What was the significance of Orientalist-Anglicist controversy in nineteenth century India? Analyse.

Answer:

The Orientalist-Anglicist controversy of the 1820s and 1830s turned on how the funds allotted by the Charter Act of 1813 should be spent: on traditional Indian learning or on western knowledge through English. Its resolution shaped Indian education, language and society for over a century.

The two positions

• Orientalists such as H.T. Prinsep and H.H. Wilson favoured Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic learning.
• They argued that education should build on India's own intellectual traditions.
• Anglicists led by Macaulay held western knowledge to be self-evidently superior.
• Macaulay's Minute of 1835 dismissed the whole of Indian literature with notorious contempt.

The outcome and its significance

• Bentinck's resolution of 1835 decided for English and western learning.
• Wood's Despatch of 1854 built a systematic structure of schools and universities upon it.
• It created an English-educated class that became the leadership of Indian nationalism.
• It opened access to modern science, liberalism and ideas of rights and nationhood.
• Traditional and vernacular learning was starved of funds and declined.
• Rammohan Roy had himself petitioned in 1823 for modern rather than Sanskrit instruction.

The controversy's significance was thus far greater than its immediate financial question. As historians note, the Anglicist victory produced the very class that would turn western liberal principles against colonial rule, so the decision of 1835 shaped both the intellectual life of modern India and the movement that ended the Raj.