India's cultural emergency - and a twisted education system

Let me explain what I mean through an example.

Let’s say, someone contaminates another's food with arsenic every day. Arsenic is deadly, but it’s a slow poison. He'll have no immediate bodily reaction when he consumes it. Say, he'd begin to feel a little drowsy, maybe confused, and have headaches often. As the symptoms worsen, he'll begin to suspect something. Before it’s too late, he needs to realise what the reason is behind these unexpected symptoms, else the outcomes can be adverse and irreversible. 

Back to the context. The reason why I mentioned that example was to say that our country has been poisoned too, and it NEEDS to change its diet before it’s too late.

Let me make things more clear. Here I quote what we know of Macaulay’s address to the British Parliament in India – 

“I have travelled the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore, I propose we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture, and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

Of course, I have seen reports which question the authenticity of this speech, but 1. the veracity of those reports by the media are just as questionable 2. the Indian education system had been replaced anyway leading to the British's desired outcome, whether this was Macaulay’s speech or not is really irrelevant.

But here the British have succeeded, atleast to some extent. They have poisoned the Indian students' intake of knowledge by getting their hold on the education its populace imbibes, the values it respects. The painful truth is, we have taken their baton forward. We teach young Indian minds about Marx and Machiavelli rather than Chānakya, Socrates and Aristotle rather than Ādi Shankara, Galileo and Euclid rather than Āryābhatta, Homer and Shakespeare rather than Kālidasa! We worship Dalton and Thomson and Schrödinger, when ancient India talked about anu and paramānu? Magellan was executed halfway through his voyage to prove that the Earth was spherical when India called geography bhūgōla, gōla literally meaning ‘sphere’ and already supported the heliocentric theory long before Copernicus' defiance and death.

Why do we – the Indians – lead our people to believe that if it wasn’t for Magellan going around in a ship and returning without falling off the earthly horizon, we would’ve never known that the Earth is a sphere? This is misguidance, isn’t it? Have we gone back and reflected upon our own ancient texts, what they have said about the most basic functional unit of the body, aeons before Hooke? How even our mythology talks about evolution, much before Darwin walked?

Indian knowledge has been preserved in manuscripts – how many manuscripts, with how much information, is beyond our comprehension. The challenge is to imbibe the knowledge in them. How is that possible? To learn Sanskrit is the only way to truly understand what they contain! Or is it? True, we could have translations of those writings. But with each translation, the authenticity of the original work is diluted by human misinterpretation. The contents of the original work may have been slightly tweaked in its first translation. The second one could alter the already-misunderstood contents of the previous translation. Hence, what you get as an end product under the cover of an “authentic translation” (which many contemporary Indian writers are rather fond of) is a cumulative remnant of misinterpretations, misinterpretations, and more misinterpretations, and if any, intentionally fabricated hoax content which was never there in the first place. 

Undoubtedly, only the original is the most reliable source. And if its medium is Sanskrit, embrace it. Until then, this is my request to you. If you are a student, question your textbooks. Delve deeper. Never be afraid to put a question-mark on what you’re taught. For all you know, the Aryan theory is being disproved. What you learn about the Later Vedic Age and the glory of Akbar or Khilji could be wrong. And to the parents, Netflix and chill should not be all that they have to pass on when they are in your shoes. Develop a bond with them! Pass on your values and your culture, your beliefs – it’s no good if you have absorbed this culture, but distance it from the next generation!! 

India is yet to achieve independence, true independence from its brainwashed British mindset!