As a recovering post-colonial country, our values are still heavily hindered by the rigorous conditioning we have gone through as a race and as a community. Our institutions, even the most respected ones, have very little Indian-ness to them. This includes our bureaucratic system, our forces, as well as how we view our race and others in the global, commercial and contemporary context. In this essay, I will be borrowing a literary device of James Baldwin where I will be signifying imperialism and colonialism with the terminology of a ‘white man’.
Our cultural memory collectively hasn’t ever seen the British rule as an entity that completely robbed us of our wealth and culture, even in our secondary level educational books they are never demonized for it, almost as if we aren’t allowed to imagine how horrible the term colonialism should be. This can be proved by two things. One, Indians and India has been consumed so much with its aftermath that when we speak of independent India, the stress is not a lot on what we achieved the independence from but on the grim reality of its aftermath that due to our current political climate is seen as an independence from the outsider that is not a white man but a Muslim. Two, we have an undying amount of sympathy for this white man which we as a community don’t ever really extend to our own clan unless it’s a chai wala (tea seller) who has Muslim blood on his hands.
There was never a collective narrative of oppression in every part of the country, there was no singular experience of colonialism that was shared by every Indian which is why even in her most unified forms, there was always some diversity. Divide and rule was done well in the freedom movement and even now. It has taken us 70 some years and an army of thinkers like Shashi Tharoor to come on terms with the fact that the Bengal famine was a Churchill orchestrated human atrocity and it must be called out as it is. Taking the liberty to paraphrase Dr. Tharor loosely, I refuse to accept that railroads, the buildings, the postal service that the white man built for easy oppression was in any way beneficial for us we paid for the rebuilding of India as a colony we an economy that constituted 24% of worlds GDP then paid from our own pockets to the white man for him to oppress us with more ease.
Our cultural memory as a community perhaps differs in its experience of it but that doesn’t change or shift the blame from this white man. Speaking of cultural memory, this week’s Notre Dame burning that was mourned by the world including some sections of old colonies. It is important to notice the irony in our reaction as an old colony, like most of the old colonies and indigenous civilizations which have lost language, cultures, land, economy as well as tangible lives in millions to the white man. One building, which some newspapers deemed as a tragedy shows how we love the little bumps in the ride of a white man, we sympathise with the white man’s loss of culture because even if we are free from his direct oppression we are still caged in our unconscious and sometimes conscious desperateness to be white.
https://twitter.com/Vanessid/status/1117888562358145024
This is not very different from the view of Baldwin on black bodies – we as brown individuals despise our identity not because it’s not whole or empty or lacks the universal Indian-ness to it, we despise it because we have been conditioned to despise it. In doing that we also prove our loyalty to the white man who knows we would give anything to be born white. We have been told to accept without question that ‘white is right’, this is our cultural memory.
There is a famous study that proves that trauma is passed down to the next generation. The violence of our oppression is literally in our bones, it’s distributed to each one of us in different forms and so we keep refusing to understand that trauma. Instead, we dance for the appreciation of a white man like we’re still equivalent to an animal for them, hoping he will save us from our savageness and hence further empowering the white man’s saviour complex. But god forbid his precious church is partly on fire, his overvalued history is entitled to our thoughts and prayers