“Indic Uvacha: Macaulay’s Shadow Runs Deeper Than We Admit”, Indica Today, December 09, 2025
“Was the Prime Minister only partly right when he accused Macaulay of mentally colonising India? In a recent article in ThePrint (“Did English language create captive minds” dated 25th of November, 2025), Prof. Ashutosh Varshney argued that there were complex and multivalent consequences of Macaulay’s legacy. While many indeed adopted the lens of the colonizer, many others used English knowledge for emancipation, and even development.
The author used the example of three Indian stalwarts of the 20th century: Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru, to build his case. In this article, I argue that Macaulay’s impact was far deeper than it appears, and even when English education empowered Indians, it often did so by subtly reshaping their minds through colonial categories.
Gandhi: A Borrowed Pacifism, an Indigenous Resistance
To begin with, let us consider the example of Gandhi cited by the author. There are two main points which were made: First, that Gandhi developed his idea of non-violence from the Advaita tradition of this land, which sees the oneness in all and thus forbids violence towards another as violence towards self. Second, Gandhi’s inspiration of civil disobedience came through the thoughts and works of Thoreau, Ruskin and Tolstoy……”
Read full article at indica.today
