Culture
Language, Education, and Macaulay’s Minute
Key statistic
1835
Year of Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education — the founding document of English-medium instruction in India.
In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote a short administrative memorandum arguing that Indian children should be educated in English, in a curriculum modelled on that of England. His stated aim was to create ‘a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.’ The Minute was accepted, and it shaped Indian schooling for the next century and a half.
The consequences are still with us. English remains the language of Indian higher education, of much of Indian law, of the professional economy. The curriculum has changed, but the architecture — the primacy of English, the shape of the syllabus, the examination system — has proved remarkably durable.
The National Education Policy 2020 is the most ambitious attempt yet to rebalance this inheritance. Whether it succeeds in decolonising Indian education, or simply modernises the same underlying structure, is one of the most consequential civic questions of the next decade.
The Initiative gathers historians of education, linguists, and policy voices to look honestly at where Macaulay’s inheritance still runs — and where it has genuinely been outgrown.
“A country that does not think in its own language will always find itself translating its own life.”
— From a campaign essay — draft
