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Sunanda K Datta-Ray on T B Macaulay - the man, the biography, his biographer, and Macaulay’s Children

How many of the hundreds of members and their guests who visit Kolkata’s Bengal Club every day notice a marble plaque at the entrance saying that Thomas Babington Macaulay’s house once occupied that spot? Does Macaulay’s name means anything even to those who do notice the inscription?

Yet, it’s largely because of Macaulay that English is the subcontinent’s common language today. It’s also largely because of Macaulay that the rule of law prevails in India and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis find it necessary to be apologetic when their governance deviates from it. True, the Whig historian, poet and politician was a member of the Supreme Council of India for only four years (1834-38) of his 59, but, for better or worse, those four years laid the foundations of modern India. No other civilian has left such an indelible imprint on the lives of millions of people in Asia and farther afield.

 

Macaulay’s Indian sojourn forms only a small part of the massive tapestry Robert E Sullivan has woven with a sharp eye for detail and — one suspects — an iconoclast’s delight in pulling down his subject by many pegs. Indeed, some might feel after ploughing through 614 pages of heavy prose, including 87 pages of notes, that little heroism survives. But despite distractions, obsessions and a weakness for judging the past in present terms, Sullivan acknowledges that “the Indian Penal Code is Macaulay’s most enduring and perhaps greatest achievement”. Far more enduring in fact than Horatius keeping the bridge in the brave days of old in Macaulay’s own stirring Lays of Ancient Rome.

Not that everyone is agreed on the benefits of imposing Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence on Asian societies. Even British administrators like Charles Metcalfe and Penderel Moon harboured doubts on that score, and Macaulay himself was sceptical about the justice doled out by British Indian courts. But these misgivings relate more to operation than theory and do not automatically indict a system that was created in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising and was reproduced in other British colonies. The Indian Penal Code still exists recognisably in places as far apart as Singapore and Zimbabwe.

Nationalist writers have expressed similar misgivings about the purpose and merit of Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education, but of its impact there can be no doubt. In discussing the controversy over his famous (or infamous) promise to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”, Sullivan’s meticulously researched biography, marking the 150th anniversary of Macaulay’s death, does not pay adequate attention to what Macaulay called the “already existing desires and felt needs of forward looking gentry in India” — C A Bayly’s “Indian ecumene”. When he said he wanted to be “the guardian of the people of India against the European settlers” he meant modernisers like Raja Rammohan Roy who feared being overwhelmed by the East India Company’s well-meaning Orientalists.

Being profoundly convinced of the innate superiority of Western thought and letters (“a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”), Macaulay found it easier to respond to this indigenous elite’s demand and “educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue”. He hoped that English would also enrich the Indian languages so “that they could become vehicles for European scientific, historical, and literary expression”.

Much is made of Macaulay’s dislike of India (“all the fruits of the tropics are not worth a pottle of Covent Garden strawberries, and… a lodging up three pairs of stairs in London is better than a palace in a compound at Chowringhee”) while savouring the power India gave him. But this could be said of most British administrators. Few actually enjoyed living here. Macaulay, at least, had a sense of duty and repeatedly stated his determination to do his best by those he saw as his charges. While downplaying this admittedly paternalistic aspect of his subject’s character, Sullivan presents a picture of conscious or unconscious hypocrisy. He accuses Macaulay of rationalising genocide by arguing that it is “more merciful to extirpate a hundred thousand human beings at once, and to fill the void with a well-governed population, than to misgovern millions through a long succession of generations”.

Macaulay’s supposed duplicity didn’t end there. In Sullivan’s words, he “became a prominent spokesman for abolishing slavery in the British Empire who lacked any taste for the cause, a forceful theoretician and practitioner of reforming Whig politics who was a Machiavellian realist, a soaring parliamentary orator who avoided debate, a self-declared Christian who was a committed sceptic and a masterly secularizer of English history and culture, and a stern public moralist in love with his two youngest sisters”.

The last charge seems typical of American academics for whom the world can be understood only if it is prostrate on a psychiatrist’s couch where all its actions can be scrutinised in terms of post-Freudian theory.

Thus, Stanley Wolpert of the University of California, Los Angeles, dredged up flimsy scraps of trivia in Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny solemnly to pronounce that Jawaharlal Nehru was a homosexual. Sullivan, who teaches history at the University of Notre Dame, also goes off at a tangent to talk of his subject’s “unconsummated passion for his two youngest sisters”. Wolpert’s fanciful — wishful? — imagination doesn’t concern us here. But, clearly, Sullivan hasn’t a clue to the culture of Victorian England and the gushing letters that were commonplace then if he believes Macaulay lusted incestuously after his sisters.

Sigmund Freud’s comment, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” comes to mind. But try telling that to an American academic bent on analysis.

As for Macaulay’s Children, a desk with a plaque saying it had belonged to him — the sole Indian relic of the man who gave us the language and the law — disappeared from the Bengal Club with no one turning a hair.

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MACAULAY
The Tragedy of Power
Author: Robert E Sullivan
Publisher: Orient BlackSwan
Pages: 624
Price: Rs 795