English Language, Indian Culture and ‘Globalization’

Dr H P Shukla
Professor of English
Kumaun University, Nainital

It is both my pleasure and privilege to be present here1 at such a wonderful

gathering of young educators, academics and compatriots who all very sincerely
share the onerous task of being nation builders for a future India in the challenging
uneasy days of ‘globalization’. In defining its objectives, the Academic Staff College
avers to be “a nodal agency for the transformation and empowerment of teaching
community” and aims to “help the teachers to emerge as sensitive citizens … who
simultaneously become the force for fighting out the backward linkages of
globalization” (K.U. Prospectus, 86). Such an objective is also a pointer as to the
nature and direction of the orientation and refresher programs being organized here.
In short, we are being asked to take cognizance of the prevailing ethos of the time-
spirit and changing world structures and thus to “transform” and equip ourselves
with “necessary contemporary skills” to face successfully the challenges of our
times. The function of the resource person is to bring in focus, by defining and
elaboration, any one of these challenges facing us today, and to set our minds afire
with thoughtful imagination so that we can clearly see for ourselves the issues and
things as they stand out in their entirety and hidden complexity. This alone shall
enable us to act decisively on our world and help us light our little candle that shall
be our pathfinder in the darkest of nights.

It is essential at the outset to take stock of our role as educators and to do away with
a lot of unnecessary baggage. Teaching is the noblest of all professions. And this I
say not in a self applauding manner, but in total earnest and with complete
objectivity. Notwithstanding how far one is aware of it or whether others appreciate
it or not, it remains a fact nonetheless that the teacher alone is responsible for
nurturing and shaping the young ones of the race. Man, more than anything else, is a
mental being and thus needs to be nurtured as such. The teacher in being the
workforce for refining and holding of all mental energy may alone be capable of
transferring this energy for the nurture of their young pupils. As a mental dynamo
he confronts all thought-forces that arise in an ever changing mind-space, the source
of all sensible universe and sentient beings. He is therefore the force that not only
gives direction to but rather effectively shapes what comes to be realized as high
culture. It is needless to point out that all plebeian demands from a teacher are
ungainly, for he exists not to satisfy either the market or social forces but to be just

1
Lectures delivered at UGC Academic Staff College, Nainital (June 18-20, 2008).
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what he essentially is. No, he is not a mere trainer or tutor: these are but the lowest
of his lower functions. Pursuer of all knowledge, he is the jnani and the domain of
highest knowledge his resting place. The commonplace dictum that one can give
only what one has is no less true for the teacher. It behoves him therefore, quite
logically, to go in for pursuit of pure knowledge, the boundless treasure house of all
good, as the one and only goal of his existence. But he is sure more than a giver, for
just as the Sun he radiates mental and psychic energy and prepares in the pupil a
recipient soil.

Having thus seated ourselves, or as they say—having provided a framework of

thought for our discussion, we need to look at the topic for the present assembly.
English language, Indian culture, and ‘Globalization’—all three form vital parts of
our common heritage today, and we study these to define an identity for ourselves.
English language and globalization are the forces of history, outside us, that have
invaded and impacted our lives to their basic fabric. Indian culture is the soil in
which we are born, the material which has shaped the very foundations of our body,
life and mind. The three together constitute what we are and shall be. It seems at the
moment that we stand facing a turmoil at the crossroads of history where we shall be
asked either to fight a demonic host of Westernization that threatens at their very
roots our cherished timeless values of virtue and culture or else to rise to the greater
task of discovering a reconciliation that shall reconfigure the whole into a magical
symphony beckoning us to a golden future for the mother earth.

II

But before we look at the arrival of Englishmen and their language in India, we need
a little space to deliberate upon the nature of language itself.

Language as the organised manifest form of thought, speech, communion and

intelligence is one of the most mysterious creations of nature; for it certainly is
antecedent to man, though in its verbal form it is often taken to be a product of
human mind and culture. If all gestures and motions of being including the
production of various sounds are taken as effective means of communication and
placed under the non-verbal category of language, then it goes without saying that
all animals – even all living beings – possess a language in its various stages of
growth. And then there are those discernible patterns of nature including the flight
formation of birds and cycles of seasons and birth and death that stir us deeply with
their hidden sense of mystery and meaning and endow us with a purposefulness of
living. If such forms be symbolic of something beyond form, then the symbolic in its
totality, together with all those symbols captured by man in art, sculpture,
architecture and dance, constitutes an altogether different realm of language. Thus

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whatever speaks, suggests, or carries meaning is language. Bewildered by such an
infinity of its scope and depth, man in every culture and epoch has equated the
language with the Divine. Thus we have in this country the concept of Sabda-
Brahman, the Word as another aspect of the Supreme Reality, and in the Bible is said,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God” (John 1:1).

If this somehow points us to the essence of the nature of language, then we need to
approach it with utmost care and humility. Only then will it be possible for us to
touch, in consonance with the quality of our reverence, a little of the mystery and
magic of language, and also perhaps a modest ability to wield its magical leverage.
Language, it is said, not only reveals but also in its power as Brahman creates Reality.
But there is language and language and accordingly an infinity of gradations of the
Real. In its polarity language is so like the white and black magic in extremes, and
we must not forget that language at its heart is magical, as is so well testified by that
timeless utterance, the Mantra. Thus on the one hand, in the hands of Rishis, poets
and thinkers, language creates a fair representation of Reality, while on the other in
the hands of falsifiers – politicians, media, and many other forms of popular public
discourse: all those tribes of Ravana – it creates nothing but illusion, the Indrajal.

Indian linguistics differentiates four levels of speech – para, pashyanti, madhyama and
vaikhari, and distinguishes – not necessarily in an exact correspondence – four kinds
of men according to their level of mind – acharya, pandit, samanyajan, and alpabuddhi.
Sanskrit itself, in its etymological kinship to the word samskara, is the language of the
cultured. That is why in Kalidas, for example, only the upper and educated classes
speak Sanskrit, while the uneducated masses have their speeches in Prakrit. On
similar grounds, some of the Western theorists are of the view that only the language
used for highest learning – the one written by men of letters, philosophers, and
thinkers – is the real language, all else being the overgrowth of an untended garden.
The point here is to be aware of different levels of language and accord each their
due reverence. When, for example, a TV announcer tries to sell the next day’s cricket
match by calling it Mahabharata, one should be able to see immediately the
debasement of language by such idiots. Mahabharata is a war where the highest
values of a nation are at stake, and the grim realities of life portrayed therein are far
from frivolous and fun, which is what a cricket match is. T. S. Eliot in one of his
poems has pointed to this debasement of language with telling effects:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert

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 Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera. (Collected Poems, 194)
As one descends lower from Para to Vaikhari, from the subtle magical inevitability of
the word in a mantric utterance to its gross everyday usage, the relationship between
language and culture becomes only too obvious. The images, metaphors, idioms, the
pithy sayings and precepts in any given language, either in literary or everyday
discourse, have their origin in the experiences of a people, in its soil, climate and life-
struggle. Language therefore, in one of its aspects, is the codification of native
experience, of native culture. It is born from and bears the whole history of a people
and race. It is also thus the storehouse of values and wisdom handed over from
generation to generation. The word therefore not only embodies the joys and pangs,
aspirations and failures of a people, but embodies as well the highest truth as seen
by its sages and poets. It is in this latter aspect that language as the carrier of the
mantric Word sows the seed of future civilizations and watches over their growth
and development. But if in the process of their onward march civilizations were to
lose touch with the informing Word that brought them forth, they would certainly
be courting their own death and perdition. Language, therefore, as the presiding
deity of a people, as the seed-word of their culture, must always be restored to its
pristine purity. It demands ceaselessly a great reverence and attention from its
people. A race that loses its language is destroyed and obliterated for ever.

III

It is with the perception of this mystery behind language that we approach the
arrival of English in India. We have always been told that English language and
education was introduced in India because the colonial rulers needed clerks and
support staff to help them in their administration. What such a statement fails to
bring home is the moot question why those colonial rulers were here in the first
place. Even though their civilizing mission was given as the cover up for their
sinister, clandestine operations, it should not be difficult to see that they came here
as barbarians and plunderers filled with an insatiable greed of ye dil maange more.
And it is to this sole purpose that English language and education was harnessed
from the beginning. We shall come back to this grand satanic design and Macaulay
who in effect fathered it. But before that we need to look at what kind of nation India
was when Englishmen fortuitously found themselves at the helm of its affairs. Here
is a concise observation by R. Y. Despande:
In the 1757 Battle of Plassey Siraj-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal, was defeated by
Robert Clive by very dubious means. Another dishonour was inflicted on the psyche
of the country. Clive claimed from the successor Mir Jafar, the crony, £40 million and

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 a huge personal revenue of £30,000 a year. India was since then steadily and
systematically plundered and reduced to a lifeless object….

“It is a country of inexhaustible riches and one which cannot fail to make its masters
the richest corporation in the world.” This is what Clive wrote back home after
arriving in India. (604)

One wonders if just one state, Bengal, could pay so much, how rich the whole nation
would have been at the time. While in the passage above the greed of Robert Clive
speaks from the housetops, his dream of being “the richest corporation in the world”
will return to haunt us again in the 21st century. But first the Englishmen needed a
strategic theory as to how this systematic plunder was to be ordered and arranged,
and with what steps could the East India Company advance on her dream road to
become “the richest corporation in the world.” It is precisely to further such a design that
the great lord Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay of Rothley enters the scene as the
master theoretician. Briefing his grand project he told the British Parliament on 2 Feb
1835:
I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one
person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such
high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer
this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual
and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient
education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and
English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their
native culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.
(qtd. in Deshpande 604-605)

We should be thankful to Macaulay for pointing out where our strength lay and also
for suggesting albeit obliquely the possibility of a way out from our present impasse.
But surely in what constituted our strength he perceived a grave threat to his dream
project. He was more forthcoming in speaking his mind in a personal letter written
to his father:
No Hindoo, who has received an English education, ever remains sincerely attached
to his religion. Some continue to profess it as a matter of policy; but many profess
themselves pure Deists and some embrace Christianity. It is my firm belief that if our
plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the
respectable class in Bengal thirty years hence. (qtd. in Singh 130)

While suggesting the broader implications of such an agenda of colonial rule I took
the cue from this assertion of Macaulay and wrote a few years ago:
As part of the same sinister strategy the Indian educated elite was deliberately kept
ignorant about their own ontology and epistemology. English language and
education which was used to consolidate the old imperialistic order is even now
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 being employed, more so with an added vigour, to strengthen the neo-imperialistic
designs. Hence, there is no such thing as ‘post-colonial’, only the fact of neo-
colonials. In the present scenario of cultural and economic warfare, the face of
exploitation has changed but not its motive which has only become more subtle and
sinister. (Shukla 94)

To come back to language which was used as a powerful tool in furtherance of

colonial exploitation, we need to look again at the power it wields and the ways in
which that power could be used for other than legitimate purposes. Language, as we
noted earlier, is the repository of culture and when we acquire a foreign language
we also in the process acquire the way of life and mode of thought embedded in that
language and culture. Even a single new word as it enters our mind space changes
the whole composition of our thought structure and causes sometime as great a
change as a radical transformation of mind. Then what to say of a whole new
language not only entering but even effacing, as part of an unholy design, all traces
of the native language! The process effects an eerie change in the very being where
one loses contact with the life-giving waters of one’s roots and has to feed on airy
nothings of alien vapours. As a result, one is worse than the legendry Trishuncou;
one has changed into a pale lifeless ghost of that dubiously great ancestor. Deeply
infected at the very soul by this alien virus, whose body and being is of the alien
culture and language, one suffers the eternal damnation of being a coolie and carrier
of that abominable cultural virus. As the virus spreads into a slow epidemic, new
markets emerge to feed this growing host of pale-white ghosts, the pukka Angrezes2
in black or brown skins. This is the growing market East India Company had come
seeking after. Two figures emerge on Indian skies: one of thunderous Macaulay
clapping applause at the success of his designs, and the other of a frowning
sorrowful Krishna who ages ago had admonished his countrymen:
Shreyanswadharmo vigunah pardharmatswanushthitat
Swadharme nidhanam shreyah pardharmo bhayavahah

Better is one’s own law of works, swadharma, though in itself faulty than an alien
law well wrought out; death in one’s own law of being is better, perilous is it to
follow an alien law. (The Gita, III, 35, Sri Aurobindo’s translation)

That little dramatic narration was intentional and for an effect. As we move further
into the new millennium, we find that things have not changed a wee bit. The
westernization has become globalization, which is just another name for
Americanism and Americanization. Macaulay’s dream of becoming “the richest
corporation in the world” has paid dividends and the United States in the vanguard
carries the project forward. Only in the focus now is no longer India but the whole of

2
The word Angrez, as understood here, stands for the whole white race, and not just for Englishmen.
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earth. In his last lectures just before his death, Edward Said put forward the devilry
of the prevailing global movement with uncanny clarity:
The world of the Washington think tanks, the various television talk shows,
innumerable radio programs, to say nothing of literally thousands of occasional
papers, journals, and magazines—all this testifies amply how densely saturated
public discourse is with interests, authorities, and powers whose extent in the
aggregate is literally unimaginable in scope and variety, except as that whole bears
centrally on the acceptance of a neoliberal postwelfare state responsive neither to the
citizenry nor to the natural environment, but to a vast structure of global corporations
unrestricted by traditional barriers or sovereignties. The unparalleled global military reach of
the United States is integral to the new structure. With the various specialized systems
and practices of the new economic situation, only very gradually and partially
disclosed, and with an administration whose idea of national security is preemptive
war, we are beginning to discern an immense panorama of how these systems and
practices (many of them new, many of them refashioned holdovers from the classical imperial
system) have been assembled to provide a geography whose purpose is slowly to
crowd out and override human agency. [Emphasis added] (124)

Mark the parallelism between the British government’s intervention in the post 1857
India and the intermittent United States’ military action during the last fifty years or
so. The project behind Macaulay’s introduction of English education in India has
also taken further strides.
In a powerfully argued and documented recent book (Who Paid the Piper? The CIA
and the Cultural Cold War), the British journalist Frances Stonor Saunders gives
plentiful evidence that the almost 200 million dollars spent by the CIA to subsidize
innumerable humanistic and academic conferences, journals like Encounter, Der
Monat, and Partisan Review, prizes, art exhibitions, concerts, musical competitions,
and many individual scholars, writers, and intellectuals, had a profound effect on the
kind of cultural work that was produced and the kind of activity carried on in the
name of freedom and humanistic activity. (Said 35)

The burgeoning impact of this growing globalization is no longer local or limited to

any one country but rather the whole human civilization and the earth herself
appears to be under its seize. Said is at pains to point out that
there is now taking place in our society an assault on thought itself, to say nothing of
democracy, equality, and the environment, by the dehumanizing forces of
globalization, neoliberal values, economic greed (euphemistically called the free
market), as well as imperialist ambition, … through the channels of communication
controlled by a tiny number of news organizations. (71)

IV

The issue before us now is to figure out the possibility of a right and just course of
action in times that pose tremendous challenge to our role both as Indians and as
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citizens of this beautiful earth. What we have been doing so far is to create an
awareness of the situation we find ourselves in. For only in that awareness lies the
possibility of a redemptive action; or it might be that such an awareness in itself
constitutes that action.

To make our vision a bit wider and more comprehensive we need to bring our focus
a little closer home. The very first thing to accept as irreversible fact of history is that
English language and globalization, just as modern technology, are here to stay. One
cannot keep the product of a culture and at the same time wish that culture away.
Also, there can be no mastering of the complex mechanism of a system either of
technology or of ideas without a proper understanding of the culture that created it.
(And remember how many systems have we imported willy-nilly from the West –
education, economy, justice, democracy and public administration, to name just a
few; all of which without a single exception have miserably failed to take roots and
flourish in this country, but that is another matter). Since language and culture, as
suggested earlier, have an inseparable symbiotic relationship, it goes without saying
that no insight into the depths of a culture can ever be gained without grappling
with the finest nuances of the language operating behind such a culture. To live with
understanding and move with mastering strides in the modern world and
contemporary India without knowing English is a chimera.

The Gandhian idea of driving out English language along with Englishmen stands
denied by the forces of history. What stares us so blatantly in the face today is the
fact of a country being ruled exclusively, in at least all its higher offices of power,
policy and influence, by English speaking Indians. And how many of these are
there? –Less than 4 lakh in a population of more than 100 crores, according to an
estimate by Avadhesh Kumar Singh (136)! The phenomenon seems unavoidable
because only these English speaking Indians can connect a contemporary India with
the modern world. Even in the world of ideas we need an English-speaking Shobha
De and Khushwant Singh to sell sex and Arundhati Roy to buttress a dwindling
Narmada movement.

But all this may not be in the right direction. No, it certainly is not. A nation that has
long been under the thraldom of colonial rule must first recover its roots, from
which it has been so methodically kept away for so long, if it were to integrate
successfully – as a living and whole being – the world movement to it. As a process
of this recovery, Indian classics, languages, history, heroes and sages, and Indian
thought in all the various fields must be brought back alive and given as the main
course to the young Indians from a very early age. And they must at the same time
be encouraged to master the English language and all western thought and systems
so as to function as Indian world citizens, holding their heads high, rooted in their
soil, and flying fearlessly in world skies.
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A non-English-speaking Indian rooted in his past and history would be no better
than a frog in the well, and an English speaking Indian unaware of his roots would
be worse than an eternally damned white lifeless ghost of a Trishuncou. The task is
to work out a synthesis and poise from which to function competently in a fast
growing corporate globe and yet not be a part of its demeaning self-devouring net;
to look at and hold holistically the world movement without cavil, calumny, anger
or hatred; to win back the spirit of vasudhaiv kutumbkam in the calm and wisdom of
Isha Upanishad —
Isha vasyamidam sarvam yat kinch jagatyam jagat,
Tein tyakten bhunjitha ma gridhah kasya svidhanam.
All this is for habitation by the Lord, whatsoever is individual universe of movement
in the universal motion. By that renounced thou shouldst enjoy; lust not after any
man’s possession. (Sri Aurobindo’s translation)

To move on with this note of peace and reconciliation, allow me to quote a rather
longish passage from a German US citizen and thinker, Erich Auerbach where,
almost in the spirit of Isha Upanishad, he exhorts us to see the world and ourselves
transformed anew in the iridescent glow of an ever new dawn and to work with a
conscious intellectual effort towards such a transformation:
Basically, the way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we
are concerned with things of the past or things of the present. A change in our
manner of viewing history will of necessity soon be transferred to our manner of
viewing current conditions. When people realize that epochs and societies are not to
be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking but
rather in every case in terms of their own premises; when people reckon among such
premises not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and
historical factors; when, in other words, they come to develop a sense of historical
dynamics, of the incompatibility of historical phenomena and of their constant inner
mobility; when they come to appreciate the vital unity of individual epochs, so that
each epoch appears as a whole whose character is reflected in each of its
manifestations; when, finally, they accept the conviction that the meaning of events
cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material
needed to understand it must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society
and in major political events but also in art, economy, material and intellectual
culture, in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is
only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and
what, in both a more concrete and a more profound sense, is universally valid: then it
is to be expected that those insights will also be transferred to the present and that, in
consequence, the present too will be seen as incomparable and unique, as animated
by inner forces and in a constant state of development; in other words, as a piece of
history whose everyday depths and total inner structure lay claim to our interest
both in their origins and in the direction taken by their development. (443-44)

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 V

It may not be possible for me to speak at length on Indian culture. It is both beyond
my expertise and the scope of these lectures. For this purpose the ASC should invite
a professor of History who can hold in his mind the whole of Indian history and the
history of the modern world as well, and who from such a comprehensive vision can
enunciate the essential nature of Indian people and culture so as to examine India’s
position vis-à-vis the cesspool whorl of current historical currents in which she finds
herself enmeshed today. For me, it is enough to make a few broad observations on
this issue.

It is there for everyone to see that for long, like a true and faithful colonial slave, we
have been aping the shining coat of western civilization – in the name of
development, progress, economic well-being, GDP-GNP, and what not. And also we
have been at pains to agree with the Angrez that all that is Indian – language,
literature, philosophy, ritual, festivals, social organization – is barbarian in origin
and backward in contemporary relevance. Macaulay was quite succinct when he
fathered such an outlook in his Minutes on Education in 1835, “A single shelf of a
good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
As a result one has only to look at the status of Sanskrit in this country today: the cut
off percentage for English Honours at the number one college in Delhi University is
at about 95; for Sanskrit Honours it is a meagre 45.

It takes a man like C D Narsimhaiah, a legend among Indian teachers of English and
the one who had the honour of studying with F R Leavis, to point out that truth may
just be the opposite: “An important facet to which no one seems to have paid any
attention is to remember that the Western mode is empirical – Aristotle being the
original sinner!” (English Studies 267). What is unstated but clearly suggested is that
the Indian mode at the opposite end is essentially transcendental. Perhaps it is this
difference in the essence (soul) and not only in the existent (self) between the two
cultures that makes India and the West totally incompatible with each other. During
a discussion on the insights of Indian literary criticism, CDN – as he had so lovingly
come to be known in literary circles – in his last lectures observed:
In the context of such sophisticated preoccupation with things like “rhythmic
speech”, “spiritual seeing” and “stability of apprehension behind the instability of
word,” I fear I find Western debates on theories so dull and long-drawn, not to say
inconsequential. (Inquiry 44)

While he went on puncturing with a penchant the glitter and glamour of Western
discourse, CDN was no less sparing in pointing out what a heedless headless ass we
have been:
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 Yet the Indian tradition of a thousand years, which originated in an essentially
Indian view of life and was strengthened by a succession of some of the finest minds,
has suffered neglect, humiliation and even total rejection at our hands – and this, let
me assert, without adequate examination. (English Studies 267)

What happened during the colonial rule is understandable, but why we failed to win
a complete intellectual freedom by not throwing the Angrez out from our minds in
the years following 1947 is a matter that needs serious enquiry. Perhaps the most
unfortunate event at the time was Gandhi’s death – here was a mind who had
completely, without the least hangover, thrown the Angrez out from his body and
being. But his successor that he had so foolishly and Dhritrashtra-like planted as the
first Indian prime minister was quite a study in contrast. The Gandhian influence on
his protégé was just external and no more than skin deep. Nehru too, like Bapu, had
opted for the Indian attire: but in stead of the simple dhoti he decided to go for a
designer dress; in place of charkha, village autonomy, Ram-naam and the forging of
unity among religions he went for secularism, socialism, scientific temper, modern
industry and five or fifty year plan for the family and nation. Among his plans for
the family’s political holdings, as someone has argued rather harshly, was Nehru’s
total neglect of country’s education. Only an uneducated or ill-educated people
could continue accepting his hopeless crop of scions as their future rulers. Rajiv
Gandhi, with nothing of Gandhi in him but so full of the Angrez just like his
grandfather and even with an angrez wife, divined that bringing in the latest angrezi
machine, the computer, would solve our country’s multifarious ills and usher us all
into a golden 21st century. Only the poor chap was not there to see the day. I was still
at school when Nehru's daughter announced her crusade of garibi hatao and her
opponents so naively talked about the rising gulf between the rich and the poor.
Only the other day my friend from the department of Economics told me that more
than 80% of Indians even today were living with an income of Rs 25 a day. If the rule
of Angrez with an Indian skin has failed, we should not despair because the rule of
half-angrez half-Indian (by which I mean multinationals and certainly not Rahul
Gandhi) is round the corner.

Coming back to the ongoing onslaught of Western culture and its empirical,
materialist and consumerist values, —how long will it take us to see its peril, to turn
back to our roots and bring into action in education and life our ancient formulae?
Opposed to the neo-colonial ways where all life has become a plaything in the hands
of markets, corporations and rampant greed, there stands rooted in the Indian soil
the seminal principle of dharma, artha, kama and moksha in an ascending series of
values. This is just as an illustration and example of the way of our return to our
roots in Indian culture.

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The first thing taught, the very first value inculcated when an Indian begins his
education is dharma. Dharma is more than religion: it suggests an insightful
understanding of the order and law of nature, of life, and living in complete
harmony with it. Even as children we need to learn to appreciate the beauty and
mystery of plants, insects, birds and animals, of wind, rain, cloud, moonshine and
stars, of waterfalls, rivers and rivulets, of all the elements and all life. We need to
learn to live in harmonious relationship with everything around us, including
human beings. This is dharma; and living it, when we have found ourselves one
with the whole movement of life, we are ready to move to our next lesson, artha.

Artha is more than money, material possessions and objects. For example, the
combination of words dharmartha translates literally as for the purpose of dharma. Artha
therefore suggests the meaning, purpose and the goal of the movement of life. But
the comprehending of an all-embracing significance of life does not become possible
unless one is fully grounded in that movement of dharma. If artha in its distant
connotation has come to suggest money and material objects, it is because the latter
in their usage, possession and arrangement denote an underlying order of meaning,
value and signification behind life. To discover the motion of artha in the movement
of life is to rediscover the whole of life anew. It is the opening of the third eye before
which everything stands revealed in its essence and full splendour.

Kama of course is Desire. It is because of desire, as Buddha taught us, that we find
ourselves enmeshed in the cycles of birth and death. Perhaps the Manifestation, the
Cosmos itself comes into being because of a movement of Divine Desire; or all this,
idam sarvam, IS that primordial movement. The individual desire may only be a little
shadowy refracted shoot of that Great Motion. The handling of kama in effect is
therefore to translate into action that essential movement of desire that brought us
forth into this world. To put that seed of desire into motion is also to exhaust and
thereby end it.

The ending of desire is the ending of attachment, the root of all our sorrow,
suffering, ignorance and bondage. This is Moksha. But what it is is beyond the
speaker to enunciate. Suffice it to reiterate that hidden behind this ancient Indian
principle of dharma, artha, kama, moksha lies the secret of a whole way of life, a secret
that points beyond the blinding glamour of a material phantasmagoria that holds the
modern West in its thraldom. Do we see here the hope of a victorious escape from
that unceasing assault of cultural warfare that the West led by the United States has
launched with sinister intentions on the rest of the world?

I am a small man, too small perhaps to speak on an issue of such magnitude. I would
invoke therefore Sri Aurobindo, one of our greatest Rishis, to provide us with
concluding thoughts to this discussion. This is what he wrote long back in 1918 in
conclusion to a series of essays The Rennaissance in India:
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 India can best develop herself and serve humanity by being herself and following the
law of her own nature. This does not mean, as some narrowly and blindly suppose,
the rejection of everything new that comes to us in the stream of Time or happens to
have been first developed or powerfully expressed by the West. Such an attitude
would be intellectually absurd, physically impossible, and above all unspiritual; true
spirituality rejects no new light, no added means or materials of our human self-
development. It means simply to keep our centre, our essential way of being, our
inborn nature and assimilate to it all we receive, and evolve out of it all we do and
create. Religion has been a central preoccupation of the Indian mind; some have told
us that too much religion ruined India, precisely because we made the whole of life
religion or religion the whole of life, we have failed in life and gone under. I will not
answer, adopting the language used by the poet in a slightly different connection,
that our fall does not matter and that the dust in which India lies is sacred. The fall,
the failure does matter, and to lie in the dust is no sound position for man or nation.
But the reason assigned is not the true one. If the majority of Indians had indeed
made the whole of their lives religion in the true sense of the word, we should not be
where we are now; it was because their public life became most irreligious, egoistic,
self-seeking, materialistic that they fell. It is possible, that on one side we deviated
too much into an excessive religiosity, that is to say, an excessive externalism of
ceremony, rule, routine, mechanical worship, on the other into a too world-shunning
asceticism which drew away the best minds who were thus lost to society instead of
standing like the ancient Rishis as its spiritual support and its illuminating life-
givers. But the root of the matter was the dwindling of the spiritual impulse in its
generality and broadness, the decline of intellectual activity and freedom, the waning
of great ideals, the loss of the gust of life. (Foundations of Indian Culture 432-33)

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- - -. English Studies in India: Widening Horizons. New Delhi: Pencraft
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Said, Edward W. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Hampshire: Palgrave
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Saunders, Frances Stonor. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.
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