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All of a sudden, after a flood of rave reviews, Zareer Masani's book on Lord Macaulay, the 19th century British administrator who imposed the English language as the official medium of instruction in India, has become the must read political biography of the moment.

As a producer who worked for BBC Radio 4 for 20 years, the author is measured and low key.

Macaulay: Britain's Liberal Imperialist (The Bodley Head; £20) 'has been fairly well reviewed,' concedes the 65-year-old author, affectionately trying to control his over-enthusiastic dog, Susie.

With photographs in the drawing room of his father, Minoo Masani, a founder member of the Swatantra Party, and his mother, Shakuntala Srivastava, Indian objet d'art and a large collection of Western classical LPs, there is a touch of cosmopolitan old Bombay about his house in Tufnell Park, north London, where Zareer has lived for 30 years.

He seems pleased that the conservative historian Andrew Roberts called his biography 'enjoyably politically incorrect' in The Daily Telegraph.

It certainly must be refreshing for reviewers in Britain to come across an Indian historian who has recognised the positive legacy left behind by Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (October 25, 1800 to December 28, 1859), a man condemned by successive generations in India as irredeemably racist on the strength of one notorious quote.

Talking of the Orientalists, who preferred to give primacy to Indian languages, Macaulay had declared: 'I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.'

Zareer, though, defends Macaulay: 'He has often been taken out of context and that quote is an example of it.'

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  Talking point: Author Zareer Masani and (top) a portrait of Macaulay

This comment by Macaulay, Zareer insists, 'was in the context of usefulness of knowledge rather than literary merit'.

No wonder then that in The Observer, John Kampfner has applauded 'this engaging biography', while old India hand Ian Jack delivered this verdict in Prospect: 'Masani's book is an elegant mixture of polemic and biography, which, while it doesn't soft pedal Macaulay's racial hauteur, gives his reforms credit for opening India to the world and often changing it for the better.'

'Splendid and original' was Daniel Johnson's depiction in Standpoint, while in The Times, Philip Collins found it 'engrossing'.

That India gained a link language through English is not exactly a new thesis. Macaulay was a British historian and Whig politician who went to India for four years in 1834 and introduced English medium education through his famous Minute on Indian Education of February 1835.

Incidentally, there is a statue of Macaulay in the ante-chapel of Trinity College which Amartya Sen was fond of pointing out to Indian visitors when he was Master of the Cambridge College. Its Latin inscription translates to: 'He was the first to write history in such a way that the true facts might be read with more pleasure than fiction.'

Zareer would probably like the same thing said about him. He took to history at Cathedral School in Bombay. He recalls that his paternal grandfather, Sir Rustom Masani, a historian, 'gave me an abridged edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and we used to read together from it. It was full of interesting stories. From quite an early age I was more interested in the past than the present.'

He then read history as an undergraduate and DPhil student at Oxford.

The author does not dispute that Macaulay 'was a very flawed hero. There is no getting away from the fact that he had a culturally racist approach to the superiority of Western culture, language, education. What I have argued is that this would have been completely typical of his time.'

The biography confirms that Macaulay was 'obsessively attached' to his sisters, Hannah and Margaret, though the relationship was 'not overtly incestuous'.

'But where he was very advanced was in recognising that anyone regardless of colour or ethnicity could become an equal citizen of the British Empire,' Zareer goes on.

Zareer's reasoning leads inexorably to a much more dramatic conclusion: 'The very concept of India would not have existed had Macaulay's education policy not been adopted because there would have been no language in which to define India. People now say, 'Oh, it's a geographical term,' but no one used it geographically to describe the people south of the Indus as Indian. There was Hindoostan which was the way the Muslim conquerors saw it — it tended to refer to northern India.'

When Zareer sent off an article to a senior editor in India, speculating on what might have happened had Partition not occurred — 'India would have been the biggest Muslim country in the world' — he received an irritable reply asking him not to waste his time on hypothetical situations.

'But I think if the British hadn't come most historians would agree you would have had regional warlords,' he speculates. 'So these regional states would have been the way the subcontinent would have developed. It is very unlikely that they would have come together because what would have held them together? You would not have had a Pan-Indian ruling elite, you would not have had an Indian National Congress, you would not have had the kind of professional business class that has a stake in a united India.'

One day Zareer might be persuaded to do a biography of Winston Churchill, who has been held responsible by historians such as Madhusree Mukerjee for aggravating the Bengal Famine and causing the deaths of millions.

'I am familiar with that thesis but I think there are strong arguments against it as well,' counters Zareer. 'Even someone like Amartya Sen has found evidence that a lot of the causes of the famine were indigenous to Bengali society — (such as) hoarding, speculating. There was profiteering by Bengalis which the British did not do enough to suppress.'

Whether public opinion is ready for a complete overturning of conventional wisdom is another question.