Critique of India

[Stephen R.L.Clark]

I hesitate to intrude: I'm not an Indologist, but a lowly philosopher who has only visited India 
once (though we do have Indian research fellows here at Liverpool, courtesy of the Charles 
Wallace Memorial Trust).

But I'm not convinced that we need any special reason why `India' is poor, or relatively 
powerless. I'm not even convinced that India is much more of a unity than that other 
protuberance on the edge of the great eurasian continent (namely Europe). A thousand years 
ago Europe was a barbarous, filthy fringe, and the light, wealth and music were to be found 
much further east. Times change, for all sorts of reasons,  and probably will again.

I'm also not convinced that it makes much sense to talk about `the West', as if there was a 
single, materialistic, spiritually impoverished, nature-conquering demon in residence in 
Europe and the European diaspora. Europe has a long, flourishing spiritual tradition. 
Europeans can - for better or worse - be quite as romantic about their past or their rural 
neighbours as `Indians'. Talk about `conquering nature' is not a specifically `Western' 
metaphor: it is neither confined to the west, nor universal in the west.

>From which you may gather that I adhere to the `it just did' school of historical analysis: 
there is no need to suppose that the British, or the Arabs, or the Aryans deserved - in any 
way at all - to spread their language and mannerisms worldwide, at different periods. That's 
just the way it happened (so far). Nor is there any need to suppose that the victims of those 
expansions were uniformly nicer or wiser people than the victors. Nor is there any need to 
suppose that `the victors' were themselves united: at the time of the British Raj most Britons 
were at least as much victims as most Indians. I am willing to accept my share of the 
communal guilt - and some credit - for British behaviour in India and elsewhere (as being a 
willing subject of the United Kingdom, united by ties of civil friendship, and consequently 
ready to be ashamed of things done in that kingdom's name), but I can also point out that my 
actual ancestors were themselves oppressed members of the labouring classes, and had no 
say at all in what was done in India or elsewhere. Those who criticise `the West' often seem 
to have a very odd idea of what people `in the west' are like. No doubt those who criticise 
`India' seem equally naive.

Best wishes

Stephen Clark
srlclark at liverpool.ac.uk