(Published in Mint Lounge, December 13 2025)

In 1784, two white men joined forces to establish an English school in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu. John Sullivan was British representative at the court of the local rajah, while C.F. Schwartz was a missionary who had long worked in India. In promoting English education, they had, of course, specific goals. Sullivan, for instance, lamented how British officials depended on “self-seeking dubashes” (interpreters) for business. If the “principal natives” took to English, however, these pesky middlemen could be eliminated. What attracted Schwartz, meanwhile, was that Western education offered also to break the “obstinate attachment” Indians had to their religion, helping the “diffusion of Christianity”. Higher-ups in London agreed. For them, in fact, English instruction promised one more advantage: the infusing of “native minds” with “respect for the British nation”. On the face of it, this was a perfect “win-win”. Except that these figures didn’t factor in a key element: the motivations of Indians themselves.

India’s engagement with English has been much in the news lately. This follows a recent speech by the Prime Minister, in which he cited the infamous Lord Macaulay and his colonial-era effort to evidently “uproot Bharat from its own foundation” by creating a class of Indians brown in colour but white in spirit. The result, the Prime Minister added, was a “sense of inferiority” about all things Indian, with a mindless aping of the West, and a devaluing of local languages. To a serious extent this is true, in that English and what it represents did acquire—and still holds—tremendous power in our country. There remain, for example, patrician clubs where the dress code frowns on kurta-pyjamas and admits brogues but not Kolhapuri slippers. Fifty years after independence, similarly, Salman Rushdie could claim that “Indian writers working in English” were producing “more important” work than those writing in our bhashas—a comment that has definitely not aged well.

That said, however, it is simplistic to assume that British villains of Macaulay’s type landed here with wicked designs, and that Indians tragically succumbed to said designs. For the fact is that the British grew very unhappy with the way in which “natives” deployed English, subverting the coloniser’s grammar book for their own purposes. Schwartz in Thanjavur, for example, hoped to spread Christianity via his school. Yet right from the advent it was patent that most pupils were simply learning English for “temporal welfare”. That is, they saw the language as a route to employment and enrichment—money they then poured into temples and local institutions. Decades later, in fact, missionaries would find Brahmins too reading the Bible, viewing it not as a vehicle for spiritual reinvention but as that mundane thing: a textbook. Indians, in other words, were not passively sticking to a script written by foreign puppet masters. They possessed agency and engaged with Western fare selectively, and indeed strategically.

Take, for example, some of India’s earliest high-profile products of English education. The Thanjavur rajah Serfoji II (1777-1832) was directly tutored by Schwartz. He spoke more than one European language; “emitted English poetry”; studied modern science; collected books from around the world; enjoyed Western music; and even referred to his missionary preceptor as his “father”. On the face of it, Serfoji is a perfect specimen of brown complexion plus white culture. Yet, the rajah never converted—in fact, he was a patron of temples and Vedic academies, prone to distributing cows to Brahmins, owned a magnificent collection of Sanskrit manuscripts, and remained, as a disappointed European visitor put it, a “slave to Hindoo superstition”. Of course, he did admire Western advances in medicine, technology, and so on, translating this into local languages. But it was a self-confident, calculated embrace of European ideas, without divorcing himself from the wider package that we call cultural identity.

But Serfoji was a prince. What of more ordinary men? While employment was one element in Indians’ keenness for English education, it does not tell the whole story. As the scholar Parimala V. Rao notes, for instance, of the 900 boys who graduated from English schools in western India between 1824-36, less than 100 sought official positions. Yes, many white men, in offering English education, thought they were creating an army of loyalist clerks to serve the Raj. Yet English was also producing “political leaders, professional men, and intellectuals”. For instance, one of the first systematic critiques of colonial rule emerged just six years after Macaulay’s views were aired. In 1841 a young man called Bhaskar Pandurang published an appraisal, excoriating British imperialism for its racism, economic depredations, its religious agenda, and more. And he did so in the English language in an English newspaper; he had seized Western weapons to attack Western power.

Indians involved in teaching were also alert to the politics around English education; they were not meek instruments of a colonial agenda. The Bengali textbook writer Akshay Kumar Datta (1820-66), for example, worked hard to bring modern science to his people. He acknowledged European technological superiority and criticised an Indian tendency to vest too much faith in custom. But he was not ignorant of the context in which European science came to India; he could see his country’s political prostration. White men here, he declared, showed “greed”, “self-love and tremendous malice”. They embodied “lowly instincts”. That is, even as he admired the West’s technical achievements and urged Indians to learn, this approval was not unqualified or total. Accepting value in English education was not tantamount to legitimising colonialism. If that were the case, B.G. Tilak—a firebrand nationalist if ever there was one—would have set up old-fashioned pathasalas, not the New English School and Fergusson College.

None of this is to suggest that English was not disruptive; it sapped away patronage from local knowledge systems and languages in many places, and the damage has still not been repaired. It also created a type of anglicised Indian whose notion of accomplishment is entirely Western; there are frameworks of thinking that do alienate us from our own. Jawaharlal Nehru thought adopting English as “the official all-Indian language” was “humiliating”. Mahatma Gandhi was even more damning. Yet it is also true that English’s place in our history is not black-and-white. Where colonialism is concerned, we only need to ask whether English achieved the ends its first sponsors intended. Western education was expected to Christianise India. It failed. And if in the 1780s white figures thought English would make loyal subjects of “natives”, a hundred years later brown men from across the land met under the banner of the Indian National Congress to plot out the course for anti-British nationalism. And they did this in English.

Which explains why the status of this language in India remains: “It’s complicated.”