MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON

MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON (1800–1859), British politician and writer. MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON (1800–1859), British politician and writer. Thomas Babington Macaulay, brilliant historian of England, was the first law member of the British East India Company's Supreme Council in Calcutta (Kolkata; 1834–1837). A precocious genius, reading from age three, Macaulay started writing his compendium of "universal history" at seven. He took up residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, at eighteen, was called to the Bar from Gray's Inn at twenty-six, and entered the House of Commons at thirty. Four years later he left for India, joining the executive council of Governor-General William Bentinck as British India's first law member.

Macaulay compiled British India's Code of Criminal Procedure almost single-handed, as both of his original collaborators soon fell too ill to continue. His contempt for ancient Indian religious philosophy and literature—based on his total ignorance of both—led him to argue that "a single shelf" of "paltry abridgements" of works based on Western science was of much greater value to Indian students than the entire corpus of ancient India's "false" and "superstitious" Sanskrit Vedas, Br?hma?as, and epics. Lord Bentinck's Calcutta Council was so impressed with Macaulay's rhetoric that they voted against "wasting" any company funds allocated for higher education on "Oriental learning" for Indians, who were only to study "Western learning" in English. Indian civilization's richly wonderful cultural roots and scientific wisdom were thus left undiscovered by most of the brightest young Indians of the nineteenth century, who memorized works of John Milton, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare instead. Macaulay's goal, as he put it in his famed 1835 "Minute on Education," was "to form a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."

Though Macaulay sailed from Calcutta less than four years after he arrived there, his impact on India's educational future, as well as upon its entire legal system, was perhaps greater than that of any other nineteenth-century Englishman in the service of the East India Company. A year after returning home, he joined the British Cabinet as secretary of war (1839–1841), and was later appointed paymaster general (1846–1847). His health started to fail, however, so he devoted most of his last years of life to writing his monumental History of England, five volumes of which he finished before being honored by the Crown as Baron Macaulay of Rothley in 1857, the year Britain almost lost India, following the "Sepoy Mutiny" at Meerut in early May.

Stanley Wolpert

See alsoBritish East India Company Raj ; Educational Institutions and Philosophies, Traditional and Modern

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dharkar, C. D., ed. Lord Macaulay's Legislative Minutes. London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington. History of England. 5 vols. Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee and Co., 1861.

——. Essays, Critical and Miscellaneous. New York: D. Appleton, 1864.

Pinney, Thomas, ed. The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, vol. 3: Jan. 1834–August 1841. London: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.