International Universities in India: 'Macaulay Mindset'

If I thought India was the El Dorado of International Higher Ed - everyone wanted to go there, but no one knew how - it may no longer be true: Reportedly, 17 foreign universities have got permission to open their campuses in India, with more waiting in the queue.

At the same time, Indian higher education policymaking continues to send mixed signals. The Prime Minister recently talked about the 'Macaulay Mindset' and the invitation to free India of the influence of the long-dead Lord M. (See here 'Modi wages war against the ghost of British Empire') In effect, therefore, India is telling the foreign universities that 'we want your brands but none of your methods', when China is doing the opposite - taking their methods and building its own brands! 

This is what triggered me to write this post, and I do want to make more posts about the prospects of foreign universities in India. But, as a starting point, it may be worthwhile to understand what the Prime Minister meant by 'Macaulay Mindset' and how we should think about the topic of foreign education in India.  

At the outset, I am not sure Lord M should be given as much credit. On all counts, he was ignorant and inexperienced, and his infamy arises out of a speech he delivered to please his boss, the reforming Governor General Lord Bentinck, and to advance his own career. Macaulay's influence on Indian education policy was relatively minimal, and most of his educational ideas were rejected within a few years by Lord Auckland's administration. 

However, Macaulay has acquired a totemic value in the conversations about Indian Education. He was an accomplished wordsmith, as indeed his Lays of Rome testifies, and he is remembered for the phrases he used when he made the case for English education in India, particularly the proposal to create "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect". This, for the ruling party in India, has been the root of all troubles, leading to the ascendancy of 'race traitors', people like anglophile Jawaharlal Nehru, the worthiest of Tartarus among them all. 

Yet, there is a different way to think about  Macaulay Mindset. Macaulay, for all his faults, was a liberal, an anti-slavery one after his father, and one who sided with the reformers and wished to 'open' the Indian mind to science. What he prescribed was as uncomfortable to the Colonialists as it was for the Brahmins. Following Macaulay would have meant exposing the Indians to the enlightenment ideas and writing. No one wanted Indians to become rationalists and free thinkers, and on this, the East India Company and Brahmins could agree whole-heartedly. Therefore, the English teaching in India came to focus on style and not substance: The colonial headmasters were far more comfortable dissecting the stirring rhetoric of Burke than teaching the ideas of Jefferson; learning to think like Tom Paine was out of question.

I would call this preference of style over substance 'Macaulay Mindset'. Macaulay himself was guilty of it - his speech was an example of 'confident falsehood' aka Mark Twain. The English education in India, post Macaulay, made it an art form - always the style, never the ideas!

This, then, explains why India wants foreign universities while looking to purge the education system of colonial influence. It is after the brands, rankings etc., but not anything of substance that the universities could bring. It befits the universities too: The universities have long forgotten what they are supposed to stand for and have become commercial enterprises led by business-minded managers. 

In conclusion, then, what's expected of international universities in India is a spectacle, and nothing else. It would help assuage the middle-class pangs about the falling Rupee: The parents would be able to say that their son is attending University of Southampton, muttering the 'in Delhi' part inaudibly (there is a great tradition of such speech in Indian culture). Overall, despite the Prime Minister's protestation, the 'Macaulay Mindset' would continue to rule India; the dead rhetorician should only be happy about it.