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.
However, we can - or should be able to - well appreciate that the American police is an occupying force - so is ours in South Asia. Intellectuals in discussion are fond of attributing police brutality here to the fact that the police were a British creation - designed to keep the natives in line. In his short story, Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell, then a police officer in Burma, recounts the following: "In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been Bogged with bamboos - all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt."
But his local successors feel no guilt: research by Rachel Wahl has shown how Indian police officers are expected to torture suspects, or worse. Clifford Bob, citing her work, observes the Indian police officers' denial that they are violating rights when they torture or kill suspected criminals - even after the officers have undergone international human rights training! "As Rachel Wahl has shown, the security forces justify such extrajudicial actions - and receive widespread public support for doing so - by claiming that suspects have lost all their rights because they are presumed to have broken the law (italics supplied) (pp 53-54)." "...Police view their actions as permissible and even obligatory".
Changing place- and building-names in Bangladesh - Curzon Hall, Minto Road, Hardinge Bridge - would have no effect on our inner, enslaved selves. We cannot change the history.
To remember W. H. Auden:
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