A widely known Indian author and a prominent public figure has severely criticized British rule in India as an “era of darkness”. He has held the British responsible for widespread rural poverty, dismantling of trade and commerce, introducing ‘bureaucratic despotism’ and a calculated indifference to the well-being of Indians. He has derided Lord Macaulay as framing laws that had no relevance to earlier Indian “laws”. He has gone to the extent of demanding “reparations” from the British for the alleged misrule in India.

Mahatma Gandhi was the Father of the Nation, a universally acknowledged truth. But, arguably, Lord Macaulay was the Father of Indian democracy. Throughout the recorded history of India, spanning more than 2000 years, there is no evidence of any democratic rule as we know today. There were dozens of dynasties and hundreds of kings and absolute rulers, foreign military adventurers and alien raiders who ruled through whims and fancies. Despotism and unrelenting tyranny were the order of the day, occasionally punctuated by an enlightened despot who would, on paper, proclaim people’s welfare as the goal of royal governance.

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There is no mistaking that the essentially ‘maximum’ ruler was the final dispenser of justice, the absolute law-giver guided by his own whims and a one-man legislature. Sir Thomas Roe was one of the first British ambassadors from the court of King James to the court of Jehangir at the beginning of the 17th century. He has recorded that the Mughal monarch’s word was absolute law, his momentary fancies that could change from “minute to minute”. The British had arrived first at Surat not as invaders but as traders.

With apologies to Newton, Bharat and its age-old inequities hid in the dark night of the sub-continent. The Lord said, quite literally, that let Macaulay be and there was light. It is the beginning of the 19th century and there is no rule of law, save some Regulations and that too promulgated by Macaulay’s enlightened predecessors like Warren Hastings. Enter Lord Macaulay, member of the British Governing Council. He was shocked to discover that Bharat had no written law or even a Code of Governance.

The East India Company was the only organized entity with a pan-Indian outlook. Bharat had no Central authority, the Mughal empire was disintegrating, and nominal rulers were occupying the seat of the once mighty Empire — Delhi. Provincial satraps were a law unto themselves. Thuggery, highway robberies, internecine warfare among petty rulers and tribal conflicts were the order of the day. The inhuman practice of sati was prevalent in large parts of the country. As Tagore had said famously: “The fragments that pass for our country not only lack cohesion but comprise parts at odds with one another.”

“People simply don’t change their behaviour just because someone has signed a paper hundreds of miles away,” noted an eminent historian. From Bengal in the east to Rajasthan in the west, young widows used to be dragged to the funeral pyres of their husbands and burnt alive. The men folk would keep guard with sticks lest an unwilling widow, in 9 out of 10 cases ,tried to “escape”. To cite an example, when the King of Bundi died, 84 “widows” were burnt alive; with the king of Jodhpur, the number was 64.

Life in “fabled” Bharat was truly Hobbesian — ‘nasty, brutish and short’. The average life expectancy was just 30-plus. The populace had no rights worth the name, and the peasantry was at the mercy of rapacious revenue collectors who were under no check or control. “Revenue was collected through whips and pincers”. Famines were a recurring occurrence. The situation during Macaulay’s time i.e. early 19th century had hardly improved much since the 17thcentury when the first British traders arrived, and started recording history, so to speak. It is a remarkable British habit.

A glimpse of the rural “prosperity” that the author somewhat nostalgically talks about will be evident from the accounts of some of the early British traders. Peter Mundy had travelled from Surat to Agra in 1631. “From Surat to Agra, all the highway was strowed with dead people. Women were seen to roast their dead children. A man no sooner dead than to be cut into pieces to be eaten”. Right through the 19th century, there were hardly five consecutive years when the countryside was free from the scourge of famines. The Famine Code is a wholly British invention.

The rural scene was in shocking contrast to the splendour and affluence of the royal courts. It is true that the revenue earned by Akbar’s court was many times that of the contemporary court of Queen Elizabeth, but this is a very superficial comparison. The fabled wealth of India was showcased in the exclusive royal courts and households, at the expense of the back-breaking perpetual poverty of the rural populace which was at the receiving end throughout history. It had no voicein governance or any representation.

In 1833, Lord Macaulay was appointed as the first Chairman of the Law Commission of India, again a purely British invention, to frame laws for the entire ‘country’. He worked out a miracle. Almost overnight, Bharat transformed itself into India. All the countless divisive religious, caste, community and tribal groups — Hindus, Muslims, Christians etc. — became one-‘citizens’. He single-handedly crafted the Criminal Procedure Code,1860, the first pan-Indian law that laid the foundations of civilian democracy and the rule of law.

The Code is a work of exquisite craftsmanship, without parallel in the history of Law either prior to or since, anywhere in the world. Not since Cicero, the great law giver of the Roman Empire, did an individual influence the course of a civilization as Macaulay did for the “Great Indian Civilization.” In a flawless masterpiece, he committed just one mistake — he added the prefix criminal to the Code, perhaps to decriminalize traditional governance and to sensitize the populace about its rights and safeguards in the face of the omnipotent state.

The Code enshrined the basic principles of Constitutional law of the first modern democratic state in the history of the world — the USA. For the first time in the history of Bharat, the implementation of law was separated from its enforcement. The implementation was entrusted to civilian magistrates whereas enforcement was entrusted to the coercive arm of the state — the police. Macaulay was a scholar of Roman jurisprudence who defined law as a ‘speaking magistrate’.

(To be concluded)