Thursday, September 12, 2013

The contemporary irrelevance of a small island where the sun never set

I blog in the English language, while living in what was once a colony of Britain, after having immigrated from a country that was also a British colony.  All thanks to Britain having colonized huge territories.

It boggles my mind how Britain managed to achieve all these and more from the tiny outpost it is in the northern seas.

It is not merely the conquering of lands along, which, I still have a tough time believing was possible at all.  I mean, think about it.  From far, far away, crossing the waters, and then ruling over countries with populations  large enough to have easily overrun the rulers!  Yes, we can talk forever about the advantage of guns over swords, and the cunning divide-and-conquer approach, and whatever else.  But, at some point we have to assemble that jigsaw puzzle and wonder how that ever happened, yes?

It is not merely the conquering, and ruling over, distant lands.  Britain's empire achieved way more than that.  It has made millions like me think in the English language.  Thinking in a language has profound consequences:
‘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.’
If you cannot imagine the sheer geographic aspect of this, look up in a world map the locations of the UK and Sri Lanka, which was home to Coomaraswamy.  Think about a world before modern ships and planes and emails and telephones.  Britain's rule forever changed the histories of the lands colonized in the name of the crown.  That historical continuity was gone. For eternity. 

When I visit India, there is far less Tamil literature anymore when compared to my growing up years.  When the Tamil nativists worry that Tamil is slowly dying, their concerns are not baseless.  Students there seem to be a lot more familiar with the British and American histories, for instance, than about the Sangam literature or even the Chola Empire.

Now, look at the same world from the British perspective.  Since the end of the Second World War, Britain's influence on the rest of the world has been in a rapid decline.  The sun, which once never set in the empire, now rarely shines.  The colonies in the past wondered whatever happened to their power and influence; that same set of questions preoccupies their erstwhile masters.

Thus, I bet it hurt their sentiments a lot when Vladimir Putin's aide brushed aside the UK with a single statement about Britain's irrelevance in the ongoing Syrian drama:
“a small island … no one pays any attention to them”
The old teenage emotions on colonialism and anti-Britain have never gone away inside me and, hence, I was delighted with that statement.  I wish somebody a lot more acceptable had uttered that and not one of the minions of the maniacal Putin.

The Telegraph reminds us that this is merely the latest in a rich tradition of insults directed at Britain, including this one that I particularly like for the obvious reason:
A demon took a monkey to wife – the result by the Grace of God was the English.
Indian saying 
Thinking about Britain along these lines reminded me of the tshirt I bought two years ago when I was in Chennai.  The young entrepreneur was impressed with my fondness for the Tamil language despite my life that is anything but that of a traditional Tamil.  We continued to chat even after I bought the tshirt about which I have blogged before.  I told him about the "Veera Vanchi" stories that I grew up with.  As he got a sense of how much I hated the fact that the lands became somebody else's colony, and how history was disrupted, he brought out another tshirt and said, "this is the last piece I have, and I didn't want to sell it.  But, I think you will like it."

I bought that thsirt too. 



That young fellow's website for the tshirt advertising and sales exists no more.  I bet his business failed because there is no interest even among Tamils in Tamil Nadu for tshirts with Tamil words, and even Tamils in Tamil Nadu prefer English words and sentences instead on their tshirts--the very social problem that the entrepreneur wanted to address via his tshirts.

That is one mighty legacy for a small island that no one pays attention to.

ps: I located this translation of the verse in the tshirt ... sounds good enough to me
Like the men,
who failed to think beyond the next meal;
who find pleasure, in the faults of the rest;
whose souls toil in constant despair - mind
tangled in desparation and agony;
who wish ills to their neighbour;
who subject themselves to luck's mischief;
who live burdened with miseries,
and passed life as a burden
Born human,
did you wonder, if like those men,
I would also fall for fate's follies?

4 comments:

Ramesh said...

A post I could comment on with a full post in reply !!

Oh yes, the British empire was one of the greatest achievements of a nation. Previous huge empires - Alexander, Genghis Khan, etc rarely had the lasting influence that the British empire has left. It is a staggering achievement as you have observed - the sheer scale , the longetivity and the
lasting effects are simply mind boggling.

However disagree with you that the decline of Indian languages is a decline in culture - completely disagree with Coomaraswamy. Firstly I don't even agree that the Indian languages are dying. Twenty years ago, the educated elite were all only English speaking - like you and me. Today, with the broadbasing of education, Indian languages are comfortably spoken everywhere - in fact on the road you will rarely hear English even amongst "elite" couples. Yes, there is the curious mixture of English and the Indian language - the Hinglish effect, but actually a bastardised version of the Indian languages is seeing a renaissance.

The issue I have most is with the notion that the decline of a language equates to decline of the culture. Indian culture and the uniquely Indian way of life continues to thrive. Other cultures which had been conquered - the Latin Americans, for example, completely lost their culture. Not so India. A beautiful comparison is with China. In China, they have preserved their language pristinely, but everything else is now Western - the old Chinese culture simply does not exist. In India, the only thing that has declined, if at all, is the language. In everything else, the deep culture remains for good or bad.

Sriram Khé said...

hmmmm .... we will have to agree to disagree it seems ;)

Ok, first for the agreement, which is to joke, yet again, that thankfully it was the British who colonized India and not Spain or France or, worse, Belgium. The atrocities that the Belgians committed in Africa, or the Dutch in Indonesia, well, India was spared of those. Plus, who wants to speak French anyway ;)

I suppose we disagree with what we mean as the cultural continuity. The Greeks, for instance, have that historical continuity. The literature of the old flourishes even now.
Th examples you provide from India and China are wonderful examples of the peoples adapting to the conditions that they have been presented. The resilience is awesome, and I don't doubt or deny that. The Greeks, too, adapt to the changing world, and so do the French. But, they do not have the element of a jarring long break from which they had to rediscover their own history in so many forms.

We have disagreed before too on this point--we are being consistent ;)

I think at the end of it all, it comes down to me not having made my peace with that horrible aspect of British rule in India, and of European imperialism all over.

Ravi Rajagopalan said...

I am amazed by your erudition and learning, and I went into a tizzy of exploration after reading this.

I am, at the age of 56, deeply ashamed at the colonization of India by the British, and the sweep of Western Imperialism all over Asia and Africa. Lets not even go to the annihilation of the native people in North and South America. I am even more ashamed at the unstoppable mental colonization which has taken place.

Interfering in culture is like introducing entropy into a system; its like Schrodinger's Cat - what existed is gone and what will be is not known.

The only comfort is that there are about a 100 million or so like you and me. Dhobi ke kutte.

Sriram Khé said...

Good to see you here after a while, Ravi.

Yes, with age, I am even more pissed off at European colonization than when I was an angry teenager. Maybe also because I am learning more and more about how it messed things up. For instance, until I came to the US, I had no idea that the US government systematically killed off the Native American languages--kids in schools were even forbidden to speak their languages and they had to speak only in English.

Forcing a language on kids is such an easy way to kill an entire culture. I grew up with the DMK on its pro-Tamil and anti-Hindi rhetoric that appealed to me a lot, and has stayed with me all through the years. Maybe this protection of Tamil is the only useful contribution from the DMK!

And, yes, as we look around the world ... from the native peoples of Australia to the Andes to .... what a tragedy!