The Beautiful Tree #6 - The Thinkers Behind Dismantling Indigenous Education
Macaulay, Marx, Mills and their disdain for India
Thank you for sticking with the me reading The Beautiful Tree - Indian Indigenous Education in The 18th Century for the past six weeks! I have enjoyed understanding and exploring the ideas in this excellent book, and I hope we all have become a little richer in our ideas from this series.
In the first article, we went into what British education was like in the 18th century. In the second, we explored how the Scottish Highland clearances led to the Scottish enlightenment, which then led to the field of Indology. In the third and fourth articles, we got into the meat of it all - what was Indian education like in the 18th century?
We found that there was a ‘school in every village’, with some administrators estimating 100,000 schools in Bengal and Bihar. Education was free for everyone, and schools represented the diversity of the community around them. Girls seem to have been educated at home. There were plenty of institutes of higher education as well, which had many different ways of subsidizing students.
In the fifth piece, we went into how education was funded so that it was free - Only 20% of land revenue went to the central treasury, and at least 40% went towards public goods, education and arts. This had sustained through all the Islamic conquests. But the British dismantled this system and changed things so that some land was taxed even as high as 93% and all the revenue went straight to Europe, and only a fixed amount was allowed to be spent in India on Indians. This destroyed the education system and institutions that provided education.
In today’s final piece, we’ll look at the European thinkers and leaders whose influential thoughts led to the purposeful destruction and decay of Indian education.
Gandhi’s argument with a British educationist
So by 1900, the prevalent attitude in India was that our education system had declined from what our grandparents had, and that the British were responsible for it. This came from hearing stories from family and general prevalent societal narratives. Many people had written on this topic by 1930.
However, an increasing number of westernized Indians, who could be Marxists, or Fabian socialists, or Capitalists, had contempt for India and said this idea was too far-fetched to be true, and if it was true, it was irrelevant.
At this point, Gandhi leaned towards what the general attitude of Indians was. He was invited to speak at Chatham House in London, where the Round Table Conference was taking place on 20 Oct 1931. Hi stalk was titled ‘The Future Of India’. He spoke on many different topics, but relevant to this book, he said
India is more illiterate today than it was 50 or 100 years ago
The British administrators instead of nurturing education, rooted out what had existed.
Immediately, an objection came from Sir Philip Hartog, a founder of the School Of Oriental Studies, London. He was an educationist with over a decade’s experience in India. He questioned Gandhi in the meeting itself, and then they had a long correspondence over the next 5-6 weeks, and then they had an hour-long interview.
In the meeting itself, Hartog said the 1931 equivalent of “SOURCE?!!”. Gandhi cited sources that had been based on the Bengal and Punjab surveys we’ve previously discussed. Hartog then responded with the 1931 equivalent of “This is just vibes-based research”.
Gandhi slyly said he’d offer a public retraction if he found evidence contradicting what he said and went back to India.
Hartog started doing his own research. He talked to historian Edward J Thompson, and asked him for facts. Thompson said Gandhi was probably right, and added “I’m reading old records by pre-mutiny Residents, they teem with information that makes you hope the Congresswallah will never get hold of it”. Hartog ended their correspondence sourly because he didn’t get what he was looking for.
Hartog wrote a rebuttal to Gandhi and published it saying he hoped Gandhi would retract his statement. But by the time that came out, Gandhi was imprisoned in Yerwada, and he directed his friend, Prof. KT Shah to look into the matter. Which he did, and cited Max Mueller, along with all the sources we’ve previously discussed, including Thomas Munro, the governor of Madras Presidency.
Hartog responded with the 1931 equivalent of “That’s just a blogpost, got any peer-reviewed sources?”. He then proceeded to write three lectures at the University of London Institute of Education where he used the data in these sources we’ve discussed to prove his point instead. He did this by cherrypicking the lowest numbers from the districts and took the words of the Governor out of context, and he concluded that until the House of Commons allotted money for education in India, there wasn’t much of it.
One reason for Hartog being so stubborn could be that he was an immigrant to England, and lacked any context from family or friends for how education was in England prior to the 1850s. But another thing that troubled him was a Quaker missionary saying that after the British regime, there would be a counter-reformation in education in India, and India will go back a 1000 years and more to the “old days when she gave out a great wealth of ideas, especially to the rest of Asia”. How could British rule in India end? Hartog would not hear of it.
He sent his lectures to Gandhi and asked him to withdraw his statement. Gandhi said most experts support my view, but their authority wouldn’t be considered as sufficient proof by you, and I haven’t changed my views. It ended there.
Hartog was just following a rich tradition of Europeans deriding India for their own purposes
Racism and ill-intent from Marx, Macaulay and Mills
In the 1830s, the reports on education were used to assert that in India, reading and writing were taught only with an eye to business transactions, and ‘nothing whatever is learnt except reading, and with the exception of writing and a little arithmentic, the education of the great majority goes no further”. Though, this is only considered problematic due to prejudice, because education in England at this point barely better, and in fact much worse - we’ve discussed how on average, the Indian schoolboy had ten years of education, but the English schoolboy only had one, and in some country schools, “writing was excluded for fear of evil consequences”.
The real reason for this type of reading was that if they said education had declined, they’d have to explain why, and that would involve citing these same sources saying that taxes were being diverted to England, which meant the funding for education had dried up which caused the decline.
But, the underlying reason for this malice towards Indian education and its deliberate uprooting was more religious and cultural. If they had to have an undisturbed period of British rule, the Indian education system needed to be uprooting.
In 1813, British MP William Wilberforce said Indians were “deeply sunk, and by their religious superstitions fast bound, in the lowest depths of moral and social wretchedness”
Thomas Babington Macaulay, the son of a Scottish Highlander, was the Paymaster-General of Britain and went on to be highly involved in structuring the education system of India. He said, the totality of Indian knowledge and scholarship did not even equal the contents of “a single shelf of a good European library” and that all the historical information contained in books written in Sanscrit was “less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England”. To Macaulay all Indian knowledge, if not despicable, was at least absurd: absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology.
Karl Marx said similar things. Writing in the New York Daily Tribune on June 25, 1853 he shared the view of the perennial nature of Indian misery and approvingly quoted an ancient Indian text which according to him placed “the commencement of Indian misery in an epoch even more remote than the Christian creation of the world’. According to him Indian life had always been undignified, stagnatory, vegetative, and passive, given to a brutalizing worship of nature instead of man being the “sovereign of nature” as contemplated in contemporary European thought. And therefore Karl Marx concluded, “whatever may have been the crimes of England” in India, “she was the unconscious tool of history” in bringing about what Marx so anxiously looked forward to, India’s westernisation.
If Wilberforce, Macaulay, and Marx sought to justify British intervention in India, James Mill provided the intellectual foundation for colonial rule. His History of British India (1817), a three-volume work, became the definitive text for British administrators in India.
Mill’s assessment of Indian society was scathing. He claimed that Hindus and Muslims alike were marked by "insincerity, mendacity, and perfidy." While he accused Muslims of being extravagant and pleasure-seeking, he labeled Hindus as "penurious and ascetic," likening them to eunuchs who "excel in the qualities of a slave." He described Hindus as cowardly, unclean, and prone to deception, stating that their poetry, science, governance, and military capabilities were vastly inferior to those of Europe.
For Mill, European civilization—even during the feudal ages—was far superior. He argued that Europeans surpassed Indians in philosophy, law, agriculture, and even poetry. The roads in India, he claimed, were mere paths, its medicine primitive, and its people slavish and unmanly. His conclusion was damning: "The Gothic nations, as soon as they became a settled people, exhibit the marks of a superior character and civilization to those of the Hindus.
The Colonial Agenda: Erasing Indianness
Mill, Wilberforce, Macaulay, and Marx—despite their differing ideologies—shared one belief: Indian civilization was inherently inferior and needed to be reshaped in Europe’s image.
For Mill, India’s salvation lay in adopting "utility as the object of every pursuit."
For Wilberforce, it meant embracing his version of Christianity.
For Macaulay, it required becoming Anglicized.
For Marx, it meant Westernization.
Before them, Henry Dundas, a Scotsman who was the trusted lieutenant of Prime Minister William Pitt The Younger —had already set the tone. Indians, he declared, must not only submit to British rule but also feel "indebted to our beneficence and wisdom" for whatever benefits they received.
The colonial project was never just about economic exploitation. It was also about erasing Indian identity and replacing it with a European one, especially since doing so would help them have a long, uninterrupted period of exploiting the subcontinent.
This ideological battle over education and culture was not an accident—it was by design.
Since British authorities universally dismissed Indian culture and institutions as inferior, it was inevitable that Indian education would suffer. To hasten its decline, it was not enough to mock and belittle it—steps were taken to deprive it of resources and let it wither away. There was no need for outright bans or forceful closures of schools; financial restrictions and persistent ridicule were far more effective.
A telling sign of this approach came from London when officials acknowledged a survey of indigenous education in the Madras Presidency. Even before reviewing the survey’s findings, they approved of the initiative and reassured local authorities not to alarm the people by making them fear government interference in education. But this approval came with a revealing caveat: "It would be equally wrong to do anything to fortify them in the absurd opinion that their own rude institutions of education are so perfect as not to admit of improvement."
This carefully worded statement, typical of official British dispatches, was a clear directive. It signaled not only continued ridicule and denunciation of the Indian education system but also the final withdrawal of any remaining state support. With no funding and no backing, India’s indigenous education system was left with no choice but to stagnate and die.
The long-term effects of uprooting the Beautiful Tree
Indigenous Indian education was thus neglected and uprooted, and was replaced by an alien and rootless system (as graphically described by Ananda Coomaraswamy). It had many painful consequences.
Literacy rates and general knowledge were obliterated to such an extent that for many years after independence, we couldn’t make a significant dent in it even with attempts at universal education.
Indian social balance was destroyed. Previously, everyone from all sections of society had primary education, which enabled them to participate in society and gain power and dignity. Destroying education along with the economy led to great deteroiration in status, socio-economic conditions and personal dignity of SC/STs and OBCs.
Even today, even the most educated Indians are not only ignorant of the society they live in or the culture that sustains this society, but the system of education induces a lack of confidence among the entire populace.
Conclusion
It has been quite galling to see how the very root of our thought processes have been manufactured into us by the British, and we barely ever challenge these thought processes and ideas about our own culture. Our education system has done a great job just having us think about ourselves the same way the worst of the British colonialists thought about us, and we have done so little to change it.
At least studying the history of how this came to be might be our own “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” moment, and will weaken the power of these thoughts over our own lives, and we can try and be better.