Malavika’s Mumbaistan: Dissing a King

Let’s face it, besides giving rise to some truly imaginative memes and jokes at his expense, King Charles’s coronation will be remembered (especially in these parts) as being a lightning- rod for festering anti-British sentiment.

In fact, it could be argued that since the days of India’s Freedom Struggle, never has anti-British sentiment been as high as it is now.

And the abiding irony of it will always be that the man who triggered it was Shashi Tharoor, one of the country’s most famous alleged Anglophiles, or that he chose to fire his salvo from the very citadel of British authority- the University of Oxford.

Ever since Tharoor’s rousing speech on the topic, the Indian public has become aware of the monumental loot by the British Empire of India’s wealth during its colonial rule.

From being the richest nation in the world to being beggared, depleted of its resources and famine -ridden thanks to the wilful plundering of its exchequer and beggaring of its people – the details of this plunder are heart breaking.

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This widespread cooling off to symbols of Western – especially British culture –and the heightened sense of pride and confidence in itself, that the country appears to be experiencing, is the result of many factors and though it is easy to credit the RSS’ long and sustained campaign to “strengthen the Hindu community and promote an ideal of upholding an Indian culture and its civilisational values” for much of it, it’s only half the story: because ironically the appreciation of Indians of their own heritage and traditions was often the result of Western appreciation: that one spotty European hippy friend in the 70s who’d joined an Indian ashram and spouted Sanskrit shlokas, or that one towering American intellect who declared India to be ‘the cradle of the human race, or that one Beatle who was ‘crazy for sitar.’

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Above all, this appreciation of all things Indian by Indians, is the slow coming of age of a people finally shrugging off the last vestiges of their colonial mindset, a mindset that has been so insidious that it was hard to even recognise in many cases.

Take the example of the convent school in Bandra which I attended, a venerable old institute which instilled a host of admirable values in its students – along with an abiding appreciation of Shakespeare, Tennyson, Scott and Dickens. Today I realise the staggering disservice that kind of education did us by completely disregarding the output of some of India’s greatest poets, lyricists and writers – many of those who lived in the same neighbourhood- and whose daughters were students of the same establishment. The piquant poignancy that those sweet girls struggled to master alien concepts from distant lands in an alien language, while the equally brilliant canon of their fathers’ legacies was ignored, is something I only realise now.

Or the fact that even as we prided ourselves on being au courant and up to speed with international popular cultures many of us grew up completely ignorant of even the most basic of tenets of our own culture.

No, there is no doubt in my mind that this pride in and appreciation of all things Indian has long been overdue and augurs well for the country, especially at a time when once again the world is looking at it for its own commercial gains and political interests. Unguarded and trusting once before to our great misfortune, hopefully, this time around, our newfound confidence will alert us to any signs of imperialism, however tempting the offers.

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But one also hopes that in this wave of national self-esteem and self-regard the baby does not get thrown out with the bath water. Because let’s face it, what the BJP and the RSS have certainly been successful in doing is recognising and aligning its cause with that of an aspirational India –those men and women who until now had been excluded from the dining table. The vast majority of India that had not assumed its positions of power and pelf once the colonialists had left its shores. That debt-ridden and beggared India which could not send its children to elite schools and colleges, could not afford health care or leisure time and whose every waking hour had been a struggle to survive, thanks to decades of unjust taxes and policies wrought by the colonists. The unwashed multitudes who finally feel that they have a chance to sit at the table, shop at malls and multiplexes and own a car and a home.

In its bid to woo and win the hearts and minds of this India, it had been strategic to paint the people at the top of India’s pyramid as effete, entitled and self-serving; qualities that had been successfully projected on to members of the Nehru-Gandhi family as an exercise in vilifying it as the symbol of ‘entitled India’.

Taking a leaf out of the colonialist’s playbook of divide and rule, the RSS successfully managed to demonise that section of India in the hearts and minds of the other (PLU) India.

And as a result, though much of the present narrative might appear to be a struggle for pole position between two political parties that adhere to divergent ideologies what it really is, is a class struggle between those allowed to occupy a seat at the table and those waiting impatiently at the door outside for their chance.

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Which is why it would be foolish for India’s elite to deny the India that is knocking at its door it’s long overdue welcome and make peace with the notion that there are others who may want to occupy the sea-facing homes, send their kids to the best colleges and decide which kind of music should be played at restaurants; indeed, it would be equally foolish for the other India finally getting its chance to emerge and enjoy the spoils of its new-found wealth and status, to not appreciate what those at the top have to offer them- their scholarship, their experience and their genteel measured approach to life art and matters.

But it will take a certain amount of maturity and wisdom for both these Indias, first torn asunder by colonialism and then by political propaganda which often seem to be in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with each other to set aside their mutual distrust and suspicions and walk side by side in peace and harmony into what is being called ‘the India moment’ and ‘the Indian century’

One can only pray that such maturity and wisdom prevails. Because the absence of it could be disastrous.