Empire State of Mind

While reading Amit Chaudhari's Afternoon raag today some distant memories of my own childhood were evoked. Growing up in Northern India, it seems strange that some of us lived with our minds placed outside our vast country. We had been colony for such a long time that being a colony was ingrained in our society. I was too young at the time to have understood the post-colonial context of my surroundings but I can clearly remember of my English teacher and my grand-dad having an unexplained respect for the British. My dad on the other hand - a rebellious believer of Indian self-dependence – did not pay much respect to the West. He seemed conscious of the Western might and he was proud of having studied at an early Victorian college but somehow managed to fight the tendencies to fall in love with the West – as if having learned the futility of such romance from the previous generation.

The West existed in such unspoken subjects in my childhood. My grand-dad had taken British for granted and at school and without realizing I too was a part of this same system. We all had a tendency to assume British supremacy in all matters. We spoke local tongues but whenever someone had to make a strong argument, switching to English seemed natural. It gave it that official touch. All disagreements over anything in fact came to an end if someone could quote from a book published in English. The possibility of publishing something in English ourselves was so distant that nothing in our world could have possibly questioned the authenticity of a book written in English. In a strange way therefore the Empire was still in our minds even if in reality it was long gone.