HVK Archives: Need for cultural pride - Revival
Need for cultural pride - Revival - The Hindustan Times
Rizwan Salim
()
September 20, 1998
Title: Need for cultural pride - Revival
Author: Rizwan Salim
Publication: The Hindustan Times
Date: September 20, 1998
India's social problem--rampant corruption to exploding
population--can disappear and the nation can become great almost
overnight if most Indians, especially the people on top in every
domain of activity, are made to undergo just one mental
transformation: Acquiring intense cultural pride. Yes, vigorous
cultural pride has the power to create great individuals and
great nations. Intense and well-informed cultural pride can be a
very strong force animating ancient historical civilisations such
as India. A people, if intoxicated enough with arrogant pride in
their history and culture, can go on to achieve greater glory.
The Japanese and the Chinese, the French and the Germans possess
a surfeit of cultural pride-and a sense of cultural superiority.
Consider their achievements over the centuries and in recent
decades.
Given the reality that Hindustan is the longest surviving ancient
civilisation and Hindus have to their credit so many uncountable
and such astonishing achievements of architecture and painting.
music and dance, poetry and drama. epics and narratives,
intellectual systems and philosophical doctrines, healing systems
and mind-body disciplines, Hindus of every caste and class today
should have possessed a well-informed and well-developed, intense
and, fully conscious cultural pride. But one of the principal
tragedies of contemporary India is that the majority of even the
educated and otherwise affluent Hindus do not possess a deep and
extensive knowledge of their culture-and do not give evidence of
an intensely felt cultural pride.
>From the earliest surviving Gupta period temples of the fifth
century to the grand Moghul monuments and Rajput palaces,
Hindustan has more than a thousand year old tradition of
stunningly beautiful and awe-inspiring architecture. Yet so
lacking in cultural pride have Indian architects been, that after
1950 they eagerly adopted the European Leftwing architects'
Bauhaus style, the architecture of ugly concrete boxes. Now they
slavishly follow the currently fashionable West "Post-Modern"
style that developed out of the Bauhaus. There has been no
authentic Indian architecture now, structures replicating shapes
and forms, motifs and decorative elements of ancient Hindu temple
and Moghul and Rajput palace art.
India's English as well as regional language novel writers who
grew to literary maturity after 1950, had they absorbed the
Hindustani cultural tradition in depth and were ambitious for
their talent could have written authentic Indian novels that
would have been ranked, in time, with the best and most enduring
of the British and American, German and Russian fiction-so
overwhelmingly varied is India's human reality and so much
potential has Indian life for engendering great novels.
Mentally crippled by their own feelings of cultural inferiority,
India's novel writers (in English mainly but also in the regional
languages) slavishly follow the Leftist-invented style of writing
and themes of the contemporary Anglo-American fiction writing,
the most degenerate school in the history of European letters.
Western Leftists favour novels with amoral, inhuman and anti-
heroic themes expressed in ungrammatical and fractured language.
Beautiful prose is repugnant to ideological Leftists.
So complete is the alienation of India's English language fiction
writers from their own culture, they seem incapable of creating
emotionally satisfying and deeply pleasurable novels. They write
fiction to please influential Leftwing book critics in England
and America, not those with good literary tastes at home and
abroad. There is nothing genuinely Indian in so many of these
"Made for Export" novels.
Lacking profound cultural knowledge and intense cultural pride,
India's intellectuals regard the fashionable ideas and ideologies
>from Europe and America as unquestionably superior to Bharat's
thousands of years old Hindu culture and wisdom. Following the
West's dictates in domains ranging from polity to economics,
jurisprudence to genetics policy, India's intellectuals do not
bother to find out if there might not be ideas and insights in
ancient Hindu philosophy, intellectual systems and texts better
than the West's. Why must we always let some American or German
argue, for example, that the Mahabharata is as good a guide for a
modem business manager and a politician as compared to an ancient
Hindu king? There is no authentic Indian response to the
intellectual questions and moral dilemmas of the modem world.
There is no genuinely Indian view of world events and trends
today. India's politicians in power over the years evidently have
never felt a surge of cultural pride to create university
programmes and institutions where Bharat's culture, texts and
tradition can be rigorously and exhaustively studied to the
highest international academic standards. Hindustan does not have
enough institutions for the scholarly study of Hindu culture. The
institutions that do exist are not of the first rank because they
were never generously funded (by government or philanthropists)
to do excellent work. There are not very many scholars of high
ability and international reputation in India today who
illuminate Hindu culture and Hindus' past great accomplishments.
It is an embarrassing truth that the best Indologists are found
in the Netherlands and Sweden, Germany and France, Japan and
Italy-not in Delhi and Ujjain, Varanasi and Puri, Madurai and
Mysore.
India's big city universities do have resident scholars doing
dedicated research in humanities. Instead of educating us - and
the world-about the profundity and the originality of Hindu
thought, and the imaginative power of Hindu arts, they prefer to
research with great seriousness works of second rate intellectual
system builders and third rate writers and poets of Europe and
America.
An intense cultural pride follows from an intense cultural
consciousness: A powerful attraction to one's own culture and
cultural practices. An intense cultural consciousness is not
evident in most
Indian men and women Performances of India's classical dances and
drama, instrumental and vocal music are not as widely held or
well-attended as would have happened had a strong interest in the
nation's refined culture of temples and royal courts existed
among most Indians. Cultural pride also means guarding against
any loss of the culture's vitality. A number of energetic and
powerfully affecting village and tribal folk art forms, including
festivals and rituals, customs and ceremonies, dances and drama,
music, and songs, jatras and trance induction techniques are on
the verge of extinction (or have vanished already) from all over
the country. There is no extensive and focused national effort to
prevent the disappearance of the very vital folk tradition of
Hindustan.
Indian society very urgently needs a class of brilliant culture
leaders: Men and women who possess a deep knowledge of Hindu
culture and the subcontinent's history; who have insights into
what is imaginative and profound, what is worth preserving in our
culture. These self-chosen culture leaders should go around the
country, giving lucid but forceful orations, educating the people
about the great qualities of their culture and creating a robust
cultural consciousness in the majority.
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