“One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.”
– Paulo Freire
(Pedagogy of the Oppressed)
At the Sixth Ramnath Goenka Lecture, Narendra Modi talked about decolonising education, freeing India from a slave mindset imposed by the British who framed a policy based on Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’ (1835). He also praised the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 as an effort to decolonise education. While Bhakts are parroting this line, many Dalit scholars are upholding Macaulay as a liberator. What remains missing is an understanding of decolonisation and India’s failure at it despite 70+ years of formal independence.
In reality, pre-colonial education was deeply hierarchical. For centuries, Shudras, Dalits, and women were legally excluded from access through texts like the Manusmriti. They faced humiliation, punishment, and often execution for even trying. Despite few reform movements, pre-British education remained the property of Brahmin men.
Macaulay’s Minute and Colonial Education in India
“The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”
– Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
(The German Ideology, 1845)
British education policy in India emerged purely from the material needs of colonial governance. The decisive turn came with Thomas Babington Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian Education’ (1835), which advocated English as the medium of higher education and dismissed native knowledge systems….as inferior. Macaulay’s aim was explicit: to create “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect,” that would mediate between colonial rulers and the colonised. Colonial education systematically obstructed India’s scientific and technological development being oriented toward training for clerical, legal, and administrative roles. Pre-colonial India was rich in artisanal knowledge and technical skill (e.g., Mysore industries under Tipu, textile industries of Bengal and Bihar, etc.), which were systematically destroyed to create markets for the British. However, it also weakened the Brahmanical monopoly on knowledge. Ideas of European renaissance created space for some social reforms.
Colonial rule did not dismantle caste, but access to literacy and schooling for Dalits and backward communities increased. English education became a tool that many Dalits, women, and marginalised communities used to challenge caste authority and enter public life. But these reforms cannot justify Macaulay who was a colonialist, committed to advancing a colonial state. He had no interest in mass education, no belief in equality, and no respect for democratic participation, neither in India, nor in Britain. Colonial education also led to cultural alienation, elitism, and a disconnection from productive labour.
Indian State and Its Failure at Decolonisation
Today, education remains deeply exclusionary. Schools and universities are dominated by the forward castes and classes. Dalit children are made to sit separately, denied the right to eat with others, forced to clean toilets and school premises, and subjected to daily humiliation, driving them to suicide. There is no thrust towards any discipline that does not serve the market. A decreasing education budget and privatisation is reducing accessibility.
No decolonisation of education started after 1947 since the colonial structures were retained that served the bourgeois and landlord classes. Any educational reform was nipped in the bud e.g., in Kerala, the elected CPI government was dismissed on 31 July 1959, after educational and land reforms. The progressive recommendations of the Kothari Commission (1964-66) were never implemented, but the recommendations of the Ambani-Birla Report (2000) to privatise education were eagerly implemented.
From the 1990s onward, education policy increasingly aligned with imperialist influences dictated by the World Bank and IMF, emphasising skills, efficiency, and market logic. With the arrival of LPG (Liberalization, Privatization, Globalization), education is no longer a ‘merit good’ or a universal right, but a commodity which can be bought and sold. Those who can afford it (or have to take out an education loan) become wage slaves for foreign capital.
National Education Policy (NEP) 2020: Saffronised Colonial Education
In the name of decolonising, NEP combines Brahminism with neoliberal policies, mythifying ‘Indian Knowledge System’ while marginalising critical scientific ideas on education. The NEP is a result of the demands of the World Bank and the World Economic Forum to supply cheap labour to the MNCs and their Indian brokers. Instead of providing free education to all and investing more in public education, NEP is promoting privatisation, and merger and closure of government schools. In the last decade (2014-2024), around 89,441 government schools closed in India while over 42,000 private schools were opened. At the same time, while criticising colonial influence, the government invites foreign universities to set up campuses in India. While criticising English and speaking about education in ‘mother tongues’, NEP imposes Hindi in a country with thousands of languages.
Anti-imperialism: Only Path to Decolonisation
Decolonisation is not merely an intellectual or cultural reform but an integral part of the revolutionary process aimed at fundamentally transforming the economic base and liberation from imperialist control. This requires an emancipation from imperialist control of the social production system that will transform the superstructure in its wake. Also, decolonisation must not imply a return to the pre-British modes, it must reject both colonial control and Brahminical tyranny. Education is an ‘ideological state apparatus,’ and it can be decolonised only when there is democratic control of people over educational institutions. This requires universal, free, tailored, and quality education for all, fit for the diversity of India. Until education serves the interests of workers, peasants, oppressed castes, and women, decolonisation will remain a distant dream.
