India, Oct. 31 -- Last Sunday was the 226th birth anniversary of Thomas Babington Macaulay. Few British statesmen have left a deeper mark on India, or been more misunderstood in the country, than Macaulay. There can be no better way to commemorate his birth than by appreciating his most important contribution: making public examination the pre-eminent route to the civil service, a reform that weakened the hold of patronage and helped modernise public administration in India.

Today, Macaulay is invariably associated with his 1835 Minute on Education. In it, he argued that public funds be redirected from oriental learning towards teaching the English tongue, as the former was the medium of traditional knowledge, which contained "serious er...