MACAULAY & "HIS CHILDREN" IN PROPER PERSPECTIVE

MACAULAY IN PERSPECTIVE: MACAULAY  A MASTERMIND BEHIND ENGLISH EDUCATION OR A MONSTER IMPERIALIST ENSLAVER OF 19TH CENTURY INDIANS AND THEIR FUTURE GENERATIONS ??

MACAULAY’S CHILDREN: MYTHS AND MISPERCEPTIONS 

by

Dr. Seshachalam Dutta

Did this man lay the foundation for entire Indian
education in English? This article is not in praise
of this man but to understand whether there is place
for the superficially obscene epithet "Macauley's
Children" attached to any and all educated Indians
using English as a medium of communication. -Editor

The misperception on Macaulay laying the foundation for entire Indian education by the medium of English is based on one notorious quote from his "Minute upon Indian Education" (Feb 2^nd 1835):

“We must at present do our best to form 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.”

This quote is rightly offensive to any full-blooded Indian, for it assumes the superiority of Englishman in comparison to the Indian, especially in reference to morals and intellect. Why did he want to form such a class? Just as interpreters? 

Removed from the context of the historical times, it leads to several interpretations. First, as regards to the superiority of British, they regarded themselves superior to all other Nations. They treated German Immigrants in England, for instance, with the same contempt as they did others saying that they were lazy and worthless as noted by Ha Joon-Chang in “Bad Samaritans (2008)”. It took two world wars, much blood letting and loss of empire for them to learn to respect Germans! 

Macaulay was no different from other colonials. This article is to postulate that for all his shortcomings, he was far more liberal and better than other Englishmen of his time and his racist comments, however obnoxious, have no bearing on the modern education in India. With all his lofty grandiloquent perorations, Macaulay was not successful in making England spend its resources in educating Indians. As David Landes, the author of “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations”, states the British spent little on social capital in India, trying to get as much as possible as, in his words, "No predator wants to lose his prey”. Most of English education in India was by the efforts of Indians themselves. British have to be given no credit. 

In juxtaposition to Macaulay haters, there is an odd Marxist activist of Utterpradesh, Chandra Bhan Prasad, who wants to build temples for Macaulay in India as he regards him a great savior of common man in India from the tyranny of exclusive classical education of "Brahmins." Chandra Bhan Prasad was one time Naxalite and presently a dedicated Dalit leader. 

This article is to objectively look at Macaulay’s contribution apart from these extreme views, contempt on one end and adoration at the other.

If Macaulay planned to create a class of people with taste of English, ‘opinions, morals and intellect’, how did he not imagine that such people would continue to accept superiority of the Englishman? How would such an Indian with the “opinions, tastes, morals and intellect of British” tolerate a foreign rule? How would they be different from the Americans who had the ‘similar opinions, tastes and morals’ and also shared British blood who drove out the British?  And this is what happened in India in less than a century. Macaulay did mention that the moral requirement for English was to treat Indian subjects with dignity rather than have millions as slaves. There was no evidence that he was part of any conspiracy of empire building or any political agenda in making that oft quoted above statement. This is clear when we look at the context of the debate at the time of writing his famous Minute.

By the early part of 18^th century the East India Company established firm control and collected revenues in Bengal, Orissa, and Bihar. The Government of Britain imposed upon the Company a requirement to provide education in India from the profits they made. In response, they appropriated a paltry sum of 100,000 rupees to spend on a population of 30 million! There was a scramble from all quarters for this money. In many areas occupied by the Company then were acquired in conquest from Muslim rulers, as indeed most of India was not long before that was ruled by them prior to the establishment of a large Maratha empire, and the language of the courts was Persian or Arabic. In fact, Persian was the language of all Muslim courts including Mughals, Bahaminis and Carnatic Nawabs. The British officers who came to India were required to learn Persian. There was a group among the British, who called themselves Orientalists. They were similar to half educated Indologists in current U.S. Universities pretending to be experts in Hindu scriptures, History and culture. The Orientalists did not include any Indian scholars in their academic circles just as the modern Indologists do not currently in most U.S universities, even though there are a few highly accomplished Sanskrit poets and Avadhanis (poetic talent combining extempore composition with prosody and extraordinary memory recall, exhibiting eight track attention) available in India and also perhaps in the U.S. The so called Orientalists were lead by J.T. Princip. He wanted Sanskrit as the language of instruction. The anti-English people had all the spurious arguments to oppose Macaulay. To enumerate:

 • The native Indians cannot learn English

Macaulay countered this argument drawing attention to the fact that he knew many Indians who had greater command over the English language than many western and eastern Europeans. "Indeed it is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the (European) continent”, to quote him, “any foreigner who can express himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos.” So, it is amply clear from this quote of Macaulay that Indians really did not wait for him to introduce English into India!

 • Sanskrit was the language of Ancient culture, that was what natives wanted and not English. 

Macaulay advanced the argument that the Orientalists had pecuniary interest (wanted to grab the money allocated to schooling) and there was no demand for Sanskrit from the natives. There is some basis for that view. Besides, both Sanskrit and Arabic (classical languages of both Hindus and Muslims) were far behind in adapting to the rapid scientific revolution in Europe, let alone in incorporating the political concepts of democracy and intellectual advances brought by European renaissance. 

Indians were spending their own money to buy English publications whereas the books printed in native languages with Government subsidy were collecting dust. Many prominent Indians of those days were in favor of English education as we will discuss momentarily. Upper class Hindus learned English at their own expense and attained higher positions in Government, while the rest were left behind without such an opportunity.

When the renowned linguist Judge William Jones wanted to learn Sanskrit, as recounted by Nehru (Discovery of India), he could not find a single Brahmin in the entire city of Calcutta to teach him Sanskrit. Sanskrit learning was and has been the exclusive privilege of priestly class and the Royalty, particularly of only men. We read in great classic of Kalidasa, Abhijnanashakuntalam, the king speaks Sanskrit and the queen Shakuntala speaks only prakrit, even though she grew up in Kanva (Muni) Rishi's ashram. It is the greatest tribute to Indian learning that, the Rig Veda, for instance, was memorized in oral tradition by Hindu scholars for 5,000 years without missing or altering a single word—all 10,580 verses, 70,000 lines and 153,826 words with exact enunciation and inflections, a greatest human intellectual achievement. The practice continues even today. Empires have come and gone, Muslims, English or others. Hindus did not look for charity for learning. 

Sanskrit learning did not ever depend on the patronage of the governments, either Muslim or Hindu. Warren Hastings was so fascinated by Sanskrit that he funded a Sanskrit college in Benares long before Macaulay came to India. In drafting of Civil law for Hindus, he heavily depended on Sanskrit scholars. It would have been absurd to have allocated the public funds designated for general education for such specialized literary field. So, the idea was opposed not only by Macaulay but by other prominent Indian leaders; one of them was Rajah Rammohan Roy, the founder of Brahmosamaj, who along with his followers was excommunicated by Orthodox Hindu establishment for his reformist activities. He was fighting to abolish child marriage by legal reform, a practice prevalent among high caste Hindus (mainly in Kuleen Brahmins). Girls as young as five were married off. It is easy to recall that Mahatma Gandhi’s marriage too was one such. Another prominent Bengali scholar, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a Sanskrit teacher, advocated learning of English. He even wanted his students to study the philosophy of Locke and Hume. Cultural renaissance in Bengal began with these stalwarts. Now, only after 150 years of this debate Hindu Nationalists in a second Hindu renaissance were awakened to promote Sanskrit through Sanskrit Bharati, to teach Sanskrit for all.

 • Arabic was needed for the Muslim culture and was the current official language in most of India (as Most of India, other than Maharashtra before the establishment of a huge Maratha Empire was ruled by Muslims for many centuries). Macaulay’s argument was really weak since this was the official language in most of India. Here, he had to fall back on the argument that in advancement of science, it was no match for English and French. Strangely, there were no significant advocates for Persian. However, Persian too had the same drawbacks as Arabic in this respect.

In all this scenario it is rather easy to form a misconception that Macaulay started English education India. Not so. English was already taught in India even before the recommendations of Macaulay. Christian Missionaries, with the permission of the East India Company and British authorities- (such permission was to be obtained as the Catholics were not favored by British)-setup schools including the English curriculum in Calcutta. Examples of Protestant colleges are the Presidency College of Calcutta and Wilson College of Bombay.

Critiques of Macaulay often forget the historical context of Macaulay’s advocacy of English education attributing to him a great colonial conspiracy hatched and spearheaded by Macaulay. He was in fact was in minority in the debate and went as far as to write to Governer Bentwick that he would resign from his Chairmanship of the committee, if his recommendations were not to be accepted. Introduction of English would be certainly to the detriment of colonialism as any thinking British politician could construe. His passion and motive was obvious in the following words in his report.

“ We are free, we are civilized, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of human race and equal measure of freedom and civilization. Are we to keep the people of India ignorant in order that we may keep them submissive? or do we give them knowledge without awakening ambition? Or do we mean to awaken ambition and provide with no legitimate went? Who will answer any of these questions in the affirmative? Yet one of them must be answered in the affirmative, by every person who maintains that we should permanently exclude the natives from high office. I have no fears. The path of duty is plain before us: and it is also the path of wisdom, of national prosperity, of national honour.” (emphasis mine) He also argued how barbaric were his ancestors before learning the language of Cicero and Plato and how Russians were crudely primitive in believing the story of St. Nicholas and how the world began after 13^th of September, before they were modernized by the introduction of European languages.

Apart from the denigrating remarks of Hindu literature by Macaulay, the fact remains accurate that Industrial revolution of 18^th century, which set the pace of intellectual and scientific developments for the next two centuries in the West; these developments bypassed India. As early as in 1600, Indians were shut out to the developments in Europe. Clocks were imported from Italy at the time of Akbar (Nehru, Discovery of India). In fact, it was the lack of knowledge in gun powder and building of canons that led to the conquest by Babar and establishment of Mogul empire. From then on the Moguls kept the technology a state secret. Indians take pride, rightly so, in great astronomy of antiquity of Aryabhatta, and  in medicine of Sushruta and Charaka. But that was several centuries before the period under review here, in fact at least 2000 years earlier. What was the status of India in the 18^th Century? 

Village people worshipped village Goddesses for the prevention and cure of cholera and small pox. Scientific knowledge advances by constant inquiry, analysis and invention. Somewhere that ability for using analytic thinking and scientific method for discovering laws of nature was lost for Indians. Indians are fond of talking about how great was Indian science in the antiquity like Ayurveda.The Ayurvedic medicine was great at one time but dated by the 18th century. This was the time in Europe of ground breaking discoveries by Louis Pasteur, Koch, and Jenner which lead to the concepts of sterilization and immunity and to vaccination and manufacture of the sterile needle for injections. Shortly before that, the steam engine was developed revolutionizing the sea travel. India had missed the boat for all these, not necessarily because Indians did not learn English, but neither did they learn French or German. India was a closed society, inwardly preoccupied abhorring global overseas explorations and in fact punishing those who crossed the oceans for committing sins levying "Prayaschitta" (repentance) upon them. To this extent Macaulay was right that India needed a medium to bring its population in touch with the advances taking place in Europe in the field of science, industry, and technology which could not be possible by popularizing Sanskrit or Arabic in those days. He was on the right track except for the disparaging tone of his narration which we find repeatedly in his writings. Technologically India was so backward that even in 1954 that this author witnessed women carrying baskets of rocks and stones on their head at the construction site of Nagarjun Sagar, the biggest masonry dam in the world. Indian civil engineers could not provide the poor women wheel barrows or other mechanical devices to move the building materials needed on site.

As stated emphatically earlier, English education did not start with Macaulay in India. Rajah Rama Moan Roy was instrumental in starting first Hindu college and then Presidency college of Calcutta along with Alexander Duffy both providing secular education in English. Within 80 years such educational institutions produced greatest leaders of India. 

                                             

Lokmanya Kesav Bal Gangadhar Tilak

To name a few of distinguished alumni of Presidency college, they are Swami Vivekananda who took Hinduism to the West and stemmed the tide of Christian conversion in Bengal, Swami Pramahansa Yogananda who took Kriya Yoga to America, Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada who established Krishna Conscious society in America and Swami Ghambhirananda of Ramakrishna Mission who translated several Upanishads into English . The alumni, prominent among social reformers and political leaders were Surendranath Banerjee and Ishwara Chandra Vidya Sagar. And, we cannot forget Subhash Chandra Bose who became the President of National Congress against the opposition of Gandhi and lead Indian National Army against the British during second world war. One of the memorable episodes of Netaji was that he hurled a Professor Oaten down the stairs for using derogatory language against Indians. 

Are these the morals, attitudes and spirit of Indians with Indian blood and skin Macaulay expected from English education? If he did, then we are all for it. If anyone says that English education made Indians "children of Macaulay" he is either stupid or ignorant or both. Many thought that English education would spread Christianity in India. Ram Mohan Roy did not become a Christian but instead an evangelist, Adam who was his associate in social reform quite remarkably left his Church and joined Ram Mohan Roy's Brahmosamaj Movement. 

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan சர்வபள்ளி ராதாகிருஷ்ணன் 'సర్వేపల్లి రాధాకృష్ణ''  BR Kt OM FBA

In the South, Radhakrishnan, later to become the president of India studied English in Madras Christian College. No one can call him Macaulay’s Child. That is within 80 years, we have seen one who interpreted Hinduism to west instead of interpreting the British to Indians. He went to England, mind you, not as a student to learn from British Universities but as Spaulding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford. Every major University in the world honored him with a doctoral degree, more than one hundred in all. Within the period of 80 years, English education produced two Nobel Prize winners in India,  Tagore in literature and C.V. Raman in Physics. No thinking man, given these facts, can disparage English as creating servility. All great leaders and freedom fighters in India, in short were English educated. It is hard to understand for a closed mind of petrified orthodoxy that cultural servility is a state of mind; it does not come from the learning of a new language. It was the study of English that heralded Indian Novel as a new form of literature starting with Bankim Chandra Chaterjee and a new form of prose poetry, in the blank verse by Tagore.

It is useful to review the state of English education in India at time the country became independent to dispel the notion that British educated Indians. Despite all the urging of Macaulay, British did not spend much of their resources on either secondary or on higher education in India. Education in India was mainly supported by local efforts, sometimes dependent on the philanthropy of land lords and princes, tax supported local governments and Municipalities. Andhra, with a population of thirty million in 1945 had only two Government colleges and one University. Only one college offered education at degree level in science. British left India in a poor state in education. Macaulay or no Macaulay, English would have been the language of communication in the entire British Empire.  Macaulay was in India only for four years and there was no “educational system” that he designed for India other than his advocating for adoption of English as a medium of instruction and communication. To emphasize again, there was no structure as “Macaulay’s system of Education” as such. The first three colleges were started after 1857, the year of transition from Company rule to Government of Britain as a consequence of first Indian Independent revolution.

What kind of man was Macaulay?

While we support his analysis for introduction of a European language in India, in this instance, English, do we build monuments for  Macaulay as advocated by Chandra Bhan Prasad? For answering that question, we need to examine Macaulay’ life and writings closely just as much as we argue that English educated ipso facto are not Macaulay's children.

Macaulay was a child prodigy, an extraordinarily brilliant man who was said to have declared that that if all the copies of Milton’s "Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained" were lost, he could reproduce them verbatim. He was never married and was devoted to his sisters like did Charles Lamb. Unlike most English, he could not ride a horse. But sadly he was a man of utter contradictions. The poetry he wrote when he was very young was well recognized and he even received awards, but he never continued writing poetry. He studied law, but never practiced law. He was a brilliant orator which propelled him into politics and was twice elected to British parliament, but he never liked politics as a career. He wanted to be known as a historian like Gibbons or Plutarch, perhaps he fashioned himself like the latter as he had avid taste for Greek and Latin. He went to India for four years as he needed money to support his family. He began writing History of England and died before he finished it. While his literary style is excellent, he never had the objectivity and ability to distance himself from his emotions, the qualities needed by an academician, as his narratives are exceptionally colored by his own passionate opinions. This is also evident in his writings on India. For a man who gave up so much for his literary pursuit, one can only sympathize and feel sorry for his failures. 

He was a liberal politician, who argued for the abolition of prepublication censorship. He praised this legislation as important second only to Magna Carta in civil rights. He argued for change in the laws enabling the Jews to contest the elections and enable them to sit in British Parliament. He failed in this, despite his maiden memorable speech on the floor of the parliament which he delivered immediately after being elected, in which he drew attention to the historical plight of Jews saying, “they did not even own the teeth of their heads," referring the extraction of gold from the dentures of Jewish corpses by King John, three hundred years earlier. It was his liberality that made him say that British education should be religiously neutral (secular). He ridiculed Catholic Church but supported granting funds for a Catholic college resulting in his defeat to parliament for one term. This is the kind of apparent contradiction in his far advanced thinking that his fellow Englishmen could not reconcile.

In his Writings on Robert Clive and Warren Hastings in Edinburgh Review his feelings for both Indians and for his own people, were not depicting both in any favorable light. He wondered how  unlike that of the New world, India was conquered and subjugated by so few Englishmen. He remarked that the story “is insipid and even distasteful” to read. Why distasteful? He knew there was no heroism in the conquest of Bengal by East India Company. Clive bribed  Mir Jaffar, the military general of Suraj-Ud- Doualah, the Nawab of Bengal. The deal was mediated by a business man, Omichand. There was hardly a battle at Plassey. 50,000 Nawab troops stood by and simply watched when Clive attacked the palace guards of the Nawab with mere 300 Company British soldiers and 1200 Indian Sepoys. They massacred the palace soldiers. Only 4 British soldiers and 14 sepoys died . The battle lasted a few hours. Mir Jaffar Came to the throne. Clive got , according to historian Landes, a booty of $140 Million an equivalent of One Billion US dollars in today’s money. Omichand got cheated and got nothing. 

While both Clive and Omichand were partners in conspiracy and Corruption, what was the view of Macaulay? He wrote, “He (Omichand) possessed great influence with his own race, and had in large measure the Hindoo talents, quick observation, tact, dexterity, perseverance and the Hindoo vices, servility, greediness, and treachery.” How was Hindu treachery distinct from that of British? How greedy was he compared to a desk clerk in East India Company taking the loot of $140 Million? 

Mir Jaffar could not meet the demands of the British Company and so agreed for duel taxation of the subjects. Economy of Bengal, which alone supplied the wealth for the industrial development of Britain, was crushed. The farmers were forced to cultivate indigo instead of rice which was staple. Then the rains failed, with that crops failed. The British Company workers began hoarding food . The result was the historic famine in which one third of population died of hunger and disease. Macaulay describes famine: “Tender delicate women, whose veils had never been lifted before the public gaze, came forth from the inner chambers in which Eastern Jealousy had kept watch over their beauty, threw themselves on the earth before the passerby and, with loud wailings, implored a handful of of rice for their children”. The dead bodies were washed by the subsequent street floods into Ganges. Macaulay admits the corruption of Clive and exonerates him for trying to control the corruption of other officers unsuccessfully in the name of administrative reform. 

We find similar paradox when he writes about Warren Hastings, the first Governor of British India under Company rule. Warren Hasting, was an unscrupulous and unprincipled man, who, while traveling on ship to India concerted with wife of a fellow Jew and paid him to divorce her in order for him to marry the woman. Like Clive he was also indicted for corruption but exonerated for his service to his country. Hastings mainly collected his loot from the princely states. His corruption was brought to the notice of British Council In India by a Maharaja Nanda Kumar in Bengal. Hastings was in trouble. Here is how Macaulay describes Nanadakumar and his people to exculpate Hastings _ “What the horns are for the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, what the sting to the bee, what beauty, according to the old Greek song, is to the woman, deceit is to the Bengalee. Large promises, smooth excuses, elaborate tissue of circumstantial falsehood, chicanery, perjury, forgery, are the weapons of offensive and defensive, of the people of lower Ganges? So Nandakumar was charged with forgery and perjury. He was sentenced to death by a friend of Hastings, Judge Impey. Macaulay admits that Impey sent an innocent man to death by legal means for political purpose. Hastings later acknowledges that the judge saved his honor and fortune. While condemning the Judge, Macaulay finds a way to exculpate Hastings as one whose shortcomings should be overlooked in view of his service to the country. As a historian he aught to know that England might have overlooked but not history. When Nandakumar was sent to his death he died with extreme dignity. The scene was described by Macaulay thus: “Bengalees, who would see his country overrun, his home laid in ashes, his children murdered or dishonored, without having a spirit to strike blow, has yet been known to endure torture with the firmness of Mucius (Gaius Mucius) and to mount the scaffold with the steady step and even pulse of Algerone Sydney.” Mucius and Sydney were Greek heroes; the analogy shows the love of Greek history of the author. His description of misery of Hindu life during Nawab rule and since then was apt. Macaulay resorts to the logical fallacy applying particular to general—one man character to the entire race.

While it was easy to defend English as medium of learning, Macaulay went overboard in challenging that the entire literature of Hindus was not equal to a single shelf of a European library. There was no record of his short stay in India whether he had any knowledge of Hindu centers of learning. He resorts to disingenuous argument by mixing mythology with Geography and history that Indian Geography includes seas of milk and butter and their history includes notions of 30 feet men and kings ruling thirty thousand years. The argument is no different than saying Christian biology includes virgin giving birth to a child that too to a male (even assuming parthenogenesis genetically impossible!) and man coming to life after crucifixion! He sacrificed moderation for emphasis, while comparing Hindu belief in the seas of milk to Catholic ritual of ‘transubstantiation’ in which the priest proclaims the bread he offers the devotees is real flesh of Jesus-not like flesh, but real and the wine he offer is the real blood of Jesus. He called Catholic Orthodoxy a synonym for ignorance and stupidity. No true politician would engage in such diatribe even in modern secular times; but Macaulay was no true politician.

We conclude, while Macaulay has his merits, he was still an imperialist and does not deserve to have monuments to be erected in his honor as Chandra Bhan Prasad proposes. With all the patriotic tribute and adoration to his country he failed to acknowledge that England was a barbaric, cruel and corrupt country in 18^th century. There were Lords and Barons and Gentry: and there were others who were treated less than human. Capital punishment was administered to 160 crimes in England and more added as time went by. Macaulay clearly said that forgery was not a capital crime even in England under which Warren Hastings charged Nandakumar and Judge Impey gave death sentence to him for forgery in India. One of the true achievements of Macaulay was the composition of Penal code for India, which still survived in India, Burma, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. It did not contain such cruel laws of capital punishment as in England. It was canon of Justice with compassion. Another achievement of his was the establishment of Indian Civil Service (ICS) which recruited the administrators by merit; the practice until then was recruitment based on cronyism or nepotism.

Advocates of “Hate English Education”:

There are two groups who hate English as a medium of communication and both use the term Macaulay's Children pejoratively against English learning. The first group are language fanatics who refuse to speak to other Indians except in Hindi, as they want Hindi as a National Language. The issue is complex for this discussion, but suffice it to say that at the time of Independence of India there was much enthusiasm and Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha was very active and popular in Madras. The aggressive behavior of UP Politicians, like Tandon to force the language on Tamils, wiped out any chance of accepting Hindi as the official language.

The second group who used the term are ultra-orthodox people who counter any modernity with the term Macaulay's Children. Kapil Kapoor of Jawaharlal University in a seminar in 2001 called for the decolonizing of Indian mind that was created by English education leading to the neglect of inherited learning and inducing self denigration. The fact is that English education has not brought enough modernity to India leaving it with the most corrupt governments and degenerate dynastic rule in India. Rajiv Malhotra is another one who decries English educated Indians of espousing Eurocentrism. The sad fact is that the Central Cabinet Ministers in Delhi who used brutish force on demonstrators in wee hours of midnight are the people who studied and received degrees from Harvard and The University of California (Chidamabaram and Kapil Sibal). Years of education in the most enlightened and democratic Universities did not benefit them; how can leaning a language change a character. We have companion analogy to the Syrian president who studied in England for years. There is inherence in the character of Nations and their leaders, that can be traced back to the history of servitude which dehumanizes them which can not be altered by any amount of education and learning. Such dehumanization is like killing the soul with no desire in the individual to revive his identity.

When I was in 8th grade, during British reign of India (1943) my first English teacher was the son of the brother of the Speaker of the Indian Parliament Ananta Shayanam Iyengar. The poem he taught on the first day in the class and oft repeated was a well known poem of Sir Walter Scott:

Breath there the man with soul so dead , 

Who never to himself hath said ,

“This is my own, my native land!”

The poem ends with the lines (IF THERE IS SUCH A MAN))

Living, shall forfeit fair renown,

And doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust from whence he sprung,

Unwept, unhonoured and Unsung.

Hindus in their collective consciousness had already reached such a state of mind long before the debut of Macaulay on the Indian scene. They, to this day, are doubly dead and have no courage left to say as people, as "Hindus": "This is my own, my native land." In celebrating the sesquicentennial anniversary of Swami Vivekananda's birth year, it might be useful to remember that he too could be described as Macaulay's Child but he was a patriot, wherever he is, who will be watching India of 800 million Hindus who are shy or timid when it comes to declaring: "This is my own, my native land."

Swami Vivekananda

To this day Indians sing praises to "Adhinayaka "  (George V) Jaya Ho Bharata Bhagya Vidhata  (Victory to the giver of fortune ) as National Anthem which was composed for welcoming George V to India!

Patriotism can be taught in any language.  Learning of English does not create inferiority (heena Bhava) as postulated by Kapil Kapoor.