Face to Face with the Colonialist in Me

I was born much later, much after the colonialism in the sub continent was officially gone. I was, what one called a generation born in the Free India, the post Colonial India. The discussions moved from colonial leftovers to indignity. But the reality hasn’t moved as fast as the discourse has. At a personal level it took me slightly less than three decades to come face to face with the colonialist in me. For it changes colors, adapts, moulds itself, seeps through the gaps and becomes unnoticeable. It is fascinating how colonialism has assimilated itself into the native. While there are several overarching factors, at a personal level I trace it back to my first exercise of social discipline, my schooling. I studied history through the lens of the colonialists. Imagine a blind folded artist painting from the description of another person, that is what it was, and the narrator was not a native. I remember having read an essay with the title “Maoris of New Zealand”. The picture it painted was that of brute people who hunted animals crudely. I had never seen any pictures of the Maori but I definitely had an image imprinted, that of a savage, that of the one who needs to be civilized. The intention is not to eulogize the traditions of a particular place, but the point is that I, an individual from a colonized nation was identifying with the colonizer. This, much after colonialism had officially moved into text books and supposedly ceased to exist in “reality”. It is not just about how the schooling system has colonized me, the effects are much far reaching than that. As I was passing through the system of being made a conforming citizen, all the indigenouslanguages had began to look cheap. There was never a discussion on a Telugu, Kannada or Guajarati book, whoever reads them! The peers who didn’t speak English well had automatically moved to the “Lower Strata” of the society. Thrown back into the same spiral of status and caste, by the very education system which promised to be a liberator. It is fascinating how my vocabulary is borrowed from the Victorian texts or the contemporary literature in English but sometimes fails to throw up a single word in the native language.The idea is not to say that a language is bad, but to point out how in the race of colonizing oneself, we might be losing some much needed diversity. While the Germans, French learn their respective languages from first grade and English from third or fifth grade. We have a possibility of bypassing learning any local language. I do understand the complexity of languages and identity in a country like India, and the globalized world we live in, the idea is only that we should be learning them all (at least both), not one at the expense of the other. I also understand that it is an evolution and things change as per the geopolitical conditions, but the only worrying aspect is that we all seem to evolve in one single direction, one prototype. Moving to the arts, anything which didn’t belong to the urban landscape was becoming exotic. Anything that didn’t fit the borrowed sensibility was being termed as “Authentic”, synonymous with that of the “Other”, “untouched by modernity”. Another form of the patronising attitude of the colonialist. Walking down the lane of an Indian city, I have found myself photographing some things very mundane, I had began to look at my own city like an outsider. It is not just about the language and arts, the English speaking elite today identifies with the upper class of the world but has nothing in common with the other classes, castes of the society in which they live. Whoever said Marx was dated! While I ponder about what strange animal I have become, the colonialist in me asserts itself through this essay.