Hi all, This interesting and scholarly article appeared in The Hindu today under the title 'Imperial apologists peddle poisonous fairytale' by Priyamvada Gopal.
http://www.hindu.com/2006/06/29/stories/2006062903831100.htm Excerpts: A wilful ignorance of other people's cultures and histories encourages the notion that freedom, democracy and tolerance are intrinsically Western. As Professor Amartya Sen has argued, the subcontinent has long been home to traditions of free-thinking and debate. Participatory governance was not Britain's gift (recall Gandhi's indigenous village republics), even if parliamentary democracy as an institutional form was adopted in some ex-colonies. Free trade is another mythical Western contribution to world history. Amitav Ghosh has reconstructed the forgotten history of a vibrant trade culture between medieval India and Africa. When the Portuguese arrived, they demanded that the Hindu ruler of Calicut expel Muslims, "enemies of the Holy-Faith," from his kingdom. He refused and was subjected to two days of bombardment. Indeed, one legacy of European colonialism that we all reckon with is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the "clash of civilisations." The claim that east and west are bound to come into conflict is merely an extension of imperial practice which found it useful to seal off porous cultures into fixed categories. This tragic "lie of the colonial situation," as Frantz Fanon called it, rebounds on us tragically in the terror unleashed in the name of Islam and George W. Bush's "war on terror." If we are to undo the destructive legacies of empire, it won't do to invest celebratory falsifications with credibility. To make sense of a shared present and look towards a more humane future, we need to start with a little informed honesty about the past. Cheers, RKN _______________________________________________ Goanet mailing list [email protected] http://lists.goanet.org/listinfo.cgi/goanet-goanet.org
