In his Minute on Indian Education (1835), Macaulay focused narrowly on the content and medium of higher education funded by the colonial state. He did not seriously engage with the indigenous educational systems or with the vernacular. The East India Company till then patronised Sanskrit and Arabic colleges, which he argued were scientifically obsolete and irrelevant to modern governance and administration. Language, in this formulation, was for him a mechanism of rule. It was meant to create a narrow class of intermediaries – “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”Nearly two centuries later, India is formally sovereign and constitutionally secular. Yet the strategic use of culture as an instrument of political power has returned, this time not through colonial English but through a muscular majoritarian nationalism that mobilises religion, myth, and selective history – and an eagerness to impose a Sanskritised Hindi. The contexts are different; the political systems are not the same. But the underlying logic – the capture of culture to discipline society – bears uncomfortable resemblance.This is not an argument about moral equivalence. British colonialism was an external imperial project imposed by force. Hindutva is an internal political movement operating through democratic institutions, more like through their subversion and submission. The comparison merits in-depth consideration because it concerns how power functions, not merely who wields it.Macaulay understood that the empire could not be sustained by coercion alone. What had to be secured was consent – manufactured through hierarchy. By privileging English education, colonial rule produced a graded society of minds. Some were trained to speak with authority; others were expected to listen, imitate, and obey.Contemporary majoritarian nationalism deploys culture differently but no less strategically. Instead of devaluing tradition, it compresses it. India’s plural, internally argumentative civilisational inheritance – philosophical, religious, linguistic – is flattened into a singular, majoritarian identity, often labelled Sanatan Dharma. This identity is presented as timeless, uniform, and perpetually threatened. It does not invite interpretation or debate; it demands affirmation. In both cases, culture is removed from the realm of inquiry and repurposed as a political technology.Colonial education aimed to produce a loyal elite: articulate enough to administer the empire, yet ideologically aligned with it. Dissent could then be dismissed as ignorance or incapacity – an inability to grasp the benefits of “progress.” Under majoritarian nationalism, the ideal subject is not the colonial intermediary but the compliant patriot. This figure performs nationalism through visible markers – slogans, rituals, online vigilance – while abstaining from critical engagement with caste, inequality, historical violence, or the expanding reach of state power. Those who refuse this performance – students, journalists, scholars, minorities – are increasingly framed as anti-national, disruptive, or morally suspect. Colonial authority dubbed resistance as backwardness. Contemporary majoritarianism frames it as betrayal. The result, in both cases, is the delegitimisation of dissent as a civic act.Both projects speak the language of improvement. Macaulay claimed to modernise India that was mired in antiquated traditions . Hindutva claims to revive India by rescuing it from historical contamination. Yet both entail systematic erasure.Colonial education marginalised indigenous epistemologies and languages. Hindutva’s historical imagination marginalises Muslims, Dalits, Christians, women, and heterodox traditions that complicate a singular Hindu narrative. The past is not studied in its density and contradiction; it is curated for political usefulness. History becomes less a field of knowledge than a storehouse of symbols.What is lost in this process is not only accuracy but moral depth. Where colonialism induced cultural inferiority, majoritarian nationalism cultivates cultural suspicion – especially towards minorities whose very presence unsettles the dominant story.India’s freedom struggle was not only a battle for territorial sovereignty. It was also an argument for intellectual freedom: the right to think, dissent, and imagine oneself beyond imposed identities. That promise remains fragile.When one cultural identity claims exclusive ownership of the nation, citizenship becomes conditional. Loyalty replaces rights; conformity replaces participation. This is not decolonisation. It is a form of internal colonisation, carried out in the name of cultural pride.Political freedom is not secured by flags, monuments, or the sheer volume of patriotic speech. It rests on something quieter and far more demanding: the capacity to tolerate complexity, protect dissent, and confront history without fear. India’s freedom fighters were modern in outlook, scientifically tempered, and yet deeply conscious of the country’s cultural inheritance. The decades following Independence witnessed a genuine cultural renaissance. English did produce a privileged class, but it also aided India’s modernisation and served as a vital lingua franca across its many vernacular worlds. The imposition of a Sanskritised Hindi, by contrast, has repeatedly produced alienation and division rather than unity.The irony is difficult to miss. Techniques once used to legitimise imperial domination are now redeployed under the banner of nationalism. The vocabulary has changed; the structure of control has not.Ashok Lal is a playwright, poet and screen writer.This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.