December 05, 2018 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Father of the Indian Renaissance
The Hindu native who worked alongside with
the reigning Governor-General of India and Lord Macaulay came to be known as
the “Father of the Indian Renaissance” and the “Maker of Modern India”.
He was also given the title of Raja by the
penultimate Mughal Emperor of India Akbar Shah II.
His son Bahadur Shah Zafar would prove to
be the last Mughal Emperor of India and would be tried and convicted for
instigating the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 and exiled to Rangoon.
This Hindu was none other than the great
Raja Ram Mohan Roy who also incidentally happened to a bania (moneylender) and
the first one to calculate how much money East India Company was draining out
from India.
According to his calculation the company
was sending almost half of its earned revenue back to England which in 1838
alone amounted to 3 million pounds!
Of these three men who modernized or rather
Anglicized India I would credit Lord Macaulay with the strongest influence that
would last till today and perhaps even future.
Lord Macaulay was one of those men who did
not choose to mince words and was scathing (rightly or wrongly) of imparting
Oriental knowledge either through Persian or Sanskrit language.
He was not only ferociously virulent
against the use of using either Sanskrit or Persian as the medium of imparting
education but radically critical of the Eastern knowledge itself.
It was – he ardently believed – that lack
of modern scientific outlook that was keeping this bunch of Hindus and Moslems
primitive and retarded.
On the matter of English education to the
Hindu and Moslem natives of India, Macaulay had spoken forcefully earlier in
the House of Commons as an MP for Leeds that it was the moral imperative of
England to teach the natives English and Western knowledge not to keep them
submissive under the English yolk but to give the power and wisdom so that one
day they would be able to stand up equal to an Englishman and ask for their
rights.
It is worth recalling and reading the words
spoken out by him 185 years ago in the House of Commons:
“What is that power worth which is founded
on vice, on ignorance, and on misery – which we can hold only by violating the
most scared duties which as governors we owe to the governed – which as a
people blessed with far more than an ordinary measure of political liberty and
of intellectual light – we owe to a race debased by three thousand years of
despotism and priest craft?
We are free, we are civilized, to little
purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of
freedom and civilization.
Are we to keep the people of India ignorant
in order that we may keep them submissive?
Or do we think that we can give them
knowledge without awakening ambition?”
We shall continue with Macaulay’s speech
later.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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