Macaulay's
Children
Subhash Kak
Sulekha Columns, Nov 10, 2000
Imprinting is the key that explains many of our
peculiarities. Imprinted birds and mammals act as if they were human. Goslings,
when reared by a person, become imprinted to the caregiver, and they will
ignore geese. Imprinted people live in their own world of symbols, and their
behavior to an outsider would appear strange.
Imprinting occurs during a sensitive window of development.
Imprinted animals will mate with their own kind but will prefer the animal to
which they have been imprinted. In extreme cases they will refuse social
contact with their own kind. Imprinting is fixed for life; it occurs also in
motor patterns, as in birdsong. Humans are also imprinted--- to ideas and
beliefs they are exposed to in their childhood.
All this has been known for a long time. Herodotus tells us
of how hostage children raised in court became loyal to their captors. In the
US, Canada, Australia, the children of the natives were forcibly taken from
their parents and put in foster homes for this reason.
The Ottoman Empire built a bizarre but effective system based
on this idea. It created the institution of the Kapi Kullari
("Slave" or "Ruling Institution"), whose members were
legally slaves of the sultan: they were born Christians but were converted to
Islam primarily through the practice of devsirme, where able-bodied
young children were recruited as child-tribute and immersed in Islamic culture.
The kullars were forbidden to contract legal marriage,
to have acknowledged children, and to own private property. They served solely
at the pleasure of the sultan, at whose will they were promoted and executed.
The slave status divested the kullars of any personality outside the
service of the master.
The kullars as Janissaries were the best regiments of
the Ottoman army; they also served in the palace jobs and as provincial
governors. The Grand Vizier was invariably a kullar. They constituted a
superlative bureaucracy: they were devoted to their duties, were completely
loyal and since they were isolated from the general population, they were fair.
Their non-hereditary status prevented the formation of a ruling elite that
might threaten the sultan.
With time, the kullars began seeking reforms in their
inhumane system. By the end of the Empire, they had won the right to matrimony.
But as their circumstances changed they became venal; what was their strength
as an isolated community now became a license to do good only for themselves.
If the kullars constituted the backbone of the Ottoman
Empire, an institution, similar in spirit but somewhat different in form (but
more subtle and resilient), was formed to safeguard the British Empire in
India. This was the institution of the brown sahib, the colonial
apologist, formed under the directive of the famous Minute of Macaulay (1835)
who wished to create "a class who may be interpreters between us and the
millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but
English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.'' These Indian kullars
may be properly called Macaulay's children.
The central idea in the imprinting of the Indian kullars
was Macaulay's assertion that "a single shelf of a good European library
was worth the whole native literature of India." The British, following
Macaulay's ideas, dismantled the traditional pathshala system of village
education, which had provided universal literary to the people. William Adam, a
Scottish missionary in Bengal and Bihar during 1835-7, estimated that there
were 100,000 pathshalas which were popular with all classes of people,
"irrespective of their religion, caste, or social status," and the
"curriculum was designed towards meeting the practical demands of rural
society."
The village school had great room for improvement but it was
very effective and was one of the institutions of local power. When it was
superseded by the new system, controlled by the British bureaucracy using an
alien language whose benefit ordinary people could not see, children of the
poorer classes simply pulled out. This led to the illiteratization of the great
masses of the Indian population.
The Macaulayite bureaucracy worked against other traditional
knowledge also. For example, it targeted the millennia-old system of water
tanks, which had been serviced by village councils. In its place was instituted
a system of canal irrigation. This was done even where it was unsuitable, and
the local councils were disbanded. Soon, the tanks fell into disuse and the
water table dropped; this had disastrous effects for agriculture.
In the colonial state, the idea of profit was replaced by
that of service of the British empire. The new system of education was
instrumental for the socialization of this view. The idea of the other-worldly
Indian was promoted.
In 1947, there was hope that India would create a progressive
nation-state, but Macaulay's children quietly seized power. Taught to hate
India's past and lacking a defining center, they took the fashions of the
day--such as Socialism and Marxism--, and elevated these to their religious
ideology. The terms Socialism and Secularism--but with a perverted
meaning--were even written into the Indian Constitution during the Emergency of
the mid-1970s.
In awe of the British and insecure of their positions, those of
the Macaulay children who went into governance were good administrators. But as
the system of checks and balances eroded after independence, they lost their
reputation for incorruptibility.
Blind adherence to an ideology can stunt intellectual and emotional growth.
Such people are forever seeking approval from those whom they idolize, and they
are unable to grasp the incongruity of their behavior. Emotionally stunted
people are like imprinted children, who can be very cruel. (The Khmer Rouge
massacres of Cambodia, amongst the most horrific of the past century, were
carried out principally by teenagers imprinted to one brand of Marxism.)
Adults, with the minds of children, also brook no opposition, although their
ways may not be as drastic.
The Macaulayite establishment in India is especially
intolerant: it also knows a few tricks of Stalin. It silences its opponents
using censorship and a system of patronage. But recently, independent minded
American-style Internet magazines have provided a means to side-step this
censorship.
Take Arun Shourie's experience: Although India's most famous
and recognized journalist and author, winner of the Magasaysay award, he was
black-listed by mainstream publishers and the media as soon he turned his
attention to subjects considered taboo by the establishment. During the last
ten years he has been compelled to self-publish his books and newspapers have
banned him. But thanks to his Internet column he remained hugely popular until
he joined the Vajpayee administration as a minister and stopped writing.
Having been black-listed once, his books are still not
reviewed, and his speeches as a minister are rarely reported unless his words
can be twisted to paint him as a monster. He is like a non-person of the
apartheid South Africa. The favorite abusive label to pin on the opponent is to
call him "communalist" or "fascist", and Shourie has
carried these labels frequently.
As another example consider Mark Tully, the distinguished
British journalist and author, who was for a long time the bureau chief of BBC
in Delhi. Just because one of his books was perceived as somewhat critical of
the Macaulayites, he was called names and declared a sell-out. His books have
also stopped receiving notices.
This is quite unlike the rivalry between the liberals and the
conservatives in the West, where the most partisan writers concede that their
opponents have the right to be heard through the print and the TV media.
Some have suggested that the current turmoil in India is just
a struggle between the traditional and modern approaches to governance. Nothing
could be further from the truth. The opponents of the Macaulayites and Marxists
do not wish for a religious state. They want to build a modern society somewhat
like that of the United States: forward-looking but yet connected to its
culture.
Reading the reportage of the culture wars of India by Western
journalists in a hurry, one gets the feeling that the only sane people in India
are these Macaulay's children. The reformers are labeled nationalists, swamis,
traditionalists, or worse. These journalists do not understand the real nature
of the struggle.
It is funny. The West proclaimed a certain imagined view on
India, and now its pupils insist this is the real thing, even though there is
evidence to the contrary for everyone to see. Could there be a better case of
the tail wagging the dog?
© Sulekha