Here's an excellent article that takes the cricket controversy as an instance, and from that proceeds to establish how colonialism has turned Indians into racists. As the author of this piece rightly mentions, Indians bend over backwards to accommodate their masters, even as they treat the rest with disdain. Truly despicable!
Incredibly boorish
Over the years, the list of incidents that have made me ashamed of the behaviour of sections of my countrymen has been growing long. The latest addition is the manner in which Indian spectators have behaved towards the outstanding Australian all-rounder, Andrew Symonds. There can be no doubt that it was unwise of Symonds to say some of the things he did in the course of a media interview. But surely, one could have made one's disapproval known without making body movements resembling a monkey's, something with unmistakable racial overtones. As far as one could see, such gestures were absent during the Twenty20 One Day International at Brabourne Stadium in Mumbai. There was, however, severe booing directed at Symonds and one did not have to be unusually intelligent to recognise that this was because of the allegations of racism that earlier crowd behaviour toward him had triggered.
Though deeply shamed, I was not surprised by what happened. Irrespective of India's anti-racist, anti-apartheid posture in various international fora, the hodge-podge of elites and classes that call the shots in the country or clamour loudly to be heard, has always been deeply racist. During my college days in Kolkata in the 1950s, I was struck by how the general body of the students had no time for their counterparts from African countries studying in the city's colleges but made rings round visiting British or American students. Though there was no offensive racist behaviour, snide remarks behind their back were aplenty as were racist jokes in poor taste. Later, as a journalist in Delhi from the 1970s, I have been witness to the same disgusting treatment meted out to students from the North-East, heedless of the fact that this could only serve to alienate the region further from the rest of India.
I have specifically mentioned the hodge-podge here because a look at both television clips and photographs in the newspapers makes it clear that those who made racist gestures, booed and jeered at Symonds belonged to that segment. This is hardly surprising given the historical background to its rise and its present ethos.
The modern Indian middle class is a creation of British rule. At one level, it is a product of the education system initiated by Thomas Babington Macaulay, the Education Member in Governor-General William Bentinck's executive council. Its aim, to quote from Macaulay's famous minutes on education, was to "form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons Indians in blood and colour and English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect".
The people churned out by the education system that resulted form Macaulay's labours, constituted not a class in the Marxian or Weberian sense of the term but the hodge-podge mentioned above. It was -- and is -- a heterogeneous category both in terms of background and calling. Some of them were sons of landlords created by the Permanent Settlement of 1793, some of traders who acted as middlemen to British firms or private British businessmen, some were sons of officials and those engaged in professions like engineering, law and medicine that began to thrive as the British empire expanded and established its institutions all over India. Part elite, part class and predominantly upper caste, it originated in Bengal, where the British first established their rule and which was their seat of power until the transfer of the capital to Delhi in 1911, and expanded with the empire with its local variants emerging in other parts in India.
Needless to say, it was steeped in the ethos of the Western world as shaped by classical Greek Humanism, the Renaissance, Reformation and, of course, the 18th century enlightenment. Nevertheless, it was far from a monolithic formation. Ranging from those who were brown sahibs, who seldom spoke their mother tongue, to synthesisers like the followers of Raja Ram Mohun Roy and the iconoclastic spiritual children of Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, they included a number of disparate groups including the leaders of the freedom struggle, who again were a variegated lot with people like Sir Pherozeshah Mehta and Sir Surendranath Banerji, Motilal and Jawaharlal Nehru, Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Balgangadhar Tilak, Subhash Chandra Bose and, of course, Mahatma Gandhi.
Many of them lived in several worlds simultaneously. Thus RC Dutt, a member of the heaven-born Indian Civil Service, was the celebrated author of the Economic History of India in two volumes, author of Bengali works like Maharashtra Jibon Prabhat (The Coming of Morning in Maharashtra's Life) and Rajput Jibon Sandhya (The Evening of the Life of Rajputs), and, also, post retirement, a president of the Indian National Congress. Even traditionalists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak or Pandit Haraprasad Shastri -- they were, however, well versed in the West's intellectual traditions and made highly effective use of its tools of analysis and methods of acquiring, analysing and storing information.
More important, all of them had a strong sense of morality and propriety rooted, in most cases, in India's cultural traditions or the latter tempered by post-Renaissance European Humanism or Christian ethic. At the local level, leaders known for their integrity and service to the community ensured that norms of decency and propriety were not violated. There were, doubtless, breaches. Considering the broad picture, however, ideas of right and wrong, propriety and impropriety were honoured.
The cultural impact of the influx of foreign troops during World War II, the savagery of the Partition, the havoc the latter played with leadership structures and values, the disappearance of the stalwarts of the hodge-podge from public life thanks to gerontion, the disinclination of their progenies to face the heat and dust of adult franchise-based mass politics and preference for greener pastures opened up by development, changed things, as did the decline of the education system. The old values and their custodians have disappeared. Those of a rational Humanist morality have not struck roots. Instead, the culture of the West's underclass is swamping the country thanks to proliferating television channels and culturally offensive advertising. India has entered an era of what Emile Durkheim called anomie or normlessness, which is spawning aggression at a time of unrealised rising expectations, competitiveness and stress and strain of increasingly impossible urban conditions. People are becoming boorish. The Symonds episode underlined this.
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