Dr. Veraswami's admiration for the British is pathetic. "Dr Veraswami had a passionate admiration for the English, which a thousand snubs from Englishmen had not shaken. He would maintain with positive eagerness that he, as an Indian, belonged to an inferior and degenerate race." Flory and the doctor have a regularly comic conversation, in which the Englishman knocks down the English and Veraswami defends them. Dr. Veraswami says: "'My friend, my friend, you are forgetting the Oriental character. How iss it possible to have developed us, with our apathy and superstition? At least you have brought to us law and order. The unswerving British Justice and the Pax Britannica."
The frankest expression of cultural cringe -as we may call this type of outgroup favouritism - flowed from the pen of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, who favoured all things British against all things Indian: "...all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule (quoted, Mark Tully, No Full Stops In India (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1993), p 57)."
Swami Dayananda, founder of the Arya Samaj (Society of Arians) in Bombay, in 1875, famously tried to show that all Western scientific knowledge had been revealed in the Vedas - telecommunications, ships, aircraft, gravity and gravitational attraction (Peter Van Der Veer, Imperial Encounters (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2006), p 50).
The South Asian elite are in a parlous state. Spare a thought for Martin Kampchen, who wrote from Santiniketan: "Several daily newspapers of Calcutta flashed the news of Jhumpa Lahiri's wedding in Calcutta as their first-page leader, complete with a colourful photo of the happy couple. First I thought: O happy Bengal! You still honour your poets as the ancient civilisations used to do. And for a moment I remained in this innocent bliss of satisfaction. Then it dawned on me that not any writer's marriage is accorded such flattering coverage. Only expatriates who have 'made it good' abroad, who have 'done the country proud', are subjected to such exaggerated honours (The Daily Star, 27th January, 2001)." Jhumpa Lahiri had just won the Pulitzer for her collection of short stories, The Interpreter of Maladies.
Before he became prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan used to insult some people by calling them Brown Sahibs (maybe he still does). Most of his friends fit that description - which means they ape the dress, habits and affectations of the former British colonial masters. Indeed, Khan himself used very much to be a Brown Sahib. "His English is more polished than his Punjabi," according to the Independent.
A pejorative expression used by South Asians for South Asians is 'coconut': brown outside, white inside.
In 2006, a photo of then prime minister Khaleda Zia taken by Shahidul Alam was printed on the cover of TIME magazine. The Daily Star, the leading English daily of Bangladesh, made a point of mentioning the fact in its pages (April 14, 2006): "We would also like to take this opportunity to commend Mr. Alam for being the first Bangladeshi photographer whose work has been featured on the cover of Time magazine." Alam had 'made it' in the west, so he had to be 'honoured'.
"You mention the name Bangladesh to a westerner and wait for his or her first reaction and what you hear may not please your ear" lamented the now-defunct English daily The Bangladesh Observer in its cover story (October 20th, 2006). But all is not lost! Mohammed Yunus and his Grameen Bank had won the Nobel Peace Prize, rekindling "the (sic) Bengali nationalism in the teeming millions". Never mind that a connection, however tenuous, between a Nobel Prize for microcredit and Bengali nationalism, is not immediately obvious. The former, conferred by the outgroup, raises the prestige of the latter.
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