Bath Water
Reading anything by Shashi Tharoor is always a mixed bag for me. In this article, he argues that India should reject the colonial “Macaulay mindset” but retain English as a powerful tool, positioning the language as an Indian asset rather than a foreign imposition. He contrasts Thomas Macaulay’s original goal, creating English‑educated intermediaries loyal to empire, with the way Indians later turned English into a medium of resistance, global communication, and social mobility. For Tharoor, the real problem is not English itself, but a lingering hierarchy that treats Western knowledge as superior and Indian traditions as secondary.
The column highlights how English‑medium education long privileged Shakespeare, Greece and Rome while sidelining Kalidasa, the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and other Indian texts, even though these are accessible in English too. Tharoor insists that India must dethrone English from its pedestal as the sole marker of intellect and status, without discarding the language’s practical benefits in IT, diplomacy, academia, and law. He supports the National Education Policy’s push for mother‑tongue instruction, citing countries like Japan, China, and South Korea as examples of nations that modernized without abandoning their own languages.
A central strength of his argument, is the way it foregrounds the aspirations of ordinary Indians. Tharoor notes that while some politicians rail against English as a colonial residue, many working‑class families sacrifice to send their children to “English‑medium” schools because they see the language as a bridge to better jobs at home and abroad. He frames English as both a tool of global access and a language that Indians have domesticated—now used to tell Indian stories, litigate Indian cases, and shape Indian public life. The conclusion is clear: English is no longer foreign; the danger lies in using it to validate ourselves while forgetting our own intellectual and cultural inheritance.
At the same time, there are gaps and tensions in Tharoor’s reasoning that a critical reader should note. First, he underestimates how deeply access to English itself reproduces inequality: if elite schools monopolize high‑quality English education while the poor get low‑quality “English‑medium” instruction, the language doesn’t just liberate, it also hardens class lines. Saying “reject the mindset, keep the language” risks sounding too neat when, in practice, English in India is often inseparable from gatekeeping in jobs, exams, and higher education. The essay acknowledges aspiration but doesn’t fully grapple with how policy would equalize quality of English and mother‑tongue education across social strata. It must be noted that people are judged on how cleanly they speak English. You don't want to have a thick regional accent but instead aspire for neutral one like Tharoor's himself.
Second, his ardent call to teach Kalidasa alongside Shakespeare and the Upanishads alongside Plato is compelling in principle, but operationally vague and improbable. Curriculum time is finite, teacher capacity is uneven, and many state systems already struggle to teach even one canon well; the piece doesn’t confront the trade‑offs or the institutional reforms needed to make this “both/and” vision real beyond elite schools. There is also limited engagement with non‑Sanskritic, regional and Dalit–Bahujan literatures, which risks recentering a pan‑Hindu high culture under the banner of “Indian civilization. He does not offer a proposal for home the Indian literary cannon would be made suitable for easy consumption in an average school setting.
Third, the article largely treats “Macaulay mindset” as a psychological hangover rather than a set of live structural incentives, which may underplay how state, corporate, and global systems actively reward English dominance today. Exams, corporate hiring, scientific publishing, and even many government processes remain heavily English‑centric; without concrete proposals to rebalance these structures, calls to “dethrone” English can remain symbolic. Finally, while Tharoor is persuasive that English has become an Indian language in practice, he doesn’t fully address the risk that celebrating this “Indianness” of English can itself crowd out serious investment in the status, corpus, and domains of Indian languages.