By Whether during British rule or the Emergency, Ramnath Goenka, founder of the Express Group, stood up against attempts to “enslave” people and defended the right to disagree. This same spirit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Monday, should inspire a national effort to get rid of the Western mindset that has shaped India since 1835 — when Thomas Macaulay pushed for colonial education to replace traditional Indian knowledge.
Speaking at the Sixth Ramnath Goenka Lecture, the Prime Minister suggested a 10-year plan to undo the effects of Macaulay’s legacy by the time its 200th anniversary arrives.
Modi explained that Macaulay’s goal was to create Indians who “look Indian but think like the British.” This caused India to lose confidence in itself and to believe that Western culture and education were superior. According to Modi, this mindset damaged India’s self-esteem and pushed aside centuries of Indian knowledge, science, art, and culture.
Even after Independence, Modi said, India continued to follow foreign models in education, the economy, and society. When a country doesn’t value its own heritage, he argued, it ends up abandoning its native systems.
To give an example, he talked about tourism: countries that pride themselves on their heritage have thriving tourism industries. But in India, after Independence, people often distanced themselves from their own history. “Without pride in heritage, there is no reason to preserve it, and without preservation, heritage becomes just broken stones,” he said.
