Vamsee Juluri
Can the Indian mind be decolonised? The history that is taught in schools is a soulless narrative of 19th-century colonisers’ visions of conquest and power, their racist ignorance and intolerance perpetuated by a lazy post-colonial elite and memorised by generations of hapless children of a supposedly free Bharat. The languages that are taught are done so not as journeys into beauty but only as mere tools. Even the celebrated math and science, which we are so good at, produces mostly cogs in the wheel, or an occasional entrepreneur, but not the genius of a civilization known for its peculiar kind of genius that values not just materialist invention or political control over nature, but all of life itself, its sustenance and its meaning. There is much that needs to be done, but how shall we do it?
It is important to understand where India stands after 70 years of Independence as an anti-colonial project. Since 2014, it appears that a process of intense political, or at least, electoral decolonisation has taken place. Indians are voting as Indians, rather than along some narrow, artificial category of divisive self-interest. The Modi government has taken remarkable steps in democratising the economy, such as demonetisation and digitisation. The young, and the previously economically marginalised sections, seem to believe strongly in this. Yet, undoing the trappings of a
centuries-old extractive power system alien to a civilisation strongly rooted in ideals of accountability and sustainability (or dharma) is not a simple process. Although the political transformation has begun, there are still some worrisome prospects.
One is the severe damage that has already been done to the environment, to our rivers, soil, nature and traditional animal relations, by the brutal industrialisation of what was once a nurturing, sustainable, way of life. The warnings of Mahatma Gandhi in Hind Swaraj over one hundred years ago were hardly understood, let alone followed, by his self-declared political heirs (the only saving grace, of course, was that Hind Swaraj was well-understood, and taken forward with dignity and insight by Deen Dayal Upadhyaya half a century later). The second point of concern is the space of culture and education, the state of the Indian mind, as it were. The destruction there has been deep too, but in some ways incomplete, and perhaps not irreversible. There has been some resistance to mental colonisation after independence largely because of our diversity, resilience, and ultimately, a spiritual-ethical way of looking at the world.
Our myriad traditions, sampradayas, gurus, and voluntary movements have kept other ways of knowing alive despite being slandered as signs of cultural backwardness and superstition. These spaces of cultural freedom, however, cannot be taken for granted much longer. With the rapid advent of modernity, urbanisation, migration and new media technologies, the avenues for the colonisation of minds and narrowing of imagination are multiplying. Young Indians will learn more about the world from Bollywood pseudo-liberal movies and commercialized mythological cartoons than from either teachers or grand parents. We have, therefore, to confront the present with urgency.
How should we act?
We cannot take for granted that the political decolonisation of the last few years will magically result in cultural or intellectual decolonisation. Indians may have increasingly rejected the false political promises of the past, but what they are dreaming for is at best only a partly decolonised ideal. Our aspirations are largely colonised still, if not by foreign cultures, at least by alien definitions of the good life. Mobile phones for all with little more than Bollywood or Cricket can change little in the modern human’s vision of himself and the world. But what is still all around us, and in us, has the potential to unleash the full energy and consciousness we, as living beings, are still capable of. Our cultural environment, such as our temples, sculptures, music, poetry, art, and traditions, bestow on us, sooner or later, in our lives, a sense of fulfilment and contentment deeper than any destructive distraction dangled by the global consumer society. But the problem facing us now is that there is no connection between the two. We may find pride in our nation, but we are largely lacking in the vocabulary and skills for connecting our thoughts and traditions with the present and future. This is the result of decades of deliberate de-skilling, in a way, the opposite of decolonisation. It has resulted in an elite class that is largely hostile to the cultural world of the people, and a large population that remains rooted in traditions but only tentatively so.
This reality is an important one in terms of guiding decolonisation. India has become a profoundly aspirational society, and while aspiration might be good in some ways, it can be devastating if the standards of aspiration remain what they are. There is a real danger that even though the formerly dominant intellectual elites of India, who peddled extremist anti-Indic propaganda in the guise of secularism or progressivism, are
politically marginalised and popularly discredited, they will remain in control of the dreams, and maybe, even the
destinies, of the people. In the streets, in homes, in social media chatter, an India long marginalised and silenced by the New Delhi-Mumbai intellectual-cultural monopoly is speaking loudly at last. There is a widespread feeling that celebrity journalists and public
intellectuals no longer have a monopoly over India’s minds. The lack of logic, reason, and honesty in the intellectual class is regularly challenged in social media. There is energy, there is growth, and there is hope. But, in my view it is not enough. When a young Indian wishes to become a writer, professor, journalist, or movie-maker, he or she will find that the professional spaces for these remain exactly as they were, or maybe even more closely guarded now. Will the Indian mind truly be decolonised if it goes on like this? Unless a massive course correction is made, we may have a new, peculiar situation where a nominal political change continues, with old parties defeated,but the ultimate aspirational goal will remain exactly what was set for us by the old, deracinated cultural elite.
The Establishment and the Movement
The struggle for intellectual decolonisation today is usually described by those driving it (in social media and
elsewhere) as a fight between the once-dominant “Left” or “Liberals” and the emerging self-styled “RW” (Right Wing). This is a limited and unfortunate approach to the issue. The so-called Right in India is enormously diverse and ranges from cosmopolitan free-market advocates to Sanskrit revivalists. It has both “Left” and “Right” elements, and more importantly, it is too organic, vibrant, and fresh to be contained by labels. All the same, we have to acknowledge that it is rooted in a strong sense of Hindu identity, although not necessarily in an exclusivist sense. It makes more sense to describe this force as a Hindu
movement rather than as a “Right Wing” one. A successful Hindu movement is a successful liberation movement for all Indians, for humanity, and for nature most of all. We have seen this universal ideal in all our thinkers and leaders, from Dayananda Saraswati’s quest for sustainable decolonisation through Go-Raksha until the more recent evocation of “sab ka saath.”
But the bigger challenge that remains right now is this. The Hindu movement is a tangible force and is growing larger as more people become aware of the
failures of the old propaganda system. However, it has largely failed, in my view, in engaging with the Establishment from a position of strength, conviction, and competence. The majority ofprofessional academicians and journalists seem to be quite indifferent to the reality that knocks on their minds every day, though the movement with all its disparate voices tries to remind them. Annoying as some of their actions are, the professional intellectual class cannot be dismissed. They are the people who have their skin in the game, as the saying goes, while the movement is largely talking only to itself in the narcissistic echo chambers of social media. The establishment can perpetuate what they have built forever, not merely because they are funded by some foreign hand or interest as we might like to think, but because their convictions lie deeply in what they are doing. Of course, unlike the movement which only has non-
institutional players, the establishment will continue to get new students and employees, and perpetuate its theories forever. Its members have no real reason to challenge their own thinking if the movement’s approach remains unprofessional, and oblivious to the peculiarity of its
professional cultures.
The movement’s greatest strength though lies in the fact that it is conviction and experience-driven. The establishment on the other hand seems to relentlessly
produce desperate deceptions. One has been built on
character-forming, or “man-making,” with selflessness as a core principle of human existence, and the other on a
flimsy, flawed, and colonial-era notion of human beings as inferior, violent, and savage and in need of some old European “civilising mission.” Despite all the high moral ground the movement holds, the present state of
polarisation between the movement and the establishment does not augur well for decolonisation in the near future. The movement does not have the professional skills,
competences, and of course, investment, to hoist an alternative establishment overnight. Its foot-soldiers, thought-leaders, and especially its aspiring organisation and institution-builders, should understand that they cannot ride hobby-horses into fortresses alone. At the moment, there is no clarity about the role of the professionals and the volunteers vis-à-vis each other,
particularly in terms of the larger project of decolonisation. Either professional scholars and writers are treated like standardised, uniform, replaceable numbers on a list if they are seen to be sympathetic, or, rather naively, as subjects of appeasement if they are not. In either case, the movement isn’t winning here. A good way forward would be to help professionalise the movement to the extent of acquiring discipline of thought, word and action that show an understanding into the life-world and mental-ethical horizons of the professional establishment. Granted, there are some extreme personalities, and the social media is, of course, full of them. But there is a large, sensible, but highly hesitant middle in the professional establishment that has been effectively forced into hibernation because of the lack of understanding from outside its walls. We cannot decolonise the Indian mind, let alone even have a good conversation on it, without knowing how to engage, persuade, or at the very least, contain those in the professions who have a very different understanding of the world from us. Some of the most radical and bold steps in decolonisation, after all, are taking place outside the Hindu movement too, whether it is in arts, animal right activism, sustainable agriculture, or most importantly, in the home-schooling and un-schooling movement. We must be able to persuade all who matter, and for that we must know first of all, that there are things we don’t know too. Complacence is the best friend of a colonised mind.
(The writer is a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco and author of Rearming Hinduism)
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