India must outgrow, not erase Macaulay

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently called for a national effort to ‘free ourselves from the mindset of slavery that Macaulay imposed on India,’ he tapped into intellectual discourse that stretches from Africa to Asia, from Frantz Fanon to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, from Ashis Nandy to Partha Chatterjee. The anxiety that colonialism left deep imprints on the imagination — on what a society values, and whose knowledge it considers legitimate — has animated scholarship for decades. It has sought to re-centre cultural confidence after centuries of epistemic displacement.

Yet India’s case is distinctive. The Macaulay system, introduced in 1835, did more than change the medium of instruction. It reshaped aspirations, professional hierarchies, and perceptions of civilisation. English education opened doors to modern science and global mobility, but it also produced generations who associated advancement with distance from their roots. The concern — that a colonial mindset lingers long after the Union Jack was lowered — is genuine. Political decolonisation (the exit of colonial rulers) is only the beginning; the harder task is cognitive decolonisation.

Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o called this effort decolonising the mind — the recovery of cultural confidence after years of learning to see oneself through an outsider’s gaze. Frantz Fanon warned that colonial rule generates ‘Black skin, white masks’ — a metaphor for the psychological cost of internalised inferiority. Ashis Nandy argued that colonialism ‘colonised the Indian imagination’, privileging certain ways of reasoning and diminishing others. The Subaltern Studies questioned why India’s knowledge traditions had been marginalised. In short, why we remain coconuts — brown outside, white inside.

Modi’s remarks gain significance because they arrive at a moment when India has the capacity to define its own trajectory — economically, strategically, and intellectually. If there was ever a time to ask how India ought to think, create, and educate in the 21st century, it is now. The core challenge is to banish the idea that India must choose between modern knowledge and its own civilisational heritage. The choice is not between English and Sanskrit, between STEM and the Upanishads, between global science and indigenous epistemologies. The real choice is between a borrowed model of modernity and a self-confident, plural, inventive Indian modernity shaped by dialogue, not deference. Fanon never argued for rejecting Western knowledge; he argued against uncritical admiration. Ngũgĩ did not oppose learning English; he opposed the unthinking elevation of English over one’s mother tongue. Amílcar Cabral insisted that ‘returning to the source’ does not mean romanticising the past, but retrieving the cultural confidence necessary to shape the future.

For India, the task is not to erase Macaulay, but to outgrow him.

To outgrow Macaulay means acknowledging both the gains and the losses of the colonial encounter. English gave India access to global science and technology; it built bridges across linguistic communities; it fuelled India’s entry into commerce, and diplomacy. But it also displaced Indigenous knowledge systems; narrowed definitions of merit; and embedded the idea that achievement lies in imitation of Western institutions, not in reinvention.

To outgrow Macaulay means recognising that the ‘mindset of slavery’ is not merely a linguistic issue. It shows up when an Indian researcher hesitates to publish in an Indian journal because foreign journals carry greater prestige. It surfaces when Indian universities are judged primarily by how closely they resemble American ones. It appears when social science frames local problems through imported theories without asking whether India’s own intellectual archives offer deeper insight.

Modi’s call opens three lines of national introspection.

The first is educational. India’s National Education Policy (2020) already attempts to expand the intellectual canvas — mother-tongue instruction, classical languages, Indian knowledge systems, liberal arts, and multidisciplinary universities. But the deeper shift is epistemological. Decolonising the curriculum requires not merely adding ancient texts, but asking foundational questions: What counts as knowledge? Whose voices are stored in the syllabus? Why do we read Aristotle and not Kautilya with equal seriousness? Why are Indian systems of logic, medicine, mathematics, aesthetics, and governance treated as cultural artefacts rather than as living knowledge traditions with analytical value?

The second is institutional. Indian universities often remain tethered to colonial-era bureaucratic structures — rigid hierarchies, credentialism, and excessive dependence on foreign validation. A decolonised higher education system would reward original thinking over conformity, research rooted in local realities over derivative scholarship, and institutional autonomy over bureaucratic micromanagement. It would cultivate confidence without indulging chauvinism.

The third is imaginative. As thinkers like Achille Mbembe remind us, decolonisation is fundamentally about re-imagining horizons. It asks: What futures can we envision when we no longer see ourselves as inheritors of someone else’s model of progress? For India, this means reclaiming its own archive not as nostalgia but as generative inspiration. India’s intellectual traditions — whether the rationality of Nyaya, the pluralism of the Sramana traditions, or the environmental ethics of indigenous communities — offer conceptual resources for everything from sustainability to artificial intelligence ethics. They are not relics; they are assets.

But decolonisation must guard against an equal and opposite danger: indulging in civilisational insularity or cultural triumphalism. Decolonising the mind is about building self-confidence, not self-enclosure. This is where the prime minister’s 10-year horizon gains significance, not as a political timeline; it is an intellectual one. It signals the need for patient reconstruction — of curricula, institutions, research priorities, and social attitudes. It invites the country to imagine an India that is neither derivative nor defensive but comfortably itself. Modern India need not reject the English language to reclaim its mind. What it must reject is the assumption that progress lies only in foreign paradigms. A confident civilisation learns from the world without losing its centre of gravity. Decolonisation, at its best, is the art of recovering that centre.

We cannot undo the past. But we can build a future in which the Indian mind — curious, inventive, global — no longer needs Macaulay as its reference point. That is the true measure of intellectual freedom, for India and the world.

(The writer is Director, School of Social Sciences, Ramaiah University of Applied Sciences)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.