India after 60 years: Modernisation or Westernisation

“Kalidas is the Shakesphere of India”.

“Sardar vallabh bhai patel is the Bismark of India”.
“Samudragupta is the Napolean of India”.
Since defining an ‘absolute’ has always been a tough task,we use defined standards to
explain
anything by comparison. But who defines those standards? Why has our thought process
never challenged us for using Indian standards for defining the genius of western artists,
scholars or philosphers? Isnt our thinking still prone to slavery even after 60 years of
Independence? Arent we compromising with our identity with regard to westernisation
which is at times illusioned as Modernisation?

“If you want to talk with me”, Voltaire had said,”Define your terms first”.
Modernisation and westernisation are two terms with different meanings which are
sometimes used in an overlapping fashion and quite ambiguously. So before proceeding
further, we need to ensure that we never digress, by defining our terms first.
‘Modernization’ should simply mean ‘an equipment to solve the problems and meet the
challenges of modern times, with a view to ensure all round progress in future.’
And the meaning of ‘Westernization’ in a broad sense is to accept the western standards
of thinking, their system, their culture & their ideology.

India is a country which never had a status of an isolationist. From times immemorial we
have been maintaining relations with other civilizations to build bridges of understanding
with them.
We have always accepted the good trends in other cultures. Temperamentally, we have
always been internationalists. Even in recent times we send our scientists, scholars,
soldiers, technocrats, labourers across the border as our unofficial ambassadors, with this
same view. This has been the process across the globe. The knowledge, culture and
traditions never belong to an absolute place. They travel, get shared and improve in due
course of time. As Newton had Remaked,”If I had been able to see further than others ,it
was because I was standing on the shoulders of the giants”. Extracting and enhancing is
good but is anything, whether good or bad, worth compromising one’s own identity??The
history of India suggests that Indian culture has impressions of the different cultures of
invaders or traders who were attracted by India. But under the British rule, the likes of
Macaulay were successful in embedding the idea of the ‘White-man’s burden’ into the
minds of the Indians, which made them feel inferior in front of the white people and also
convinced them about the greatness of the European civilization. The long period of 200
years of slavery under the British rule established this credence firmly.But the condition
even today, 60 years after independence is that we are still unable to appreciate the
‘good’ lying within us. Even today we may talk about Leibnitz and Spinoza knowingly in
an elite group but we do not know about their contemporary Indian social philospher,
Samarth Ramdas & we even do not care to know about him. We are concerned with Prof.
Rostow’s Five stages of Economic development or the relevance of Marxism in today’s
world but we do not spend our thoughts on what Kautilya wrote in Arthashastra or what
Kapil Muni envisaged on Dialectism, which was also theorized by Marx. We are not
ready to buy cheap shirts because of their Indian tags but when someone like Mr.Kishore
Biyani of Future Group launches the same stuff under the name of ‘John Miller’-'A shirt
inspired by the Americans’, then we are illusioned and considering it to
be ’American’,we buy it for double the cost and sales go high based on this prejudice.

In the past,we have enriched and strengthened our cultural identity and national image,
by adapting to and assimilating whatever good was found in foreign cultures, systems and
structures. But at that time, it was a process of assimilation and today it is the process of
slow absorption of the foreign culture and the abrogation of our own culture and identity.

We cannot ignore the fact that the West is still at an experimental stage and not yet
rigorously tested by time. Before rushing to appreciate its values we would have to be
aware of the problems that it is facing. We cannot overlook the increase in psychiatric
disorder or heart diseases or the rise in violent crimes, suicides, accidents, alcoholism,
drug addiction etc. and
We cannot ignore them considering them as an inevitable price to be paid by a developed
state. The need of the hour is to realize that blindly following the west will cause harm
and so there ought to be a line drawn somewhere between this assimilation of their
system and the abrogation of ours.We need to stop using the Western yardstick for
deciding the course of our actions or for judging the route of our progress.

A society can never become something that it was never in the first place because some
section of it would always bear in mind its originality, however diminished. This state of
quasi-transition is not only harmful for the coming generation, but also undermines that
element which integrates any society. Now it is upto us to decide whether we would want
an illusionary Westernsation with its own faults, or a new system of Modernisation
within the purview of a domestic yardstick, without Westernisation which would be
based on the understanding of the
Problems of our unique and diversified culture which is nothing close to west.