Macaulay: the tragedy of power By Robert E. Sullivan, Harvard, £29.95

Thomas Babington Macaulay, who lived in Calcutta between 1834 and 1838, left an indelible mark on the making of modern India. He drafted the Minute on Education, which introduced Western learning in English to the Indians, and authored the Indian Penal Code, which serves still as the bulwark of criminal jurisprudence in India. In Calcutta, he lived in a mansion on Chowringhee, which from 1845 became the home of the Bengal Club, the bastion of white exclusivity. Yet, Robert E. Sullivan’s new biography of Macaulay deals with the Indian career of his subject in the most disappointing manner. This is surprising since Macaulay’s India years saw him at the apogee of power and influence. It was here that his contribution was most enduring. It can be argued that if Macaulay had not come out to India, he would have been known as an orator, a masterful essayist and writer in the 19th century but he would have been a forgotten figure in the 20th century. It was the British Empire in India that secured for Macaulay his posthumous reputation.

The previous well-known study of the man was Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian by John Clive, also published by Harvard in 1973. Clive devoted nearly 200 pages to Macaulay’s Indian achievement. In comparison, Sullivan gives a paltry 45 pages. Apart from the number of pages but also because of it, very few of the details of Macaulay’s life in Calcutta that are provided by Clive are available in Sullivan. Some of the details are important, as we shall see later in the review. This neglect is surprising as Sullivan is aware of the importance of India in Macaulay’s life. He writes, “Within living memory much of the English-reading world has demoted him [Macaulay] from an Eminent Victorian properly mentioned in the same breath with John Stuart Mill and George Eliot to a name known only to liberal-arts graduates of a certain age and to students of 19th century culture. Meanwhile his legacy flourishes in South Asia.’’ He cites with approval the inscription below his statue in Trinity College, Cambridge, which acclaims him for reforming the letters and laws of India.

Macaulay was not destined to come out to India. His father, Zachary, was a son of the manse. Zachary’s father and grandfather had both been Scottish Presbyterian ministers. Zachary himself was a member of the Clapham sect and had been a lifelong campaigner for the abolition of slavery. Zachary sent his prodigiously talented son, Thomas Babington, to a private boarding school; from there Macaulay moved to Trinity College, Cambridge. His career in Cambridge was distinguished and not distinguished. In the College Examination of Freshmen (May 1819), he was placed fourth in the first class, and in 1821, he won the coveted Craven Scholarship. In the Cambridge Union, he cut a figure as a popular orator. But as Sullivan notes, he refused to study anything but the Classics, in which he submerged himself. This had disastrous consequences. In the early 19th century, the only way to get an honours degree in Cambridge was through the mathematical tripos examination. Macaulay failed in mathematics — in the Cambridge jargon he “gulfed’’ — and was forced to take an ordinary degree. In 1823, he also failed to win a Trinity fellowship and won it in his second attempt the next year.

Zachary, a domineering father, had wanted a career in the Church for his son. When his son refused this, Zachary persuaded his son to pursue the legal profession, and Macaulay joined Lincoln’s Inn, from where he was called to the Bar in 1826. The call of silk did not capture Macaulay’s imagination. Politics beckoned him, and his driving ambition was to become a member of the House of Commons. In the early 19th century, this was not an easy ambition to fulfil for a young man with no independent resources and no aristocratic connections. Fortunately for Macaulay, his talents brought to him the patronage of Lord Landsdowne, from whose country seat in Bowood he was unanimously elected in 1830. Macaulay was launched but India was still far away.

His speeches in the House of Commons, especially the ones he made on the Reform Bill, made contemporaries refer to him as “the Burke of our age’’. He became the toast of the town and was invited out to dinner every night by members of the aristocracy. In June 1832, he was appointed one of the commissioners of the Board of Control for India. This body, since 1784, represented Parliament in the running of India while the Court of Directors represented the proprietors of the East India Company. By dint of hard work, Macaulay, in 1833, had become the secretary of the Board of Control with a salary of £1,500 per annum. India was opening up to Macaulay as a future. It had been laid down as policy that one of the members of the Supreme Council to govern India would be a person who was not a servant of the East India Company. By the middle of 1833, Macaulay was certain that the position would be offered to him and he was keen to accept it. The reasons were monetary. The post brought with it a salary of £10,000. On this salary he could return from India with a fortune even after living “in splendour’’ in Calcutta. This was important to Macaulay because he feared that without a solid income, his sisters would have to go out as governesses and milliners. Thus he sailed for India in February 1834 with his sister, Hannah, and with the complete works of Gibbon, Voltaire, Richardson, Horace and Homer to sustain him through the long voyage. The rest, as they say, is history.

Back in Britain, Macaulay was away from power but was influential. He was a champion of the Empire, of Progress and of Utility. He was also an advocate of genocide. He wrote, “it is in truth more merciful to extirpate a hundred thousand human beings at once, and to fill the void with a well-governed population, than to misgovern millions through a long succession of generations’’. Sullivan locates Macaulay’s “tragedy’’ in this double facedness: the champion of Progress who could advocate murder. But such contrary views are well known among paladins of empire, and the British Empire in India had no better high priest than Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Macaulay’s private life remains under a shadow as Sullivan reveals but does not explore. Sullivan mentions “Macaulay’s passion for his two youngest sisters’’ but refuses to explicate the nature of the passion. Was it sexual? He made his sister, Hannah, live with him in Calcutta even after her marriage to Charles Trevelyan. This is a detail that Sullivan only mentions in passing. It is significant that Macaulay censored his own journal by defacing material and after his death, Hannah and her son, George, not only defaced but occasionally also tore out offending pages. What were Macaulay’s demons? He relished power in India. But in his private life, what did he like and what did he hide? Mysterious and provocative questions hover over Sullivan’s life of Macaulay. But, unfortunately, Sullivan does not even gesture towards such questions.