When you read texts like these, you feel empowered

Makarand Paranjape Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Gandhi’s idea of traditional Indian civilization was that it was self-sufficient and couldn’t really be improved. Some people might consider this a very limited and static view of human endeavour, extremely conservative. Again, Gandhi is a most complex figure. He had no use for several detestable and crippling aspects of Indian custom and tradition. These included untouchability and the oppression of women. He not only found no scriptural sanction for these practices, but he also went to extent of saying that if scriptural sanction were found, he would reject it. Gandhi’s self-sufficiency thesis was thus tempered by a stringent social critique and by an admiration for several qualities of Western culture. Between Rammohan’s insufficiency thesis and Gandhi’s sufficiency thesis may be placed most important thinkers of modern India, whether it is Bankim or Nehru, or Vivekananda or Tagore, Aurobindo or Ambedkar. Most of these thinkers advocated some kind of compromise between these two positions...

This is a constant refrain among not just the missionaries, but the British liberals as well. William Wilberforce openly stated in the British parliament that one of the missions of the empire was to Christianize India and to destroy it’s heathen civilization. Even Max Mueller’s private papers reveal this hidden agenda. So you have this utter and cynical disregard of Indian civilization on the one hand and then, on the other hand you have a person like Radhakanta Deb, again a very complex figure, who was actually a proponent of sati and several other “orthodox” customs. For instance, he was against the remarriage of widows and an advocate of child marriage. Today, most of us would find these positions both untenable and unacceptable. So there are complete capitulators and complete revivalists, both of whom are outside the spectrum of the Indian consensus. That is why we mustn’t think that we are making a new beginning. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There is a very rich and varied tradition of decolonization that is available to us. When we examine the parameters of this process of decolonization in India, we know how we can ideologically map all the major thinkers. For instance, you will find that some are more spiritual, while others are more materialistic or some are more militaristic while others are more nonviolent. Thus, you might argue that the Indian Marxists are more materialistic, while Tagore, Aurobindo, or Ramana Maharshi are more spiritual. While Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose is more militaristic, Gandhi is are more non-violent. Again, some, like Dayananda Saraswati or Gandhi will use the language of tradition, while Dadabhai Naoroji or Nehru will use that of modernity. But both are opposed to British imperialism...

Take the case of our English syllabus. It’s so obvious that we have to change it. That this has already happened in several universities is heartening. We need to ask what it is that we are actually teaching, and why. Here we’ve been changing our syllabus, including new texts, but is anybody reading Bhartrihari? Yes there are some people, as we know only too well, but so few of them. That is why I said that we need to create a little tool kit for decolonizing the Indian mind. We can put in Ngugi Wa Thiong’o in it; in fact he uses this very phrase “decolonizing the mind” in his essay on the need to write in an African language. We can put Franz Fanon in this kit. But we also need to put Gandhi in it. As my friend Professor Satendra Nandan of the Australian National University says, how is it that the works of the man who led the largest struggle against colonialism in human history are excluded from every reader on postcolonialism? Or we might put in Sri Aurobindo’s Foundations of Indian Culture in our kit. When you read texts like these, you feel empowered. You feel that you have a surer grip, a firmer handle on this business of colonialism. This process needs to be effected in all our areas and disciplines of study. The content has to be changed constantly in keeping with our goals and needs. We simply can’t afford the sort of syllabi, which remain static for, literally, half a century at a time, as is still the case in India.