Of Momentous Heroes & An Uncertain Nation

In Delhi the best place to look for ‘affordable’ continental food are the small restaurants in Paharganj. I happen to visit Paharganj recently and went out to have lunch (picture of Lasagne floating in my head) with a friend at one such restaurant. The place was not very crowded but what struck me was the fact that in the 20 odd people sitting there we were the only Desis and rest ‘white’ Videshi. In minutes I saw a few more blonde heads trickle in and a dreadlocked head move out of the door. While I was chatting with my friend arguing about what to order the waiter kept on hanging around our table to get our order, the food on other tables was conspicuous by its absence.

भारत

The fact that the waiter (a 15-16 yr old lad) never bothered to ask the man with white skin about his order, while he kept on hounding us for full 20 minutes that we took for ordering the pre-ordained Lasagne opened my eyes to a bitter reality. I saw a society that still believes that they are the “White Man’s Burden”. If one starts introspecting after 60 years of independence the failure to exorcise the colonial ghost and an inherent inferiority complex when compared to ‘them’ has been the biggest failure of India as a society. The silver lining in this otherwise gloomy cloud of hopelessness have been individuals who have shone through their abilities and intellect and have shown them what we are all about.

The Heroes

Not counting the Nehru’s, Patel’s and the man called Gandhi, there was one man called V K Krishna Menon. After being appointed India’s first high commissioner to the UK in 1947 he had a huge responsibility on his shoulders to represent our nation in the country which had ruled us for almost two centuries. He performed his duty with utmost dignity and established himself as a distinguished ambassador. He never cared about the overtly patronising nature of the British society in general towards India and on occasion he let them know that they are dealing with one of the finest brains in the Indian politics.

One such incident is of a lady from British aristocracy who asked the London School of Economics educated Menon, how he can speak such articulately in English. Menon retorted, “Ma’am I happen to have studied this language, which you merely have picked!” Also on 23rd January 1957 Krishna Menon, then the head of Indian delegation to the UN, delivered an unprecedented 8-hour speech defending India’s stand on Kashmir and vociferously criticizing the United States. To date, Krishna Menon’s speech is the longest ever delivered in the United Nations Security Council.

Cricket despite being a relic of the British era had become a religion of sorts in post-independent India. In 1951 when India defeated their past masters at their own game in Madras (now Chennai) by an innings and 8 runs, the skipper Vijay Hazare was put on a heavenly pedestal. But still it was a team comprising of gentlemen who just played the game and when confronted by barrage of expletives (and bouncers) from their English counter-parts they preferred to sway away from the line. In 1971 Pakistan wasn’t the only nation cowering from the onslaught launched by India. We beat them in their own backyard for the first time and the reason we were able to do that was the team’s self belief and its ability to stand up to their erstwhile colonial masters as equals. The white cricketer was shown his place by players like Dilip Sardesai, Sunil Gavaskar, Kapil Dev and later Sachin Tendulkar amongst others. But nobody did it as emphatically as Saurav Ganguly. After rubbing (snooty??) stalwart of the game Steve Waugh the wrong way during the home series in 2001 (which by the way India won!), Ganguly went to England and did a ‘semi-nude victory jig’ in the hallowed Lord’s balcony.

It made Ganguly an icon for this star-starved nation for next few years and ensured that this incident will be firmly etched on the memory of anyone who saw ‘Dada’ swirling his t-shirt and telling the Englishmen what exactly to do next! It also became the face of the new aggressive India that was dynamic and wasn’t ready to be cowed down by the colour of the skin of his opposing number. From that day onwards we have finally learnt to play our game differently and have ceased to be the docile ‘good boys’ of the game. But have the people, who deify these very players, being able to make that attitude shift that apparently the Indian cricketer has made? The simple answer of this difficult question is no.


We still feel blessed if a European tourist enquires about the way to the lavatory from us while the African students are called names while they travel using the public transport. It’s as if that we have accepted the supremacy of the white skinned and the English speaking over us. By imposing a cultural hegemony of sorts on us through language and various other Medias, the ‘West’ has been successful in its endeavour to turn us into a nation of ‘Brown Sahebs’. As the father of Western Education in India Thomas Babington Macaulay visualised we are turning into a nation of “…Indian in blood and colour, but English (read Western) in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

Language is the most important vehicle to assert identity and by loosing it or corrupting it we are loosing ourselves. Studying English language isn’t bad but learning it at the cost of your own mother tongue leaves a kind of void in one’s personality and similarly appreciating western culture is fine till the time you are at least aware of your own roots. When the later condition is not fulfilled then we get a generation of disjointed individuals floating in nothingness in a dazed condition searching for their own space, their own identity.

Our trepidation for the white skin manifests from this colonised mind which forces us to automatically cow down in front of an otherwise a normal white person. We are looking for fair skinned people even amongst our own community, so you see those horribly absurd and rather bemusing matrimonial adverts looking for a ‘fair groom’. It throws the conventional ‘tall, DARK, handsome’ norm for a man’s attractiveness out of the window. The only party not complaining here are the ‘fairness cream’ manufacturers who have sold more millions of tonnes of cream, both to men & women.

We need to realise that it is crippling us intellectually, morally, emotionally and spiritually. Embracing the so-called modern world at the cost of loosing one’s identity, culture and sense of individuality may not be such a sensible thing to do. The process of decolonising the Indian mind might take some time but we can make a start by putting a stop on giving out those absurd matrimonial adverts and trying to judge an individual on parameters other than his skin colour.