The Comprador Dissimulation
(Image courtesy: tamilandvedas.com)
The reaction of the “liberal commentators” across India to the recent opening of a Hindi Medical College in Madhya Pradesh was disappointing, though not surprising. The mere countenance of an option for the vast majority of Indians — Hindi speakers numbering over 400 million — to receive a decent technical education in their own native tongue was seen as a threat by the Anglophone elite of India, who after having instantly turned into supporters of regional languages, yet again screamed about the “upcoming apocalypse” in India, maybe even a “genocide” of non-Hindi speakers. Ignoring the prodigious ability for the Indian elite to constantly cry “wolf,” a clear-headed student of history will recognize that this response is nothing new: it has been the same one for over a century.
The usual illogical statements thrown about in support of the status quo this time are also not much different: that the new development is “Hindi Imposition” (but the British-era status-quo of “English Imposition” should be welcomed and celebrated); that India is too diverse for any one Indian language (but an alien English is a one-size-fit-all a-okay); that since a few “elite” drops from the vast sea of Indian demographic migrate to Anglo-Saxon nations every year, the entire country should ensure that it scuttles the outcomes of the vast majority (and with it, its own economy in favor of said Anglo-Saxon nations); that since all the STEM academic journals are in English, and clearly since all the 73 percent literate Indians need to constantly read them after their generally miserable day, it would rid the “proletariat” from having direct access to the “knowledge” in said journals (which cannot possibly ever be expressed in any language other than English — except German, French, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, and so on); and that since the “IT coolies” are employed because of their — generally mediocre — English ability, that we would lose our “competitive advantage” (implicitly assuming that Indian technical skills and knowledge mean little).
The English-Apartheid, as Sankrant Sanu terms it, is very real. The negligible state-funding/push for the development of Indian languages has rendered the majority of Indians linguistic cripples: lacking both the resources for learning a distant foreign language and the requisite opportunities in their foundational language, the natives are so lost that they cannot distinguish between “forward” and “backward” nor “yesterday” and “tomorrow”. Worse yet, since the Anglophone “liberal” comprador class fills all the academic positions, monopolizes knowledge production, and serves as the interface for India-studies departments across the world, rebellion is prevented by suppressing conscience itself. Orwell, or rather, the antagonist of “1984,” would be proud.
This tragic position of Bharata has not changed in multiple centuries.
The English imposition is not a “fictional entity”. It comes straight out of the Indian state with clear legal-judicial-bureaucratic structures: the system, like all successful ones, also reproduces itself, and is so set up that no bureaucratic-judicial-academic-media actor can make his way up the greasy-pole without mimicking the ghosts of dead British imperialists. The system ensures that funding is only allowed for English-medium universities so that no counter-elites can rise up either. This was, of course, explicitly set up this way by the British to secure their vice-like-grip: Macaulay’s minutes notes this explicitly.
However, this medieval-feudal setup comes with great economic costs: India remains a colonial-feudal country, in which a tiny section has post-industrialized. Indian agriculture is inefficient, run by all sorts of monopolies and middlemen; Indian manufacturing is surfeit with “third-world” inefficiency, known for being filled with labor and logistics issues to the point of being uncompetitive with a China with five times the wages. In addition, anyone brave enough to start something is cursed with the locust-like state officials who bear down on you, ostensibly due to non-compliance with rules that neither the enforcer, nor the citizens upon whom these laws are thrust upon – often, neither the drafter, nor the judge — fully understand, but can often only be “adjusted” or “disappeared” for the right bribe.
The compradors have an explanation for all this too: that apparently all this is not due to colonization, nor due to the Indian state that remained untouched after independence but is due to the conspiracy of the “scheming, devilish, satanic… Brahmins”. The Brahmin, essentially translating to “intellectual” in Sanskrit, having been the central hate-figure of Islamists and British invaders alike, is, like the Jews, reanimated and hipkapi-ed (1) readily into service for anything and everything. The community, now dead as a political entity, having been denied the right to manage any of the hallowed Hindu institutions, barely has the ability to preserve all the millennia-old traditions that they inherited. Regardless, this sells very well in the woke zeitgeist that defines the age, and new stars are being minted across Harvard and other Ivies to “save” India from herself, this time with help from self-serving African American elites and their patrons who have already “saved” not only African Americans, but the whole of Africa (sarcasm). It also just so happens to align with long-term American geo-political goals in Asia. Empiricism, evidence, be damned: we are in the post-truth age, dammit (and the only real thing is the sweet greenback)!
The compradors, who themselves wield all the state-power and cause all the economic havoc with the British education/state setup, now claim that there is a “secret” Brahmin organization (think “Elders of Zion”) that is systematically denying people entry into English-speaking universities. Never mind that to be forced to learn in an incomprehensible hard-to-learn language leads to bad educational outcomes (especially in poor communities without access to learning resources), the compradors have also convinced people that English-medium education is the only way to liberation — if only from their cursed “heathen” selves — even if all one achieves, in the end, is to speak a pidgin-English only to be laughed at and derided by “tech-bros” on HackerNews. This is progress, apparently (Someone, please tell the Asian Tigers)!
That the native languages, cultures, and everything Indian are tools of oppression, all craftily designed and actively manipulated by a class that cannot even secure their own institutions from state loot, is apparently so obvious that it is all “self-evident” and needs no study. If you are European, you recognize this story: this is the charge against the Catholics by the Protestants. In Europe there is an element of historical truth to it; is this the case for India though?
The multiple sociological surveys carried out by the East India Company says not. Reports in the early nineteenth century by William Adam, Thomas Munro and others (all uncorrupted by the “diabolical” Brahmins) show the same result: that Shudras made up anywhere between 20-80 percent of students in village-supported native schools, in fields ranging from medicine to ethics. Dharampal, in his magnificent tome, “The Beautiful Tree,” notes — based on these reports — that the number of schools in pre-British India far exceeded that in Britain on a per-capita basis. Even the best of kings in the sub-continent, from the Hakka-Bukka of Vijayanagara to the Wodeyars were Shudras. The composers of the great Indian epics were born of Shudras, and C.K. Raju notes that even the greatest of Indian mathematicians, Aryabhata, was one too. All this, hundreds of years before the “discovery” of the Americas and India.
If Shudras in India are the “Black slaves” of America as the “bullshitters” of the academic complex now contend, where are the Black Valmikis? Where are the Black American rulers, freedom fighters? Where are your Black Aryabhatas? The comprador class not only ignores hard data (including contemporary crime statistics), but willfully ignores the economic devastation — especially to these groups in India — by the invaders when they speak of Indian society. The destruction of an economy, one that was once the largest in the world, one that produced the highest grade “wootz” steel yet known to man, is supposed to have not caused the slightest bit of collateral damage to people involved in producing such hard goods. No sir, all this was due to “Brahmin conspiracy”. Thank God, the Anglo-Islamists helped liberate them (from their wealth)!
This is not just the story of education. As Veena Talwar notes, even the problem of “dowry,” can be traced back to the British policy of “marketization” of land to collect more taxes. Meenakshi Jain notes how the nearly non-existent practice of “Sati” was re-animated by the Christian missionaries in India to secure both funding and support of British-European elites for their cause of “harvesting” the souls of Indian “heathens”. If India were truly independent, its intellectual class, the people in power, ought to be broadcasting these truths from their privileged positions, yet they don’t.
No European stops them, not in India, but they don’t even care. The only rational explanation is that the compradors do this for self-benefit. Given their helm at power for two hundred years or more, it is also quite likely that all of India’s woes are caused by the comprador class, all of which they blame — and thereby try to destroy, without evidence — on the ancient “Brahmin” civilization.
This is dissimulation by the elite. To pretend to care for a fallen people, to produce sentences that ostensibly provide an explanation for their fall, but which only really serve to cover up their own crimes and collusion with the colonizers, and to instead direct the hate towards a powerless fall-guy. Similar things happened in Weimar Germany, it happens in Europe, it happens in Asia, it happens in Islamic countries, and it happens in India. We can only take succor in that all of humanity appears to share a few psycho-social weaknesses.
Why does this happen? I blame the public intellectuals for not only not reflecting reality, but for actively spreading falsehood. The “social sciences” are no sciences: they are but mere tools to create and shape the reality that the elites want to see. In India, it was Islamic invaders earlier, then the Christian inquisitors, then the East India Company thieves, then the British bureaucrat “civilizers,” and now some dark-skinned “eminences” (or their not-so-dark-skinned spokespersons) across India and the world. Same ghost, different skin and hair. Such diversity!
The stability of the underlying “scientific” theories over hundreds of years should scare us, yet it does not. In India, these social science “geniuses” don’t need to define or elaborate the “caste system” (in contrast to the compradors’ state-mediated, multi-century, vice-like control): unending Sokal-esque word-vomit, sprinkled with cherry-picked instances of violence, together with some “wink-wink” and “nudge-nudge” about the “Brahminical psycho-linguistic, satanic mind-control,” and the stamp of a Western institution is sufficient. These, we are told, are enlightenment values that define the sciences; often, quite amusingly, by total scientific illiterates. “Bring out the gas-chambers, push in the Brahmin, your problems are solved,” to paraphrase Periyar, the Nazi-sympathizing “god” of the Dravidianists and a fellow traveler of the compradors. Crude as this is, it is at least honest.
Everyone is free to have their objectives: to manipulate language to meet these objectives is, however, deeply unethical (2). A level-playing field on the realm of ideas serves our world, and India in particular, better. India needs to consider the only non-imperial development model that has worked successfully across the world: the East-Asian/German model, with an industry-focused diverse banking sector (3). The only thing holding her back are the wrathful compradors, whose obsession for wealth and control is far beyond the suffering of their country (4).
It’s time to wake up. To deal with the linguistic creatures that live in our heads. To reflect reality, instead of being hijacked by them.
1. S. N. Balagangadhara, “Hinduism and hipkapi: An Imaginary Entity,”
2. J’accuse: note that India-studies academics have much greater access to the above sources compared to amateur nobodies. Yet, all we get is censorship and deep heathen-hate driven contempt; hard to believe that all of them are this stupid.
3. Richard Werner (2003). “Princes of the Yen: Japan’s Central Bankers and the Transformation of the Economy”. Routledge.
4. “Compradors” is not a distinct set of people as in occidental discourse; these are ideational entities whose hold over Indians varies by differing amounts.
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