Long live Indian education!

A few anecdotal references:


Babar was from Uzbekistan. In Tashkent there are statues of him. He is a demi God.


Pakistan did not exist when India was invaded.


Afghans have Mongol descent. Chenghiz Khan was from Mongolia. He is supposed to be the most virile person known to mankind. He is stated to have fathered thousands of kids from hundreds of women, many of them raped by him.They say people having his genes are more likely to be terrorists. There is some research going on on this even at this time.


Pattu has given some good data. India had one of the best irrigation systems, even in the south.You can still see remains of them from the Delhi - BAngalore train... KK Express which we would use while at IIM. At the time of British conquest, Indian farm labour was 6 times richer than their European counterpart. Our exotic spices like black pepper were exchanged for equivalent wts of gold in the 13th to 15th centuries in Europe.




I was tempted to send the following quote (part 1) to you all as another bit to whip up our Indian sense of pride as I have come across this at several fora and I love quoting it. But then, my sense of caution made me search the net and found its rebuttal which is part 2 below. I am once again shaken by the quantum of free shit that we consume. I now wonder if I should have even writeen what I wrote bove. Is my knowledge accurate?




Part1.


THE PROPOSAL OF MACAULAY


EXTRACTS OF LORD MACAULAY'S ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT ON FEBRUARY 2, 1835.




"I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominant nation."






Part2.




BJP Manifesto: The bogus Macaulay quote refuses to die


BJP’s Lok Sabha Elections 2009 manifesto (PDF), released yesterday, starts with the preface written by Dr. Murli Manohar Joshi (“To build a prosperous, powerful nation, recall India’s past“).




I found L K Advani’s IT vision (released a few days ago) and some other parts of the BJP manifesto very impressive. But, I can’t say the same about Dr. Joshi’s piece. It was the typical “India was the most advanced nation, but the British destroyed us” rant. While I agree that the British rule was responsible for a lot of bad things that happened to the Indian subcontinent, it’s hard to ignore the most glaring mistake in the manifesto – the spurious quote attributed to Thomas Babington Macaulay. Dr. Joshi writes:






India’s prosperity, its talents and the state of its high moral society can be best understood by what Thomas Babington Macaulay stated in his speech of February 02, 1835, in the British Parliament. “I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief, such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such high caliber, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very back bone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self esteem, their native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.” This policy was implemented very meticulously by Britishers and the education system was created to make Indian’s [sic] ignorant about themselves.


Well, the problem is that Macaulay’s Minute on Education (2 February 1835) doesn’t contain these words, and Macaulay wasn’t addressing the British parliament on 2 February 1835 – he was in India.


Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay




Could this quote be from some other speech by Macaulay, then? I don’t think so. Anybody who has read Macaulay’s speech, would know that a man like him would have never praised India so generously. It’s hard to imagine Macaulay talking about India using words like “such high moral values, people of such high caliber” or “spiritual and cultural heritage”). As evident by the speech made on 2 February 1835, he had a superiority complex:




“I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”




“And I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit [sic] poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations.”




“…when a nation of high intellectual attainments undertakes to superintend the education of a nation comparatively ignorant…”




“(On Sanskrit and Arabic literature) But to encourage the study of a literature, admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcated the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. It is confined that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We are to teach it because it is fruitful of monstrous superstitions. We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting the natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can we reasonably or decently bribe men, out of the revenues of the State, to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass or what texts of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?




Obviously, the infamous quote mentioned in the BJP’s manifesto is a fabricated one. It was not fabricated by BJP, though – the story goes earlier than that. Burjor Avari, in his India: The Ancient Past (p 19-20), while citing this quote as an example of “tampering with historical evidence”, writes:




“No proof of this statement has been found in any of the volumes containing the writings and speeches of Macaulay. In a journal in which the extract appeared, the writer did not reproduce the exact wording of the Minutes, but merely paraphrased them, using the qualifying phrase: ‘His words were to the effect.’ This is extremely mischievous, as numerous interpretations can be drawin from the Minutes.”


Now, I certainly don’t agree with Macaulay’s opinion on the Indian literature. And, by no means, I’m one of those “Macaulay’s children”. But, do we Indians need to propagate a fabricated quote to prove how great India is?




Recently, when we were celebrating the success of Slumdog Millionaire, some of our compatriots alleged that we Indians are “obsessed with western recognition”. Isn’t this fabrication, in an indirect way, an obsession with “western recognition”? Isn’t cooking up a quote about the greatness of Indian culture and misattributing it to an inimical British man an indication of being obsessed with the “western recognition”?




Belgian orientalist Koenraad Elst has written a detailed article on this spurious quote: A dubious quotation, a controversial reputation: the merits of Lord Macaulay. He says that the oldest traceable source of this quote appears to be a journal called The Awakening Ray (vol.4, no.5). Thanks to lazy writers who do not bother checking their sources, this quote has found its way to several blogs, books, news reports and other media.


While I agree that the Indian education system needs to be overhauled, I don’t think propagating fabricated quotes would be of much help.




This quote apart, there are many other things in Dr. Joshi’s preface that I’d like to comment on (the bit on the “Indian civilisation” being the “most ancient”, “foreign attacks and alien rule”, the statement about educated Indians having lost sight of India’s cultural and civilizational greatness, religions having existed “peacefully” in India etc.), but I’d save these for another post.


Long live Indian education!