Beyond Macaulay: What a Confident India Would Actually Need

The debate around Macaulay and decolonisation resurfaces periodically in India’s public life. It is often framed as English versus Sanskrit, modernity versus tradition, West versus civilisational memory. Yet civilisations are rarely weakened only by external domination. They are weakened when their standards of validation shift outward. The sharper question before India is not linguistic or cultural. It is psychological and institutional. The deeper contest is between inherited self-doubt and structural self-confidence.

Before colonial intervention, India possessed formidable intellectual traditions. Mathematics, astronomy, medicine, linguistics and philosophy developed with remarkable sophistication. Access to knowledge was uneven and often mediated by lineage and vocation, but intellectual depth was not absent. Colonial education disrupted older hierarchies and expanded mobility. It widened participation. Yet it also relocated the site of legitimacy. A foreign framework became the arbiter of intellectual worth. Over time, the injury was not only structural. It was epistemic.

Independent India inherited both opportunity and insecurity. English became a tool of access and aspiration, but it also evolved into a marker of hierarchy. Institutional templates were adopted without always being adapted. Legal reasoning continued to echo colonial administrative logic. University rankings became tied disproportionately to Western citation systems. Policy success was frequently measured against benchmarks developed for very different social textures. Validation, subtly but consistently, flowed outward.

Cosmetic change may spark curiosity, but it cannot cure inherited doubt. Renaming institutions or replacing statues does not automatically reconfigure the grammar of governance or the architecture of legitimacy. Symbols matter because they signal memory. But symbolism without structural recalibration remains surface treatment.

What would a confident India actually require?

First, a shift in validation. Knowledge produced in Indian languages must not be treated as derivative by default. Civilisational memory must be engaged critically rather than defensively. Global fluency should coexist with intellectual rootedness. Confidence is not rejection of the world. It is participation without psychological subordination.

Second, aspiration must translate into institutional design. Education policy cannot merely insert references to Indian knowledge traditions; it must integrate them into research, funding priorities and academic incentives. Administrative reform cannot only digitise colonial bureaucratic structures; it must re-examine whether inherited hierarchies still serve a democratic society of continental scale. Development metrics cannot be imported wholesale; they must be calibrated to India’s social complexity, demographic scale and cultural pluralism.

Third, legitimacy must be earned through performance. It is neither inherited from antiquity nor asserted through rhetoric. It is sustained through delivery. When courts dispense justice efficiently, when public universities reward intellectual originality rather than imitation, when local governance aligns with community realities, institutions generate trust. Performance transforms identity from sentiment into confidence.

India’s civilisational character has never been singular. It is a woven fabric of languages, philosophies and regional traditions. Alignment does not demand uniformity. It demands coherence. The task is not to collapse plurality into one narrative, nor to fragment into competitive assertions. It is to design structures in which diversity reinforces institutional strength rather than destabilising it.

The difficulty lies not only in policy but in mindset. Sections of India’s elite remain more comfortable citing Western validation than cultivating indigenous frameworks of excellence. At the same time, reactive cultural assertion can substitute spectacle for reform. One form defers. The other performs. Neither builds durable legitimacy.

A confident India does not need to be loud. It needs to be aligned.

Alignment means that aspiration, policy, education, administration and cultural confidence move in the same direction. It means that global engagement emerges from self-assurance rather than anxiety. It means that institutions reflect the society they govern rather than the empire that once ruled it.

The question before India is not whether it will speak English or Sanskrit. It is whether it will evaluate itself through borrowed lenses or through its own civilisational reasoning. The mind India chooses now will shape not only its growth, but the legitimacy of its century.

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Bhaskar Jha is a communication strategist who writes on leadership, legitimacy and meaning-making in modern India.