Macaulay’s Plan to replace 5000 years old Sanskrit with 200 years old English.

February 1835

The Legislative Question

Some gentlemen on the Committee of Public Instruction believe the British Parliament strictly prescribed their current course in 1813. If they’re right, we need a legislative act to make any changes. I’ve stayed out of preparing the statements now before us. I wanted to wait until this matter came to me as a member of the Council of India.

The Act of Parliament doesn’t mean what they think it means. It says nothing about which languages or sciences should be studied. It sets apart a sum “for the revival and promotion of literature and the 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.”

They argue that “literature” must mean only Arabic and Sanskrit literature. They claim Parliament would never call someone a “learned native” if he knew Milton’s poetry, Locke’s metaphysics, and Newton’s physics. Instead, they say the term applies only to those who studied the sacred books of the Hindoos, learning all the uses of cusa-grass and the mysteries of absorption into the Deity.

This interpretation doesn’t satisfy. Consider a parallel case. Suppose the Pacha of Egypt set aside money for “reviving and promoting literature, and encouraging learned natives of Egypt.” Would anyone think he meant students should spend years studying hieroglyphics, searching into doctrines disguised under the fable of Osiris, and determining the exact ritual for worshipping cats and onions? Would he be inconsistent if he taught them English and French instead, along with the sciences those languages unlock?

What the Act Really Says

The supporters of the old system rely on certain words, yet other words in the same act contradict them completely. This lac of rupees is set apart not only for “reviving literature in India” but also for “the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories.” Those words alone authorize all the changes I propose.

If the Council agrees with my interpretation, no legislative act is necessary. If they disagree, I’ll prepare a short act rescinding that clause of the 1813 Charter.

The Question of Public Faith

The admirers of the Oriental system use another argument. They believe the public faith is pledged to the present system. They claim that changing how we spend funds currently used for Arabic and Sanskrit would be outright spoliation.

I don’t understand their reasoning. Grants from the public purse for encouraging literature are no different from grants for other useful purposes. We build a sanatorium where we think it’s healthy. Are we pledged to keep it there if it proves useless? We start building a pier. Is it a violation of public faith to stop if we realize it’s pointless?

Property rights are sacred, but nothing endangers them more than the current practice of attributing them to things where they don’t belong. Those who give abuses the sanctity of property are actually giving property the unpopularity and fragility of abuses.

If the Government gave any person a formal assurance, or even created a reasonable expectation of income for teaching or learning Sanskrit or Arabic, I would respect that person’s financial interests. I would err on the side of generosity rather than question the public faith. Yet talking about the Government pledging itself to teach certain languages and sciences, even when those languages become useless and those sciences exploded, seems meaningless to me.

There isn’t a single word in any public instructions suggesting the Indian Government intended to give such a pledge or considered these funds permanently fixed. Even if there were, I would deny our predecessors had the power to bind us on this subject. Suppose a government in the last century enacted that all subjects must be inoculated for smallpox forever. Would that government be bound to continue after Jenner’s discovery?

These promises that nobody claims, these vested rights that vest in nobody, this property without proprietors, this robbery that makes nobody poorer – people with higher faculties than mine might understand them. I consider this plea merely a set phrase regularly used in England and India to defend every abuse that has no other defense.

I hold this lac of rupees to be at the disposal of the Governor General in Council for promoting learning in India in whatever way seems most advisable. His Lordship is as free to direct that it no longer be used for encouraging Arabic and Sanskrit as he is to reduce the reward for killing tigers in Mysore or stop spending public money on cathedral chanting.

The Core Question

We have a fund to be used as Government directs for the intellectual improvement of this country’s people. The simple question is: what’s the most useful way to employ it?

All parties agree on one point. The dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information. They’re so poor and rude that translating any valuable work into them won’t be easy until they’re enriched from some other source. Everyone admits that intellectually improving those classes who can pursue higher studies requires some non-vernacular language.

Choosing the Language

What should that language be? Half the Committee says English. The other half strongly recommends Arabic and Sanskrit. The whole question comes down to this: which language is best worth knowing?

I know neither Sanskrit nor Arabic, yet I’ve done what I could to value them correctly. I’ve read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I’ve talked with men distinguished for their proficiency in Eastern tongues, both here and at home. I’m ready to accept Oriental learning at the Orientalists’ own valuation. I’ve never found one who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.

Even Committee members who support the Oriental plan fully admit the intrinsic superiority of Western literature. The department where Eastern writers rank highest is poetry, I suppose. Yet I’ve never met an Orientalist who ventured to claim that Arabic and Sanskrit poetry could compare to that of the great European nations.

When we move from works of imagination to works recording facts and investigating general principles, the European superiority becomes absolutely immeasurable. It’s no exaggeration to say that all the historical information collected from all the books written in Sanskrit is less valuable than what you’d find in the most basic abridgments used at English preparatory schools. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the two nations hold nearly the same relative positions.

The Case for English

How does the case stand? We must educate people who cannot currently be educated in their mother tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. Our own language hardly needs its claims recapitulated. It stands preeminent even among Western languages.

It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest Greece bequeathed to us. It contains models of every species of eloquence. Its historical compositions, considered merely as narratives, have seldom been surpassed. As vehicles of ethical and political instruction, they’ve never been equaled. It offers just and lively representations of human life and nature. It contains the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade. It provides full and correct information about every experimental science that preserves health, increases comfort, or expands the intellect.

Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth that the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded over ninety generations. The literature now existing in that language is worth more than all the literature that existed in all the world’s languages three hundred years ago. That’s not all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It’s spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It’s likely to become the language of commerce throughout the eastern seas. It’s the language of two great European communities rising in southern Africa and Australasia, communities that grow more important every year and more closely connected with our Indian empire.

Whether we look at our literature’s intrinsic value or at this country’s particular situation, we see the strongest reason to think that of all foreign tongues, English would be most useful to our native subjects.

Our Duty Is Clear

The question before us is simply this: when we can teach this language, should we instead teach languages that by universal confession contain no books worth comparing to our own? When we can teach European science, should we teach systems that by universal confession, wherever they differ from European ones, differ for the worse? When we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, should we countenance at public expense medical doctrines that would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy that would make English schoolgirls laugh, history full of kings thirty feet high with reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made up of seas of treacle and butter?

Learning from History

We have experience to guide us. History furnishes several similar cases, and they all teach the same lesson. Two memorable instances in modern times show a great impulse given to a whole society’s mind, prejudices overthrown, knowledge diffused, taste purified, arts and sciences planted in countries recently ignorant and barbarous.

The first instance is the great revival of letters among Western nations at the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time, almost everything worth reading was contained in the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction has acted, had they neglected the language of Cicero and Tacitus, had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our island, had they printed and taught nothing at the universities but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon and romances in Norman-French, would England be what she is now?

What Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether Sanskrit literature is as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman ancestors. In some departments, particularly history, I’m certain it’s much less so.

Another instance is still before our eyes. Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation previously as barbarous as our ancestors before the crusades has gradually emerged from ignorance and taken its place among civilized communities. I speak of Russia. There’s now in that country a large educated class, full of persons fit to serve the state in the highest functions, in no way inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of Paris and London.

There’s reason to hope that this vast empire, which in our grandfathers’ time was probably behind the Punjab, may in our grandchildren’s time press close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. How was this change effected? Not by flattering national prejudices. Not by feeding the young Muscovite’s mind with the old women’s stories his rude fathers believed. Not by filling his head with lying legends about St. Nicholas. Not by encouraging him to study whether the world was created on the 13th of September. Not by calling him “a learned native” when he mastered these points. Instead, by teaching him those foreign languages where the greatest mass of information had been laid up, thus putting all that information within his reach.

The languages of Western Europe civilized Russia. I cannot doubt they will do for the Hindoo what they’ve done for the Tartar.

The Opposition’s Arguments

What are the arguments against this course that theory and experience both recommend? It’s said we ought to secure the cooperation of the native public, and we can do this only by teaching Sanskrit and Arabic.

I cannot admit that when a nation of high intellectual attainments undertakes to superintend the education of a comparatively ignorant nation, the learners are absolutely to prescribe the course the teachers take. It’s not necessary to say anything on this subject though, because unanswerable evidence proves we’re not securing the natives’ cooperation. It would be bad enough to consult their intellectual taste at the expense of their intellectual health, yet we’re consulting neither. We’re withholding from them the learning they’re craving. We’re forcing on them the mock-learning they nauseate.

This is proved by the fact that we’re forced to pay our Arabic and Sanskrit students, while those who learn English are willing to pay us. All the declarations in the world about the natives’ love and reverence for their sacred dialects will never outweigh this undisputed fact: we cannot find in all our vast empire a single student who will let us teach him those dialects unless we pay him.

I have before me the accounts of the Madrassa for December 1833. The Arabic students appear to have been seventy-seven in number. All receive stipends from the public. The whole amount paid to them is above 500 rupees a month. On the other side of the account stands this item: “Deduct amount realized from the out-students of English for the months of May, June and July last, 103 rupees.”

What the Market Tells Us

I’ve been told it’s merely from want of local experience that I’m surprised at these facts, that it’s not the fashion for students in India to study at their own charge. This only confirms my opinion. Nothing is more certain than that it never can be necessary anywhere in the world to pay men for doing what they think pleasant and profitable. India is no exception to this rule.

The people of India don’t require payment for eating rice when they’re hungry or wearing woolen cloth in the cold season. To come nearer to our case, the children who learn their letters and a little elementary arithmetic from the village schoolmaster don’t get paid by him. He gets paid for teaching them. Why then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanskrit and Arabic? Evidently because it’s universally felt that knowing Sanskrit and Arabic doesn’t compensate for the trouble of acquiring them. On all such subjects, the state of the market is the decisive test.

Other evidence exists if needed. A petition was presented last year to the Committee by several ex-students of the Sanskrit College. The petitioners stated they had studied in the college ten or twelve years. They had made themselves acquainted with Hindoo literature and science. They had received certificates of proficiency. And what is the fruit of all this?

“Notwithstanding such testimonials,” they say, “we have but little prospect of bettering our condition without the kind assistance of your Honorable Committee, the indifference with which we are generally looked upon by our countrymen leaving no hope of encouragement and assistance from them.” They therefore beg to be recommended to the Governor General for places under the Government, not places of high dignity or emolument, but such as may just enable them to exist.

“We want means,” they say, “for a decent living, and for our progressive improvement, which, however, we cannot obtain without the assistance of Government, by whom we have been educated and maintained from childhood.” They conclude by representing very pathetically that they’re sure it was never the Government’s intention, after behaving so liberally to them during their education, to abandon them to destitution and neglect.

Compensation for Education?

I’ve seen many petitions to Government for compensation. All of them, even the most unreasonable, assumed that some loss had been sustained, that some wrong had been inflicted. These are surely the first petitioners who ever demanded compensation for having been educated free, for having been supported by the public during twelve years, and then sent forth into the world well furnished with literature and science.

They represent their education as an injury giving them a claim on the Government for redress, an injury for which the stipends paid during the infliction were very inadequate compensation. I don’t doubt they’re right. They’ve wasted the best years of life learning what procures for them neither bread nor respect.

Surely we might with advantage have saved the cost of making these persons useless and miserable. Surely men may be brought up to be burdens to the public and objects of contempt to their neighbors at a somewhat smaller charge to the state. Yet such is our policy. We don’t even stand neutral in the contest between truth and falsehood. We’re not content to leave the natives to the influence of their own hereditary prejudices.

To the natural difficulties that obstruct the progress of sound science in the East, we add fresh difficulties of our own making. Bounties and premiums, such as ought not to be given even for the propagation of truth, we lavish on false taste and false philosophy.

Creating Our Own Opposition

By acting thus we create the very evil we fear. We’re making the opposition we don’t find. What we spend on the Arabic and Sanskrit colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth. It’s bounty money paid to raise up champions of error. It goes to form a nest, not merely of helpless place-hunters, but of bigots prompted by passion and interest to raise a cry against every useful scheme of education.

If there should be any opposition among the natives to the change I recommend, that opposition will be the effect of our own system. It will be headed by persons supported by our stipends and trained in our colleges. The longer we persevere in our present course, the more formidable that opposition will be. It will be reinforced every year by recruits we’re paying.

From native society left to itself, we have no difficulties to apprehend. All the murmuring will come from that oriental interest which we have, by artificial means, called into being and nursed into strength.

The Evidence of the Market

There’s yet another fact alone sufficient to prove that the native public’s feeling, when left to itself, is not what the supporters of the old system represent. The Committee has spent above a lac of rupees printing Arabic and Sanskrit books. Those books find no purchasers. It’s very rare that a single copy is disposed of.

Twenty-three thousand volumes, most of them folios and quartos, fill the libraries, or rather the lumber-rooms, of this body. The Committee contrives to get rid of some portion of their vast stock of oriental literature by giving books away, yet they cannot give as fast as they print. About twenty thousand rupees a year are spent adding fresh masses of waste paper to a hoard that I should think is already sufficiently ample.

During the last three years, about sixty thousand rupees have been expended this way. The sale of Arabic and Sanskrit books during those three years has not yielded quite one thousand rupees. Meanwhile the School-book Society is selling seven or eight thousand English volumes every year, and not only pays the expenses of printing but realizes a profit of 20 percent on its outlay.

The Question of Law

The fact that Hindoo law is learned chiefly from Sanskrit books, and Mahomedan law from Arabic books, has been much insisted on, yet it doesn’t bear on the question at all. We are commanded by Parliament to ascertain and digest the laws of India. The assistance of a Law Commission has been given to us for that purpose.

As soon as the code is promulgated, the Shaster and the Hedaya will be useless to a Moonsiff or Sudder Ameen. I hope and trust that before the boys now entering the Madrassa and the Sanskrit college complete their studies, this great work will be finished. It would be manifestly absurd to educate the rising generation with a view to a state of things we mean to alter before they reach manhood.

Religious Neutrality

There’s yet another argument that seems even more untenable. It’s said that Sanskrit and Arabic are the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred million people are written, and that they’re on that account entitled to peculiar encouragement.

Assuredly it’s the duty of the British Government in India to be not only tolerant but neutral on all religious questions. Yet to encourage the study of a literature admitted to be of small intrinsic value only because that literature inculcates the most serious errors on the most important subjects is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought to be sacredly preserved.

It’s confessed that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We’re to teach it because it’s fruitful of monstrous superstitions. We’re to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those engaged in converting natives to Christianity.

While we act thus, can we reasonably and decently bribe men out of the revenues of the state to waste their youth learning how to purify themselves after touching an ass, or what text of the Vedas they should repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?

The Capacity of Indians

The advocates of Oriental learning take for granted that no native of this country can possibly attain more than a mere smattering of English. They don’t attempt to prove this, yet they perpetually insinuate it. They designate the education their opponents recommend as a mere spelling book education. They assume it’s undeniable that the question is between profound knowledge of Hindoo and Arabian literature and science on one side, and superficial knowledge of the rudiments of English on the other.

This is not merely an assumption but an assumption contrary to all reason and experience. We know that foreigners of all nations do learn our language sufficiently to have access to all the most abstruse knowledge it contains, sufficiently to relish even the more delicate graces of our most idiomatic writers.

There are in this very town natives quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language. I have heard these gentlemen speak with a liberality and intelligence that would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction. Indeed it’s unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the continent, any foreigner who can express himself in English with as much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos.

Nobody, I suppose, will contend that English is so difficult to a Hindoo as Greek to an Englishman. Yet an intelligent English youth, in much less time than our unfortunate pupils spend at the Sanskrit college, becomes able to read, enjoy, and even imitate, not unhappily, the compositions of the best Greek authors. Less than half the time that enables an English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles ought to enable a Hindoo to read Hume and Milton.

Summary of the Argument

To sum up what I have said: I think it clear that we’re not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813. We’re not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied. We’re free to employ our funds as we choose. We ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing.

English is better worth knowing than Sanskrit or Arabic. The natives are desirous to be taught English and are not desirous to be taught Sanskrit or Arabic. Neither as the languages of law nor as the languages of religion do Sanskrit and Arabic have any peculiar claim to our engagement. It’s possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and to this end our efforts ought to be directed.

The Intermediary Class

In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen whose general views I oppose. I feel with them that it’s 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 we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and color 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.

Practical Recommendations

I would strictly respect all existing interests. I would deal even generously with all individuals who have had fair reason to expect a pecuniary provision. Yet I would strike at the root of the bad system which has hitherto been fostered by us.

I would at once stop the printing of Arabic and Sanskrit books. I would abolish the Madrassa and the Sanskrit college at Calcutta. Benares is the great seat of Brahmanical learning. Delhi is the seat of Arabic learning. If we retain the Sanskrit college at Benares and the Mahometan college at Delhi, we do enough, and much more than enough in my opinion, for the Eastern languages.

If the Benares and Delhi colleges should be retained, I would at least recommend that no stipends shall be given to any students who may hereafter repair there, but that the people shall be left to make their own choice between the rival systems of education without being bribed by us to learn what they have no desire to know.

The funds thus placed at our disposal would enable us to give larger encouragement to the Hindoo college at Calcutta, and to establish in the principal cities throughout the Presidencies of Fort William and Agra schools in which the English language might be well and thoroughly taught.

Final Position

If the decision of his Lordship in Council should be such as I anticipate, I shall enter on the performance of my duties with the greatest zeal and alacrity. If, on the other hand, it be the opinion of the Government that the present system ought to remain unchanged, I beg that I may be permitted to retire from the chair of the Committee.

I feel that I could not be of the smallest use there. I feel also that I should be lending my countenance to what I firmly believe to be a mere delusion. I believe the present system tends not to accelerate the progress of truth but to delay the natural death of expiring errors.

I conceive that we have at present no right to the respectable name of a Board of Public Instruction. We are a Board for wasting public money, for printing books of less value than the paper on which they’re printed was while it was blank, for giving artificial encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology, for raising up a breed of scholars who find their scholarship an encumbrance and a blemish, who live on the public while they’re receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to them that when they’ve received it they must either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives.

Entertaining these opinions, I’m naturally desirous to decline all share in the responsibility of a body which, unless it alters its whole mode of proceeding, I must consider not merely as useless but as positively noxious.

(Accessed and incorporated from: https://ia800707.us.archive.org/20/items/Minutes_201311/MinutesNew.pdf )

Today in the year 2025

Macaulay condemned Oriental education for producing unemployable scholars dependent on government stipends. Now Britain imports talent because its own system produces exactly that.

The cycle is complete. British universities churn out graduates with degrees in subjects the market doesn’t value. They leave with debt and credentials that don’t open doors. Meanwhile, companies hire engineers from India, doctors from Pakistan, nurses from the Philippines.

Macaulay wanted to create Indians who could think like Englishmen. He got his wish. But somewhere along the way, England forgot how to produce what it once valued. The practical knowledge, the useful skills, the scholarship that actually opens doors.

The symptoms match his diagnosis perfectly. Public money funds courses with no market value. Students pile up debt for education that won’t pay it back. They finish their degrees and find themselves trapped between unemployment and underemployment. The government pays twice – once for the education, again for the support afterward.

Schools and Universities are waiting for students. (See https://fortune.com/2025/11/08/gen-z-college-higher-education-not-worth-it-narrative-broken/ )

Britain now looks elsewhere for what its schools don’t produce. The engineers come from abroad. The programmers, the researchers, the technical experts. Not because British students lack intelligence, but because the system stopped teaching what matters.

Macaulay saw this pattern in 1835 India. Sanskrit scholars with certificates but no prospects, begging for government posts because no one else wanted their expertise. He called it “raising up a breed of scholars who find their scholarship an encumbrance.”

The difference? He had the courage to say the system was broken. He proposed burning it down and starting fresh. Modern Britain just keeps printing the worthless books, awarding the meaningless certificates, and wondering why its graduates can’t compete.

The snake doesn’t just eat its own tail. It’s convinced itself the tail is nutritious.