How Indians made the most of an imperial tool that was meant to discipline them

Toronto

: In 1835, when Thomas Babington Macaulay submitted his now-infamous ‘Minute on Indian Education’, he could not have foreseen the world he was helping to conjure. The document is often recalled for its hauteur — that single shelf of English books allegedly outweighing all the learning of India and Arabia.

But a quieter line sits, almost shyly, alongside the bluster: his hope that Indians educated in the English language would ‘form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern’.
His dream was small, almost bureaucratic. He imagined an auxiliary class to shore up an empire.