The duality and the suffering of Macaulay's Middleman

Abstract

This paper is about Macaulay's middleman who worked as an interpreter between the colonized and the colonizer. Macaulay proposed an educational policy for the Indian Subordinate. He wanted to establish the colonial school to make the middleman who would help them to govern the colonized. There were two characteristics of the middleman. The middleman should be native in blood. But he would be English in taste. Because of his characteristic, the middleman had access to belonging the colonizer side as well as the colonized side. But belonging both sides created ambiguity. It was difficult for the middleman to decide where he belonged. It also created ambivalence position. Therefore, the middleman faced duality. In V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men and Tagore’s Tota Kahini, we have two different middlemen who were from a different geographical location still both faced the same kind of duality.