A man leaves the shores of his country on a 5 year deputation to India.
His folks working in India lead a miserable life; though they have unlimited power, they are not understood by the locals with whom they work to build an empire. They have a problem of communicating with the locals as many many languages are spoken in India though Sanskrit and Arabic are the main stay. He carries with him the power to allocate funds to do some developmental work in India.
Within a year's stay in India, he makes a suggestion to his employers that changes India forever or so thought the world...
He writes a 'minute' about his understanding of the problems Indians and his colleagues in India face and suggests a solution. Here they are, in his own words:
"
I hold this lakh of rupees to be quite at the disposal of the Governor-General in Council for the purpose of promoting learning in India in any way which may be thought most advisable. I hold his Lordship to be quite as free to direct that it shall no longer be employed in encouraging Arabic and Sanscrit, as he is to direct that the reward for killing tigers in Mysore shall be diminished, or that no more public money shall be expended on the chaunting at the cathedral.
We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing it?
All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them. It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them.
What then shall that language be? One-half of the committee maintain that it should be the English. The other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be-- which language is the best worth knowing?
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.
...
...
The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own, whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, wherever they differ from those of Europe differ for the worse, and whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter.
...
"
His Government decides that Indians must learn only English so that governance and control will be easier.
English became 'The' language for the next 200 years.
Out went all the accumulated wisdom of ages and the link to a glorious past was severed to almost its last thread.
Cut back to 2014, a recent scientific study published in the Western world hails the astonishing effects of fasting, stating that it actually rejuvenates all the cells in the body and improves immunity!
Fasting was (and is) part and parcel of the Indian way of life for time immemorial!!
Many 'purely observation based' findings recorded / practiced by Indians are slowly and steadily getting proven by western science after so many hundreds (or even thousands) of years!
Consider these facts (source: Wikipedia, year and finding):
-----------
- 499 – The Indian astronomer-mathematician, Aryabhata, in his Aryabhatiya, propounds a possibly heliocentric solar system of gravitation, and an eccentricepicyclic model of the planets, where the planets follow elliptical orbits around the Sun, and the Moon and planets shine by reflected sunlight.
- 500 – Aryabhata accurately computes the Earth's circumference, the solar and lunar eclipses, and the length of Earth's revolution around the Sun.
- 620s – Indian mathematician-astronomer Brahmagupta recognizes gravity as a force of attraction, and briefly describes a law of gravitation.
-----------
So Gravity waited for Newton to be discovered and the Planetary arrangement waited 1100 years for Mr. Johannes Kepler to arrive to reveal itself to the educated world!.
The triumph of this great Nation lies in its ability to preserve and progress the traditional knowledge system that largely survived by means of story telling and way-of-life teachings still practised (gurukul as an example).
That English gentleman, Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, was dead wrong, seriously!
English language gained a new 'ism', i.e.
Macaulayism - defined as the conscious policy of liquidating indigenous culture
through the planned substitution of the alien culture of a colonizing power via
the education system anywhere in the world.
He still lives on to remind people those who are disloyal to their country and their heritage; they are referred as Macaulay's children!
Just an after-thought:
As science keeps expanding the knowledge of the world we live in, it also keeps increasing the quantum of unknowns; the number of known points (in the below picture the circles represent the ever expanding scientific knowledge and the dots represent the interface with our universe) coming into contact with the unknown lying out there also keeps expanding!
He actually missed out this phrase in his famous quote about known knowns, unknown knowns etc...
No comments:
Post a Comment