Macaulay, Viswanathan, Bhabha

In his "Minute on Indian Education", Thomas Macaulay puts forth his case for educating the Indian people with the English language. Despite his belief that the English language and its canon are intrinsically superior to the languages native to India, he does not believe the Indians themselves inferior per se. Indians look different and are culturally backward, in his view, but their hardware is essentially the same as an Englishman's. "Civilizing" them is simply a matter of programming, so that they may be "Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." Making them into brown Englishmen is the only way to truly educate them and save them. This is Robert Southey's "Great I" in practice-"unintended proof of how much an Englishman thinks of his own consequence." We hear less blatantly ethnocentric versions of this line of thought even in the modern United States, when the subjects of immigration and bilingual education arise.

The English thought that the Indians were fundamentally different in terms of what they knew. Macaulay claimed that they knew nothing and only held beliefs, as evident in their understanding of history, which from Macaulay's point of view is largely mythology. Of course, Macaulay does not note that English literature itself is full of fanciful myths. He states that the study of Greek and Roman writing brought the ancient people of England to the glory they experienced in his time, as a vast empire, but neglects the fact that those writings are full of the myth and legend he finds so dangerous for the intellectual growth of India. Just as "Hindu History" is separated from "Real History" in the consciousness of Indians, so is "Christian History" separated from "World History" in the minds of the English. Christianity and Hinduism both contain miracles and supernatural happenings, characteristics of Religion in general.

Nonetheless, Macaulay argues that the value of English literature holds "ninety generations" of knowledge and progress. He presents this as a gift to India, never seeing it as an imposition. Gauri Viswanathan notes that English education in India began as primarily language studies, but Britain gradually began to use English literature as a way to bring both secular and religious educations to the Indian population. English literature, he says, was a useful merge of the secular and religious, both a refutation of religion and an embrace of it-one of many "self conscious glorifications of existing social contradictions", contradictions and motives that Macaulay ignores. In English literature, the colonial administrators saw an opportunity to "disclaim any intentions of proselytizing" while at the same time prompting spontaneous reading, or at least understanding the principles of, the Bible. All this and avoiding "native resistance" too, because regardless of the side effects, English literature wore the "guise of liberal education". This plan would lead the Indians to submit not from any force or power, but by teaching them to come to an understanding of their own that the English were more wise, and more moral. The English could avoid being subjugators and conquerors by being "educators".

Homi K. Bhaba mentions contradictions similar to the contradictions Viswanathan points out in the colonialists use of English literature. Bhaba writes that the conqueror is part of the conquered's nation, but their "right of representation is based on its radical difference." The colonial power, in an effort to become the "voice of modernity" for the conquered people, must become a part of them, making India a "hybrid". However, the "rules of recognition" still apply. The conqueror maintains the "voice," becomes the "present". At once the conquered are to accept that they are nationals along with the new presence, but the ways and will of the newcomer are recognized as superior and authoritative.

The recognition of authority, Bhaba says, must be immediately apparent and generally recognized. Years after the establishing of English authority in India and India's return to independence, Arundhati Roy's fictional character Chacko and his family, in her novel The God Of Small Things, are in many senses still affected by Viswanathan's complicated questions of the "strategy of containment" and the assertion of authority within the "network of relations of culture, state, and civil society". Chacko, an Oxford educated Indian, tells his niece and nephew that they are a "family of anglophiles". The children do some research to learn that "anglophile" means "well disposed to the English." When they find three definitions for "disposed", Chacko tells them that the one meant in this case is "bring mind into a certain state." Their minds, he says, have been brought into a state of admiration for England and English things. He is not happy about being "trapped out of place" or "robbed of their history", but he recognizes that they are. In this way they are like Bhaba's paradoxical "hybrid".