Decolonising The Mind ! - II

 

 

“It is time we decolonised our minds and ourselves. This is our time, but we will have to prepare ourselves, bring change in our behaviour, start thinking as winners. Through self-discipline, we can achieve our goals and become Vishwa-Guru. ...” -Dr. Mohan Bhagwat, Sarsanghachalak, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, at a seminar on decolonising Indian mind, organised by Bharatiya Vichar Manch, in Ahmedabad, in 2019. THIS is, possibly, the most appropriate -- and acceptable -- definition of the process of decolonisation of the Indian mind. True, there are innumerable shades to the idea, and some of them are quite complex. But the core thought is straight and simple -- as Indians, we must conduct ourselves as Indians, without coming under the shadow of any thought that represents an un-Indian or a non-Indian identity. In other words, the expectation is that as Indians, our thought process must be enriched by India’s history, India’s culture, India’s tradition, India’s diversity, India’s accommodative ethos, India’s wonderful social institutions with family as the basic unit, India’s sciences, India’s architecture, India’s literature expressed in countless languages and regional dialects ... !

 

Dr. Mohan Bhagwat adds a very appropriate touch to it by saying that Indians should realise that This is our time, but we will have to prepare ourselves, bring change in our behaviour, start thinking as winners. The expression thinking as winners has two pre-suppositions (or suggestions) - one, we do not often think as winners; and, two, we do not do so because we are affected by a sense of inferiority about ourselves. This sense of inferiority is the outcome of what is described as colonial mindset -- one that is dominated by the sense of our inferiority as a race or nation as against the race or nation that ruled us once. So, we must start thinking as winners -- that is unaffected by anybody’s flamboyance or anybody’s showmanship or anybody’s looking down upon us. We might have been under alien rule for long. Those foreign rulers might have imposed upon us their ways of thought and action and even culture. They might have made conscious efforts to make us feel bad about ourselves -- our history, our sciences, our literature etc etc etc ... !

 

Yet, factually, as we have seen in the past few decades, that we are the claimants of a great history and magnanimous cultural ethos and accommodative tradition spanning countless thousands of years. This knowledge -- thanks to the relentless efforts of generations of scholars -- has given us enough reasons to feel proud of ourselves as a race, as a nation, as a society whose historical timeline is far more enormous than anybody’s widest range of imagination. Making conscious efforts to raise the levels of this awareness is decolonisation of the Indian mind. In other words, we extricate ourselves -- individually and collectively -- from the burden of negative alien influences, and start basking in the Indianness of the making of our ancestors. There, of course, is a political dimension as well to the idea of decolonisation of the Indian mind. There are among us some elements that tell us to discard everything that is not Indian.

 

This approach is actually a response to the denigrating dominance of western influence on the gullible Indian mind of the early and the middle parts of the last century. But then, another dimension of this is more amenable to the core virtue of Indian culture -- accommodation. This virtue or value or attribute stems from an ancient vedic wisdom expressed so neatly in just five words: Aano Bhadra Kratavo Yantu Vishwatah ! (May noble thoughts come to us from all universe. ) This mindset led India of the past to become the true leader of the world, in the process creating a genuine knowledge society whose influence actually spread across the seas and into every possible part of the globe. That the Indian influence had gone into every possible nook and corner of the world can be gleaned from archaeological and historical evidence available to us in different forms. India of the past was the thought-centre of the world, from where a vast body of knowledge travelled everywhere around the globe.

 

In reverse, that was also the India that welcomed every new nuance of knowledge coming from different corners of the world. When the idea of decolonisation of mind comes up in Indian thinking, what comes into focus is two-way process of flow of knowledge -- tempered by Indian signature, a term that needs a deeper and further explanation. It means an emphasis on our national identity that is tempered and strengthened by the core value system of India -- unaffected by anything politically foreign. In other words, we need to evolve a mindset that refuses to be cowed down by alien influence that make us feel inferior to others and their ways. Once we arrive at this point in our thought-process, we start a parallel process of liberation from the colonial mindset. Uninfluenced by anything unIndian, we start a journey inward -- of national self-realisation !