Macaulay: Pioneer of India’s Modernisation

Zareer Masani

Random House India

288 pages, Rs 450

Babington Macaulay is most famous for having introduced the English language as a medium of instruction in Indian schools, creating a class of English-speaking Indians who are sometimes derisively referred to as ‘Macaulay’s Children’. But was this an act of cultural imperialism or a modernising move far before its time—or both? Macaulay is the first biography for the general reader of this vastly influential, eccentric and contradictory figure.