India after 60 years: Modernisation or Westernisation
13 08 2008
“Kalidas is the Shakesphere of India”.
“Sardar vallabh bhai patel is the Bismark of India”.
“Samudragupta is the Napolean of India”.
Since defining an ‘absolute’ has always been a tough task,we use defined standards to explain
anything by comparison. But who defines those standards? Why has our thought process never challenged us for using Indian standards for defining the genius of western artists, scholars or philosphers? Isnt our thinking still prone to slavery even after 60 years of Independence? Arent we compromising with our identity with regard to westernisation which is at times illusioned as Modernisation?
“If you want to talk with me”, Voltaire had said,”Define your terms first”.
Modernisation and westernisation are two terms with different meanings which are sometimes used in an overlapping fashion and quite ambiguously. So before proceeding further, we need to ensure that we never digress, by defining our terms first. ‘Modernization’ should simply mean ‘an equipment to solve the problems and meet the challenges of modern times, with a view to ensure all round progress in future.’
And the meaning of ‘Westernization’ in a broad sense is to accept the western standards of thinking, their system, their culture & their ideology.
India is a country which never had a status of an isolationist. From times immemorial we have been maintaining relations with other civilizations to build bridges of understanding with them.
We have always accepted the good trends in other cultures. Temperamentally, we have always been internationalists. Even in recent times we send our scientists, scholars, soldiers, technocrats, labourers across the border as our unofficial ambassadors, with this same view. This has been the process across the globe. The knowledge, culture and traditions never belong to an absolute place. They travel, get shared and improve in due course of time. As Newton had
Remaked,”If I had been able to see further than others ,it was because I was standing on the shoulders of the giants”. Extracting and enhancing is good but is anything, whether good or bad, worth compromising one’s own identity??
The history of India suggests that Indian culture has impressions of the different cultures of invaders or traders who were attracted by India. But under the British rule, the likes of Macaulay were successful in embedding the idea of the ‘White-man’s burden’ into the minds of the Indians, which made them feel inferior in front of the white people and also convinced them about the greatness of the European civilization. The long period of 200 years of slavery under the British rule established this credence firmly.
But the condition even today, 60 years after independence is that we are still unable to appreciate the ‘good’ lying within us. Even today we may talk about Leibnitz and Spinoza knowingly in an elite group but we do not know about their contemporary Indian social philospher, Samarth Ramdas & we even do not care to know about him. We are concerned with Prof. Rostow’s Five stages of Economic development or the relevance of Marxism in today’s world but we do not spend our thoughts on what Kautilya wrote in Arthashastra or what Kapil Muni envisaged on Dialectism, which was also theorized by Marx. We are not ready to buy cheap shirts because of their Indian tags but when someone like Mr.Kishore Biyani of Future Group launches the same stuff under the name of ‘John Miller’-’A shirt inspired by the Americans’, then we are illusioned and considering it to be ’American’,we buy it for double the cost and sales go high based on this prejudice.
In the past,we have enriched and strengthened our cultural identity and national image, by adapting to and assimilating whatever good was found in foreign cultures, systems and structures. But at that time, it was a process of assimilation and today it is the process of slow absorption of the foreign culture and the abrogation of our own culture and identity.
We cannot ignore the fact that the West is still at an experimental stage and not yet rigorously tested by time. Before rushing to appreciate its values we would have to be aware of the problems that it is facing. We cannot overlook the increase in psychiatric disorder or heart diseases or the rise in violent crimes, suicides, accidents, alcoholism, drug addiction etc. and
We cannot ignore them considering them as an inevitable price to be paid by a developed state. The need of the hour is to realize that blindly following the west will cause harm
and so there ought to be a line drawn somewhere between this assimilation of their system and the abrogation of ours.We need to stop using the Western yardstick for deciding the course of our actions or for judging the route of our progress.
A society can never become something that it was never in the first place because some section of it would always bear in mind its originality, however diminished. This state of quasi-transition is not only harmful for the coming generation, but also undermines that element which integrates any society. Now it is upto us to decide whether we would want an illusionary Westernsation with its own faults, or a new system of Modernisation within the purview of a domestic yardstick, without Westernisation which would be based on the understanding of the
Problems of our unique and diversified culture which is nothing close to west.
written in 2008.
by- prasun parashar
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