Broken history. Broken hearts.

“No man ever went to the East Indies with good intentions.”

Wrote Horace Walpole.  The same Walpole who also gave the English language the word Serendipity.

To think that I had to come to the US as a graduate student and then learn about the horrors that these bastards unleashed upon the browns!  How twisted that the history that we studied in a "free" India was merely the European version :(

In contemporary India, the fair-skinned rulers have been replaced by uber-nationalistic Hindu leaders.  The curse of the East India Company haunts the old country.  Heck, it haunts the entire Subcontinent and the world!

So, yes, there is immense schadenfreude--I won't deny that--when the old colonizer is all twisted about itself thanks to Brexit.

What an ironical twist of fate that the melanin-deficient Brits who roamed the far corners of the earth, imposed their customs, religion, language, and themselves too, on the browns everywhere, are now upset that other melanin-deficient ones from the continent across the channel are pouring into their precious island!

If only we humans learnt the lesson not to mess up other people's lives!  But we don't.

And, so, here i am thinking and writing in English as a result, instead of carrying on with one of the oldest languages ever.  I am often reminded of this:

‘It is hard to realize,’ Coomaraswamy writes in The Dance of Shiva, ‘how completely the continuity of Indian life has been severed. A single generation of English education suffices to break the threads of tradition and to create a nondescript and superficial being deprived of all roots—a sort of intellectual pariah who does not belong to the East or the West.’

The word "pariah" of course coming from the Subcontinent.  A word that in its usage in the old country that is as awful as the "n"-word in this culture.

Why this unleashing of anti-colonial emotions?

I am reading a book about people from India who were brought to the West Indies.  I have been commissioned to review that book.  In the formal review, I cannot bring such emotions.  So, I will vent here, and then take the sober academic writing there ;)