“Empowered by Goddess English, Dalits can take their place in the new globalised world. Imagine, if we had followed only indigenous study, we would be like Afghanistan or Nepal today,” were the words of Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit activist on 25 October 2006 while celebrating 206th birthday in Delhi of Thomas Babington Macaulay (TBM), known more as Lord Macaulay (25 October 1800 - 28 December 1859). The birthday party was to unveil a portrait of the newly invented ‘Goddess of English’. He even took the lead to build a unique temple of English Devi in a village in Uttar Pradesh to popularise English.
Prasad has taken the lead for his innovative project when Lord Macaulay is being condemned by using the term ‘Macaulay’s Children’ especially by self-proclaimed nationalists and the leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and Sangh Parivar. Macaulay introduced a new education system and ensured that English, not Persian or sanskrit, became the lingua franca. "We have received requests from our sister organisations in Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra for setting up this novel 'English Devi' temple," said Chandra Bhan Prasad, a researcher at Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) who is the brain behind the move.
Though Dr. Narendra Jadhav, a nominated Member of Parliament in Rajya Sabha by the Modi Government and one of the authorities on Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, may not be on the same page with Prasad, but he was quite impressed by the celebration of the birthday of Lord Macaulay and the concept of the Goddess of English. He was rather first to bring it to the notice of this writer way back in 2011 when he was a Member of the Planning Commission headed by his Guru and PM Dr. Manmohan Singh and also a Member of the National Advisory Council headed by the UPA Chairperson Smt. Sonia Gandhi. An Oxford educated Indian historian Dr. Zaheer Minoo Masani in his well researched and an out of the box book ‘Macaulay: Pioneer of India’s Modernization’ reveals: “..in the living room of a leading Dalit intellectual (in Delhi), Macaulay’s portrait hangs proudly beside that of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, the brilliant academic who led the ‘Untouchable’ political and social revival during the first half of the twentieth century. There is a strong facial resemblance between the two men, but the similarities do not end there. Ambedkar, like Macaulay whom he greatly admired, was a classical liberal who believed that India’s future lay, not with nationalist revivals of the past, but with the wholehearted adoption of Western education and institution.” Zareer Masani reclaims Macaulay as a pioneer of globalisation based on the English language and Western values. A strong advocate of liberal interventionism across the globe, he was the ideological precursor of today's Western military interventions in the world’s trouble-spots.
Chandra Bhan Prasad, also a columnist with Pioneer Daily, has a provokingly different take on Macaulay, says historian William Dalrymple. Prasad feels it is the ‘caste-Hindu’ racism that has painted Macaulay black. He asserts with examples how his sayings have been distorted and quoted out of contexts to subvert the facts. He holds that Macaulay was one of the foremost rationalists of his time. Was Macaulay attempting to create 'Intellectual slaves' for the British Empire? Yes, if we just read the following: "We must at present do our best to form a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect". We, in a most mischievous manner, present the above quote, twisted, taken out of context, and thus, present Lord Macaulay as a villain.
No, if we read the full paragraph as originally available in his February 1835 "Minutes" on Indian education. "It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population."
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Zaheer Masani’s Macaulay
