Invasion Theory II

Recently, Mr. Manmohan Singh babbled that British rule actually helped India. I thought I will be shocked to hear India’s prime minister saying that, but I wasn’t. It will be too naive to be shocked with this statement. The reason behind such a statement is not that Mr. Singh is Britain educated but the reason is total lack of historical perspective among the society. The problem is two pronged; first we do not take our history seriously, mostly brushing it of as ‘history’ and second, few people who take history seriously usually have no real sense of history.

As V. S. Naipaul correctly observed that, Indians need to face their wounds; the wounds of a defeated and plundered civilization. We say that we have ancient civilization. But if we ask ourselves what exactly do we know about our ancient civilization then very few people can actually answer the question. We no longer have our old universities, medicine, engineering and we are fast loosing our philosophy. We do not even speak, write or even understand Sanskrit anymore. (The way we are going, I doubt after fifty years we will be speaking even Hindi) There is no question that our civilization is old, already an antique when western civilization rose in Rome but it happened thousands of years ago. But this false sense of superiority seems to me like a poor attempt to conceal the deep wounds we had in last thousand years. The Islamic invaders followed by British crooks beheaded us so badly that we are still trying to find the logic explanation to our defeat. All of our values that lead us to dazzling heights proved completely useless against the marauding and barbaric invaders from west. Unfortunately we are still trying to pick up those values and boast the greatness of our civilization.

Out of this apathy towards our own history rose the attitude which is reflected in our Prime ministers statement. He is not to be blamed as he is mare reflection of our society. Lot of Indians do think that British rule was good. But was it really good or it was better than Islamic invaders we had for 500 years? Actually, both of them were equally bad. Both of them tried to destroy what we stand for and what we strive for. Our religion, tradition, custom, language, history, even geography is muddled because of them. They left us with no sense of direction and with no sense of ourselves..

Within 60 years of Independence if Indian prime minister states that British rule was good then I am scared of the future. I am just hoping that Mr. Singh statement was politically motivated and he did not meant that. But even in this hope lies a defeat which I am not ready to face.