Thomas Macaulay is most famous for having introduced the English language as a medium for learning in India, creating a class of westernized Indians who are sometimes derisively referred to as ‘Macaulay’s children’. Was this an act of cultural imperialism or a modernizing move far before its time? Macaulay has always inspired both admiration and hostility in India. Ever since he served on the Supreme Council of India in the 1830s, his thinking and policies have had a profound, transformative impact on the subcontinent. Today, some Dalit activists even celebrate him as their liberator from caste tyranny. Macaulay is the first biography of this vastly influential figure for the general reader, giving a vivid sense of a brilliant, eccentric, contradictory man and his complex times. In a portrait that is as elegant as it is intriguing, Zareer Masani traces Macaulay’s fascinating journey from child prodigy, historian and parliamentary orator in London to imperial administrator in India, and then a revered elder statesman back in Britain. The reader is allowed a glimpse into what it felt like to be at the centre of power in a global empire, ruling over hundreds of millions of Indian subjects and shaping the destiny of a subcontinent.

Determined to be his own man, he had no sooner achieved financial and political security--in a lucrative post on the Governor-General's Council in India--than the relationship with his beloved sisters so necessary to his emotional security was destroyed. Here is the public Macaulay: cocksure and impetuous, a parvenu lacking the specific gravity of a statesman, and yet speaking out not only for freedom as an abstraction, but concretely for the rights of Jews, Roman Catholics and blacks; envisioning a potential beauty and splendor in industrialization; almost singlehandedly writing a penal code for India; becoming embroiled in the crucial controversy over Indian education (what should be taught and in what language); and forever leaving his mark on Anglo-Indian cultural relations--just as India left its mark on him.

Romans in Victorian literature are at once pagan persecutors, pious statesmen, pleasure-seeking decadents, and heroes of empire: this volume examines how these manifold and often contradictory representations are deployed in a range of ways in the works of authors from Thomas Macaulay to Rudyard Kipling to create useable models of masculinity.

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