The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s8.12

c4.s8.12

As to James Mill, so also to Wilberforce, Macaulay, and Karl Marx and the thought and approaches they represented (for it is more as spokesmen of such thinking and approaches that they are important in the context of India rather than as outstanding individuals), the manners, customs and civilisation of India were intrinsically barbarous. And to each of them, India could become civilised only by discarding its Indianness, and by adopting ‘utility as the object of every pursuit’⁹³ according to Mill; by embracing his peculiar brand of Christianity for Wilberforce; by becoming anglicised, according to Macaulay; and for Marx by becoming western. Prior to them, for Henry Dundas, the man who governed India from London for twenty long years, Indians not only had to become subservient to British authority but also had to feel ‘indebted to our beneficence and wisdom for advantages they are to receive’; and, in like manner, ‘feel solely indebted to our protection for the countenance and enjoyment of them’⁹⁴ before they could even qualify for being considered as civilised.