Why India is Degraded?

December 25, 2004

The original source is:

>From Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Minute of 2 February 1835 on Indian

Education," Macaulay, Prose and Poetry, selected by G. M. Young (Cambridge

MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp-721-24,729.

This is quoted in the following web pages:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1833macaulay-india.html

http://www.mssu.edu/projectsouthasia/history/primarydocs/education/Macaulay0

01.

htm

This second one doesnt seem to work anymore?? Hmmmmm.

Thanks a lot to iysmumbai for posting it.

I think this should be posted as much as possible to cover up the demoniac

plans to destroy the wonderful vedic culture.

Your servant

Damana Krishna dasa

December 26, 2004

Please accept my obeisances. All glories to Srila Prabhupada!

After exhaustive research and consulting with some of our devotees in

academia, I would conclude that this quote is a fabrication.

Lord Macauly was responsible for deciding that English would be the medium

for the schools set up by the British Empire in India. He also clearly

thought that British culture was highly superior to the Indians. He felt

that Sanskrit and Arabic, the medium for education at the time, were useless

languages. His opinion of local languages, such as Bengali, etc. was even

lower. He would not have "glorified" Indian culture in any way; doing so

would be inconsistent with his writing.

Here is a quote from his "Minute" which nicely describes his attitude:

from : http://www.languageinindia.com/april2003/macaulay.html

MACAULEY, THOMAS BABINGTON (1958) Minute on education, in: W. T. DE BARY et

al. (Eds) Sources of Indian Tradition (New York, Columbia University Press),

p. 601

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.. I have never found one among them [indians] who could deny that

a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native

literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western

literature is, indeed, fully admitted..It may be safely said, that the

literature now extant in that language [English] is of far greater value

than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the

languages of the world together.

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