Macaulay and The Bengal Renaissance: A Fragmented Awakening

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi calls for decolonising the Indian mind by 2035, the Bengal Renaissance returns to the spotlight. 

By NIRENDRA DEV

New Delhi, January 2, 2026 — Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set an ambitious civilisational target: the decolonisation of the Indian mindset by 2035. The call is not merely administrative or educational—it is ideological, historical, and deeply civilisational. Yet, to understand why this goal is profoundly complex, one must revisit India’s first great intellectual awakening—the Bengal Renaissance, born in colonial Calcutta, the epicentre of British power in India.

Contrary to popular caricature, the Bengal Renaissance did not fail. It transformed Indian thought, literature, science, social reform, and art. But it also fractured—undermined by elitism, colonial proximity, and the diffusion of its intellectual energy into political ideologies that replaced reform with agitation.

Calcutta: The Colonial Front Row Seat

For most of British rule, Calcutta was the capital of the Indian Empire. This geographical and administrative intimacy with colonial authority gave Bengalis an unprecedented front-row view of Western modernity, Enlightenment thought, and English education.

Thomas Babington Macaulay’s infamous aim—to create “a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, opinions and intellect”—found its most fertile ground in Bengal. English education was not resisted; it was pragmatically absorbed. Like Persian and Arabic in earlier centuries, English became a tool of power and professional mobility.

Yet this embrace carried contradictions.

While English education and Western rationalism were accepted, civilisation remained sacred. Religion, tradition, and cultural memory created an invisible boundary. The colonial ruler was intellectually studied—but civilisationally excluded. Hence the emergence of terms like firangi and saheb—markers of distance even amidst intimacy.

Renaissance Leaders: Reform Through the West

The Renaissance produced towering figures: Raja Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), whose campaign against Sati and for equality was unthinkable without his engagement with Western liberal thought.

Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–1873), whose turbulent life—conversion to Christianity, adoption of Western habits, and literary rebellion—became a radical experiment in cultural self-discovery. His Meghnadbadh Kavya, which reimagined the Ramayana from Ravana’s lineage, challenged civilisational orthodoxy in ways still uncomfortable today.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941, the global face of Bengal’s intellectual synthesis, who treated the world as his oyster—winning the Nobel Prize, travelling across continents, and establishing Santiniketan as a bridge between East and West.

This was the Tagorean synthesis—a belief that India’s progress lay in blending Western modernity with Eastern spirituality.

Elitism and the Bhadralok Bubble

However, the Renaissance largely remained confined to the upper-caste, upper-class Bhadralok. It failed to penetrate deeply into rural Bengal, lower castes, or the broader Muslim society—despite notable exceptions like Kazi Nazrul Islam and Begum Rokeya.

The Freedom of Intellect Movement (1926) within Bengali Muslim society attempted to challenge orthodoxy, but the broader renaissance remained socially narrow.

This elitism produced its sharpest critique: the Renaissance reformed ideas, not society at scale.

From Reform to Ideology

An irony of history is that Bengal’s immense intellectual energy did not consolidate into sustained social transformation. Instead, much of it dispersed into political activism, and later into Communism, which replaced civilisational introspection with class struggle.

What began as reform became rhetoric. What could have been cultural regeneration turned into ideological mobilisation.

As thinker Raj Narayan Bose warned, Hindus were forgetting that ideas of freedom and national consciousness already existed within their own civilisation—long before colonial contact.

The Unfinished Question of Identity

By the early 20th century, Bengal’s middle class found itself caught between two worlds. Western education had liberated the mind, but colonial dominance complicated self-respect. The result was an agonising search for identity—a dilemma that still haunts India today.

The Bengal Renaissance made groundbreaking intellectual contributions, but its limited social reach and ideological fragmentation prevented it from becoming a pan-Indian civilisational movement.

Why This Matters Now

As India debates decolonisation today, the lesson from Bengal is sobering: You cannot decolonise the mind by merely rejecting the West—nor by blindly absorbing it.

The Renaissance did not fail.

It stalled—because reform without roots, and modernity without mass inclusion, cannot endure.

(This is an opinion piece. Views expressed are author’s own.)

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