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Just Like That | Decolonising the Indian mind: Beyond political freedom

Jan 19, 2025 08:00 AM IST

While India's independence was a monumental achievement, the remnants of colonial influence endure in language, education, and cultural preferences

I do not agree with many things that RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat says, but I have no hesitation in endorsing what in my view is right. Recently, in a speech in Indore, he said that political freedom may have come to us on August 15, 1947, but even after that we remained prisoners of the legacy left by colonialism and were not truly free in the cultural sense.

 Decades of political struggle and the most remarkable acts of courage and sacrifice of countless Indians preceded the proud unfurling of the Tiranga and the descent of the Union Jack on August 15, 1947.(Getty Images) PREMIUM
Decades of political struggle and the most remarkable acts of courage and sacrifice of countless Indians preceded the proud unfurling of the Tiranga and the descent of the Union Jack on August 15, 1947.(Getty Images)

In this column, I keep away from political matters, but consider the cultural dimension even of politics my legitimate arena. I have consistently argued that it is the inevitable fate of all successfully colonised countries to remain culturally enslaved to their colonial rulers, long after political freedom has been attained. This is because colonial rule is not only about the physical subjugation of a people. It is as much—if not more—about the colonisation of the mind. Thus, political freedom is only one part of the project of decolonisation.

Undoubtedly, it is a very significant part. Decades of political struggle and the most remarkable acts of courage and sacrifice of countless Indians preceded the proud unfurling of the Tiranga and the descent of the Union Jack on August 15, 1947. It was not easy or quick to defeat the mightiest military power of the time, and that too principally through non-violence and satyagraha under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. It is, therefore, not my intent, even remotely, to downgrade the political importance of our Independence Day.

But the colonisers—at least the more farsighted among them—knew that the real purpose behind their political conquest was to achieve far more long-lasting goals. Nobody could have stated it with greater honesty than Thomas Babington Macaulay in his Minute on Education of 1835. Derisively, even damningly, dismissive of the civilisational refinements and achievements of anything Indian, he stated the coloniser’s purpose with clinical clarity: ‘We must at present do our best to form a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and intellect’. This class, he added, would in time become "by degrees fit vehicles for conveying (our) knowledge to the great mass of the population". In saying this he was only echoing what he had said earlier—and again without the slightest ideological prevarication—in a speech in the House of Commons: ‘There are triumphs which are followed by no reverse. There is an empire exempt from the natural cause of decay. These triumphs are the pacific triumphs of reason over barbarism; that empire is the imperishable empire of our arts and our morals, our literature and our laws.

It is this ‘imperishable empire’ in the cultural field that, I think, Bhagwat was talking about. And that empire does not cease to exist with political freedom alone. How true this is can be gauged by even a cursory evaluation of the continuing cultural consequences of colonialism. Decades after colonialism has ended politically, English is still the language of the elite; we judge a person’s ability by his or her ability to speak English with the right degree of accent and fluency; most of the Anglicised elite cannot count on a hundred in their own language; our education curriculum ensures—especially that of elite schools—that we have read Shakespeare but not Kalidasa; very few of us have actually read—leave alone studied—our own linguistic classics; we don’t know—and this surprised me—even such basics as who was Adi Shankaracharya, what did he write, and when did he live; we effortlessly mimic western cultural choices; in short, so many of us have shallow roots in the immensely fertile landscape of our own culture.

The process of reclaiming our cultural roots with authenticity is time-consuming. It can take decades, and sometimes even much more. For instance, in Africa, people in the countries that were under French colonial rule, now speak predominantly French. In spite of so many years of political independence, they have not resurrected their own languages, and in many cases, these are lost forever, and along with them, an entire corpus of cultural memory, symbolism, folklore, proverbs and way of life. Therefore, I do not agree with Mohan Bhagwat that one event, the Pran Pratishtha of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, is sufficient to dismantle colonial cooption and ensure true freedom. Culture has a correlation to religion, but it is not only about religion, and thus much more still needs to be done by us to become a culturally rooted, independent and autonomous civilisation. We have been tardy even in doing what was—and is—possible to expedite this process. A good example of this neglect is our education system. Too little has changed in its content and syllabus in an imaginative and enduring manner for our new generations to be sufficiently familiar with their own remarkable cultural heritage.

It is true that things are changing, and slowly but surely, we are inching towards reappropriating our own cultural space. But this is still a work in progress.

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