THE PERIOD OF COLONIAL RULEmedium of education and administration had to be settled. The issue was
very complex because prominent Indians—for instance, the great Sanskrit
scholar Raja Radhakantha Deb, whom one would have expected to side
with the Orientalists—thought in practical terms about jobs for the boys
and supported the Anglicists, although they would not generally have
subscribed to Macaulay’s views. The Hindus especially were quick to take
to English; under Mughal rule they had mastered Persian as the language
of administration; they now learned the language of the new rulers as well.
The first message of Indian nationalism was articulated in English in the
Hindu College, Calcutta, where a young poet, de Rozio, half-European
and half-Indian by birth, taught the first generation of English-educated
Bengali college boys. They were referred to as Derozians and many of
them rose to eminence in later life; in their college days, however, they
shocked Indian society by breaking as many of its taboos as possible. The
conservative directors of the college—among them Radhakantha Deb—
held de Rozio responsible for all this trouble and sacked him. Even so,
many generations were to remember him as the harbinger of a new age.
The other hero of this new age was Raja Ram Mohan Roy, founder of the
Brahmo Samaj sect which formulated the creed of an enlightened Neo-
Hinduism akin to Christian Unitarianism, to which he was very much
attracted. Roy knew Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian and English, and was a rare
mediator between the old and the new in India. He died in 1833 in
England, where he had gone as an emissary of the Great Mughal who was
still the nominal sovereign of India.
Western college education spread very quickly in India in the first half of
the nineteenth century. The pace was set by three government colleges in
Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. In Calcutta and Madras they were called
Presidency Colleges; in Bombay the government college was named
Elphinstone College, in honour of a distinguished governor of Bombay.
The Scottish Presbyterians who had done a great deal for education in
Britain followed suit with the establishment of the Scottish Churches
College, Calcutta, and of Wilson College, Bombay. The graduates of these
colleges found good jobs as teachers, lawyers and even as judges on the
benches of the British law courts.
The civil service, on the other hand, still remained reserved to British
recruits who had studied at Haileybury College in England. This college
had been set up in 1806 by the directors of the East India Company in
response to the gauntlet thrown down by Wellesley’s establishment of Fort
William College, Calcutta. The directors were taken aback by Wellesley’s
move because the servants of the company were at that time not yet
selected by means of a competitive exam, but on the recommendation of
directors who usually bestowed this patronage on some poor but
promising young relative. If Fort William College could fail such people in
examination it would have been a disaster for the directors concerned.