Macaulay: Pioneer of India’s Modernisation. By Zareer Masani. Random House India; 288 pages; 450 rupees. 

WHEN her prime minister suggested that Thomas Babington Macaulay resembled a book in breeches, Queen Victoria got the giggles. The short, plump secretary at war overflowed with learning. As a politician he would deliver prolix speeches without notes or hesitation. As an historian, he was pre-eminent. In Britain and America the only writer more famous than Macaulay was Charles Dickens.

Whereas Britain remembers Macaulay as the entertaining but misguided father of the Whig interpretation of history, which charted his country’s progress towards parliamentary democracy, Indian nationalists curse his legacy. During his four years as a colonial politician, they argue, he fastened the yoke of the English language onto India. Even today “Macaulay’s children” is a pejorative term for those he Westernised. In this brisk, well-written biography Zareer Masani comes forcefully to his defence.

Mr Masani, the son of one of the leaders of the liberal Swatantra party, maintains that English was the glue that held together multilingual India; the southern states would never have accepted the imposition of Hindi. Unlike the Orientalists, who doubted the Indians’ capacity for understanding, Macaulay saw them as capable of becoming completely immersed in imperial society, and thought English was better suited to learning than the vernacular languages. Macaulay carried much of the standard racist baggage of his time, but his utilitarianism made him a progressive.

Mr Masani’s case is tightly argued, but it perhaps overstates Macaulay’s impact. His achievements in India were more rhetorical than substantive. Although his 1835 “Minute on Indian Education” offered a “highly persuasive ideological basis” for the British imperial mission, it was really nothing more than the justification of a policy which Lord William Bentinck, India’s governor-general, already supported. Macaulay reformed archaic discriminatory laws in Calcutta more out of distaste for their principles than dislike of their practical impact. Only the enlightened legal code, which he drafted, stands out as an important individual achievement. John Stuart Mill was not entirely unfair in calling Macaulay a “coxcombical dilettante litterateur”.