Good article on what others can learn from the Indian experience.
http://www.voice-online.co.uk/content.php?show=8763
WE ALL NEED INDIAN LESSONS
BY Tony Sewell
George Bush has anointed India as his most favoured nation. He has even ignored the fact that they have nuclear bombs and are taking American jobs.
In the 21st century, every sixth human being will be Indian. India is very close to becoming the second largest consumer market in the world, with a buying middle class numbering over half a billion. The Indian economy is already the fourth largest in terms of purchasing power. It is in the top ten in overall GDP. The world’s largest democracy is a nuclear power.
COMMON
Yet at least 200 million Indians remain desperately poor, illiteracy rates are high, communal violence is widespread and corruption is endemic. Brides are still tortured and burnt for dowries, female infanticide is common and the caste system has lost little of its power and none of its brutality.
So with all these contradictions, why is India flavour of the month for the White House? For me its because the Hindu religion has given India a unifying framework but also a great deal of freedom – something, at least superficially, close to Americans’ hearts. What other religion around the world throws in a guide book about really interesting sexual positions?
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What Hinduism has given to Indians is a wonderful contradiction, the ability to belong and not to belong to the world. I always felt that much of the spirituality that the Beatles got into in the 60s was just a bit of Indian myth-making. They are a pragmatic people.
I remember a trip I took to the source of the holy river Ganga – there was a group of men looking deeply and spiritually into the water – then suddenly like birds they would dive in. This was no ritual, they were simply going after the coins on the riverbed.
Unlike Christianity or Islam, there is no notion of ultimate sin in Hinduism. What I love is how they are able to harness their Gods and make use of them for their own ends.
Indians have never been, and will never be, ‘other-worldly’. They hanker for the material goods that this world has to offer, and look up to the wealthy and more powerful.
Hindusim has some wonderful psychological props to give those of us born out of the madness of colonialism. The British, and before them the Moghuls and the Turks, must have wondered why it was so easy to rule a people with such a strong history.
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STRATEGY
The answer is that the Indians were just playing them. Hindu culture is no easy ride for would-be colonialists. It regarded all foreigners as ‘mleccha’, unclean.
The practical Indian mind would collude with the more stronger power. They wouldn’t try and fight it out when the odds were against them, the best strategy was to absorb the enemy.
Those Indian elites who compromised with the British knew that soon their time would come.
No one can accuse Indians of crass consumerism like America, where religion is just a comfort zone for hating ‘other’ people. Indians have managed to survive endless invaders by their ability to compromise and adapt while their Hindu culture and civilisation remained intact.
I have visited India several times and I found their caste system baffling. They associate dark skin with the negative, and no black southern Indian girl will ever win Miss India.
That said, most of the caste hierarchy is based on status and family What is even more interesting is that many Indians in Britain also have African roots. My neighbour had to admit that he had never visited India and was, in all intense and purposes, a son of Kenya.
Bush can see a spirit in Indians that he can’t argue with; he is the world emperor who wants India. The Indians appear to have laid down in acquiescence: America is now another opportunity, just like the British had been.
In the same week that George Bush was blessing India, Chris Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University, was also in India busy recruiting students. Indian students have been going to American and Australian campuses and not to Oxbridge.
They have shown that ‘talented people’ can be a bigger asset than oil in world trade. There are lessons here for Africa and the Caribbean when comes to modernising their education systems.
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For those of us brought up on Christianity and Islam, we may need to be less reliant on fatalism and like our Hindu neighbours, start bribing the Gods to work in our favour.
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Published: 17 March 2006
Issue: 1209
