Macaulay's Ghost in the Indian Classroom: Colonial Language Policy and the Ranking of Knowledge

This essay reads Macaulay's afterlife not as the execution of one man's 1835 design but as an institutional grammar that ranks languages, texts, subjects, and speakers. It traces that grammar from colonial filtration and English literary study into textbook pedagogy, examinations, caste-marked access, translation, and a present in which policy promises mother-tongue schooling, even as the three-language formula is contested. The hierarchy endures because ‘western knowledge is no longer seen as only one mode of knowing but as knowledge itself,’ (Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 3.) making English appear fitted for theory while Indian languages are confined to illustration. Yet English also carries mobility, dissent, and Dalit assertion. Decolonisation therefore requires neither expulsion nor official nativism but epistemic parity: multilingual theorisation, reciprocal translation, redesigned assessment, and curricula that redistribute the authority to interpret and produce knowledge.