“Deshis suck big-time!” this is how he began. And then he went on saying, “Indian migrants show little willingness to integrate with the local culture and to mix with the other country’s people. On the other hand, migrants from many other nations do mix with locals and adopt their ways of living. For example, why can’t they (Indians) dress according to the local flavour?” To me, the most shocking part was to find that the writer was an Indian. A Westernised Indian, if I borrow the phrase, because I see the same thinking in him what has been systematically taught to us since the British times: the thinking which curses us with an inferiority complex as a nation and as a culture. I will explain how.
Let me start with asking one question. Which other set of migrants do you think ‘integrate well’ with local culture? Here, I would ask to specifically consider the migrants and visitors from other countries to India. Do you think the British integrated well with India when they came in? Did they respect the local culture, their religion, or their language? Do you think the Afghans who came before them integrated well with the locals? Or did they enslave the locals, converted them into their own foreign faith or taxed them discriminately? Why go back into history; do the Westerners and Arabs of the present times integrate well with Indians? Picking up the dressing, don’t the Muslims always dress differently in their own Arab garbs, wherever they go – from India to the US (including the popular styles of beard)? Going further on dress, don’t the Sikh males always wear their symbolic turban wherever they go or settle down, with others accepting them as they are? Do most of the Westerner ladies in the present India wear sarees or an Indian dress, and do they really respect Hindu symbols? Leaving the foreigners aside, don’t our own Indian converted Christians start behaving differently and try to ridicule ancient local customs and symbols, and thereby showing disintegration rather than any ‘integration’?
Why should Indians (Hindus) start taking wine or beef, if the local culture says so? Why should Indian migrant women shun their sarees and pick up miniskirts, if that is what locals wear? Why should Indian migrants to the Middle East start wearing Burqa or sporting a typical beard? On the reverse, why there is no need for the Westerners or the Arabs, when they come to India, to respect the Indian culture in the same spirits of dressing?
I think many of us have today forgotten our own strengths. This is why such inferiority complex sets in our psyche which makes us willing to ‘integrate’ with locals in ways which would destroy our own identity. One central trait of Indians is that they have always respected diversity. (When I say Indians, I mean Hindus and the practitioners in indigenous faiths. I don’t include Islamists and Christians who have mostly been intolerant of diversity.) This is why there have been no wars between the competing faiths like Sanatan Dharma or Jainism or Sikhism. In fact, the most ancient religion Hinduism easily embraced gods from other faiths like Lord Buddha or Lord Mahavira as their own gods and worshipped them. There was no protest when the Sikh Guru Shree Guru Govind Singh went on touring India and people flocked to accept his sect. Even the Arabs and Muslims have been allowed to live in India peacefully for centuries without any pressure on them to abandon their own cultural traits. So when we Indians ourselves practice so high level of tolerance and we embrace diversity, should we not also expect the other nations to practice the same spirits, which by all evaluations are peaceful and beneficial for the world?
I think it is high time we Indians and Hindus should get rid of any inferiority complex which may have set in due to foreign education. The pressure to be ‘like them’, even if we have migrated to other countries, is an unwanted and weakening psyche. We Indians and Hindus have always practiced highest levels of tolerance to diversity in others, and there is no reason why we should ourselves abandon our customs, culture, and religion, in order to destroy our own diversity.
No comments:
Post a Comment