05-06-2009, 02:04 AM
X post - Rudradev
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The amount of semantic confusion that threatens to cripple discussions like this one is intense.
When we Macaulayputra think of "secularism", "democracy", "egalitarianism", "liberty" etc. etc. we are invoking ideas that are basically Western solutions to Western problems... or more appropriately, Western-designed ameliorants to the sins of Western civilization. The very notional biases that shape our concepts of "equal", "just" and "fair", are exactly the ones induced in us by our erstwhile Western masters (who designed our educational curricula) in order to make us feel inferior.
See, it's this simple. Western nations never had democracy and egalitarianism... they had slavery and wars and massacres. Then in 1648 they came up with this great cure of "secularism" to stop what was essentially a Western disease derived from Judeo-Christian revealed religion; and with the Glorious Revolution forty years later the British came up with "parliamentary democracy" so that a small oligarchy of white slave-owning landowners could wield more authority than the king over the destiny of their nation.
At the same time they expanded and subjugated nations like ours via colonialism. An honest appraisal of our Dharm and its values was, of course, anathema to them. So they forcibly superimposed their Western context over our Indian reality, by creating a class of Macaulayputra who assumed the supremacy of Western context as an axiom. Thus we could be browbeaten and intimidated intellectually, by the idea that Hindu Dharm was superstitious (therefore inferior to Western rationalism), casteist (therefore inferior to Western egalitarianism) etc.
Finally when leaving India to the Indians in 1947 they browbeat us once more, with the idea that Hindu majoritarianism would inevitably punish the Muslims and Christians (and was therefore inferior to Western secularism). It was their Last "You Farted" Laugh... and the defensiveness it engendered among us, is still being used to mock us with the travesty of "Conversions" as noted in the title of this thread.
Here we are debating the fairness or equity or this or that rule of the game... but it's a useless exercise unless we first alter the playing field itself.
In this respect, it is possible that the Chinese may even be ahead of us. Maoism in China came at a great apparent cost to native cultural and normative institutions... but the fact remains that these institutions had been pervaded to a large (if not quite as large as India) extent by Western influences upto and including the advent of the KMT government. Maoism's Cultural Revolution was like a very, very severe detergent... it inundated the prevailing situation with brute force, scouring away all that had gone before.
However, it may yet turn out that native civilizational norms (being deeply ingrained in China over the millenia) have survived Maoism in one form or the other, and may constitute the nucleus of a new Chinese nationalism to replace Communist ideology. Meanwhile, the Western influences that existed only in the few centuries since the Portuguese arrived at Macau, and have been well and truly flushed away.
New Western influences coming from the exposure to American capitalism are not as much of a threat to China as to India, exactly because any trace of Macaulayism and Western contextual supremacism that could have served as ideological beachheads for the new Western cultural invasion were wiped out during the Cultural Revolution.
For all the panic here about avoiding conflict and finding peaceful solutions at any cost, it may be time to realize that the things we want may never materialize without our paying a significant price in blood, "liberty" and more. Whether the price is worth it, is another matter.
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<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The amount of semantic confusion that threatens to cripple discussions like this one is intense.
When we Macaulayputra think of "secularism", "democracy", "egalitarianism", "liberty" etc. etc. we are invoking ideas that are basically Western solutions to Western problems... or more appropriately, Western-designed ameliorants to the sins of Western civilization. The very notional biases that shape our concepts of "equal", "just" and "fair", are exactly the ones induced in us by our erstwhile Western masters (who designed our educational curricula) in order to make us feel inferior.
See, it's this simple. Western nations never had democracy and egalitarianism... they had slavery and wars and massacres. Then in 1648 they came up with this great cure of "secularism" to stop what was essentially a Western disease derived from Judeo-Christian revealed religion; and with the Glorious Revolution forty years later the British came up with "parliamentary democracy" so that a small oligarchy of white slave-owning landowners could wield more authority than the king over the destiny of their nation.
At the same time they expanded and subjugated nations like ours via colonialism. An honest appraisal of our Dharm and its values was, of course, anathema to them. So they forcibly superimposed their Western context over our Indian reality, by creating a class of Macaulayputra who assumed the supremacy of Western context as an axiom. Thus we could be browbeaten and intimidated intellectually, by the idea that Hindu Dharm was superstitious (therefore inferior to Western rationalism), casteist (therefore inferior to Western egalitarianism) etc.
Finally when leaving India to the Indians in 1947 they browbeat us once more, with the idea that Hindu majoritarianism would inevitably punish the Muslims and Christians (and was therefore inferior to Western secularism). It was their Last "You Farted" Laugh... and the defensiveness it engendered among us, is still being used to mock us with the travesty of "Conversions" as noted in the title of this thread.
Here we are debating the fairness or equity or this or that rule of the game... but it's a useless exercise unless we first alter the playing field itself.
In this respect, it is possible that the Chinese may even be ahead of us. Maoism in China came at a great apparent cost to native cultural and normative institutions... but the fact remains that these institutions had been pervaded to a large (if not quite as large as India) extent by Western influences upto and including the advent of the KMT government. Maoism's Cultural Revolution was like a very, very severe detergent... it inundated the prevailing situation with brute force, scouring away all that had gone before.
However, it may yet turn out that native civilizational norms (being deeply ingrained in China over the millenia) have survived Maoism in one form or the other, and may constitute the nucleus of a new Chinese nationalism to replace Communist ideology. Meanwhile, the Western influences that existed only in the few centuries since the Portuguese arrived at Macau, and have been well and truly flushed away.
New Western influences coming from the exposure to American capitalism are not as much of a threat to China as to India, exactly because any trace of Macaulayism and Western contextual supremacism that could have served as ideological beachheads for the new Western cultural invasion were wiped out during the Cultural Revolution.
For all the panic here about avoiding conflict and finding peaceful solutions at any cost, it may be time to realize that the things we want may never materialize without our paying a significant price in blood, "liberty" and more. Whether the price is worth it, is another matter.
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