Macaulay decided, Indians must learn mathematics, geography, science—and they would learn it in English. Far from singing praises of Indian culture, he saw it as British destiny to bring modernity to India—where a few decades earlier William Jones had immersed himself in Indian literature, Macaulay spent his time in Calcutta reading classics from Greece and Rome. ‘It may be,’ he hoped with patronising transparency, ‘that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better
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