© AesthetixMS 2021. This Open Access article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For citation use the DOI. For commercial re-use, please contact editor@rupkatha.com. A Nation within a Nation: English Education as a Tool of Divide and Rule Policy in Colonial India Thakurdas Jana 1 & Sandip Sarkar 2 1 State Aided College Teacher, Post-Graduate Department of English, Bhatter College, Dantan, West Bengal, India. E-mail: thakurdas0901@gmail.com 2 Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Science, NIT, Raipur, India. E-mail: sandipsarkar7@gmail.com Abstract Famous Irish political scientist and historian, Benedict Anderson, in his book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism has described nations as imagined communities. Stephen May, the British novelist, playwright, and TV writer, has viewed that language is used as a political tool to strengthen the imagined community of a nation-state. Eventually, many countries have been named after the language predominantly used in a particular country. But during the colonial expansion that the linguistic identity of a colonised nation like India and its people has been transformed in different ways. With the English Education Act, 1835 Lord Bentinck defeated the Orientalists and promoted English education in India. Consequently, different missionaries like Joshua Marshman, William Carey, William Ward, and Alexander Duff, who principally used English education to preach Christianity among the Indians, and British officials like Charles Grant, Lord Macaulay, William Hazlitt, and also some higher-class Indians like Raja Rammohan Roy, Keshab Chandra Sen, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay supported the Anglicist view and tried to spread the English education in India. Different English schools like Dharmatala Academy were built and in the curriculum of different universities, the writings of different English authors like Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope were included. Many higher-class Indians became more interested in English study losing their interest in vernacular education. Vijay Agnew in her autobiography, Where I Come From, and Madhu Kishor in her article “The Dominance of Angreziyat in Our Education” have acc used English education of making them unaware and ignorant of the Indian culture and writings. In this way, the higher-class English educated Indians have created one English nation within the Hindustan. Even the translation of different Indian classical texts into English like Sir William Jone’s translation of Abhjnanasakuntalam in 1789 and Sir Charles Wilkins’ translation of Bhagabadgita in 1784 has also paved the way for forming a different identity. In this context, the present paper aims to show how the different tools for spreading the English language divided the nation into two, supporting the divide and rule policy of the British, which is still effective in the so-called united, equal, and democratic India. Keywords: nation, division, colonialism, English education, India. In the very introduction of his book entitled Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson defines the nation in an ‘anthropological spirit’ as “. . . an imagined political community- an imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 2015: 6). Language plays a crucial role in forming an imagined community and it is found that most of the bordered lands, it may be countries or states in India, have been terms of the language popularly used in the lands. Stephen May, the British novelist, playwright and TV writer, in his book entitled Language and minority rights: Ethnicity, nationalism, and the politics of language (2008) has viewed that language is used as a political tool to strengthen the imagined community of a nation-state (May 2008). Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak in her interview with Judith Butler comments that “language becomes one way of asserting criteria control over Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities (ISSN 0975-2935) Indexed by Web of Science, Scopus, DOAJ, ERIHPLUS Vol. 13, No. 1, January-March, 2021. 1-8 Full Text: http://rupkatha.com/V13/n1/v13n101.pdf DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v13n1.01