Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent denunciation of the “Macaulay mindset”— first at the Ramnath Goenka Lecture and then at the Dharma Dhwaj unfurling in Ayodhya — has reignited a debate about the place of English in India. The timing is apt: As India strides into global prominence, it must reckon with the legacy of a language that was once imposed to subjugate, but has since been appropriated to liberate, challenge, and even charm.

The irony is delicious. Thomas Babington Macaulay, in his infamous 1835 Minute on Indian Education, proposed the creation of “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. His goal was not cultural upliftment but colonial convenience — a cadre of clerks and collaborators who would serve the British Empire more efficiently than the British themselves. He dismissed centuries of Indian learning with breathtaking arrogance, declaring that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.

Yet history, like language, has a way of turning tables. The language of the rulers was appropriated by the ruled and used as their own; the very class Macaulay sought to create became the vanguard of Indian nationalism. And English, far from remaining a tool of subjugation, became a weapon of resistance. Ramnath Goenka, whose name adorned the lecture where Modi launched the first salvo, used an English-language newspaper —The Indian Express — to challenge the British Raj and later, the Emergency. The irony was not lost on anyone who listened closely.

But Macaulay’s legacy was not just linguistic, it was epistemic. The education system he inspired privileged Western knowledge and denigrated Indian traditions. Well into the post-Independence decades, Indian children in English-medium schools learned Shakespeare but not Kalidasa, read the Bible (or at least Bible stories) but not the Ramayana, studied the greatness of Greece and Rome but remained ignorant of the Mahabharata. Even the best-educated knew more of Plutarch and Pliny than of the Puranas or the Upanishads.

This was not the fault of English per se. All these Indian texts are available in excellent English translations. The problem was — and remains — the mindset: A colonial hangover that equated English with superiority and Indian knowledge with quaintness. It is this mindset, not the language, that deserves the Prime Minister’s ire.

When I published The Great Indian Novel in 1989 — a satirical retelling of the Mahabharata as a parable of 20th-century Indian history — I argued that the epic itself should be compulsory reading for every Indian school child, regardless of the medium of instruction. Thirty-six years later, that plea remains unheeded.

English occupies a curious place in contemporary India. It is denounced by politicians who thunder against colonial residues, even as rickshaw-pullers scrape together tuition fees to send their children to third-rate “English-medium” schools. One prominent leader even suggested Indians should be “ashamed” to speak English. But shame is not what the rickshaw-puller or domestic servant feels when he dreams of his child learning English to become a software engineer in Bengaluru or a nurse in Toronto. For him, English is not a betrayal — it is a bridge to opportunity, to better jobs than pulling a rickshaw or making tea (or beds).

Indeed, English has served India well. It has given us access to global knowledge, enabled our IT boom, and allowed us to punch above our weight in diplomacy, academia, and literature. It is the language of our Supreme Court judgments, our scientific papers, and our bestselling novels. It is the medium through which India speaks to the world — and increasingly, to itself.

But it must no longer be the only medium through which we validate ourselves. The new National Education Policy’s emphasis on mother tongues is a welcome corrective. Nations like Japan, China, and South Korea embraced modernity without abandoning their languages. India must do the same — not by discarding English, but by dethroning it from its sole place on the pedestal. We must see English as a useful key to open important doors for us — in life, and to the world. But we must neither abandon the languages that root us to our soil nor the culture and habits that can only be meaningfully expressed in those languages.

We must shed the Macaulay mindset, not the English language. We must neither discard English nor the treasures it gives us access to; but we must learn of ourselves too, and imbibe the rich and heady waters of our own civilisation. We must teach Kalidasa alongside Shakespeare, the Upanishads alongside Plato, the Ramayana alongside the Bible (And yes, the tales of Laila-Majnu, the Sufi saints and the Bhakti movement as well; our civilisation is vast, eclectic and multi-religious). We must ensure that our children know the stories of their land before they learn the myths of another. And we must do so in every language, English included.

For English is no longer foreign. It is Indian in accent, idiom, and imagination. It is the language in which we mourn our tragedies and celebrate our triumphs. It is the language in which I write this article — and in which I once retold the Mahabharata.

So let us not be ashamed of English. Let us be ashamed only if we use it to forget who we are. Let us not discard the language that connects us to the world. Let us discard the mindset that disconnects us from ourselves.

In the end, Macaulay gave us a tool. We turned it into a weapon, a bridge, a mirror. Now, it is time to wield it wisely — and to remember that the soul of India does not reside in any one tongue, but in the stories we choose to tell, and the truths we dare to teach.

The writer is MP, Thiruvananthapuram, Lok Sabha and the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning author of 27 books, including The Great Indian Novel