'A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
Thomas Babington Macaulay was an inaugural member of a governing Supreme Council of India.
His policies shaped the education for millions of Indian children for over a century, actively disconnecting them from their language, heritage and cultural beliefs.
'We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
He left behind an archive of letters to his beloved sister Margaret, which some modern biographers have interpreted as evidence of an "incestuous desire, probably unconsummated,"
I discovered these letters in the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, whilst researching the historical links between local merchants to the East India Company.
Some of the letters have been represented here, using the colours that adorn trading vessels of the colonized subjects.
