Essays in Rebellion

Excerpt: ...the covers of the Bible, as a museum of superstitious relics. Into the midst of peoples of an immemorial age, which seemed to them as unworthy of reckoning as the beating wings of a parrot's flight from one temple to the next, there came a man in whose head the dates of European history were arranged in faultless compartments, and to whom the past presented itself as a series of Ministerial crises, diversified by oratory and political songs. To Indians the word progress meant the passage of the soul through aeons of reincarnation towards a blissful absorption into the inconceivable void of indistinctive existence, as when at last a jar is broken and the space inside it returns to space. For Macaulay the word progress called up a bustling picture of mechanical inventions, an increasing output of manufactured goods, a larger demand for improving literature, and a growth of political clubs to promulgate the blessings of Reform. The Indian supposed success in life to lie in patiently following the labour and the observances of his fathers before him, dwelling in the same simple home, suppressing all earthly desire, and saving a little off the daily rice or the annual barter in the hope that, when the last furrow was driven, or the last brazen pot hammered out, there might still be time for the glory of pilgrimage and the sanctification of a holy river. To Macaulay, success in life was the going shop, the growing trade, a seat on the Treasury Bench, the applause of listening Senates, and the eligible residence of deserving age. Thus equipped, he was instructed by the Reform Government which he worshipped, to mark out the lines for Indian education upon a basis of the wisdom common to East and West. Though others were dubious, he never hesitated. From childhood he had never ceased to praise the goodness and the grace that made the happy English child. As far as in him lay, he would extend that gracious advantage to the teeming populations of India. In...