India
= Cow + Kamasutra
By Satya Sagar
Znet
03 December, 2003
India=
Cow + Kamasutra. That in general is the equation that defines this vast,
ancient and populous South Asian country even today for many people
in the West.
I can hear the howls
of protest coming in. Sure, there are a few ex-hippies who would throw
some pot into the picture and some serious scholars who have in depth
knowledge of the place but on an average, the image of India in most
Western societies is one still steeped in the Oriental stereotype.
And how could it
be otherwise, given the balance of power between India and the West
over the past few centuries, heavily skewed in favor of the latter.
Frankly, I don't get upset when I confront Western stereotypes since
the evils of four centuries of colonialism cannot be undone in a mere
fifty years.
But I had reason
to be disappointed recently, when on a trip to Latin America, I found
the average citizen there imbued with the same level of ignorance of
my part of the globe. What! An Orientalist fellow-slave?
I mean, I expected
people from within the developing world, faced with broadly similar
problems and all at the bottom of the global pecking order to take a
little more interest and learn about each other. After all, if we suffer
together we must also share together, whatever little we possess.
Noble sentiment,
blah, blah, blah-but listen to what I got at every street corner of
this pretty little South American town I was in: "Porque de la
India no come baccho ? Why don't they eat cows in India? And is it true
many Indians are well-versed with the details of the Kamasutra ?"
Man, if there is
any example of how screwed up the so-called global information superhighway
is in our world it has to be this complete lack of communication between
Asia and Latin America.
Asked in Spanish
and answered in English the answers would typically run into a few hours
of conversation. My responses to the Cow question:
A) Many Indians
are so poor that they don't even get to eat grass, leave alone a full
cow.
B) It is only a small minority of upper caste Hindus in India who don't
eat cows for religious/cultural reasons and it is their right not to
do so. However, these fellows also control the levers of power and want
their personal beliefs imposed on the rest of the country, so they have
skewed policies against all others getting access to any decent quality
beef.
C) The rest of India, made up of variety of castes, communities and
religious groups would happily eat the cow provided it was available,
cooked properly with the right spices and not imported from Britain
(many Indians are poor, but they are not stupid).
And about the Kamasutra:
Even if most Indians
read this ancient manual of sex everyday- what on Earth would they do
with all that extra information? The sexual mores and practices (or
their absence) of most Indians (and South Asians in general) have been
shaped historically by three of the most patriarchal and sexually super-conservative
groups known to humankind- the pretentiously ascetic Bramhins, the elitist
Mughals and the tight-assed Victorian British. And that cultural combination,
let me tell you, is enough to instantly evaporate any idea of love on
contact with your consciousness!
--- and so on. But
at some stage I tired of sticking to facts and tried to duck the dreaded
'Cow and Kamasutra' questions. One facile answer I came up with was
'Indian cows run so fast that it is very difficult to catch them'. And
to one Argentinian friend who insisted on bringing up the subject of
the cow I said ' in India cows live under water and are difficult to
fish'.
And she nearly believed
me, for I soon discovered (to my utter horror) that many on this continent
had such an exotic notion of India/Asia that they were willing to believe
any tale I conjured up. Even 'Indian cows live under water' kind of
stuff!
To be fair to my
Latin American friends- the cow in particular does continue to occupy
a prominent place in modern Indian life. The Indian National Congress,
which misruled India for over four decades after independence from British
misrule for example cunningly used the cow as its election symbol. Members
of India's much-oppressed 'lower' caste dalits routinely get lynched
by upper-caste mobs on mere suspicion of having killed a cow for its
skin or meat. And in recent years the Hindu fundamentalists have made
banning cow slaughter a hot election campaign theme. In other words
even the dead cow, is still a live issue in India.
But all that is
beside the point. Obviously both the cow and the Kamasutra are objects
of curiosity in Latin America because there is little else they get
to know about a nation where one sixth of the planet's population lives.
The lack of information and knowledge is mutual though, with most Indians/Asians
clueless about Latin American history, culture and society beyond the
stereotype 'football', 'carnival' and 'tequila'.
So what really prevents
an average Latin American or an Asian from picking up a book or watching
a documentary and learning about each other's continents? Why are they
not speaking to each other more frequently, visiting each other's villages
and towns? Why are such large parts of humanity still so starkly ignorant
of each other's existence in this age of constantly instant information?
At first glance
the information gap can be easily put down as due to linguistic barriers.
Latin America speaks Spanish, Portuguese, Quechua etc., and Asia speaks
English, Hindi, Chinese, Thai, Malay and so on.
Distance is also
another obvious barrier because Asia and Latin America are virtually
on opposite sides of the globe. Traveling from Thailand to Ecuador for
example takes a whopping 38 hours, including 25 hours of flying time.
Airline routes however
give us a clue as to some of the real reasons for the lack of communication
between the two continents. If one looks at the map of the world according
to Star Alliance for example, the globe is essentially a network of
airline pathways held together by just a few hubs- London, Paris, Tokyo,
Los Angeles.
To get to Latin
America from most parts of Asia one has to fly through one of these
former or new centres of corporate globalisation, many of which were
also the capitals of the old colonial world. The airline routes of our
times are mostly a mirror image of the old naval routes of colonial
pillage and plunder.
Information too,
unfortunately, has a bad habit of flowing exclusively from one part
of the Third World to the other along these very same, well-worn routes.
So it is in our world today that for Asian citizens there is absolutely
no way of getting to know Latin America (and vice versa) except through
established, guided paths that provide the translations and interpretation
of each others societies, politics and culture. In other words if my
Latin American friends ask typically Orientalist questions such as the
ones about the 'cow and the Kamasutra' that is because they really have
no other choice- all their information comes through typically Orientalist
sources.
And it is not just
Asia and Latin America that are completely disconnected. This is even
more so the case with Africa which remains the Dark Continent to many
of us simply because all light emerging from it is mutated or muted
by the colonial routers its passes through.
Come to think of
it, forget continents as far apart as Asia, Africa and Latin America,
the lack of information and understanding of each other among Asian
countries themselves is appalling. Most educated Indians know more about
what Prince Charles is having for dinner than basic facts about entire
thriving societies just a few hours flight from their borders.
One uncle of mine
back in India, an engineer by profession, once asked me to tell him
what was the difference between Bangkok and Thailand- I kid you not!
His counterparts in Thailand, in turn, know only two things about India-
that the Buddha was born there 2500 years ago and that a nuclear bomb
was tested in 1998. The myriad centuries in between the Buddha and the
Bomb are a gaping hole in their consciousness, which in the meanwhile
is filled with intimate knowledge of Cherie Blair's Nth baby and the
Terminator's sex life. (No, I am not insinuating anything here)
The deeper reasons
for this lack of communication between the developing countries are
essentially linked to the way European colonialism operated historically.
The colonialists carved out the globe into tightly controlled fiefdoms
in a manner that precluded all possibilities of the subject people interacting
freely among themselves.
For the colonial
powers keeping their subject populations ignorant of each other was
a way of preventing the emergence of a united opposition to their rule
across societies, cultures and continents. Not just that. The subject
people were repeatedly pitted against each other, an essential modus
operandi of colonialism.
So the British colonialists,
for example, used Indian troops against the Arabs, Indian traders to
sell opium to China, Indian administrators to rule Burma and even today
use Gurkhas from Nepal (on discriminatory pay scales) against anybody
they want. (The information gap I talk about is so great that unfortunately
I can't give you similar examples of how the French and the Dutch were
using their subjects against each other--- but I am sure they did the
same!!)
All this, though
unpardonable, is still understandable within the context of what colonialism
was all about. Of course, they did what they had to keep themselves
in power, right? But why should this state of affairs be allowed to
persist in our world at the beginning of the twenty first century and
that too in the middle of something that has been dubbed the Age of
Information?
(It is true that
the world's only superpower is trying to drag all of us, kicking and
screaming, back to colonial times via it's War on Terror. But hey, that
geezer who took the turkey to his troops in Baghdad a week ago does
not realize that the goose of old style colonialism was cooked long
ago! It is highly unlikely that bird will fly ever again!)
Why should there
be greater flow of information between Latin America and Asia? There
are a zillion reasons why increased information flows are good in themselves
but here are the ones that interest me the most: a) Latin America offers
some of the most frightening lessons in what colonialism can do to an
entire continent b) It also offers some of the most inspiring examples
of what resistance is possible to such oppression and c) The possibility
of forces across continents joining hands to resist their common global
oppressors remains the most exciting idea of our times.
(On a more personal
note I see the past 500 years of white, European settler domination
of Latin America as the basis for understanding the 3000-year history
of the Indian subcontinent. Essentially the caste system of India is
the end product of a similar process, over a longer period of time,
of invading/migrant/settler/fairer-skinned populations from outside
taking over the land/resources of indigenous people and imposing their
own culture on the entire nation)
And why should Asia
and Africa communicate more with each other? Because a) Africa is the
mother of all civilization and if you don't know what your mom was all
about you should jump into the most shark-infested portions of the Indian
ocean, pronto! b) The rape of Africa over the centuries by the so-called
'civilized' world is a shame on all of humanity, including those who
collaborated or watched it happen without doing anything and c) It is
a shameful history that Asia can both learn from and do something to
redress by joining hands with African citizens fighting to restore their
continent's lost peace, prosperity and dignity.
Simply put, since
exploitation today is global, the pathways to resistance too have to
be global. And since the sources of our troubles are also common- namely
colonialism/capitalism- what better way forward than to unite the oppressed
of the world across cultures and continents in our common struggle.
A word of caution
is due here. It has never been easy to unite the oppressed. As the history
of slavery and colonialism, across the globe and over the centuries
reveals, oppression by itself can bring revolts galore but no real revolutions.
There are many reasons for this:
a) Not all are oppressed
to the same degree and so the levels of motivation to change the world
order are naturally different.
b) Some sections of the oppressed genuinely believe that they can actually
claw or crawl their way into the ranks of the oppressors and therefore
have no qualms about doing so on the backs of their fellow-slaves.
c) There is no effective mechanism or conscious attempt to forge a unity
of the oppressed on a global scale.
d) The oppressed need a clear vision of a better world that is morally,
politically, economically and ecologically superior to the one that
allows slavery/colonialism/exploitation of any kind.
While we sort all
that out, what I suggest needs to be done urgently is the closing of
the information gap between social and resistance movements of Asia,
Africa and the Americas (the 3 A's). This will be a small but very necessary
step forward towards forging the long-term unity of the underprivileged
of our world.
Que crees, hermano
? Kya khayaal hei, bhaijaan ?
Satya Sagar is a
journalist based in Thailand. He can be reached at [email protected]