On India – (You may call it jingoism if it makes you happy to brand it so :P)
Of late, i have been listening to various arguments from multiple friends online and offline about this whole idea of “we were living dark ages .. the colonialists came and enlightened us“, “india missed out on the industrial revolution lets not miss out on the knowledge revolution” (this was by a ceo), “we are backward .. they are forward” so on so forth. Now, i get irritated when i listen to this. No, i am not saying india was a near perfect civilisation.. we had our negatives we also had our positives. That is the case with every civilisation. But i have this thing for blanket statements like that above.
I tried to understand why we are like this from a longgg time .. 2006 shud i say?
Like i have mentioned “macaulay” a couple of times before .. in my 2007 post on viswanatha’s “veyi padagalu” and more recently when i wrote about wenin pereira’s book .. I think the british deserve a pat on their back for ruining India ;) (and for creating India as well ??) .
I think the argument is very clear .. one side quotes text from macaulay’s minute on education … “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” and says .. “look this is how India got ruined”. The other side says.. this is all RSS propaganda .. infact it is good that they came and enlightened us. (I am simplifying arguments here.. but i think the reader gets the idea)
I have read some criticisms about the pro-pre-colonial India school of thought and i just can’t understand how anyone in their sane mind can support ludicrous ideas like colonialism .. Manifest destiny or The White Man’s Burden.
I would put myself close to the former school of thought .. i believe every land in the world is unique and has its own local needs and history .. so there is no point propagating a mono-culture for the entire world. I also feel as people from this land.. we need to have some respect for its science, its history, its culture .. what not. Again, i am not saying we were perfect.. no one is.. from time to time there were reforms and they will continue to be so. But that is no reason to assume that we lived in dark age and india before british was charectarised by legions of ignorant masses.
It is in this context that i would want to write about this very interesting series of articles that i read a couple of days ago. These are articles from the “Economic and Political Weekly”.
So the first article is titled “A critique of eurocentric social science and the question of alternatives” by Claude Alvares .. to describe it in very simplistic terms.. the article is about “academic slavery”… It is about how most of the social science curriculum is uncritically imported from the west. I think one of the followup articles also says clearly that this import is not limited to social science alone and the case is the same with maths or physics or biology as well.
This takes me to my recent reading of wiki page on “Indian Mathematics“
This was my complaint with my schooling for long .. I still dont know why my maths textbooks never spoke about the math in Bhaskara’s Lilavati . If ever there was one book that made learning maths fun it had to be this! .. the idea of teaching maths with puzzles embedded in poems is fantastic. I go straight to this section in wiki on Indian Mathematics .. not a single one of these was taught to me anywhere in my 12yrs of school mathematics or 2yrs of engineering mathematics! Who is to blame? ..It is easy to blame Macaulay :P .. but what about post independent India :D ?
Now, it is easy to understand the attitude of present day educated urban intelligentsia .. if from childhood you are barely taught anything about Indian Science or Indian Social science.. and every bloody axiom or theory you studied was an import.. then you are bound to think that .. “okie .. we indians were just a bunch of fools” . I am not giving a “holier than thou” discourse here .. i am as much a party to this culture as anyone of you are .. we are all just a bunch of fools :P ( *joke* )
And btw this is not so much about “Hindu” sciences .. the wonder called “Seamless celestial globe” invented in Mughal India is just as much an Indian invention as anything else. This is again a fascinating story though i don’t understand the full technicalities of it .. but it is about casting big large spheres without any seam. There are two ways in which big globes could be made .. one way is to cast two metal hemisphere and soldering these to produce a big sphere… it is the other way which surprised the west and by and large the rest of the world when it was discovered. I have already written about India’s legendary “wootz steel” before here.
Moral of the story is we have done a great job in forgetting to teach the new generation about everything that was ours and teaching only imported stuff. This has a direct impact on the lack of cutting edge research in India today.. if every single line of what you studied was imported .. and had a built-in dependency .. then how can “original” research spring up?
And by no means am i saying that cultures shouldn’t interact.. way back in the 5th century Varahamihira was influenced by Romaka Siddhanta ( Doctrine of Romans) .. all i am saying we shouldn’t let all the original works of the land erode .. and accept whatever is taught to us as holy gospel.
So coming back to the article..
“The question few people ask is: Why do Indians or Iranians or Chinese for that matter allow themselves to continue to be fed a diet of what Europeans or Americans decide is social science? Is it possible that they could survive for thousands of years without intensive know-how about social, political, scientific or military organisation ? Why are we unable to resist the notion that European sociology or anthropology or American political science or psychology is some kind of absolute which cannot be questioned? Or as we simply too lazy to surrender this colonial inheritance and rethink anew?“
Totalllyyyyyyyy Agree :) .. I dont know if this can be applied to MBA curriculum also.. but definitely if the idea of “management” can be extended to non-industrial societies also (coz humans were humans then also :P) .. then i am sure there will be something we can learn from Indian knowledge systems as well.
The author later quotes a far more powerful passage from a african writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o :
“The biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance [was] the cultural bomb.The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves; for instance, with other peoples’ languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life”
The author goes on to say:
“It is truly amazing to discover that so many educated segments in practically every colonized society could be so convinced eventually of their own – and their civilization’s – worthlessness, that they would allow themselves to be robbed of everything that their civilizations had to offer and then meekly submit to remould themselves in the manners and thinking of those who came from far outside their borders”
It is truly amazing Sir.. It is :( And the article goes on in this tone.It is a wonderfully well written article (tats my fav phrase btw :p)
Infact there is another one titled “Steeped in eurocentricism” which is a far more scathing criticism of the whole thing.. some passages will actually hit your straight on ur face :D
Btw no offense meant to any of my friends who were party to these arguments. Afterall we are argumentative indians.. it is our birth right to argue :D
