Cultural Gaps

What we know as cultural gap between East and West has been engineered through colonialism. It is through the colonial experience that the image of a pure, traditional, forgiving and often meek - Indian man has been engineered - an image that modern Indian male and the freed female has forsaken. Sociologists and post-colonial writers point out that the institutions which attributed softer qualities to female had worked in a similar fashion in colonies to objectify and celebrate the attributes in a whole "race" of people.

It is evident from history that the "cultural" gap wasn't as wide in the more fluid history of the 17th and 18th centuries. This was a time when East India company officials could have Indians wives and the lashkars from Western India could settle at English ports with British wives. I highly doubt that James Brooke was concerned about sending his kids to Oxbridge when he became the maharajah of Sarawak. But as we all know, the communication technologies and transportation improved by a lot in the 19th century. As East became more and more deprived, the preferences transformed. The discrimination could easily prosper when East couldn't offer any resistance - either cultural nor political - to colonialism.

The cultural gap which we talk to this day is actually not about culture at all. This talked about gap is largely determined by the perceptions of backwardness which have survived from 19th century. People in both East and West suffer with this prejudice. The right wing in the West cannot shun the idea of having imparted civilization to the East and the right wing of East cannot get over the perceived humiliation of the past. I don't see this as a cultural difference, it's only an error that needs to be corrected. In 18th century, Westerners would travel to India and delve into its literature without necessarily proving it as inferior - much the Easterners enjoyed learning the sciences without shunning their past identities or traditions. Both activities seem implausible in the modern culture as well as in the 19th century. The cultural gap which we live with was created for empire-building purposes and if that need is over, the talk of cultural gap seems unnecessary. The need is probably to stress upon what's good amongst each other without holding anyone accountable for mess-ups of our past generations.

Poets and Readers

When I was a child, I was surrounded by those who talked of national poets. Pushkin was a big name. Nirala and Dinkar were big names. So were Wordsworth, Milton and Yeats. But nobody ever quite crossed the mark which was set by Tagore. Tagore was the man. He did things that nobody had foreseen. His literature was vast. His works alone meant more than all of Hindi literature combined - his literature so great that even the English swore by it.

Yet there were very few who had read what he wrote. The exhortations to walk alone were sung on TV and his poems on national pride were engraved or sung as anthems. They imparted a sense of comfort and continuity when I read them transcribed, engraved on marble in a script I could read. But that mythical and feminine country of his pride, was a lot less mythical than those who swore by his name. In their minds and speech, he was of an order so tall that it precluded most of us from reading him. Understanding him was nearly impossible.

When I grew up, the hypocrisy had given in and soon died along with communism. We cried for the sad end of a comrade in a battle for the poor. The poets were no more relevant in the new world. Dinkar-Nirala, Yeats-Keats became things for the feeble-minded - unproductive lovers of literature who couldn't feed themselves. The biographies of CEOs made more sense now. Everyone wanted to be them. Unread by most, Tagore's name licked the dust of time. Those other poets not as great as him slowly passed out of memory as well.

Where are the poets now? Who writes and who reads? Are we up for revival again or can we descend into chaos much worse than ours? For Tagore to live or relive, I wish we could just read like he did. Reading any poetry could do perhaps - of any language or any race. Let's never claim anyone's greatness without reading him.