A few have managed to hold on to the hegemonic attitudes of the coloniser with which they can always remain at the top and effect home-grown colonisation.
JAMESMON PC OFM
India is celebrating its 75th year of Independence and, as usual, we have a tagline for the big day: 'Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav'. With the present dispensation at the centre and what the country has become in terms of its constitutional ethos and promise, we might ask, "What is there to celebrate?!" But that is the way to fool people, with mismanagement and disastrous decision-making, as we did with thali and diyas when COVID-19 'disappeared'.
The focus of this article is not the downward spiral we have got into in terms of politics, economics, poverty, secularism, and social structures. The Indian rupee has fallen to an all-time low compared to the American Dollar, and we have overtaken even Nigeria on the poverty index. But acche din have arrived for some, especially a few corporate giants. Hegemony never produces good governance, social structures, or food for all!
Colonial Sediments?
Are we suffering from a post-colonial hangover? Have we internalised the attitudes of both the coloniser and the colonised? It looks like we have. We are colonised by our own people. A few Indians who aspired to become like the colonisers have achieved infamous clout. It has become the SOP for the top man of the Indian government to divide and rule. The Indian corporate giants do the same. And the rest of the bureaucracy plays along helplessly.
So, a few have managed to hold on to the hegemonic attitudes of the coloniser with which they can always remain at the top and effect home-grown colonisation. Indian corporate giants have reached into other spaces and reached out to other people, sinking their greedy claws into other countries' resources. The coal mines in Australia are a case in point. Shouldn't we congratulate such greedy individuals and give our bureaucracy a pat on the back?
We have picked up bad lessons from the colonial times and have unwittingly remained colonised. We long for the proverbial fleshpots of the Egyptian land. We look down on ourselves, considering our civilisation and culture inferior to those of the colonial powers. This cultural cringe is exactly what the colonisers wanted. They painstakingly created a narrative that suited their nefarious plans.
Gayatri Spivak, a Bengali cultural and literary critic, put forward the idea of the 'subaltern', a term meaning 'of inferior rank’. One of the important agenda items of the colonial discourse was to ensure that in the world, there are people of inferior nature to be subjugated, controlled and civilised. According to subaltern theory, people of certain races, ethnicities, sexes, religions, or any other marginalised categories of identity are incapable of managing their affairs or making decisions and, most importantly, have no history worth mentioning. Gandhi most likely reacted to this opinion of the colonisers when he said it is better not to have a history revolving around men, their exploits, abuse of power, and genealogy. Gayatri Spivak, in her famous essay, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', makes an interesting observation about the British abolition of Sati in India. She believes it is generally understood as a case of 'white men saving brown women from brown men'.
Knowledge is Never Innocent
The creation of knowledge and its dispersal are never innocent, as some thinkers believe—just like the writing of history. When knowledge is created to be used in certain contexts and spaces, it is created with a specific objective, and one of them is to exert control over certain subjects. The colonisers often established libraries that exclusively dealt with the colonised, where research papers were produced about how to control, handle, and manipulate these subjects to their (colonisers') advantage. They considered this a perfectly normal activity.
Edward W. Said, a literary critic, in his ground-breaking study called Orientalism (1978), says the coloniser takes it for granted that "Orientalism can be discussed and analysed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it, by making statements, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism is a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." Here, the colonised have no identity of their own; they are just a mass of faceless people waiting to be explored, controlled, and exploited.
Today, corporate-controlled mass media in India continues to moderate the discourse, setting the narrative that serves our very own neo-colonisers. No wonder most Indian news channels are owned and controlled by corporate giants with an agenda to keep the faceless mass of people under their sway. The majority of the Indian middle and upper classes have become slaves to these corporate-controlled discourses. We have decided to remain colonised under our own people, forfeiting the power to decide what kind of governance we need and what direction the country should take. Our news channels are fake-news factories churning out fictional narratives to the masses. Even our voting patterns enable colonisation.
Contempt of Our Own
When you hear names likes' Bollywood', 'Tollywood', or 'Kollywood', how do you feel? Do you think it's cool or pathetic? Why are the names of Indian film industries a spin on the American Hollywood? What makes us believe that Hollywood is the gold standard? This is just one little example of our colonised behaviour.
There are myriad ways we express this colonised attitude in our conduct. We believe the standard clothing for any official appearance is a dress suit. In a sweltering country like India, we are willing to get sweat-soaked wearing the attire of the colonisers, believing our clothing is inferior. It is the result of the colonial discourse they established here. We run air conditioners in our offices 24/7 to mimic European climates to suit our (colonial) clothing. We have deviated from the ethos of the Swadeshi movement that strived to dispel colonial forces. Gandhi’s hand-spun khadi and charkha were symbols of self-esteem and positive self-sufficiency and an antidote to the inferiority complex of the colonised. Inculturation is harmless so long as it does not originate from an inferiority complex.
Neo-Colonial Times
We live in neo-colonial times. The British, French, and Portuguese still control the markets and economies of their former colonies. Though times have changed, we still see colonisation occurring in subtle new ways. What is happening in Sri Lanka is a classic case of neo-colonialism. The Portuguese, the French, the Dutch, and the British colonised Sri Lanka in the past. But now, we see Sri Lanka in the claws of the Chinese, who invested in the country through what is known as One Belt, One Road (OBOR). China has been notorious for its two-faced involvement. China has made Sri Lanka eternally indebted, and the Chinese keep occupying the most strategic and economic hubs in the island nation. Today, Sri Lanka is on the verge of civil war. Who should be blamed?
The Trap Called Development
Everyone knows that Western countries suffer from a messiah complex. The whites are always superior to the browns and the blacks. The browns and the blacks are to be civilised and saved. 'Development' is the term the colonisers use to trap 'developing' countries. But who decides what development means? Of course, the 'developed' ones. They reach out to 'developing' countries with snares disguised as assistance. The cycle will continue until both sides see themselves for what they are.
There is a need for change in global perception among countries. First-world countries cannot separate their developed status from their history of large-scale colonisation, exploitation, and looting. As long as the 'big fish eats small fish' attitude persists, neo-colonialism will continue. And the big fish need not come from abroad; they could be home-grown.
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