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.