Letter Published on 23rd April 2023
TEXT OF THE LETTER
The biggest tragedy of most Indian intellectuals since colonial times till date is the acceptance of all narratives about India as set forth by the west. Sita Ram Goel called it ‘Macaulayism’ and Balagangadhara has a more detailed thesis of ‘colonial consciousness.’ The latter is a colonial violence on Indian intellectuals who fail to look beyond the western understandings while studying both ourselves and the west. This happens much later after the colonials have left with almost a permanent altering of our intellectual frameworks. Rejecting the colonial consciousness is hard work which lazy intellectuals and ideology driven academia failed to do in independent India.
Where does this colonial consciousness work? The Aryan story; converting Indian ‘traditions’ into ‘religions’ and then accepting secularism as the best solution for harmony; superimposing ‘caste’, a western idea, into the varna and jatis of India, a different phenomenon altogether; solidifying politically and legally a rigid hierarchical “caste-system” at divergence from the socio-cultural practices; our disdainful view of traditional medicine despite its great contributions; the blanking out of Indian philosophy from all learning in schools by calling it “religion”; the need of English language to prosper and also as a national language; the idea of one dharmashastra (Manu) as prescriptive and authoritative for all eternity to come; making the western clash between “science and religion” our own; understanding our practices and rituals from a scientific perspective and making them superstitious and irrational; accepting the political ideologies of the left-right-center; the disbelief in a golden period of India which attracted plunderers from across the world; the story that we were never a nation and the British united us; ad infinitum.
Broadly, biological sex is ‘hardware’ determined by the chromosomes and the genitals; gender is ‘software’ (arising in the brain) which may think of the self as anybody in a spectrum ranging from ‘pure’ male to ‘pure’ female. The confusion between the hardware and software issues leads to bizarre activism of all kinds today with many interfering seriously in the work of medical professionals. Presently, the ‘woke activism’ of the west which has the ‘autonomous individual’ as the focus point of all its narratives has infected the Indian intellectuals. The recent ideas of the Chief Justice Of India on same-sex marriages does not make sense from an Indian cultural perspective but is an explicit example of colonial consciousness looking forever west.
Marriage or vivaaha has a special place in Hindu thought and Indian culture. Reducing it to western ideas by colonised intellectuals in positions of power can potentially cause an immense destruction of Indian social fabric. While Indian culture may accept gender identities of any form freely without persecution and may even allow same-sex people to live together, the idea of marriage and vivaaha simply is a gross violence on Indian culture, Hindu customs, and its philosophy. It betrays a poor understanding of what Indian culture is all about and exemplifies the forcible universal application of western ideas on all cultures.
RANDOM MUSINGS 