Rejection of Rationality III: Western constructs

Bereft of any achievements in the contemporary history, Indians have to settle on their glorious past alone. While Indians continue to establish their own identity in the grand scheme of world civilizations there are renewed attempts to glorify its ancient past to secure its place as a great civilization.

Now, what do you do with glaring examples of our flaws as a civilization, such as untouchability or burning of widows, etc?

Well, we have learnt the art of blaming the West for all our flaws and we have been doing this quite effectively these days. We are training our kids the art of sophistry to evade the questions directly and answer them obliquely putting the blame on alien invaders.

Here, I list some of these attempts

Untouchability

When confronted with continued persecution, discrimination and ostracism of untouchables for nearly two thousand years, we are confronted with some intellectual explanations from upper caste Hindus that the whole notion of ‘caste’ was an artificial construct imposed onto Hindus by British when they started to take population census based on caste. According to these upper caste Hindus, Indians always lived harmoniously adhering to laws of nature in perfect balance with no inequities before British exacerbated the problem by introducing caste system into India. Historians who talk about existence inequities due to caste system in India prior to British Rule are rubbished as Marxist-Communists whose only purpose is to denigrate the grand old civilization of Hindus.

Sati

When confronted with widow-burning practice of Sati and the prolonged subjugation of woman treating her as a lesser human, Hindus cite a glorious and fantastical history where women enjoyed equal freedom. To do this, they conveniently highlight selected texts while hiding the glaring truths. According to these Hindus, which include some liberated and emancipated women who have fought their fights with men and now upgraded themselves to fight other civilizations, the discriminations against women were introduced into India only after Muslim invasions and then during British Rule in India. They tell you that the women of ancient Hindu India always enjoyed freedom as in present day democracies. It was the Koranic interpretations of the Muslims and then the Victorian English conservatism that chained Indian woman. Therefore, we as Hindus do not take any blame for practicing sati or treating woman as a lesser human.

Science

Indians believe that they do not need the modern version of Science as dictated to us by the West. Empiricism is a western construct and therefore completely alien to Hindus. Hindus could arrive at the same conclusions which the West took four hundred years to arrive at just by meditating under a Banyan Tree. We are holistic and spiritual, while the West is individualistic and materialistic. Scientific methods of detailed investigation, dating, measuring, calculating, analyzing, theorizing, etc, is an artificial construct imposed onto Hindus. Though these tools are introduced into Indian education by the British the Hindus never embraced them completely. Now, we are poised to reject this Modern Science because we have alternative theories from our ancient histories. All we need is little translations of these conundrums and riddles, that’s all. When our ancestors wrote about foxes, they are in fact fermions, and when they talked about bears, they are in fact bosons. And people like Fritjof Capra, a Westerner, has already validated our claims. You have to understand that it is extremely important for us to know that a Westerner ratifies our ridiculous assumptions.

We don’t need Science as it is taught in the West. Instead, we just need to renew our very own versions of ancient and alternative pseudo-sciences. We will soon have our own universities of Ayurveda, Astrology, Vedic Shastra, Mantra Tantra, Vaastu Shastra, Vedic Mathematics, etc, and produce PhDs to compete against you. And it will be very cheap too. We will not need labs, experimentations. No cyclotrons, no massive scale archaeological expeditions. No genetic research, no fusion experiments. All we need is a big farm of Banyan trees. Our scientists will sit under the trees and chant OM to reveal the truth to you.

History

We do not believe in the exact chronology and carbon dating that West adopts to establish veracity of historical events. Indians mix mythology with history, fantasy with facts, and ‘obliterate histories to establish myths’. We do not care if Rama is real, because he is hyper-real. For us, history is a myth anyway. We believe Rama trained monkeys to build a massive bridge from India to Sri Lanka around 1.75 Million years ago. If the West believes that humans did not exist at that point of time, it is their drawback. They have not researched enough. We don’t need any research, because our Ramacharita Manas has recorded everything. This whole notion of exactly dating incidents and recording is an artificial and Western construct. We are happy living in a fantasy land. It really doesn’t bother us to see our characters in Indian movies living in India one moment and suddenly involved in a car chase in Switzerland the next moment. Indian Cinema (which we call Bollywood, a completely original term) clearly explains our attitude towards the real world. It really doesn’t bother us to see our historical figures fighting British one minute and suddenly jumping into a dance song running around trees the next minute. For us, history is fantasy, fantasy is history. This whole notion of exact time, exact experimental results, exact flight plans, exact figures in economy, exact historical dates is anathema to Indians. We love ambiguity and we thrive in ambiguity. It allows us to fudge things, copy anyone’s inventions without paying royalty or a fine, and also befuddle our innocent Indians by draining of their tax money to feed our coffers. It allows us to buy justice whenever we want. It allows us to hide our incompetence under garbled pseudo-scientific bullshit. For us nothing is real, everything is hyper-real. In fact, Rama is hyper-real.