The Beautiful Tree: Indigenous Indian Education in the Eighteenth Century c4.s8.4

c4.s8.4

In 1813, this bold intention was publicly and powerfully expressed by William Wilberforce when he depicted Indians as being ‘deeply sunk, and by their religious superstitions fast bound, in the lowest depths of moral and social wretchedness.’⁹⁰ T.B. Macaulay expressed similar views, merely using different imagery. He commented that the totality of Indian knowledge and scholarship did not even equal the contents of ‘a single shelf of a good European library’, and that all the historical information contained in books written in Sanskrit was ‘less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.’⁹¹ To Macaulay, all Indian knowledge, if not despicable, was at least absurd: absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology.