After 75 years of Indian independence, would you say, are we still colonised in our minds? Do we still feel inferior to the British. British, when they came to India, were fascinated by the education in India and the value system that we followed. They wanted to somehow break this and make us feel inferior to them. It was Macaulay, a British who said that he will break the Indian education system and make Indians feel that the English education is superior in all aspects. He said, “A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia," Macaulay wrote in his minutes that he envisaged creating "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect". Thus the British hammered inferiority complex in Indian minds. Even today we have not come out of that influence. Many Indians are English in taste. We patronised Justin Beiner and welcomed him but Indian classical singers played to the walls. There were no audience for the Kathak dancers. Kathak, the dance form which belonged to 4th century BC. saw a downfall. What explains this gap? We disregard our Indian culture and are obsessed with the western. This obsession has become synonymous with modernity and advancement in living.
Indians were the first in inventions and discoveries. They were pioneers in research and development.They were artistes, scientists and historians. Let us Know the strength of Indian education. Here are a few examples-
The Baudhāyana Śulbasûtra is noted for containing several early mathematical results, including an approximation of the square root of 2 and the statement of the Pythagorean theorem.
Hemachandra, following the earlier Gopala, described the Fibonacci sequence in around 1150, about fifty years before Fibonacci (1202). He was considering the number of cadences of length n, and showed that these could be formed by adding a short syllable to a cadence of length n − 1, or a long syllable to one of n − 2.
Aryabhata was an Indian mathematician and astronomer of the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. He flourished in the Gupta Era and produced works such as the Aryabhatiya and the Arya-siddhanta. He was the one who found out Zero well known as circle of life. He also was the founder of decimal systems. He knew the diameter of moon and earth.
Plastic surgery and cataract surgery was known to Indians long time back. It is well endorsed in Sushruta Samhita.
West has played again and again to its advantage. Turmeric was used in kitchen of Indian houses from ages. They knew the healing properties of turmeric quite well. But we never patentented turmeric. Similarly neem. But the British has patented both turmeric and neem. All this is because of India’s broad minded ideology. It never went offensive.
There is a lesson to learn from these stories -we should stop believing in the Eurocentric theories and stop feeling that we are inferior to them. We have to prove Macaulay wrong. Let us stop looking westwards and start looking inwards
Jai Bharat
Vande Mataram