English is a bridge, not a barrier

Knowledge of English propelled India’s breakthroughs in atomic energy, space research, and medicine
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The Prime Minister’s recent remarks on Macaulay and the “mindset of slavery” have revived an old discomfort many of us have carried but rarely articulated. How much harm did Macaulay do? What did he deprive Indians of? And what mindset changes are needed today?

When Macaulay wrote his famous 9,000-word minute in 1835, the goal of the British government was not to create an education system for the Indian public but to carve out a small English-educated class to assist the administration, interact with British officials, and work as intermediaries. A century later, this experiment produced what critics called “Macaulay’s children”, though in truth, these were Indians who used English to get things done, not people who lost their Indianness to it.

My parents illustrate this well. A century after Macaulay’s minute, they returned to work in British India after higher studies abroad. Even so, they kept a deeply Indian home, shaped by their ancestral roots and family temple in Goa. Regardless of which schools we, their children, attended — elite, missionary, or government — our sense of identity was anchored at home. Indigenous pathshalas had continued alongside English-medium schools throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, leaving cultural continuity intact. I too started schooling in a Municipal Marathi School, as my parents valued the mother tongue in early education. Later, I moved to two missionary-run girls’ schools, known for instilling discipline, building confidence, and English fluency. Our real learnings came from the Indianness of everyday life, family traditions, stories, festivals, home food, the way one behaved in public. My parents spoke Marathi at home.

The school curricula in the 1950s had serious shortcomings. Almost missing were chapters covering the depth of the Mauryan administration, Chanakya’s Arthashastra, or the vastness of the Indian state. South Indian history was ignored, leaving us to believe Indian history revolved around Delhi and the Gangetic plains. The focus was on nation building and the freedom struggle, sidelining broader civilisational narratives such as Partition and the trauma of displacement.

While we studied textbooks to pass examinations, English books opened our minds to worlds beyond our everyday experience. Without question, knowledge of English propelled India’s breakthroughs in atomic energy, space research, and medicine, all driven by first-generation English-educated scientists who were deeply Indian, but globally competent.

In daily life however, it was, and is even today, natural to speak in the local language. In North India, we who joined the civil services spoke in Hindi to Ministers, secretariat and field staff, and public visitors. In Maharashtra it was Marathi; in Tamil Nadu, Tamil; in West Bengal, Bengali. Not speaking the State’s language was unacceptable and carried costs. Many Tamil officers posted in Maharashtra even mastered idiomatic Marathi to overcome the “outsider” bias.

Not inferior

My contemporaries who joined the universities, medical colleges, and scientific institutions carried no sense of inferiority. English made us all legible to the world, not alienated from ourselves. Because we spoke English well, we could easily speak for India at meetings around the world, needing no interpretation. The ease of transacting professional dialogue with proficiency, far from making us feel “colonised”, made us shine.

But it was the next generation — like my children — growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, that became consciously anti-colonial in their reading of history. This shift was not accidental. The NCERT textbooks in the 1970s deliberately placed an emphasis on Indian social reformers, constitutionalism, and regional histories, giving children a more rooted and self-aware education. By the 1990s, children learned Sanskrit compulsorily, read Indian history more fully, and grew up bilingual or trilingual. They travelled on public transport, played cricket in the alleys, and absorbed Indian society in all its layers. Macaulay or no Macaulay, Gen Y developed a flexible identity and the ability to communicate with confidence.

Today, English fluency still matters but remains essential mainly within the corporate and professional circles. In the informal sector, which accounts for 90% of India’s workforce, English is just a practical tool, not a marker of identity. Even so, everyone recognises that English fluency advances careers, while the lack of it can hinder progress. Earlier, the lack of exposure to spoken English was attributed to unequal opportunities at home and at school. Now, Gemini and Siri fill those gaps, even as Uber drivers in the Hindi belt prefer hearing route directions in English.

Yet nearly 200 years after Macaulay, there is a new-found eagerness to conflate English usage with colonial loyalty. My contemporaries have begun deriding English conversation — sometimes even within their own families — for being “un-Indian”. Coming from those whose professional success rests on English, this is galling. The Prime Minister did not call for the abandonment of English; if his words are misread in that direction, India will harm itself.

Two chasms

Ignorance leading to superiority, not inferiority, lives in two chasms which stay unfilled. Generations of Indians have learnt little about caste oppression. Jyotirao Phule and B.R. Ambedkar were never taught in my generation or for decades thereafter — leaving me and my children (now in their fifties) blissfully unaware of the cruelty of caste. This gap was not Macaulay’s creation. It was (and is) the result of middle-class indifference to face uncomfortable truths.

The second chasm was created by Macaulay by urging the British to end funding for Sanskrit and Arabic as “bounties to raise up champions of error” — a prejudice that delayed Sanskrit’s revival for 150 years, erased state support to Arabic, and eventually pushed Urdu — an Indian language born of a Delhi dialect Khari Boli ( wrongly conflated with Islam) — into undeserved decline. The purpose of revisiting Macaulay’s legacy should not be to manufacture new resentments. English remains a bridge, not a barrier; and without question we must fill the historical and social gaps that Macaulay never created but that our mindsets have allowed to persist. Only if the Prime Minister’s words are read as a call to deepen our knowledge of India and shed unnecessary imitation of foreign lifestyles, the outcome will be constructive. That is the only sensible way to interpret the Prime Minister’s call.

Shailaja Chandra was formerly Secretary, Government of India, and Chief Secretary, Delhi

shailajachandra1@gmail.com

Published – March 01, 2026 05:22 am IST