Paradise Lost?

In Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, Satan postulates that it is “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heaven”. Interestingly, I’ve come across a completely opposite mindset lately.

On my travels across India in the last few months, I had occasion to speak to a lot of people about the changing political landscape. There were very many valid concerns about the rise of radicalism and right wing rhetoric, about callous and unthinking laws being put into motion to the detriment of the common man, about the lack of infra structure to support the rapid expansion of metropolitan cities and/or small towns, and a general fearfulness and dread that democracy, such as it is, was being eroded by an authoritarian government.

However, what shocked and saddened me was the stance of a particular generation. This is the generation that was born shortly after India gained its Independence from the British. This is the generation who was too young to remember what it was like in the days of the Raj, but old enough to have enjoyed the remaining benefits of a disciplined governance and a healthy infra structure. Their stance is paradoxical to Satan/Lucifer’s. They truly believe that as Indians we were better off being ruled by the British. That we are a corrupt and morally bankrupt nation with a slavish mentality. That, like chaotic teenagers on the loose, we will end up destroying India. That, under the British, there was cohesion and rule of law and a principled superintendence.

Of course there was. The British saw the Empire as an extension of Britain. They plundered while they ruled. But they also built the railways and the schools and the courts, and everything was tickety-boo. For them.

Winston Churchill, that great hero who led Britain to victory in World War 2, once said, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” His antediluvian statements can be dismissed as the thought process of the time. Of a culmination of the Imperialism practiced by many European nations, with the justification of subjugating, colonising and ultimately benefitting the savage natives of the East and of Africa.

Yet, by admitting that we were better off as a colony, aren’t we also admitting to being those very repugnant savages that Britain chose to bring to heel?

India had a rich and varied cultural history much before she was colonised. There was education, tradition, art forms and healthy trade. There was also casteism, infighting and poverty. It wasn’t perfect. Nothing ever is. What over two hundred years of colonisation did was try and make India into a pale facsimile of Britain. And that is the vision that some choose to cling to, to this day.

While I am not in agreement with the myth of the puritanical Hindu land where aeroplanes and surgery were invented in whatever century B.C., neither do I agree that India should have stayed under the British Raj. Whatever great muddle the country is in now, it is it’s OWN muddle. One that the free thinkers, the activists and the common public, will help unravel in due course.

70 years of Independence may not have necessarily evened the playing field for everyone. Yet, as a relatively nascent nation rebuilding itself, India hasn’t done too badly. Every nation carries the burden of its history. What it chooses to do with it, is entirely to its own discretion.

Chosen servitude is voluntary abdication of responsibility. It is a cop out of magnificent proportions. Can anyone be happy being enslaved? As Thucydides, the ancient Athenian historian once said, “The secret to happiness is freedom…And the secret to freedom is courage.”