Saeed Naqvi | Children of Macaulay go global with Sunak’s rise

The social engineering that Thomas Babington Macaulay was embarked on for India in the 1800s has gone global with Rishi Sunak’s occupation of 10 Downing Street in Britain. Macaulay’s children were, by his own definition, “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion in morals and intellect”. Macaulay, whose Minute on Indian Education was circulated in 1835, was mainly responsible for the introduction of Western education in India.

Had Macaulay manifested himself by some miracle in the Calcutta of the 1950s and 1960s, he would have considered himself a real success. All English companies were in the safe hands of brown-Englishmen -- “boxwallahs”, as they were called. But Macaulay would have gulped at the sight of his cultural progeny of colour elevated to the job that his contemporary Benjamin Disraeli had once occupied “back home”.

Soon after Macaulay’s Minute for Education in 1835, as if on cue, the Doon School, modelled on Eton, opened its dormitories for the first batch in 1935. This facilitated princes, civil servants, the Army top brass and sundry elites to recycle their progeny through the Doon School, St. Stephen’s College (or its equivalents), and on to Cambridge or Oxford.

This recycling lasted barely for two generation because a large part of this elite ran out of cash. It found it difficult to afford the Rs 10,000 required to put their wards through a “tripos” at Cambridge. By the mid-1970s, it was the turn of the scholarship elites from the Ivy League in the United States to take over top jobs in the economics sector. Rishi Sunak, who of course was born in Britain, does not trace his ancestry to this earlier elite. His is more the aspirational tribe which did not have an elite base in India. This lot turned up not to recycle itself through famous universities. It did one better. It settled in places like Southall, Birmingham, Leicester and Leeds. The last one triggers a story told to me by Denis Healy, possibly the best Prime Minister Britain never had. During an election in the 1920s, the shortlist of three Labour candidates for Leeds South contained one M.A. Jinnah. “Supposing Jinnah had been nominated and won, would the history of the subcontinent been different?”, Healy had asked.

Had Mr Sunak’s ancestors, who left Gujranwala (now in Pakistan), come directly to Britain, where would they have settled? It is difficult to map them because they left for Kenya before India was partitioned. In one sense, Mr Sunak is Idi Amin’s gift to Britain. Had the Ugandan dictator not set into motion a chain of migration from East Africa by first expelling them from his country in the 1970s, Indians may still have remained in East Africa in large numbers.  

The planning by the Sunak family into the making of Rishi is exemplary. By way of illustration, let me first tell you a brief story of a planned future. A young man of modest means sought accommodation near a golf course so that his daughter could join the nearby school. He and his daughter would then join the golf club, at whatever cost, beg, borrow or steal. By the time she is past her higher secondary stage, ready for college, she will be an expert, if not a champion, golfer. This is high premium qualification for admission in the fanciest American colleges on his diligently drawn up list. The strategy worked.

In Mr Sunak’s case, the career was conceived and mapped with the best possible education as a stepping stone to networks, wealth and power. Stroud preparatory school, Southampton; Winchester College, where he was the head boy; Oxford, Stanford, and the campus secret societies on the way double distilling the elite network. 

It is, of course, misleading to place a person who became Prime Minister in double quick time in the same frame as those who achieved less. With a first from Oxford, when he entered Stanford as a Fulbright scholar, he met Akshata Murthy, heiress to the multi-billion dollar Infosys empire. 

An unbroken first-class record, wedded to one of the wealthiest families in Britain, quite clearly helped break the colour barrier. But it must never be forgotten wherever they celebrate Mr Sunak, that a practising Hindu is made the Prime Minister in a country which has its own proud Church of England. Britain is an Anglican monarchy, a Christian country but which, quite admirably, is socially and politically so secular as to find Mr Sunak doubly kosher.

The hoopla surrounding his assumption of office obscured the cardinal fact that he was “crowned” by an uncrowned king. Thus far, King Charles III is the monarch only by succession. He is yet to be crowned King at a ceremony where the Archbishop of Canterbury will confer on him the aura of which the crown is but a symbol.

In this perspective, is it not possible to conceive of a Hindu state which treats all its citizens, of diverse denominations, as equal? If you are so averse to the word “secularism”, change the dictionary and assign to Hinduism that meaning -- of secularism. 

The large-hearted accommodation in this instance by Britain must be glorified, of course, but do keep room for a thought: how far will this accommodation go without straining the fabric? A Prime Minister, a mayor of London, ministers in the Cabinet, always from the colonies. Also, I have watched four cricketers of subcontinental origin play for England’s Test team, and so much more. Some of it betrays a decline in quality, attitudes which probably come from resting on one’s oars, a sort of ennui after satiety, a blasé shrug of the shoulders.

When I first entered the Sunday Times, the Best and the Brightest on Fleet Street were uniform, without exception, in their marital circumstance. They were all waiting for their divorces to come through; they all had mistresses who were quite visibly advanced in the family way. The only halfway stable marriage was of Phillip Knightley, and that too because he was married to a Mangalorean, who are tenacious keepers of the institution of marriage. It was this institution which I saw fray in my very first outing to England. Is this a pertinent variable to be looking at to grasp a country’s generosity, which may also carry the seeds of its decay?