Delivering the Sixth Ramnath Goenka Lecture in Delhi on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called on people to take a pledge to end, over the next 10 years, Thomas Macaulay’s influence, which he said had “colonised” Indian minds for almost two centuries. The PM’s statements expressed a core concern of the Sangh and were in line with its position on indigenising education and “decolonising the Indian mind”.
Macaulay’s objective, Modi said, was to create Indians who “are Indians by appearance but British at heart.” The country, he added, “paid a heavy price” for this as the belief that the Western or foreign was superior took deep root. “The feeling of pride in what was ours gradually diminished. We started looking toward foreign countries for innovation. This mentality led to a trend in society where imported ideas, imported goods, and imported services were considered superior,” the PM said.
With this, the PM brought to the fore a concern that the Sangh Parivar has repeatedly raised since the days of the second sarsanghchalak M S Golwalkar who wrote In Bunch of Thoughts, “The imperialist designs of Macaulay, the brain behind the system of English education, were trumpeted aloud, ‘We must at present do our best to form a class of interpreters between us and millions whom we govern — a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’.”
Last month, RSS sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat said in Mumbai, “We were educated in the Macaulay knowledge system … We are Indians, but our minds and intellect became foreign. We must completely free ourselves from that foreign influence. Only then will we be able to access our knowledge system.”
In the 1970s, in addition to Macaulay’s influence, a new concern began bothering the Sangh: the sway Marxists held in academia, especially in social science institutions. It started when Aligarh historian Nurul Hasan became the Education Minister after Indira Gandhi allied with the CPI following the split in the Congress in 1969. With Marxist scholars often critical of what they saw as “ancient myths” and calling for a “scientific approach” towards deconstructing them, the next decades would see the Sangh Parivar adding “Marxist distortions” to its concerns about “Macaulayist distortions”. That Marxism is also “Western thought” made the alignment complete. However, with Western categories providing the frames of reference in much of global academia, replacing them is easier said than done.
The Vajpayee years
Things picked up when the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government came to power and Murli Manohar Joshi became Minister of Human Resource Development in 1998. Joshi commissioned new NCERT history textbooks, tried to reform school curricula to “nationalise and spiritualise” education, and sought to increase the essentials of Indian culture in curricula from 10% to 25%. His term also saw much controversy on the inclusion of “value education” and the proposal to teach “Vedic astrology” in universities.
Critics in the Opposition and academia labelled these moves as “saffronisation” of education. “Instead of saying that India has a very glorious past, will they teach Marx’s views?” Joshi responded in an interview to The Organiser, a Sangh-affiliated publication, after the Congress-led UPA government came to power in 2004.
The UPA government replaced these NCERT history textbooks. The new ones that were commissioned in their place are still functional. However, in the Modi years, there have been multiple deletions from these books, which have sparked controversy from time to time. In 2018, ancient Indian knowledge, traditions, and practices began to find more space in the textbooks that hit the shelves that March, The Indian Express reported. Books meant for students of Classes 6 to 10 began to carry new or additional information on ancient Indian philosophy, ayurveda, yoga, teachings of the Upanishads and smritis, and scientific achievements in ancient India in areas such as astronomy and metallurgy.
There have been changes in the last two years, too. In 2024, the new English language textbook for Class 6 titled “Poorvi”, among the first to be developed by the NCERT in line with the National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2023, had a revamped content, with references to Indian culture, tradition, and ancient knowledge. This was ostensibly in line with the new National Education Policy 2020, which calls for a curriculum to be “rooted in the Indian and local context and ethos”.
However, this has also raised questions about what constitutes “Bharatiya” in a diverse country like India. Earlier this year, the NCERT drew flak from Kerala Education Minister V Sivankutty over English textbooks having Hindi titles. The NCERT responded by saying the textbooks were named after musical instruments and classical ragas because these elements of “India’s rich musical heritage are common across all linguistic and cultural traditions of the country”.
Challenge for the Sangh
An academic close to the Sangh said on the condition of anonymity that the changes till now had been piecemeal and unless new NCERT textbooks were commissioned, some deletions here and there would serve a limited purpose in ideological terms.
However, the challenge for the Sangh is far deeper and will require a change in approach rather than just a change in textbooks. At a superficial level, indigenisation of education can mean a literal reading of every description in ancient literature as “true”, but this is unlikely to find any global acceptance. At a deeper level, it would mean putting in place a new epistemological system based largely on Indian philosophical traditions to make sense of the country. This would mean a changed theoretical approach to how knowledge is constituted. There is not much evidence of that happening yet.
“The challenge is huge, but we need first steps. The biggest challenge is that what Macaulay did here many of his contemporaries did in Africa and other parts of the world, leading to the establishment of a Eurocentric system to make sense of the world,” said BJP leader and former MP Vinay Sahasrabuddhe. The “obsession with political correctness” in academic circles was a problem, as sounding fashionable became more important than inquiry, he said, adding that “wokeism” had become a challenge the world over.
Sahasrabuddhe said there was a need to take definitive steps. “Until 1999, our Budget would be presented at 4 pm, as if to align it with the British time zone. It was only with the Vajpayee government that this outdated practice deriving from British influence was changed,” he said.
Former BJP MP Rakesh Sinha said, “What the PM means first and foremost is the decolonisation of our imagination, in which we give too much of a centrality to the West. Our education system should contextualise our knowledge systems; it is not as if we replace schools and colleges with Vedic vidyalayas. But our philosophy should get credit. It is used by the West without giving credit to India.”
However, according to Projit Mukharji, who teaches history at Ashoka University, the “West versus non-West” binary is simplistic. “This West vs non-West divide itself is Orientalist in nature. In the act of resisting the West, we end up reproducing it. The Europe of today owes a lot to non-European cultures, just as non-European cultures also owe a lot to Europe. What we have everywhere are entangled histories stretching back millennia, but we oversimplify by thinking that there is a neat binary, and also by shortening the time of exchange and entanglement,” he told The Indian Express.