Shaping the Indian Mind

May 23, 2010 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

As “Arrival Day” was commemorated over the last few weeks – maybe we should talk about “Arrival Month” – there appeared to be a widespread assumption that the Indians brought some sort of pristine “Indian culture” that only came under attack in Guyana.
The fact of the matter is that culture by its very nature is a very protean attribute – ever changing and adjusting to the exigencies facing its adherents.
While some blithely extol a culture “existing for thousands of years” we have to appreciate that during that time India experienced scores of major invasions and settlement by outsiders – all of which precipitated seismic changes in the social order and the general culture.
The most significant of course was the conquest and rule over India by the Moguls in 1192 (the attacks had actually begun since ce 700).
The religion of Islam and the Persian-influenced Mogul courts had the most profound impact on the culture our ancestors brought here as immigrants between 1838 and 1917.
But the rule of Britain – starting from the conquest of Bengal by Robert Clive at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 – also precipitated massive cultural changes.
In many ways these were even more far-reaching since they was so carefully conceptualised and executed as a project of conquest that incorporated the new homeland of Guyana.
In a debate that was initiated in 1823 for the basis of “Education” in British India, the 1835 Minute of Macaulay summarised the goals: to create a creature that would be “Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” He neglected to mention that the “Indian blood and colour” would ensure that the Indians could never be “really” British, but at best a dark imitation.
This end was achieved by aestheticising the British rule of physical force by the more insidious symbolic force encapsulated through its power to define “knowledge”.
This classificatory power was crucial in the construction of the hegemony since the rulers could establish a scale of value for all knowledge.
This process operated at several levels. Firstly, knowledge would only be transmitted in the language of the conqueror – English.
As Grant, one of the Anglican supporters said, “Its acquisition was expected to undermine and subvert the fabric of error that was Hinduism.” Using and thinking in the English language ensured that all other concepts from other paradigms had to fit within the Proscrustean bed of the British world-view. (E.g. to understand what a “Procrustian bed” was, one had to have an acquaintance with the English-appropriated Greek Classics.)
Secondly, knowledge is to be only transmitted within the approved schools. Even those on the outside, whose learning is given no credence by the British, devalue knowledge obtained outside of the official schools since they all accept that only “schools” impart knowledge.
The fisherman, farmer, yogi, pandit or weaver is by definition, not knowledgeable and thus inferior.
Thirdly, the particular, historical experiences of the British are untethered from their parochial origins and universalized as applicable for all places and all times. For the transmission of knowledge, the British curriculum is deemed complete i.e. it is universalized as “Education”. The graduated Indian is taught that he is “Educated”, period, not that he is educated, say, to keep records.
The Bible is “Scripture”; “Literature” is English literature. In fact, one of the ironies of the new dispensation was that “English Literature” as a subject was taught for the first time in India – in England, as we mentioned it was only Latin and Greek.
According to Macaulay, Sanskrit and Arabic were found lacking: “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”.
In each instance, the premises underlying the universalized elements become pervasive as they are applied to local conditions.
For instance Hinduism is evaluated not as a way of life but as a “religion” through the Christian criteria of one God, one Book, one Founder, Saint, sinner, Devil, demons, heathens, priests and how these relate to each other – sinning, repenting, forgiving, judging, punishing, submitting – to produce results such as salvation or damnation.
The narrative created a binary identity set in which the Indian as the “other” was the negative image of the positive British. Physically, the Indian was defined as small and dark – they were “wogs” or “niggers” epitomised, in the words of Macaulay by “the effete, effeminate vaporous, swooning Bengali” In behaviour, he was a coward: weak, passive, docile, cunning, shifty, fawning, otherworldly and superstitious. The stiff upper lip British, of course, were the opposite.
Spreading Christianity was high on the agenda of the British. Christianity was defined as rational, and free of the superstitions that bedeviled Hinduism.
Its calculation of the moment of creation of the earth as 23rd October 4004 BC at 9 am was accepted as scientific while the Hindu claim of the universe being billions of years old were categorized as “ridiculous”.
Hinduism was without question a mass of depravity, idolatry and superstitions such as suttee or wife-burning and “cow Worship”. Its underlying philosophy was “other-worldly” and unscientific. The Hindu was labelled “spiritual” and this essentialist tag has remained the most enduring purported Hindu characteristic.
The Hindu social system received the harshest criticism since this was an aspect of Hindu life that was most visible. Hindu social practice was defined as dominated by casteism, child- marriages, prohibition of widow remarriage and cow worship.
The historical context of these practices was overlooked. The British castigated India for its deficiencies but neglected to mention that in the slave colonies and their successors it created social orders even more rigid than that of the caste system.
Indian political science, arts and literature, history, philosophy, science, mathematics, linguistics, astronomy, semantics etc were all denigrated even as British and European scholars mined these fields for their nuggets.
Even as they left the shores of India, many Indians had, to varying extents, adjusted their world view and their culture in response to the British onslaught in India. This onslaught continues unabated to this day as ‘westernisation”.