By Subhash Kak
Many international observers have written about the high level of self-loathing in India. I think this is not true of the general population.
Like people from other nations, most Indians are proud, self-confident, honest, and resilient and this explains their success in science, business, arts, and politics around the world.
Yet, there is a kernel of truth in these reports. India’s Anglosphere, members of which are the ones who interact with international authors are indeed a class that is obsequious and servile to the outsiders while being insufferably shallow and narcissistic amongst its own. So what’s the origin of this self-hate?
To answer this, we must go back to James Mill, author of the highly influential History of British India (1817), who wrote this about the entire populations of China and India:
Both nations are to nearly an equal degree tainted with the vices of insincerity; dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess which surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated society.
Both are disposed to excessive exaggeration with regard to every thing relating to themselves. Both are cowardly and unfeeling. Both are in the highest degree conceited of themselves, and full of affected contempt for others. Both are, in the physical sense, disgustingly unclean in their persons and houses.
Elsewhere he condemned Indian culture as “barren, perverse and objectionable.” And he wrote of Indians: “under the glossing exterior of the Hindu, lies a general disposition to deceit and perfidy. [And] the same insincerity, mendacity, and perfidy; the same indifference to the feelings of others; the same prostitution and venality are conspicuous in both [Hindus and Muslims].”
One could call this sweeping judgement the ravings of a crazed asshat. James Mill (1773–1836), ordained as a minister by the Church, worked for the East India Company and became its chief apologist. He never visited India or knew any Indian language and his idea of India was a fantasy based on second and third-hand accounts. Historians like Grant Duff and H.H. Wilson, who had lived in India, condemned the book as being entirely wrong.
But Mill’s ideas were to shape British policy in India directly as a high official of the East India Company, and indirectly through Thomas Babington Macaulay who devised a system of English education for the Indian elite.
Okay, Mill was a racist twit, but why should we care? He has been dead a long, long time. We know that racism was the foundation of colonialism, but we have moved on. India has been politically independent for over seventy years.
Sadly, India’s political independence did not mean civilizational independence. Mill’s ideas matter for they remain powerful within the Indian Anglosphere. Its members have become, in the memorable phrase of Macaulay, “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Sadly, their accents sound fake and they are not equal in intellect to the best in Britain. They remain unaware of the psychological truth that one must love oneself before one can love and understand others.
As purveyors of shallow opinions like that of Mill, they hate those who are not trying to be like them, and they have a visceral aversion for the customs of the land. Ridiculing those who can’t speak English with the fluency they have, the people who get ahead in their circles are not necessarily the most competent.
Macaulay called Mill’s book “the greatest historical work which has appeared since that of Gibbon.” It was to become the textbook for the candidates for the Indian Civil Service and English educated Indians for several generations. Worst of all, its larger premise still underlies school and college curricula in India, and Indians continue to be exposed to the propaganda underlying this work.
An example of the self-loathing of Indians is the Bollywood actors in Hindi-language films. On Hindi TV programs, most of them insist on answering questions in English!
2. The Judiciary
Indian judiciary works under a system of language-apartheid. Article 348 of the Indian Constitution (about “Language to be used in the Supreme Court and in the High Courts and for Acts, Bills, etc.”) states that “(a) all proceedings in the Supreme Court and in every High Court… shall be in the English language.”
Imagine that over 70 years after Independence, lawyers in India’s Supreme Court cannot present their case in any Indian language. In 2008, the 216th report of the Law Commission declared that only English qualified for use in the Supreme Court:
It is important to remember that every citizen, every court has the right to understand the law laid down finally by the apex court and at present one should appreciate that such a language is only English.
Given this oversized focus on the supposedly right language, there is much less attention given to logic and critical thinking. Some of the stuff the justices churn out in their opinions is sophomoric, with allusions to Shakespeare and Marlowe or Foucault and Habermas in misplaced settings.
Reliance on English alone in the proceedings and in the judgments on disputes related to culture and civilization is deeply problematic because commonly used English terminology is often not equivalent to what are considered corresponding Indian notions. Thus using precedents from religious property disputes in the UK to issues concerning Hindu temples or other institutions is unwarranted because the term religion is not equivalent to dharma.
Many judges have no sense of India as a civilization and they look at India’s issues from the colonial lens. A wit has remarked that more of India’s mind-colonization occurred since 1947 than in all of the British Rule. Such Indian judges are not even aware of their biases.
3. Science and technology
Language apartheid exists in fields of science. For example, consider computer science which is nothing but an extension of mathematics. Indian schoolchildren are taught computer science only in English., which is ridiculous. This prevents brilliant children with innate ability in mathematics, but no facility in English, from never achieving their potential in a key technology sector.
Education at the highest level is imparted in English, and one is not allowed to submit dissertations for Ph.D. degree in any Indian language.
Continuing denigration of Indian culture and character has led to the loss of self-confidence amongst the Anglophones. It is not surprising then that when it comes to competing internationally in the field of technology, most business leaders in India are reluctant to go beyond providing back-office support to Western companies.
4.
In The History of British India, Mill set out to attack the history, character, religion, literature, arts, and laws of India. He justified the colonization of India and the rapine of its resources as a byproduct of bringing civilization to the country.
Mill’s ideas provided the rationale for the colonial rule that was described by Kipling as “The White Man’s Burden.” It has been estimated that British colonial rule, with its destruction of Indian industry and education, cost India $45 trillion in today’s dollars. But worse, India’s Anglosphere swallowed the colonial nostrums about Britain’s civilising role and embraced what the American historian Thomas Trautmann has called “British Indophobia” [another name for Hinduphobia].
China dealt with attitudes such as that of James Mill with the slogan to end “The century of humiliation” and in the past half-century has striven to match the glory of its imperial past. China was able to rediscover its spirit of excellence because, unlike India, its elites are not alienated from its own culture and history.
Seventy years ago, India’s education bureaucrats decided to keep out India’s own sciences and other scholarly traditions from school and college curricula on the false pretense that they are part of religion.
5.
Kapila Vatsyayan, modern India’s eminent scholar of art and a good friend, who passed away just a few months ago, once told me that colleges Britain founded in India served their own needs for clerks and soldiers to help in the extraction of Indian wealth and to protect the Raj, with some effort thrown in to understand India’s past so that they could control it better.
The fields that they left alone — art, music, dance, and yoga — are the only ones that have maintained vitality. Indeed, people from all over the world travel to India to learn about these fields.
Behind these fields lies Indian philosophy, which remains sidelined in Indian academia as something provincial, fit only for those who are stuck in the past.
6.
Nelson Mandela said: “Hatred is like drinking poison and then waiting for it to kill your enemy.” The self-loathing in India’s Anglosphere has percolated down to the media and entertainment. For some time now Bollywood writers have mimicked anti-Semitic, racist, sexist stereotypes of old pre-Second War Western cinema, crudely replacing the Jewish character with the baniya and the temple priest. Audiences have begun to say now: Enough is enough.
Author: Subhash Kak
Disclaimer: The article was first published on Medium We have republished it with kind permission from the author. The author is solely responsible for the views expressed in this article. The opinions and facts are presented solely by him, and neither The Australia Today News nor its partners assume any responsibility for them.
