This paper examines how Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) and his infamous (1835) Minute have been historicised in accounts of the past and the present of English language teaching in India and elsewhere. For this purpose, we engage in an overview of historical accounts of colonial Indian education and language policy. On this basis we show how various authors (mis)represent Macaulay's Minute as an important policy event which had a decisive impact on British imperial anglicisation of Indian education. Four broad aspects representing different 'uses' of the narrative of Macaulay's Minute can be thematised:
- Macaulay as a representation of colonial anglicisation
- Macaulay as a recurring motif in ELT and education debates
- Macaulay as a representation of the global / of threat to local/native sentiments
- Macaulay as a symbol of 21st-century anglicisation (monolingual ideologies)
On the basis of our own research involving consultation of primary sources and rereading secondary accounts, we adopt a revisionist perspective on the Minute, arguing that, while no historian can escape the limitations / historicity of her/his own understanding, it is necessary to attempt principled, 'ideology-lite' / data-rich history as a counterweight to simplified and/or propagandistic accounts which, in this case, present an inaccurate picture of the origins and development of English-medium instruction and monolingual methodology in the field of ELT.
