Decolonising The Mind ! - III

 

 

“If I were to look over the whole world to find out the country most richly endowed with all the wealth, power and beauty that Nature can bestow -- in some parts a very paradise on earth -- I should point to India. If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions of some of them which well deserve the attention of even of those who have studied Plato and Kant -- I should point to India. If I were to ask myself from what literature we, here in Europe, we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of one semitic race the Jewish, may draw that corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, in fact more truly human, a life, not for this life, but a transfigured and eternal life -- again I should point to India ...” -German scholar and Indologist Friedrich MaxMuller, in a lecture series to the probationers of the Indian Civil Service course in England.

 

Those lectures were subsequently converted into a book, titled “India: What Can It Teach Us?”. THE talk of decolonising of the Indian mind, actually, must draw strength from the thought expressed by MaxMuller about India as a metaphor. India has so much to be proud of by way of knowledge culture and contribution to humanity. Yet, most unfortunately, a majority of Indians do not realise this because they are not aware of their own strength, thanks to their mindset clouded by colonial influence. But when we know what a person of the eminence and scholarship of Friedrich MaxMuller has to say about India, we realise that all along we have done much injustice to ourselves and our motherland and its rich culture.

 

To set that injustice to ourselves right is the core idea of the process of decolonising of the Indian mind -- by freeing it from the colonial influence that stands on the foundation of an inferiority complex generations of Indians have been taught to harbour in their individual and collective psyches. Of course, let us not overlook the reality that MaxMuller was an integral part of the British -- or European -- political agenda to convert India fully into a land of eternal slaves. As per that plan, the British rulers made systematic -- and successful -- attempts to distort true history of India, destroy its indigenous education system, damage the sense of self-worth of the Indian people, and make them feel all the time inferior to the British and Europeans. The arrogant British rulers also made every effort to instill into Indian minds an indelible sense of being eternally inferior to nobody in particular but other race in general. Before the British started employing their dirty designs to distort the Indian mindset about two centuries ago, they studied India in minute detail -- and inferred that India harboured a terrific, great culture for thousands of years. Once they understood that detailed profile of the larger Indian society, they designed a road-map to send India on an eternal downward spiral of confidence in itself. MaxMuller played a big role in that dirty design. What was his contribution ? It related to a better understanding of what India actually was. And then the British designed a strategy to cause a deep damage to Indian culture.

 

Based on MaxMuller’s observation, the British introduced a massive and systematic and patient plan to inject into the Indian mind tendencies of perfect slaves. India was a British colony, and its residents had to follow the British agenda. Colonising the Indian mind was that agenda. As per that agenda, the Indians were to be made to forget their own worth -- as a culture that produced a great knowledge society of which the Vedas were the foundational texts. Those great books -- the RigVed, the YajurVed, the SaamVed, and later the AtharvaVed -- evolution of human knowledge to cover fields such as space, oceans, architecture, metallurgy, music, crafts, engineering, sciences, arts, literature. And the alien rulers knew that India’s real strength lay in that treasure of knowledge. So, they sought to destroy or damage that -- colonisation, so to say.

 

Those alien rulers in general -- and the British in particular -- were immensely successful in that demonic project. Generations of Indians kept feeling a sense of racial inferiority. And that served the alien purpose of creating a slave land in India for all the time to come. Of course, a conscious effort is underway now to reverse that dirty process, and is gaining ever higher levels of success. The thought that India must first decolonise its mind consciously is gaining an increasing currency. Of course, it must be admitted that all those efforts of decolonisation of the Indian mind are still only in the initial stages -- if one may be allowed to say so. That was the reason why intellectual leaders talk of the urgent and strong need to decolonise the Indian mind. This process of reversal is complex and needs a great contemplation to be successful -- on an ongoing basis.