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Is English Education Killing India?

Vishal Mangalwadi | On January 26, 2017

Indian English has become an elitist language of discrimination against the masses who cannot afford expensive education. It is a conduit for corrupting young (as well as highly educated) minds with snobbery and the poison of western perversions.

Did the British Raj leave behind English education as a Trojan Horse to subvert India? Or is English education a blessing Christian missions brought to bless India?

British East India Company was already running the Banaras Sanskrit College, when it decided to start a new Sanskrit College in Calcutta. In his famous letter to William Pitt, the British Prime Minister, India’s first social reformer, Raja Ram Mohun Roy condemned the government’s decision. On Dec 11, 1823, he wrote to the PM that if the British policy was to keep India in darkness, then yes, they should teach India Sanskrit. But if their intention was to emancipate and develop India, then the Company should invest in teaching English.

Lord Macaulay’s 1835 ‘Minute on Education’ was an acceptance of Roy’s arguments. Macaulay simply gave formal assent to the view point to the Father of Modern India, William Carey. Carey mentored Ram Mohun Roy and his friend, the Scottish missionary Alexander Duff — Calcutta’s and India’s foremost educationist.

No Hindu Pandit, no Muslim Maulavi, no Indian politician, but a cobbler-turned-baptist missionary, William Carey, championed Indian vernaculars. The purpose of teaching English education was to create a class of educated Indians who will study the best of English education and translate it into vernaculars to uplift the downtrodden “common man” — that is, the average Indian no Pandit wanted to educate. The following video, created by some students in our university, discusses this controversy.

Vishal Mangalwadi

Prof Vishal Mangalwadi directs the Centre for Human Resource Development in a Unversity in North India. He has authored 20 books and lectured in 40 countries. His exposition of Indian philosophy and Western thought and culture In books such as “The World of Gurus”, and “The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization” are studied at university level.

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