ENGLISH EDUCATION TO DESTROY TIMELESS BHARAT’S NATIONAL HINDU IDENTITY-IV 

V.SUNDARAM I.A.S.

Front cover of the book

In Chapter 2 of this book, these authors have described in detail as to how the introduction of Macaulay system of English education introduced in 1835 laid a solid foundation for the destruction of the ancient Gurukula system of education, Hindu religion, Hindu culture, Hindu society and Sanatana Dharma.

LORD MACAULAY
(1800-1859)

LORD WILLIAM BENTINCK (1774-1839)

Lord Macaulay arrived in India in 1834 and took up the post of the Legal Member in the Governor General’s Council in Calcutta. Lord William Bentinck (1774-1839) was the Governor General of India at that time. Even before coming to India Macaulay’s anti-Hindu and anti-Indian views on education policy were well-known. He drafted his famous Minutes on Education Policy on 2 February 1835 and 7 March 1835. Lord Bentinck put his seal of approval on the Minutes of Macaulay on 7 March 1835.

What really emerges from the official and known records is that Macaulay, Lord Bentinck and Sir Charles Trevelyan (1807-1886) PLOTTED TOGETHER TO DEFEAT THE STRONG CASE MADE OUT FOR THE CONTINUANCE OF ORIENTAL SYSTEM OF EDUCATION IN INDIA WHICH WAS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED BY ORIENTALISTS LIKE H.H Wilson, J.C.C Southerland, J.T Princep and, James Princep of the Brahmi script decipherment fame. These Orientalists were all members of the General Committee of Public Instruction (GCPI). Macaulay carried the day along with Charles Trevelyan, who was his brother-in-law. There is also clear documentary evidence to prove that Macaulay had written to his sister in December 1834 itself mentioning that Lord Bentinck had given his informal consent in favour of Christian missionaries in India and Macaulay’s English-oriented approach to the policy on Indian Education.

According to Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit, in order to discontinue the teaching of Sanskrit and also to dismantle and discard the entire prevailing education system, Macaulay resorted to the most absurd logic and launched a blistering attack on the opposition by the Orientalists. To quote Macaulay’s words: ‘As it seems to be the opinion of some of the Gentlemen who compose the General Committee of Public Instruction (GCPI) that the course which they have hitherto pursued was strictly prescribed by the British Parliament in 1813 … it is argued, or rather taken for granted, that by literature the Parliament can have meant only Arabic and Sanskrit literature; that they never would have given the Honourable appellation of a ‘learned native’ to a native who was familiar with the poetry of Milton, the metaphysics of Locke, and with the physics of Newton; but that they meant to designate by that name only such persons as might have studied in the sacred books of the Hindoos all the uses of Cusa-Grass, and all the mysteries of absorption into Deity … This does not appear to be a satisfactory interpretation ... if the Government has given to any person a formal assurance — nay, if the Government has excited in any person (‘s) mind a reasonable expectation, —  that he shall receive a certain income as a teacher of a learner of Sanskrit or Arabic, I would respect that person’s Pecuniary interests … But to talk of a Government pledging itself to teach certain languages and certain sciences, though those languages may become useless, though those languages may be exploded, seems to me quite unmeaning’.

JAMES PRINSEP
(1799-1840)  

Abb.: James Prinsep

[Bildquelle: Wikipedia, GNU FDLicence]

H.H.WILSON

(1786-1860)

In order to understand the above Minutes of Macaulay, it is necessary to look at the Charter Act of 1813 passed by the British Parliament that Macaulay is referring to above. The relevant portion (Clause XLIII) of the East Indian Company Charter Act of 1813 says: “And be it further enacted … after defraying the expenses of the military, civil, and commercial establishments, and paying the interests of debt, in manner herein-after provided, a sum of not less than one Lakh of Rupees in each year shall be set apart and applied to the revival and improvement of literature and encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories in India.

It is a well-documented fact that the above quoted Clause XLIII above was incorporated duly in the 1813 Charter Act of the Company largely because of Lord Minto’s views favoring the ‘revival’ of literature and traditional Indian learning as set out in his well-known Minutes of 6 March 1811. We can see from Macaulay’s mean, mendacious, malicious and mischievous Minutes above that he not only re-interpreted the 1813 Act absurdly but also imputed pecuniary motives to those distinguished Orientalists who were opposing Macaulay’s evangelical, colonial and racist designs against the traditional Indian educational system.

Macaulay himself admitted (rarest of the rare admission indeed!!!) that he had no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic languages. And yet, despite this admission, we cannot fail to see the overweening racial arrogance oozing out of the following foolish Minutes of Macaulay: ‘I have no knowledge of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. 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 Arabic (he meant Arabia).  The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those Members of the General Committee for Public Instruction (GCPI) who support the Oriental plan of education. … It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England’.

The anti-Hindu, anti-national and anti-social Congress party---the private zamindari of Sonia Gandhi--- and her paid slavish minions in the UPA Government subscribe to the views of Lord Macaulay expressed in the paragraph above.

Macaulay savagely attacked the Sanskrit language and Gurukula system of education when he wrote the following Minutes: ‘It is confessed that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We are to teach it because it is fruitful of monstrous superstitions. WE ARE TO TEACH FALSE HISTORY, FALSE ASTRONOMY, FALSE MEDICINE, BECAUSE WE FIND THEM IN COMPANY OF A FALSE RELIGION’. This is the view of the Firangi Memsahib Sonia Gandhi and the savagely ignorant anti-Hindu highly educated secular Indians of today-- 175 years after Lord Macaulay spoke those words.

After saying all this, Macaulay made out the following case for the immediate introduction of English as a medium of education in India. “We have to educate a people, who cannot at present be educated by means of their own mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with the works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us … whoever knows that language 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 the generations. It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that language, is of a greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class … whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of the country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.”

When I re-read the above outlandishly foolish Minutes of Macaulay, I cannot help observing that he seems to take special delight in declaring thus: ‘I won’t be satisfied if you are already aware of my Himalayan imperial colonial ignorance and Christian superciliousness stemming from my racial arrogance. My White English Christian soul shall rest in peace, only if I can get on top of a public podium and proclaim with imperial authority the boundless extent, altitude, magnitude, and volume of my colossal British colonial ignorance of ancient India and her deathless culture.’

Finally, the real colonial intention of the policy of permanent mental enslavement of the natives of India was declared by Lord Macaulay at the end of his famous Minutes cited above: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern — A CLASS OF PERSONS INDIAN IN BLOOD AND COLOUR, BUT ENGLISH IN TASTES, IN OPINIONS, IN MORALS AND IN INTELLECT’.

And the rest is history. Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit have rightly concluded that in FREE INDIA TODAY, WE ARE MORE BURDENED WITH MACAULAYISM THAN IN BRITISH INDIA. The ‘Class’ created by Macaulay for British colonial purposes in 1835 continues to remain firmly entrenched in the India of today and continues to be the ‘Interpreter’ between the Indian masses and the new political bosses. Our decadent and colonial educational system even today continues to produce only ‘Interpreters’ who are “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and intellect”.

During the past six centuries the most belligerent, the most rapacious, the most power-drunk section of humanity has been precisely the Christian Western world. Its armies followed by its priests and merchants … its peculiar brand of “Christian Love” has generally manifested itself in pitiless extermination, enslavement, coercion, destruction of traditional cultures and their values … and the spread of alcoholism and venereal diseases and mercenary ruthlessness and the like.

In Chapter 3 titled ‘History of Indian History Writing’, Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit, have convincingly proved how the tool of history and history writing has been mischievously used by the Congress Government and Communist Governments after our Independence to politically intimidate and culturally undermine the Hindus of India.

Max Mueller wrote as follows to the Duke of Argyll on December 16, 1868: “India has been conquered ONCE, but India must be conquered AGAIN, and that second conquest should be CONQUEST BY EDUCATION”.

What did Max Mueller mean by FIRST CONQUEST? He was referring to the victory of Lord Macaulay and his English system of education, in 1835, over the Oriental learning that had been recommended by distinguished Orientalists like H.H Wilson, James Princep. These distinguished Orientalists had recommended the continuance and wider diffusion of traditional learning through languages like Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarathi, Assamese, Hindi, Arabic, Urdu and Persian. We can see the clever timing of Max Mueller’s letter. One generation had passed after the introduction of English as a medium of education in 1835. The Universities of Madras, Calcutta and Bombay had been established by 1860. The first batch of “brown Sahib” graduates in English education had come out of these Universities.

It was in the larger British colonial interests to mislead the minds of these young ‘brown Sahibs’ about the cultural heritage of ancient India. Physical and geographical political enslavement of India had been completed by 1850. The imperial foundations for the cultural enslavement and colonization of the minds, hearts and souls of the Indians had been well and truly laid by Lord Macaulay in collusion with the Governor General Lord William Bentinck in 1835. Max Mueller wanted this process to be taken to its logical conclusion through the hastening of the process of SECOND CONQUEST.

The SECOND CONQUEST was fully achieved by 1900 in a matter of less than two generations. Thus the following dream of Macaulay expressed vigorously in his Minutes of 1835 had thus become a reality in 1900: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern — A CLASS OF PERSONS INDIAN IN BLOOD AND COLOUR, BUT ENGLISH IN TASTES, IN OPINIONS, IN MORALS AND IN INTELLECT’. Maulana Jawaharlal Nehru had just such a mindset and he was very proud of that slavish mentality.

MAX MULLER (1823-1900)

When Max Mueller spoke about the need for the SECOND CONQUEST in 1868, he was clear in his mind that not only British authorities in England and India but also the newly arrived Indian ‘brown Sahibs’ turned out by our Universities at that time should participate with gusto in publicly proclaiming the denigrating assessments of Macaulay on the knowledge contained in Sanskrit literature as absolutely fair, correct and authentic. These ‘brown Sahibs’ were expected to function with the rare degree of dedication and cold-blooded detachment as Anglican torch bearers of the new English system of anti-Sanskrit and anti-Hindu enslaving education. These half-baked hybrid Indians with a colonial mindset started endorsing wholeheartedly the following assessment of Lord Macaulay. ‘It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at Preparatory Schools in England.’

According to Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit, this ‘class’ of persons created by Macaulay and supported by Max Mueller have continued their colonial cultural and intellectual depredations even in post-Independent India. This was made possible by the imposition of minority-appeasing political programme and pernicious  philosophy of anti-Hindu “secularism” of Jawaharlal Nehru who served as the First Prime Minister of Independent India for 17 long years from 1947 to 1964.

The two authors have rightly pointed out that as a fallout from the policy of anti-Hindu minority appeasement of the Government of India, in a strange manner history has virtually taken over the media space available for academics, during the last 10 years. The endless debates, newspaper articles, talks in seminars, acrimonious television shows, radio talks and publication of books and pamphlets would easily prove this point. This is an unprecedented development. It is hard to believe that even Court Cases have been filed and the Human Rights Commission has been approached for requisite legal relief on the subject of Curriculum, in general, and Social Science Curriculum, including history Curriculum, in particular, alleging ‘SAFFRONISATION’, ‘COMMUNALIZATION’ and ‘TALIBANISATION’ of Education and History.

The authors have rightly pointed out that history, history writing and history teaching have, indeed become newsworthy not only in India but also in most other parts of the world. The reasons may be different, varying from country to country — the construction of a National History Curriculum in England and Wales, the decision of National History Standards in Germany, the approach to invasion of Latin American countries by the Europeans, the development of new curricula in the successor states of the former USSR, or even the re-writing of History text books in Russia after the collapse of the former USSR. To quote the words of Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit, “Issues of identities, heritage and citizenship, all rooted in the past, have become the hot stuff of politics.”

I fully endorse the view of these two authors when they write: “To say that History is a science, as many Marxist historians propagate, is nothing but a fallacy”. David Clarke was right when he expressed the view that History is an ‘undisciplined’ discipline. The writing of history involves not only facts but also the political, social, economic and other kinds of ideological agendas and claptrap of historians.

According to Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit problems begin when the hard facts of history are trimmed, selectively quoted or presented in a coloured and distorted manner or even swept under the carpet to suit the historian’s Marxist agenda. Such attempts and practices have led to the presentation of not only factually incorrect history but also distorted history, which finally results in the distortion of a nation’s history, it’s peoples past and their identity.

Against this background these two authors have come to the irrefutable conclusion that for the past 40 years, the stage of Indian history has been dominated, managed and controlled by those openly professing a Marxist approach to history and proudly flaunting their membership cards of one communist party or another. They have controlled not only institutions of Higher learning but also the national research funding agencies like the University Grants Commission (UGC), the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), the Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR), the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR). Even the elementary and Higher Secondary Education and educational organisations like the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT), The State Councils of Educational Research and Training and Boards of Secondary Education have not escaped the vicious Marxist attention. All of them have been forced to function under their thumbs. These two authors have concluded thus: “Through people selectively placed in these organisations, our Marxist activists have implemented their political, social and economic agenda and got their own books, research monographs and textbooks published, prescribed and taught”.

One of the most disturbing — and of course interesting — aspects of the recent campaign of the ‘eminent’ Marxist historians has been their contention that history cannot be re-written or revised (once the Marxists have re-written them!!!) One of the known toadies of the Marxist party, a dubious scholar called R.S Sharma, recently wrote an article in a newspaper in which he shamelessly said that there should not be any tampering with history, at least in those areas on which there is a general consensus among historians. When asked about the topics on which there is “general consensus” and the historians among whom this consensus has been arrived at, he preferred to maintain a mysterious silence. Professor Makkhan Lal and Professor Rajendra Dixit have said in this context: “All one could gather is that there is agreement among some of the ‘eminent’ historians and the topics are those that can be used for blackening the ancient period of Indian history. Thus the hardcore of this argument is that whatever has been written by the ‘eminent’ historians on those areas of ancient Indian history is final. No modification, no addition and no deletion could be made on their pronouncements”.

Just as there is a raging controversy on the writing of Indian History, so also there is an intensely hot debate going on regarding the nature of the history of Latin America and Mexico. The debate is whether it should be viewed as the discovery of a new world and new economic resources for Europe or it should be seen as the destruction of the independently developed native civilizations by technologically more advanced nations that have an unending lust for looting others’ treasures and making people subservient.

When the question of celebrating 500 years of the ‘discovery’ of South America arose in Europe in the 1990s, a simple but very sharp historical statement was made by the historians from Latin America: “IT MAY BE A SUBJECT OF CELEBRATIONS FOR EUROPEANS BUT FOR US IT IS A SUBJECT OF MOURNING BECAUSE JUST IN A FEW YEARS THE EUROPEANS DESTROYED OUR CIVILIZATION DEVELOPED OVER SEVERAL THOUSANDS OF YEARS”.

WHAT THE NATIVE HISTORIANS OF SOUTH AMERICA OF FEELING ABOUT THE APPROACH OF EUROPEAN HISTORIANS TODAY, SO ALSO THE GENUINE HISTORIANS OF INDIA ARE FEELING ABOUT THE MISLEADING, MALICIOUS, AND MALAFIDE MARXIST APPROACH TO THE WRITING OF INDIA’S ANCIENT HISTORY AND CULTURE. The Greek tragedy of India is that all the instruments of the Indian state –-- the Executive, the Legislature and the Judiciary--- all heavily infected, infiltrated and subverted by the menacing Marxist Deathly Virus——are completely regulating and controlling (even strangulating!!!) the writing of ancient Indian history and culture.