HOW SHOULD THE WEST BUILD ITSELF?

Towards the end of her presenting Supriya Gandhi couldn’t contain her urge to even more boldly state than before during her talk her biases in reading British India History. She said, ‘it was a time of a major displacement in India.’

Not wanting to disturb her talk, I took to chat immediately: ‘British colonialism brought a displacement of India’s privileged and powerful, and a lease of new life for its historically oppressed.’

Supriya Gandhi did not respond. There were other responses piled up in chat before mine, all very affirming, mostly from caste Hindus and about three from the very few non-Hindu participants. Time constraints may have forced Gandhi not to respond.

But one participant sent me a personal message asking curtly, ‘How come?’ I gave the individual a detailed explanation of how the millions of Indian outcastes, mostly dark-skinned aboriginals were kept out of the closed socio-economic system created by Vedic caste and spent their lives as scavengers and destitutes who couldn’t earn a living and were treated worse than stray animals. They were hated, beaten, and killed by caste Hindus with no account of the atrocities kept and no punishment for culprits rendered before Muslims and Europeans came in to rule India and change the status quo.

The huge problem for more than a couple centuries in the elite universities and think tanks of the world, especially here in the West, has been that there are no representatives of the voices of the oppressed in the elite groups that discuss Indian history and the impact of empire on India – all empires, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, and European. Brahmins and other caste Hindus such as Supriya Gandhi who have always found a way into elite groups because of the privilege these categories have without a break enjoyed in India are able to continue to convince the world of a lop-sided view of history which has some truth in it, but hides other even more essential truth to create a view that is erroneous.

Unfortunately, Europeans have consistently enabled the privileged groups who have in return only displaced them from power. This happened in India, and now it is happening in the West too.

The post-colonial studies project does attend to certain serious omissions of responsibility and virtue by colonial rulers, but it turns into a racist project of the displaced vengeful people of privilege returning through such schemes to displace the former colonialists and usurp privilege.

The West would be blind to this reality only at its own expense. It is important for the West in a whole lot of aspects of community creation to embrace the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized and to raise them to equality, self-respect, dignity, and work. These are likely to express greater solidarity with the values of the West than those who are only seeking to displace those who displaced them and usurp power and privilege.