This article was originally posted on the Dharma Dispatch Substack.

Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s comprehensive vandalism of the unbroken educational heritage of India wouldn’t have been so successful but for the unstinted official support he received from William Bentinck, then the Governor General of India.

Bentinck’s destruction of the centuries-old educational system of India is a devastation that the country may never fully recover from. His project was ably assisted by Macaulay, Charles Trevelyan, Charles Metcalfe, and Mountstuart Elphinstone.

Hundreds of Sanskrit schools and colleges across Bengal were the maiden victims of this project. The Calcutta-based Goḻiśrī Saṃskṛta-pāṭhaśālā (Golishri Sanskrit School) in Calcutta was one of the first such institutions to fall.

Premachandra-Vagisha, the head of the Golisri School, wrote anxious letters to the British, desperately begging them not to destroy his sacred school. Reading those letters, even today, is a painful experience.

But nobody in the 19th Century British establishment paid heed to his gut-wrenching appeals. The consequence: five generations of Calcutta citizens haven’t even heard the name of Golisri Sanskrit School.