Started reading the book India That is Bharat by J Sai Deepak.
Normally I write about a book after reading it in full. But this is one book , the very idea of decolonization shakes you up. The book attempts to put in right perspective some seemingly anomalous issues .
Bharat is such an ancient civilization that excelled and is still excelling in every aspect of life ; be it poetry, philosophy, Science architecture and the idea of humanity to include not just homo sapiens but every living being.
One book like Thirukkural or one Architectural marvel like Brihadeeswara Temple ,Thanjavoor, both over 1000 years old, is enough to see that we are a highly evolved Civilization.
Yet, we have Indians and Indian origin foreigners decrying , trashing our culture , hating the very idea of Bharat or Hindus.
There is an unwritten new lexicon that says,
modern/rational/scientific/aesthetic/decent = western
desi is a kind of universal antonym for anything desirable.
Why so ?
Ban on entry to many places in Indian attire is accepted in our country .But there is a huge outrage on any ban on entry to just Hindu temples in a western dress . Why ?
Communists and Islamists and Christians are at one another’s throat all over the world but are so cosy with one another in India. How ?
Why is it that a dog lover ‘owning’ a Siberian husky in Chennai moving from AC to AC environment keeps a special stick to chase the street dogs?
Why is it that nobody finds it incongruous to have glass front building in cities with just two seasons ; hot and hotter?
Why is nobody finding it odd many Indian homes adopt foreign breeds of dogs while the desis are relegated to streets ?
Why are Indic languages , so rich in poetry and culture no more the languages spoken at Indian homes except for communication with maids and drivers?
Why are we running after pizza and pasta when Europeans don’t take to idli or Roti ?
We not only imitate western culture but actually denounce our own.
This book is all about ‘Decolonization‘
some excerpts from the book:
It was only a matter of time before the new convert to European culture and religion not only disowned his previous identity but also spewed venom against it because he associated his past and heritage with weakness, superstition and defeatism, thus completing the process of severing ties with his roots.
Colonial curriculum was often imported from either Britain or North America, and was designed to produce Africans who would always consider themselves inferior in their interactions with Europeans, and would take pride in serving the interests of the White man.
The educated Englishman was our model; what we aspired to be were ‘black Englishmen’. We were taught—and believed—that the best ideas were English ideas, the best government was English government, and the best men were Englishmen.
To cut a long story short, colonial education annihilated a society’s belief in itself.
European coloniality was directly responsible for disrupting the sacred relationship between indigenous peoples and nature, the destruction of their faith, language, political and societal structures and knowledge—in short, their entire culture.
Given that Bharat was (and remains) the land of heathendom in the eyes of the Christian coloniser, it was axiomatic that false religion abounded and immorality prospered. This laid the foundations of the colonial stereotype that the indigenous idol-worshipping Hindu was ‘untrustworthy, immoral, corrupt and cowardly’ and compared poorly to the ‘unyielding Muslim’ who, though he rejected the gospel, was closer to the Christian worldview, being ‘of the book’.
The West believes in recording the ideas and events in writing. Thanks to that obsession with written records , we have the papal bull of 1493 that spells out the original aim of what is now called Colonization.
In 1493 CE, Pope Alexander VI issued a papal bull or decree, “Inter Caetera,” in which he authorized Spain and Portugal to colonize the Americas and its Native peoples as subjects.
It was literally a search and destroy mission of all indigenous cultures all over the world.
The whiteman’s effort , the effort of the Church is still operative . It is still an ongoing process as the minds of indigenous people too have been colonized and we are busy whipping ourselves for all that our ancestors believed in.
These indigenous anti-Bharat people in Bharat are today identified as leftists wokes, liberals, seculars, feminists, converted and what not.
We have seen great Indians like Swami Vivekananda, Subramanya Bharathi, Rabindranath Tagore and so on who refused to be swayed by the West even while being open to all ideas.
In todays world Swami Vivekananda would just be dismissed as Sanghi; so would bharathiyaar be. Tagore would be quoted selectively but an institution like Shantiniketan would still be called Sanghi.
Today anyone talking well of Indic Civilization is called a Sanghi.
These are some of the people today trying to break the shackle of colonization of the mind.
J Sai Deepak, Dr Vikram Sampath, Dr Meenakshi Jain, Dr Anand Ranganathan at Arth a Cultural festival Feb 2022.
Today , they are termed as Right Wing , keeping with the idea of the West categorizing all people into Left and Right.
You know, as per Abrahamic faiths every man has the Angel and the Devil on the shoulders guiding away from or tempting a man to sin.
Note that here too the Angel is on the right 🙂
