Response to Dr. Zareer Masani, author of Macaulay: Britain's Liberal Imperialist.

Response to Dr. Zareer Masani, author of Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist.

I thank Dr. Zareer Masani for his response to my review of his Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist (Bodley Head, 2012).The editor of the Dublin Review of Books not wishing a point-by-point reply, and I not wishing to answer by halves, I post it here. Dr. Masani has asked me to provide several references and proofs and I am more than happy to do so.

Macaulay’s views on Cromwell and the extermination of the aboriginal Irish are to be found in Macaulay’s well-known ‘State of Ireland’ speech (delivered to the House of Commons, 19 February 1844).

Macaulay supported a strong British state military (again, his parliamentary speeches show this irrefutably). His support of the Opium War was predicated upon wishing to open the Chinese market to British goods. In regards to Macaulay as orator – I said that he was not a good one. He wasn’t. His contemporaries crowded to hear him speak for the content of his speeches, not for his oratorical skills. He was no Burke, Grattan or Sheridan. None of his fellow MPs praise him for a charismatic brilliance of delivery.

            Dr. Masani pulls me up on my having said Macaulay wanted to cannonade the Indian rebels of 1857. I looked over Macaulay’s Journal entries for 1857. Dr. Masani is indeed correct. Macaulay wished to castrate, whip and behead the Indian rebels but he does not offer any opinion as to cannonading. I regret having misrepresented Macaulay’s humanity.

            Rather oddly, Dr. Masani accuses me of Anglophobia and linguistic chauvinism. I can assure Dr. Masani that I have learned an awful lot (morally, personally, intellectually) from the English people, from English democratic history and from English culture. I have happily spent over a decade of my adult life studying Literature in the English language (it may amuse Dr. Masani to know that neither of my parents are native English speakers). Macaulay did not set out to make Indian Anglophones, but rather to create Indian English speakers who would think and act in the interest of those in Britain who most benefitted from the profits of the British Empire. Today, as before, the English elite mock, or rather sneer at, India’s Macaulay Children - the mimic-men of Mumbai’s Royal Willingdon or Royal Yacht. The average English person pities the inferiority-complex of the Indian mimic-man, for the English people, to their credit, have never been taken in by their own elite. My problem with Macaulay’s Children is that they have no confidence in English as actually spoken in India, as inflected by the Indian people and their own environment and culture. Macaulay’s Children wish to be but carbon-copies of Received Pronunciation speech and thought patterns. That to me is a tragic misuse of the English language.

Contrary to Dr. Masani’s statement, the majority of Indian commerce is not transacted in English. As in the case of the vast majority of countries, the greatest portion of India’s commerce (in absolute GDP/GNP terms) is transacted within the domestic economy - at the local, federal and national level. While some of this is conducted in English, the majority of it is not. The export sector is a different matter. English is far more common there. The fact that the government has had to artificially stimulate a plan to encourage commerce through English demonstrates how weak it is as a transactional medium within the economy. Dr. Masani points to white-collar jobs. The vast majority of India’s economy is not white-collar.

Again, contrary to Dr. Masani, India has underperformed economically. I compared democratic India’s record to totalitarian China’s performance. 17.3% of the world’s population is Indian – yet, in terms of global GDP India accounts for less than 5.8%. Indian GDP per capita is low at $3,900 (compare to $9,300 for China). Indian per capita GDP is below Gabon, Namibia, Iraq, Angola, Syria and Swaziland. Just under 30% of the Indian population live below the poverty line (all the prior statistics are US CIA figures – most other governmental agencies along with the World Bank and IMF reflect the same findings with minor variables). A third of the world’s extremely poor people live in India (Economist, 23 November 2013). Over 32% of Indian citizens live on under $1.25 a day (400 million people). Corruption is endemic (Transparency International India Report 2013). Rural food insecurity has increased in absolute terms since the 1980s. India, unfortunately, is in economic terms a severely underdeveloped nation. Even compared to England’s former ex-colonies India fairs badly (though Myanmar does do worse). Colonialism has a tendency to cripple the economies of nations long-term. 

As to Dr. Masani’s father - I never stated that Minoo Masani was a Stalinist (he had an honest record of fighting against the dictator). Minoo was briefly a member of the Indian Communist Party (he had admired and subsequently visited the Soviet Union). In the 1930s Minoo co-operated with the Trotskyite Fourth International (see B.R. Nanda ed., Socialism in India, 1972, p.116). In 1934 Minoo told his followers to abandon the symbol of the Charkha for the ‘tractor which revolutionised life in Soviet Russia’ (Minoo Masani speech delivered at Mumbai, 24 July, 1934, A/CC Papers, File no. G-23/ 1934-35). Lastly, Minoo’s great Swatantra colleague S. V. Raju talks of Minoo’s adherence to Communism in the early 1930s. Minoo ended up a conservative Liberal, but there is no justice to be had by misrepresenting his early political life just as there is no point in whitewashing Macaulay.

Dr. Masani is correct to state that Swatantra supported a mixed economy – but as time went on that party advocated keeping state regulation to a minimum (a trip to the National Library of India’s pamphlet collection is useful here – compare a Swatantra election manifesto of the 1950s to one from the 1970s; see also Howard Erdman, The Swatantra Party and India Conservatism (CUP, 1967)).

When I said that Swatantra sunk into oblivion, I meant that it imploded as an organisation (hence my comparing it to the Progressive Democrats). Its spirit did live on in India, but whether Congress was converted to neoliberalism through Swatantra or through the dominance of global neoliberalism in the 1990s onwards is a matter of debate. Undoubtedly Swatantra was a local conduit of a greater global neoliberal movement. 

Dr. Masani appears to suggest that he is not now a supporter of Western Liberal intervention as practiced by Thatcher, Cameron, Blair and Obama. If I (along with some of his former colleagues) have erred in supposing him to have been an adherent of this type of Western intervention, I apologise unreservedly.

Lord Nympsfield does support an element of hereditary and spiritual peers in the House of Lords (vide Hansards) unless he has once again changed his mind on the composition of the Lords (which he has done more than once on this matter as his Maiden Speech to the Lords amply demonstrates).  

Excluding Macaulay’s works, Dr. Masani uses just 21 articles and monographs in his biography on Macaulay (including one by F.A. Hayek and one by Matthew Arnold). There is an immense amount of printed and manuscript material on Macaulay by his contemporaries (European and India) that Dr. Masani simply ignores. It is also quite evident that Dr. Masani is rather selective in what he uses of Macaulay’s own works. Robert E. Sullivan’s biography is not a ‘diatribe’. It is the accepted standard life. It was favourably reviewed by L.G. Mitchell (English Historical Review, April 2012) and Walter Arnstein commends large parts of it (Victorian Studies, Spring 2011). Even the fervent Macaulay admirer, Catherine Hall, admits the biography has ‘significant’ insights (HWJ, no. 70, 2010). True, Andrew Roberts damned Sullivan’s book, but that in itself is a commendation.

India is not held together by the glue of the English language (less than 2% of the Indian population are native English speakers, less than 8% speak it with any degree of proficiency). Dr. Masani greatly underestimates his Indian ancestors by stating that democracy would not have existed in India without British imperialism. The history of British imperialism in India is a history of over two-hundred years of dictatorship. British India held its subjects in check through mass violence and coercion. Surely Dr. Masani does not believe that India ever gladly accepted Imperial rule? Rather than tying India together, English has, to some extent, helped disunite India – Macaulay’s children are an elite caste holding a disproportionate amount of power and wealth. English is not a unifying lingua franca - the vast majority of Indians do not speak or read it.

            I did not state that the English language caused Muslim separatism (Dr. Masani will notice the question mark at the end of my sentence). I asked the question as to Dr. Masani’s opinion regarding this proposition as chewed over by such figures as Chaudhri Muhammad Ali. My own opinion is that Pakistan would have seceded independent of any linguistic considerations. India is a collection of nations under one state. In this century, several of those nations will declare for independence in due course whether or not they speak Hindi or lean to favouring English (modern India, in that regard, is similar to contemporary Spain). English will not hold the Indian state together. Needless to say the English language has failed in the past to hold the Indian subcontinent together as one unified State.

Dr. Masani credits Macaulay with having invented popular history. Here he conveniently overlooks such figures as William Cobbett and Bronterre O’Brien, the ‘progenitors’ of such popular historians as Howard Zinn, Chris Harman, Mike Jay, E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm.

Finally, Dr. Masani asks me for references to Macaulay in the works of the Booker-Prize winning novelist and political-economist Arundhati Roy. He could look at ‘Interview’ (Outlook India, 22 August 2005), ‘The Un-Victim’ (Guernica, 15 February 2011), and The Shape of the Beast (Penguin India, 2013). He further asked me for references to Macaulay in the works of the internationally renowned bio-political theoretician Vandana Shiva. He might find particularly interesting her views on the ‘Macaulay effect’ (Business Standard, 27 March 2011).

Best wishes, Niall.

© Niall Gillespie 2014.