Condoning Colonisation...an enduring South Asian folly

My mother is fond of saying that the British should have never left Sri Lanka. She says that they left us with their universal language, functioning roads and railways and an excellent system of Government. From the title of my post, you can probably discern that I violently disagree. My mother's argument, though oft-repeated by the most intellectual South Asians you will ever meet, is utter bollocks.

It presupposes that South Asians are genetically incapable of building decent infrastructure, using their language for business or governing themselves. It also uses the evidence of the present to justify this false glorification of a terrible past. My reply to this foolishness is that the present is so miserable because the British left it that way. Hundreds of years of looting and "one-against-another" power politics does not leave a nation stronger, it leaves it divided and physically, culturally and economically raped. The British didnt build their infrastructure to help anyone, they built it to help them steal. The British left their language behind so that generations of ass-kissers could kiss ass without the British having to learn the local language. The British left their excellent system of Government behind to justify the cruelties and injustices they heaped up on the people according to a system on the pliant elite understood.

Ofcoure the elite in South Asia will never agree to my argument. They, we, I, have been fed and fattened, distanced from the rif-raff, by the giant wall that is the English language. The lower-caste, the godeyas, the tribals dont have its magical powers, we do. We have spent the last 50 yrs or so after independence further strengthening these inequalities. In fact, we have even used the divisions the British left us (between Hindu and Muslim, Sinhala and Tamil) to pursue policies that maintain power within the English-speaking elite (which is always curiously composed of members from every community, happily accumulating Pounds Sterling). South Asians remain as divided (or more so) as the British found us and later left us, only along different cleavages.

The current generation is not exempted from this attempt at using English as a boot on the neck of national culture and the poor, uneducated majority of South Asia. We do not harbour any ambitions to teach our countrymen English, to share our magical knowledge, but rather we laugh at them as villagers who are not part of the "Globalised World".

This is all in stark contrast to the South East Asians (not including Singapore), Chinese and Japanese. They have never learned English in the same way that South Asians have. They produce no Booker Prize winners, no Nobel Prize winners for Literature, no blockbuster movies half-in-English-half-in-Hindi. We look down upon them for "their lack of creativity". I would argue that they use the West for the only thing the West is good for, trade and the production of nice things. Each of these nations treats the defeat of colonisation as a great and important national event, and I have yet to meet a citizen of these countries who wishes that the British never left.

We have a lot to learn from the chinky-eyed, yellow people that we share a giant continent with. I just hope that we pick up Mandarin as well as we have picked up English.