In discussions leading up to the Act Thomas Babington Macaulay produced his famous Memorandum on (Indian) Education which was scathing on the inferiority (as he saw it) of native (particularly Hindu) culture and learning.
There was therefore a need to produce—by English-language higher education—"a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect" who could in their turn develop the tools to transmit Western learning in the vernacular languages of India.
Macaulay, who was Legal Member of the Council of India, and was to be President of the committee, refused to take up the post until the matter was resolved, and sought a clear directive from the Governor-General on the strategy to be adopted.
In 1833 in the House of Commons Macaulay (then MP for Leeds),[3] had spoken in favour of renewal of the company's charter, in terms which make his own views on the culture and society of the sub-continent adequately clear: I see a government[4] anxiously bent on the public good.
I see the public mind of India, that public mind which we found debased and contracted by the worst forms of political and religious tyranny, expanding itself to just and noble views of the ends of government and of the social duties of man.In the peroration, he emphasized the moral imperative of educating Indians in English ways, not to keep them submissive but to give them the potential eventually to claim the same rights as the English: What is that power worth which is founded on vice, on ignorance, and on misery—which we can hold only by violating the most sacred duties which as governors we owe to the governed—which as a people blessed with far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and of intellectual light—we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priest craft?
To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens would indeed be a title to glory all our own.
He summarised his argument To sum up what I have said, I think it is clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813; that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied; that we are free to employ our funds as we choose; that we ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing; that English is better worth knowing than Sanskrit or Arabic; that the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanskrit or Arabic; that neither as the languages of law, nor as the languages of religion, have the Sanskrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our engagement; that it is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed.With Macaulay’s Minute – notes that are recorded during a meeting, highlighting key issues that are discussed, motions proposed or voted on, and certain activities that may need to be acted upon – his efforts were not always perceived in the kindest of light.
I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.
It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England.
In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.In 1937 and 1938, writers Edward Thompson and Percival Spear argued how Macaulay’s Minute was more “secondhand nonsense” and how the “decisive consideration was financial economy… it was cheaper to teach people to read in English than to subsidize translations in a variety of Indian languages….” With this came the idea of a divide in Indian society on how to approach this new way of thinking.
Despite some doing better off in a game of winners and losers, most natives were detrimentally affected by the Minutes, with many being impacted by this drastic shift into ‘westernizing’ of ‘Indian’ cultures.
He returned to the comparison later: Whoever knows [English] has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations.
[...] The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own; whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, whenever they differ from those of Europe, differ for the worse; and whether, when we can patronise sound Philosophy and true History, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines, which would disgrace an English farrier,—Astronomy, which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school,—History, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long,—and Geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.Mass education would be (in the fullness of time) by the class of Anglicised Indians the new policy should produce, and by the means of vernacular dialects: [...] it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people.
Relaying back to how only the elite could receive higher English education, this created the divide that resulted in the major religious and cultural shifts throughout India.
The Governor-General of India in Council has attentively considered the two letters from the Secretary to the Committee of Public Instruction,[9] dated the 21st and 22nd January last, and the papers referred to in them.
He conceives that the only effect of such a system can be to give artificial encouragement to branches of learning which, in the natural course of things, would be superseded by more useful studies and he directs that no stipend shall be given to any student that may hereafter enter at any of these institutions; and that when any professor of Oriental learning shall vacate his situation, the Committee shall report to the Government the number and state of the class in order that the Government may be able to decide upon the expediency of appointing a successor.
Fourth, His Lordship in Council directs that all the funds which these reforms will leave at the disposal of the Committee be henceforth employed in imparting to the native population a knowledge of English literature and science through the medium of the English language; and His lordship.On the news of the Act reaching England, a despatch giving the official response of the company's Court of Directors was drafted within India House (the company's London office).
The younger Mill was thought to hold similar views to his father, but his draft despatch turned out to be quite critical of the Act.
Mill argued that students seeking an 'English education' in order to prosper could simply acquire enough of the requisite practical accomplishments (facility in English etc.)
This analysis was acceptable to East India Company's Court of Directors but unacceptable to their political masters (because it effectively endorsed the previous policy of 'engraftment') and John Cam Hobhouse insisted on the despatch being redrafted to be a mere holding statement noting the Act but venturing no opinion upon it.
The East India Company directors responded with a despatch in 1841 endorsing the twin-track approach and suggesting a third: We forbear at present from expressing an opinion regarding the most efficient mode of communicating and disseminating European Knowledge.
At the same time we authorise you to give all suitable encouragement to translators of European works into the vernacular languages and also to provide for the compilation of a proper series of Vernacular Class books according to the plan which Lord Auckland has proposed.The East India Company also resumed subsidising the publication of Sanscrit and Arabic works, but now by a grant to the Asiatic Society rather than by undertaking publication under their own auspices.
[10] In 1861, Mill in the last chapter ('On the Government of Dependencies') of his 'Considerations on Representative Government' restated the doctrine Macaulay had advanced a quarter of a century earlier – the moral imperative to improve subject peoples, which justified reforms by the rulers of which the ruled were as yet unaware of the need for, "There are ... [conditions of society] in which, there being no spring of spontaneous improvement in the people themselves, their almost only hope of making any steps in advance [to 'a higher civilisation'] depends on the chances of a good despot.
The ruling country ought to be able to do for its subjects all that could be done by a succession of absolute monarchs guaranteed by irresistible force against the precariousness of tenure attendant on barbarous despotisms, and qualified by their genius to anticipate all that experience has taught to the more advanced nation.
They are feared, suspected, probably disliked by the population; seldom sought by them except for interested purposes; and they are prone to think the servilely submissive are the trustworthy.