Macaulay's Minute and the Making of Indian English

Abstract

This paper revisits the colonial origins of Indian English by returning to the document that, more than any other, shaped the linguistic destiny of the subcontinent: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Education of 1835. I am not interested in rehearsing the familiar denunciation of Macaulay as cultural villain that story has been told often enough. What I want to do instead is read the Minute closely, attending to its rhetorical strategies and its institutional context, and then trace what happened after: how Indians took a language thrust upon them and made it genuinely their own. The paper draws on Phillipson’s linguistic imperialism framework and Pennycook’s cultural politics of English, but it also pushes back against both, arguing that neither model adequately captures the messy, creative, contradictory process through which Indian English actually came into being. I engage with Sharma and Sharma’s recent work on Indianness in Indian English, and with the longer tradition running from Kachru through Viswanathan to Ashcroft. The central claim is straightforward: Indian English was never just received. It was made.