Opinion | Who Really Suffers From A Cultural Inferiority Complex? |
In a recent book by Romila Thapar titled “Speaking of History", in which she discusses Indian history, caste, gender, religion, myth, and nationalism with Namit Arora, one of the questions explored concerns what Arora calls the “cultural inferiority complex" of Indians.
Arora suggests that this sense of inferiority helps explain why many Indians respond enthusiastically to comforting historical myths and to assertive, majoritarian forms of cultural nationalism promoted in contemporary politics. He then asks Thapar where this inferiority complex originates.
Thapar argues that its primary source lies in India’s experience of conquest. As might be expected, she is careful to distinguish between different kinds of conquerors, particularly between the Mughal rulers and the British. In her account, the Mughal period was marked by economic prosperity, state support for mathematics and the sciences, and encouragement of traditional culture alongside philosophical and religious dialogue. By contrast, British colonial rule introduced a fundamentally different dynamic. Colonialism, she argues, was premised on the assumption of Indian inferiority and sought to legitimise this assumption through racial theories presented as objective knowledge. As Thapar puts it: “There was the constant supervision of an alien people who regarded Indians as inferior. This was sought to be justified by theories of race, claimed as knowledge, and which underlined the theory of inferiority of the Indian. The consistent repetition of inferiority did the damage."
As someone without formal academic training in history, I do not claim the authority to evaluate her account in which the Mughals are portrayed as benign conquerors and the British as malign ones. Nor am I in a position to critically assess her argument that the Mughals encouraged philosophical and religious dialogue and patronised regional culture, even though Babur’s own memoirs and accounts from Aurangzeb’s reign present a markedly different picture, including major temple destructions and episodes of forced conversion. “Colonial influences on history writing have been damaging," Arora remarks in the conversation; by that logic, one might........