The English Education Act of 1835 was a legislative act of the Council of India, which gave effect to a decision in 1835 by Lord William Bentinck, the then Governor-General of the British East India Company, to reallocate funds for education and literature in the regions governed by the British East India Company. Previously, they had given limited support to traditional Muslim and Hindu education and the publication of literature in traditional languages of education in India including Sanskrit and Persian; henceforward they intended to support establishments teaching a Western curriculum with English as the language of instruction. Together with other measures promoting English as the language of administration and of the higher law courts (instead of Persian, as under the Mughal Empire), this led eventually to English becoming one of the languages of India, rather than simply the native tongue of its foreign rulers.
In discussions leading up to the Act Thomas Babington Macaulay produced his famous Memorandum on (Indian) Education which was scathing on the inferiority (as he saw it) of native (particularly Hindu) culture and learning. He argued that Western learning was superior, and currently could only be taught through the medium of English. There was therefore a need to produce—by English-language higher education—"a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect" who could in their turn develop the tools to transmit Western learning in the vernacular languages of India. Macaulay recommended that the East India Company stop printing Arabic and Sanskrit books and stop supporting traditional education beyond "the Sanskrit College at Benares and the Mahometan College at Delhi" (which he considered adequate to maintain traditional learning).
The act itself, however, took a less negative attitude to traditional education than Macaulay, and was soon succeeded by further measures which slightly increased funding. Vernacular language education, however, continued to receive little funding, although it had not been much supported before 1835 in any case.
British support for Indian learning When the Parliament had renewed the charter of the East India Company for 20 years in 1813, it had required the company to use 100,000 rupees per yearThe rupee was then worth about two shillings, so roughly £10,000 (equivalent current purchasing power clearly considerably more) "for the revival and promotion of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories."quoted in Macaulay's Minute This had gone to support traditional forms (and content) of education, which (like their contemporary equivalents in England) were firmly non-utilitarian. In 1813, by the request of Colonel John Munro, the then British Resident of Travancore and Pulikkottil Dionysius II, a learned monk of the Orthodox Syrian Church, Gowri Parvati Bayi, the Queen of Travancore granted permission to start a Theological college in Kottayam, Travancore. The queen granted the tax free 16 acre property, 20,000, and the necessary timber for construction. The foundation stone was laid on 18 February 1813 and the construction completed by 1815. The structure of the Old Seminary Building is called Naalukettu translated into English as central-quadrangle. The early missionaries who worked here – Norton, Henry Baker, Benjamin Bailey and Fenn – rendered remarkable service. Initially called Cottayam College, the Seminary was not exclusively meant for priest training. It was a seat of English general education in the State of Travancore and is regarded as the "first locale to start English education" in Kerala and the first to have Englishmen as teachers in 1815 itself. In course of time it even came to be known as Syrian College. The students were taught English, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac and Sanskrit over and above Malayalam along with Theological subjects.
By the early 1820s, some administrators within the East India Company were questioning if this was a sensible use of the money. James Mill noted that the declared purpose of the Madrassa (Mohammedan College) and the Hindu College in Calcutta set up by the company had been "to make a favourable impression, by our encouragement of their literature, upon the minds of the natives" but took the view that the money of the company should have been to further not oriental learning but instead "useful learning". Indeed, private enterprise colleges had begun to spring up in Bengal teaching Western knowledge in English ("English education"), to serve a native clientele which felt it would be more important that their sons learnt to understand the English than that they were taught to appreciate classic poetry.
Broadly similar issues ('classical education' vs 'liberal education') had already arisen for education in England with existing grammar schools being unwilling (or legally unable) to give instruction in subjects other than Latin or Greek and were to end in an expansion of their curriculum to include modern subjects. In the Indian situation a complicating factor was that the 'classical education' reflected the attitudes and beliefs of the various traditions in the sub-continent, 'English education' clearly did not, and there was felt to be a danger of an adverse reaction among the existing learned classes of India to any withdrawal of support for them.
This led to divided counsels within the Committee of Public Instruction. Macaulay, who was Legal Member of the Council of India, and was to be President of the committee, refused to take up the post until the matter was resolved, and sought a clear directive from the Governor-General on the strategy to be adopted.
It should have been clear what answer Macaulay was seeking, given his past comments. In 1833 in the House of Commons Macaulay (then MP for Leeds),subsequent financial difficulties had led him to go out to India to rebuild his fortunes had spoken in favour of renewal of the company's charter, in terms which make his own views on the culture and society of the sub-continent adequately clear:
I see a governmentthat of the East India Company anxiously bent on the public good. Even in its errors I recognize a paternal feeling towards the great people committed to its charge. I see toleration strictly maintained. Yet I see bloody and degrading superstitions gradually losing their power. I see the morality, the philosophy, the taste of Europe, beginning to produce a salutary effect on the hearts and understandings of our subjects. I see the public mind of India, that public mind which we found debased and contracted by the worst forms of political and religious tyranny, expanding itself to just and noble views of the ends of government and of the social duties of man.
In the peroration, he emphasized the moral imperative of educating Indians in English ways, not to keep them submissive but to give them the potential eventually to claim the same rights as the English:
What is that power worth which is founded on vice, on ignorance, and on misery—which we can hold only by violating the most sacred duties which as governors we owe to the governed—which as a people blessed with far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and of intellectual light—we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of despotism and priest craft? We are free, we are civilized, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilization.
Are we to keep the people of India ignorant in order that we may keep them submissive? Or do we think that we can give them knowledge without awakening ambition? Or do we mean to awaken ambition and to provide it with no legitimate vent? Who will answer any of these questions in the affirmative? Yet one of them must be answered in the affirmative, by every person who maintains that we ought permanently to exclude the natives from high office. I have no fears. The path of duty is plain before us: and it is also the path of wisdom, of national prosperity, of national honour.
The destinies of our Indian empire are covered with thick darkness. It is difficult to form any conjecture as to the fate reserved for a state which resembles no other in history, and which forms by itself a separate class of political phenomena. The laws which regulate its growth and its decay are still unknown to us. It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history. To have found a great people sunk in the lowest depths of slavery and superstition, to have so ruled them as to have made them desirous and capable of all the privileges of citizens would indeed be a title to glory all our own.But in an essay of 1825, Macaulay had defended the politics of Milton (objected to by Johnson's Lives of the Poets) on very different lines Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they might indeed wait forever. "Milton", Edinburgh Review, August 1825 ; included in T. B. Macaulay 'Critical and Historical Essays, Vol 1', J M Dent, London, 1910 [Everyman's Library, volume 225] The sceptre may pass away from us. Unforeseen accidents may derange our most profound schemes of policy. Victory may be inconstant to our arms. But there are triumphs which are followed by no reverses. There is an empire exempt from all natural causes of decay. Those triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.
Macaulay's "Minute Upon Indian Education" To remove all doubt, however, Macaulay produced and circulated a Minute on the subject. Macaulay argued that support for the publication of books in Sanskrit and Arabic should be withdrawn, support for traditional education should be reduced to funding for the Madrassa at Delhi and the Hindu College at Benares, but students should no longer be paid to study at these establishments.Macaulay described it as unheard of that students should have to be paid to study, but later had to concede that scholarships were routinely awarded at English universities The money released by these steps should instead go to fund education in Western subjects, with English as the language of instruction. He summarised his argument
To sum up what I have said, I think it is clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813; that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied; that we are free to employ our funds as we choose; that we ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing; that English is better worth knowing than Sanskrit or Arabic; that the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanskrit or Arabic; that neither as the languages of law, nor as the languages of religion, have the Sanskrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our engagement; that it is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed.