Delivering the Sixth Ramnath Goenka Lecture held in New Delhi on Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi set a 10-year timeline to reverse the legacy of what will soon be the 200th year of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s campaign. Referring to a part of Macaulay’s famous speech, Modi said that his “biggest crime” was creating Indians who “are Indians by appearance but British at heart”. This philosophy, the PM argued, has caused India to pay a heavy price. It not only broke the country’s self-confidence but also instilled a sense of inferiority.Criticism continues to shape the reputation of Macaulay, even 166 years after his death. In South Asia, his legacy survives—from the books children read to the laws interpreted in courts. The Latin inscription below his statue at Trinity College, Cambridge University, praises him for reforming the letters and laws of India.Who was Macaulay, and how did he come to play such a central role in colonial India?Macaulay’s early lifeMacaulay was born on October 25, 1800 and grew up with eight siblings. As the eldest, he felt responsible for their care and well-being while his father, Zachary Macaulay, was away in anti-slavery campaigns. At the age of 13, however, Macaulay was sent to a private boarding school. “At the personal level, the two childhood traumas of forcible separation from the family and bullying at school probably made him both extremely sensitive of familial ties and extremely hostile to his opponents,” notes author Parimala V Rao in Beyond Macaulay: Education in India, 1780-1860 (2020).In school, he learnt Greek and Latin and became proficient in both languages. At 18, he joined Cambridge to study law, and later, at 30, he became a member of Parliament. Interestingly, he argued that it was better for a civil servant about to be sent to India “to learn a tribal language than dead languages like Greek and Latin”.Also read | The lingua of power: English and the making of modern IndiaIn 1832, when the debate on the renewal of the East India Company’s Charter began in the British Parliament, Macaulay took an interest and began to familiarise himself with events in India. “He expressed regret that the British Parliament paid less attention to events in India than to minor incidents in England,” writes Rao.Reforms in lawMacaulay was appointed law member to draft the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Rao notes, “Once he accepted the position of the first Law Member in the governor-general’s Council, he told his sister that ‘it was his “peculiar” charge to act as the guardian of the people of India against the European settlers…’”. Macaulay reached Madras on June 10, 1834.Story continues below this adChakshu Roy, expert on legislative functioning and procedures, writes in an article for The Indian Express, “He once described his legal experience as being limited to convicting a boy of stealing a parcel of cocks and hens. But Macaulay had a sharp mind, studied law at Cambridge and was interested in politics.”Roy further notes that, as a law member, Macaulay championed press freedom and the removal of privileges enjoyed by British settlers who could appeal to the Supreme Court at Calcutta. “The Charter Act also established a law commission, and he was appointed its chairman. It is in this position that he embarked on consolidating and codifying the criminal laws of India.” As a result, a Civil Procedure Code (1859), an Indian Penal Code (1860), and a Criminal Procedure Code (1861) were prepared.Macaulay completed the draft of the IPC in 1837, which came into force in 1862. “Crimes from his IPC, like sodomy,” writes Roy, “became a crime not only in India but in almost all British territories and continued to remain so after their independence.”“A glance at his Wikipedia entry,” writes historian Robert E. Sullivan in Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power (2009), “will inform you that his penal code remains the law there [the subcontinent] and elsewhere in the former British Empire.”Story continues below this adReforms in educationWhen Macaulay arrived in India, the General Committee of Public Instruction—a body to oversee education policies and funds in colonial India—was deadlocked between two factions, the Orientalists and the Anglicists. The Anglicists supported European ideas and English education and were opposed to the practice of Oriental learning. They sought to curtail stipends for students of Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic, and to reduce expenditure on publishing works in these languages. The Orientalists, by contrast, favoured Indian language and literature.In The Story of English in India (2006), N. Krishnaswamy and Lalitha Krishnaswamy note: “William Bentinck (governor-general of India) solved the problem by appointing Macaulay, Law Member of the Council, President of the Committee of Public Instruction.”This appointment paved the way for Macaulay’s Minute of 2 February 1835, often called the ‘Manifesto of English Education in India’. In it, Macaulay said: “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. To that class we may leave it to redefine the vernacular dialects in the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from Western nomenclature…”.Soon after, the government adopted English as the medium of instruction in schools and colleges. It established a handful of English institutions rather than a large number of elementary schools, effectively neglecting mass education. It is this legacy, among others, that PM Modi now seeks to reverse.