T. B. Macaulay
- Macaulay came from a deeply religious Protestant family, so his motivation was to convert numerous Hindus to Christianity, which he thought would also help the administrative problems that the English were facing
- His plan was to create an educational system that would make an educated elite that would naturally be English by their own choice, and thus give up their own Hindu traditions
- Then they would also work and cooperate more efficiently with the English administration.
- facilitate the British colonialism by making Indians, especially the Brahmanas, collaborators loyal to their new masters
- “Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully. The effect of this education on the Hindus is prodigious… It is my belief that if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be effected without any efforts to proselytize, without the smallest interference with religious liberty, by natural operation of knowledge and reflection. I heartily rejoice in the project.”
- “It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.”
- “In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. 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. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”
- This is in reference that Macaulay figured that the British would not be able to educate all Indians in the ways of the British, but could indeed create a class of them who would be English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect, and then engage them in influencing the rest of India, thus helping the English in their job of overseeing the rest of India, and, of course, converting them.
- “Through the whole Hindoo Pantheon you will look in vain for anything resembling those beautiful and majestic forms which stood in the shrines of ancient Greece. All is hideous, and grotesque, and ignoble. As this superstition is of all superstitions the most inelegant, so is it of all superstitions the most immoral. Emblems of vice are objects of public worship. Acts of vice are acts of public worship. The courtesans are as much a part of the establishment of the temple, as much ministers of the god, as the priests. Crimes against life, crimes against property, are not only permitted but enjoined by this odious theology.”