amounted, in Wilson’s view, to a serious breach of the trust the British had carefully cultivated with the Indians.
- This would, he argued, “defeat the very purpose in view… the intellectual, moral and religious improvement of the people of India,” by impressing upon Indian minds that they and their rulers held conflicting feelings and interests.
- The Anglicist assumption that natives had no genuine interest in their own languages was, according to Wilson, disproved when Macaulay’s Minute provoked a petition signed by 8,000 Mohammedans, pleading for the continuance of the Madrassa.
- Wilson argued that petitioners understood that withdrawing scholarships effectively meant closing an institution, since students depended heavily on such support.
- Stipends, he pointed out, were a common norm even in Britain — and he saw an even greater need for scholarships in India, where they often constituted the only means of livelihood for students.
- His next point concerned the language of instruction.
- English, in his view, was too foreign a language to effectively introduce Indians to Western knowledge; this had instead to be done in forms familiar to them.
- He believed that learned natives would, over time, come to recognise the errors in their own practices and gradually look up to Western culture and learning.
- From a more practical standpoint, he argued that natives had a right to demand funding for the studies they deemed fit, particularly since they themselves were the ones generating revenue for the British.
- His central argument was that Indians would voluntarily and willingly accept the soundness of English culture, transmitted through “able pundits and maulvis, who should add English to Sanskrit and Arabic, who should expose the absurdities of their own systems and advocate adoption of European knowledge.”
- This, Wilson believed, would produce a far more fundamental change than a merely rudimentary grasp of the English language — one that, on its own, would fail to instil the very values the British sought to spread.
- Withdrawing funding for scholarships at colleges teaching native knowledge amounted, in Wilson’s view, to a serious breach of the trust the British had carefully cultivated with the Indians.
The Resolution of 1835 and its Aftermath
- A month after its circulation, Macaulay’s Minute became official policy, when Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General of India, signed the resulting resolution.
- The Resolution of 7 March 1835 accepted Macaulay’s position that, going forward, the object of the Company’s Government should be the promotion of European literature and sciences through the medium of English, and that all funds would henceforth be spent for this purpose.
- For Macaulay, this represented a clear victory over his detractors — particularly the Orientalists, the East India Company officials, scholars, translators, and collectors who had supported instruction in India through Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian.
- Bentinck’s resolution was followed by further enactments that accelerated the growth of English education in India.
- The first was the Freedom of the Press Act (1825), which encouraged the printing and publication of books, and made English books available at low cost.
- Two years later, to the considerable dismay of Muslims, Persian was abolished as the official language of record and the courts, replaced by English in the higher courts and Indian languages in the lower courts.
- Thereafter, the Government made only half-hearted efforts to develop the vernacular languages, largely leaving the development of literature in these languages to the genius and needs of the people who spoke them.
- In the North-West Provinces (modern Uttar Pradesh), Mr. James Thomason, Lieutenant-Governor during 1843–53, made efforts to develop a comprehensive scheme of village education through the medium of the vernacular languages.
- The smaller English schools were abolished, with English education henceforth confined to colleges.
- In these village schools, useful subjects such as mensuration and agricultural science were taught through the medium of the vernaculars.
- Above all, a Department of Education was organised for the inspection and improvement of indigenous schools.
- The motivating force behind Thomason’s plan was, ultimately, to train personnel for employment in the newly established Revenue and Public Works Departments of the province.
- In the North-West Provinces (modern Uttar Pradesh), Mr. James Thomason, Lieutenant-Governor during 1843–53, made efforts to develop a comprehensive scheme of village education through the medium of the vernacular languages.
