Proud To Be Slave
By Ravi S Ghosh
15 September, 2010
Countercurrents.org
The punchline of Puducherry Tourism Department's advertisement says "The closest you'll get to visiting the French without a passport." It seems they cherish the French culture the colonists left behind more than their own. To me, it smells of proud feelings of being ruled by French, of being enslaved.
It is not just Puducherry, but the whole of Indian subcontinent which not only refuses to get rid of colonial heritage but is boastful of it. We love our foreign connections even if they are slavish in nature. We sing of kings who ruled the land though they were totalitarian and often barbaric. To be slave of a great master is better than being independent. We trade self independence with the egoistic feeling of being associated (rather oppressed) with prodigious lords.
There is nothing wrong in wearing a foreign culture, but then we should not be singing about the greatness of Indian culture and the motherland over others at the same time. What else it is if not hypocrisy? We give preference to English over Indian languages and then go ahead to change names of the cities, from Pondicherry to Puducherry, Bombay to Mumbai. We have abandoned our traditional attires in favor of western ones and yet we never miss an opportunity to blame Britain for our current miseries and talk of the golden India before British arrival.
I will cut it here with two questions to be answered:
1. Aren't Indians hypocrits, wearing the foreign culture all the while being boastful of Indian culture which has been abandoned in the darkness of history?
2. Is it Indian nature to associate ourselves with men of great stature rather than trying to achieve greatness?
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