Mill and Macaulay dismissed Indian learning without knowing any Indian language
Evidence
In 1817 the Utilitarian thinker James Mill published a three-volume History of British India, in which he comprehensively disparaged Oriental culture. That culture was, he believed, the product of despotism, superstition and poverty and there was no point in pretending that Europe could learn anything from it. The same sort of point was made with misconceived eloquence by the statesman and man of letters, Lord Macaulay. In a minute on education in India, written in 1835, he claimed to have talked to Orientalists, but ‘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’. Or, as he also put it, ‘all the historical information which has been collected in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England’. Mill had never been out to India and neither he nor Macaulay had actually troubled to learn Sanskrit. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 285
Categorization
- XREF: Connects directly to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article territory and to the broader Saidian Orientalism critique Irwin is tracking throughout this book.