If you want applause, cheering, and claps as an Indian, anywhere in a foreign land and also in urban India – you must abuse your nation. This works like magic. No exaggeration, this is a hard fact, and the entire ‘Lubral Brigade’ thrives on this. The best part is that even if you abuse India in Harvard or Oxford University campuses, the cheerleaders are fellow Indians. They take pride in it and if you praise India or Indians the same fellows will either remain uncomfortably silent or boo you out.
Some of these guys have made it into a lucrative profession. It is at the center of the standup comedy. If you criticize India in a foreign university you will be loved for it- a cheap way for cheap publicity. Not a penny spent – Vir not-so-vir Das, got free fame for a week from such a deed some months ago. Do you ever cheer the Pakistani or South African cricket team in a T20 match when playing against India? You have to be insane or an outright traitor.
Criticism of your Country at the Center of your Profession- CCCP. People are making millions out of it. Not liking a leader is fine, in this case, PM Modi, but turning that dislike into hate for the nation is problematic and comes out of a lack of ethics, morals, and national integrity.
People like Dhruv Rathee take a dig at India sitting in Germany- thousands of miles away. He has over 4 million followers, most of them presumably Indian, who apparently love their country being slandered with lies and misinformation. He has a captive audience. You call him a cockroach and all the 4500 species of cockroaches become famous and rejoice with him. The more you abuse/troll them the happier they are. If you are loved for hate and not love, what is the big deal as long as you are cheered by your fan base? These guys are professionals. I don’t know how much they actually hate their nation, but the audience is genuine – they love someone hating their country- and that is far more worrisome.
This cannot be brushed off as ‘one of’ kind of stuff and the moot question is ‘why this has been happening for more than a quarter of a century of independence, and will we ever be able to put a stop to this?’
Palki Sharma a brilliant orator and patriot at heart, a journalist shared her anguish at The Ranveer Show – TRS podcast. She was speaking for India at a British University and she said that people who made her uncomfortable were fellow Indians!
The malaise is much deeper
The rot has seeped in deep. This is more to do with our colonial past of around 200 years. If you want to rule a race, you need to rule their minds first. The Brits did exactly that- they created a class within the class.
Macaulay-ism and Macaulay-isation of the Indian education system and Indian Mindset
‘Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous, and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It’s a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people’s minds. I’m talking about your language – Mark Pagel
There was a well-thought-out philosophy to thrust the English language on us – destroy their language and then they are themselves destroyed was the basic idea. The term Macaulay-ism is derived from the name of British politician Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was instrumental in making English the medium of instruction for higher education in India.
Macaulay produced his famous Memorandum on Indian Education system in which he argued that Western learning was superior, and could only be taught through the medium of English.
There was therefore a need to produce—by English-language higher education “a class of Indians, English in opinions, in morals and even in intellect” who could in their turn develop the tools to transmit Western learning in the vernacular languages of India. And Indians were quick to follow their master’s voice.
Macaulay recommended the immediate stopping of the printing by the East India Company of Arabic and Sanskrit books and that the company should not continue to support traditional education as far as possible- limiting it to only a couple of colleges.
The Empire’s Day is celebrated on 24th May every year by the British. It was celebrated in India during the Raj. We loved to celebrate their festivals. We proudly hosted and participated in the ‘May Queen Ball’, where we brown sahibs and brown memsahibs danced and waltzed on the dance floors with English music played by a live band. A May queen- the most beautiful girl who could be Indian- was crowned. It was in most major cities of the country and celebrated to date. Many don’t even know why are they still dancing. As they say ‘King is dead long live the king’.
We started looking down at our language and even ourselves and Herr Macaulay won.
Most- almost all Indian politicians delivered speeches abroad in perfect English and we took so much pride in it that our chests swelled with pride. One can see the change very recently. There is a reversal of this trend. But some of us are not happy with this change.
Creation of Brown Brigade
There were approximately 30,000 British officers of different levels who ruled millions, in fact, crores of Indians for close to 200 years. This is an enigma of sorts for most but let me dig a bit deeper to examine the methodology. We must grant the devil its due. Yes, they were smart rulers and administrators and understood our psyche very well. ‘Rule through the ruled’ was the way forward.
They created a parallel second-grade tier of ‘English Speaking’ Indians who were their flunkies in a way. They had started three universities quite early that was in 1857 for this purpose. These were the people who were close to them and thought very highly of themselves as ‘close to the power center’. The idea was to create brown sahibs who would be loyal to them. The most loyal and efficient rose to get officer ranks. This was a privileged lot and yet they were kept at a distance.
In fact, class of JCO (junior commissioned officers), Naib subedars, Subedars, and Subedar Majors was created for the army for a similar role- grade II officers. They were made to wear pips with stripes on the shoulder to differentiate between British officers and also keep them in place! They could communicate to their Indian troops in local languages and were also in a way two way communicators. They conveyed the problems of Indian troops to the British white officers and showed to the troops that they could curry favors from them from the white sahibs. So, a false sense of authority pumped them up.
The whites drew power from the British crown and Indian babus drew power from the White sahibs.
We after independence retained the same classification. English speaking babus became our bureaucrats. It is like snakes shedding their skin. (ICS, Indian Civil Service during the British Raj became IAS, Indian Administrative Service). Remember, a leopard never changes its spots. The total strength of IAS ruling the nation is less than 5000 officers today across India- it is like a super cadre to control 1.4 billion Indians today. They have also created a grade II buffer cadre of state services. The state-level jobs (can’t call riff-raff though) are done by them and the IAS is like British officers- though brown in color.
The senior police officers during the British Raj were mostly Whites. The Subordinate Police Service consisted of Inspectors, Sub-Inspectors, Head Constables (or Sergeant in the City forces and cantonments), and Constables, consisting mainly of Indians except for the higher ranks.
Even the jail superintendent who escorted Bhagat Singh to the Gallows was an Indian.
‘At 7.30 p.m. of 23 March 1931, just as twilight was setting in, when the Chief Superintendent of Central Lahore Jail, Major P. D. Chopra, escorted a lean, young man of twenty-three years to the raised scaffold in the grounds of the jail. Looking on, was Deputy Jail Superintendent, Khan Sahib Mohammad Akbar Khan.’ – ‘Guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism.’
As we became Independent the white men left us but left behind their clones as ‘Brown kings’; our politicians. They just donned Indian clothes – pajama, Kurta, sandals and a Gandhi topi. But most of them had the British soul! They were mostly Oxford or Cambridge-qualified. They maintained superiority over their subjects- yes subjects- through the English language. They were seen by an ordinary Indian as ‘Padha likha sahab’ – a bridge between them and the rest of the developed world especially the officers of the British Raj- a bridge too far and too long for an ordinary Indian (non-English speaking) to fathom! Of course, language was the barrier between those who ruled and those who were ruled. Now Indians rule the Indians through English.
The Whites ruled us by creating awe, the brown Sahibs just changed their outer shell (clothes) and still ruled us with more awe.
Remember a speech called “Tryst with Destiny” which was an English-language speech by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, to the Indian Constituent Assembly in the Parliament House, on the eve of India’s Independence, towards midnight on 14 August 1947. The speech was on the aspects that transcended Indian history. It is considered to be one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century and to be a landmark oration (in perfect English) that captures the essence of the triumphant culmination of the Indian independence movement against British colonial rule in India. He declared the end of the colonial era and called on citizens to recognize the promise and opportunity of the moment- Voila!
It would be a stretch to believe that the speech was understood by the majority population of India at the time.
A cultural shift is required.
It is a long shot but one must start now- and it has started at last.
Culture is such a powerful construct that no nation can afford to avoid it. If you have culture, you have a lot you can bank on. India may be 75 years old as an entity called a nation state but to deprive India of patriotism would be taking away that which held its civilization alive and kicking for more than 5,000 (some would say 10,000) years.
We are the only civilization in the world that has an unbroken or continuous history of rituals, traditions, and practices, a knowledge that constitutes a living culture that survived a thousand years of invasion, conversion, and colonialism. As perhaps the only true civilization state, a sense of pride for the land and culture is inevitable in India. Not only are our epics linked to geography (there is in our memory an Ayodhya, a Dwarka, a Kashi, a Mathura; For a former colony, patriotism is the lifeblood of the nation-state; for a civilization state, it is the raison d’être- a reason to exist.
Somehow our Brown Sahib rulers disregarded the power of culture. They neither themselves connected to Indian pride nor let the rest of their countrymen do it. These Brown sahibs emulated the white colonial masters of yesteryears. In this quest to imitate the West, they inspired several other Indians to do the same. That was the high benchmark set by the quasi-Indians.
When Sadhguru was asked a question as to what has changed in the last nine years beginning in 2014, he said ‘For the first time an Indian is ruling India’! And that is a fact one cannot miss or undermine. And many cannot digest it.
We are not getting into future shock but are shocked by our past heritage- which was cleverly or inadvertently masked for close to sixty years. By none other than our own clan! From Macau-lisation to Congressisation via Nehruvian-ism.
No wonder today the Communist Party of China is back to celebrating Confucius and Chinese civilization around the world. Chinese patriotism has thus been fused with a sense of civilization which is now propagated even by the Communist Party. Today, following the vision of Premier Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party holds lessons for its leaders in embracing its 5,000-year-old culture.
What China is struggling to achieve ought to be effortless for India- India today has a different directional and benevolent leadership that is not shy of doing what it has to.
