Supremely confident in their superiority, some British officials almost revelled in the contempt with which they held India. This attitude was perhaps most forcefully expressed by Macaulay in his 1835 Minute on Education, where he held that ‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’. Scorn was translated into a host of practical measures that increasingly separated the Company from its Indian hinterland. By the 1830s, the Company’s Governor-General William Bentinck would admit that ‘we are in fact strangers in the land’. Verbal abuse mounted, with ’nigger’ becoming a common expression for Indians in the 1840s and 1850s.
“An Empire of Scorn”, p156
