If you go to a therapist, they will first ask you to open up about your childhood, past relationships, and other life events. This helps them understand if you have any past traumas or behavioral patterns contributing to your present condition. Without knowing this information, they can’t provide you with the appropriate treatment that works long-term.
So basically, you can’t ignore your untreated past traumas and think it won’t have any consequences on your life. You would be playing a fool’s game if you did that. You must take the necessary actions to resolve it if you wish to live a sane and peaceful life. This is the law of nature.
Now, does this same law of nature apply to a country’s past as well?
Can a country’s unresolved past influence its natives’ current worldview? Can it impact how the modern mind thinks and acts now, even after so many centuries have passed? And is it possible to trace their low self-esteem, insecurities, and self-doubt, everything back to their country’s past incidents?
Well, the simple answer to those questions is, Yes.
TV host Gopinath in a recent interview with Zoho’s founder Sridhar Vembu, asked him a question: “Why is it that Indians are smart enough to be CEOs of most big MNCs but couldn’t establish any companies like Google and Apple on their own?”
To this, Sridhar responded by saying, “India has world-class talent and resources. That is an undebatable fact. But it’s our Colonial Mindset that is limiting us. If you look at the history of India, it has seen anything but invasion after invasion and colonization. From Ghazni Muhammad to the Persians and the Mughals, and then the Queen’s rule from 1600 till 1947. When a country has such a past, is it any surprise its people don’t have the confidence and self-esteem?”
Damn. That sounded both depressing and interesting to me. And it was ridiculous to an extent too. You know, to realize that something that happened to our grandparents and their forefathers over a century ago is screwing our present life. As if we don’t have enough things to worry about in our lives.
But unfortunately, that’s what you call generational baggage.
Yet there was one thing that still remained unclear to me: How did these invasions and colonizations create an inferiority complex in our ancestors?
Has it got something to do with us living life as colonized population for so long, which in turn, would have gradually conditioned us to believe that we were only meant to be oppressed race? Or, centuries of being easily vulnerable to attacks and invasions convinced us we were weak and incapable? I didn’t know. I had a lot of questions.
It only turned out later that our inferiority complex wasn’t because of any of the above reasons. It was because of something else: Culture. Our obsession with the culture of the British colonizers. A by-product of colonization.
Okay, but how did this obsession with the colonizer’s culture lead to our inferiority complex? How are these two connected, you ask?
To answer that, we first need to understand how their culture rubbed off on us.
Where it all started…
In the past, whenever colonists landed in a country, they considered it their duty to civilize the captured people. To them, civilizing the colonized people meant imposing their own cultural practices upon people.
So what did they do? They brought their own way of dressing, cuisines, beliefs, arts, entertainment, and everything to the colonized land. As a way of speeding up this cultural imposition, they tried to brainwash the natives into believing that their indigenous culture was gross and barbarian. Their biggest propaganda machine was the education system they framed for India, which we still use to date.
So gradually, most of the natives began adopting this new culture while distancing themselves from their own. Over time, it reached a point where only mimicking the new culture was seen as civilized in the natives’ eyes. In order for you to be considered civilized, you needed to look and act like the colonizers. You needed to have the same preferences and tastes like that of the colonizers. (You had to look fairer just like the colonizer!)
Imagine repeating this for more than 500 years. That’s almost like altering our evolution process as a society. No wonder why colonial mentality is deeply rooted in our society.
(Just for instance, if it’s not for corporate events and college events, how often do we fancy wearing traditional dresses? And most of us don’t even wear them more than once after we buy them. Besides, we feel a sense of pride when we tell others we like foreign cinema, music, and books as opposed to national or regional ones.)
And what happens when you ignore your roots and culture and constantly try to mimic some culture that’s not yours? You will feel inferior and weak. Because, come on, deep down you know where you came from was primitive and inferior culture, as the colonizers had you believe.
It’s this way of trying to mimic the Colonizers that got us into the trouble of developing an inferiority complex. Peter Ronald deSouza, Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, talks about this clearly in his work, “The Recolonization of the Indian Mind,” he says,
“…what did colonialism do to the native mind? It enslaved the native mind, making it believe that what had emerged in the colonial encounter was good. It produced a shadow mind whose creativeness was eroded and which, unknown to itself, adopted an intellectual life that was marked by imitation and mimicry. It led to an erasure of cultural memory, producing disconnect with a millennia-old intellectual and cultural life. It made the colonized people feel that their cultures were inferior and that abandoning them, and adopting the cultural practices of the colonizer was, therefore, the way to go if one wanted to be respectable and be accepted as civilized.”
Now it’s been 77 years since our independence and we have countless examples of individuals who broke free from this generational baggage and have achieved/are achieving incredible things. But still, the residue seems to take hold of most people.
The testament to that statement is the usage of some phrases in our languages that directly imply colonial mentality. In Tamil, there is a commonly used phrase called, “Velainu vandhutta vellakkaaran dhan,” which translates into “there’s no better workmanship than that of the whites.” They say you can understand a culture better by simply looking at the kind of idioms and proverbs the natives use in their language. This idiom clearly explains how deep the colonial mentality runs in our blood.
But how many years will it take before we get rid of that residue from us completely?
Well, when you are trained to be the oppressed for that many centuries, it takes some time to heal, of course. But there is a quicker solution.
Which is, knowing who you were.
If we are to regain our lost confidence and self-respect we first need to understand clearly about our culture and remember who we were. We need to break down our country’s history and understand our strengths and our glory.
Did it really take colonizers to civilize us?
A common argument natives usually bring forward is that the British colonizers introduced many reforms, therefore they civilized Indians. Of course, the colonizers subdued casteism to some extent, abolished Sati, legalized widow remarriage and so on. That’s not to say we were uncivilized. You could say we had some shortcomings as it is the case with any other culture.
Take medieval Europe for instance. Until the 18th century, Europe was extremely violent. People were tortured and executed in public, in ways you can never imagine. Think of the most inhumane punishment you know and then 10x it, you will remotely come closer to matching its magnitude.
Public executions were considered a big source of entertainment across Europe. Such that people used to get tickets to watch the gruesome executions. It was more like a public fair that attracted merchants, street theatre troops, and other sellers. You get the idea.
Talk about being barbarian.
But now, it’s a totally different story. People learn, change, and become better. It’s the same with Indian culture or any other culture. To think that our ancestors were primitive because they were once following these acts in the name of culture would be a narrow view of history.
The bottom line is, we should understand that every culture has some flaws and you can’t write off a culture as outright uncivilized just for that reason. Don’t let this notion make you feel inferior about your culture.
Not weak, just different specializations
Now let’s suppose the colonizers didn’t impose their culture on us. Even if that’s the case, it’s possible many of us might look at all the engineering and tech marvels of the colonizers and say: “fuck it, what’s wrong in following their culture which acted as the medium to the creation of all these cool inventions and technologies. So obviously, white culture must be superior. Right?”
Fair enough.
But maybe not.
It’s true that we didn’t do as well with developing technology and modern machinery as they did then. But we had our strong points as well. Just that in this part of the world our strengths were in architecture, literature, philosophy, spirituality, arts, yoga, mathematics, and meditation.
So should we feel inferior because we didn’t excel in science and technology like the whites? Well, if that’s the case, then shouldn’t Britishers feel inferior about the fact that they didn’t come up with yoga and meditation and failed to shine in mathematics as we did, so to speak?
Sure, we lagged behind in tech in the past centuries, but look at us now. We are flourishing in everything. From tech to space science to all the other fields there is. We’re making huge strides, and setting new standards. What other proof of potential do we need to not feel inferior about ourselves?
As different cultures, we may have been good at different things in different time periods in the past. But today, there is no disparity in knowledge and skill. We are complementing each other now by exchanging ideas and knowledge—be it spirituality or tech or any new ideas or discovery.
Imagine how silly it would be to be biased to think that we are incapable of achieving things now because we didn’t do so in the past. And that only colonizers are capable of doing great things.
Whenever you feel even the slightest sense of self-limiting voices echoing inside of you, grab it by its throat and choke it against a wall. Correctly recognizing those colonial mentality voices and resolving it then and there is the key. And now that you know what tools to use against, it’s going to be far easier to do so.
If a kid aspires to become a scientist, he never complains that nobody in his bloodline was a scientist before so he can’t become one. Instead, he works for it with passion.
Let that sink in.
Still not convinced?
Oh, come on, don’t be a fucking crybaby. For the love of God… Go get your ass off and live up to your fullest potential.
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