Colonial Discourse and the Suffering of Indian American Children

Front matter

Colonial Discoursé and the Suffering of Indian a

American Childre

A Francophone Postcolonial Anal}

Preface

This work goes into the very roots of psycho-social consequences that Indian American children face after they are exposed to the school textbook discourse on Hinduism and Ancient India, sixth grade onwards. In the early nineteenth century, James Mill, who eventually became one of the topmost officials in the imperial East India Company, wrote a three-volume work titled The History of British India.' In volume one, he wrote seven chapters on the Hindu people with the thesis that they are savage, uncivilized, brute, primitive, uncouth, rude, coarse, etc. Making their primitiveness and savagery the defining characteristic of his work, he wrote on topics about their social structure and social laws, their governance and taxation systems, and their manners and customs. In addition, he devoted considerable space to arguing that Hinduism was a primitive and pagan religion that was irrational, superstitious, incoherent, and child-like. Backed by the massive imperial power that Britain eventually exerted on the world, this colonial-racist discourse set the narrative on Hindus, Hinduism, and Ancient India, which continues to get regurgitated, surprising as it may sound, in the middle-school textbooks in the United States, albeit in politically correct and sanitized ways. There is an intimate connection—an almost exact correspondence—between James

! James Mill, The History of British India: Volume 1, ed. Hayman Horace Wilson (London: James Madden and Co., 1840).

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Mill’s colonial-racist discourse and the current school textbook discourse. The parameters and coordinates on which James Mill constructed the discourse currently describe Hinduism, Hindus, and Ancient India in the textbooks. Consequently, this archaic and racist discourse, camouflaged under the cover of political correctness, produces in the Indian American children a psychological impact quite similar to what racism is known to have: shame, inferiority, embarrassment, identity confusion, assimilation, and a phenomenon identical to racelessness where the children dissociate from the tradition and culture of their ancestors. This is in addition to the mocking, teasing, and bullying they begin to encounter right after they are exposed to the discourse in the sixth grade.

The irony of it all is that Mill’s discourse is one of complete fabrication and projection, given that there also is an exact correspondence between his British social and political writings on the one hand and his noxious discourse on Hindus and Hinduism on the other. Mill was a utilitarian and, as one of the foremost disciples of Bentham, was actively involved in bringing about a social and political transformation of British society, which resulted in the parliamentary reform of 1832 that put Britain on the road to representative governance and other liberal values such as the freedom of the press, separation of Church and State, freedom of religion among others. Mill brought these laudable, emancipatory, and muchneeded reforms through his voluminous writings in the Supplement to Encyclopedia Britannica and other British journals. Unfortunately, Mill concocted his narrative on India, Hinduism, and Hindus in light of the social and political conditions that he wanted to reform and expel from British society—at the expense of India and Hinduism, as this work thoroughly reveals. Mill’s characterization of Hinduism is in the shadows of the practices of the Church of England—the Church of Englandism as he called it. His description of the Hindu society bears an exact correspondence with his description of the British society that he did not want in Britain to exist. The Hindu form of governance and taxation structure he describes in the History mirror the regressive British form of governance and taxation that the Utilitarians desperately wanted to dismantle. In short, Mill projected onto the Hindu society the shadows of British society as he curated his narrative in the History. Given that his discourse got the backing of the imperial East India Company, it became the normative

Preface ix discourse as time passed. It now finds a reproduction in the school textbooks in a politically correct and sanitized form, causing damaging psycho-social consequences for Indian American children. The container of the analysis, both in terms of the discourse of James Mill and the psychological consequences that the Indian American children experience, comes from the writings of Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, and Albert Memmi—the Francophone postcolonial thinkers as they are called in the postcolonial canon.

Chapter Breakdown

To understand the structure of this work, we need to visualize concentric circles with the bigger ones encompassing the smaller ones. The largest concentric circle is the framework of colonialism and postcolonialism in which we have positioned our work. It gives an outline of the consequences of colonization, especially in the realm of discourse production and discourse dissemination. It discusses the effects of “epistemic violence,” where the knowledge worldview of the colonized by the colonizer was completely mauled and distorted. The colonizer then ensured that the perverted knowledge on the colonized became part of what Gramsci calls civil society (schools, colleges, and universities) and political society (the bureaucracy and the police), with the most sinister effects.’ Postcolonialism is about uncovering those distortions and perversions so that the postcolonial society can undo the damage. As a part of the postcolonial recovery, we have identified James Mill as the distorter numero uno of representations on India and Hinduism—the consequences of which are pervasive in academia and media with his now politically correct and sanitized discourse beginning in the sixth grade. We close the chapter by giving a brief biography of Mill, specifically on how his magnum opus, the History of British India, came to be written.

? Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

3In Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

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In the next concentric circle, Chap. 2, we expand upon the framework of colonialism and postcolonialism, constructing it with the insights provided by the Francophone postcolonial thinkers Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, and Albert Memmi. After giving a brief biography of each of these thinkers while showing how their paths have crossed with one another, we outline the central thesis of each of these thinkers: That the colonizers spent considerable time, energy, money, and intellectual power in characterizing the colonized as uncivilized, primitive, and savage. The colonizer took every measure to describe himself as civilized and the colonized as savage and primitive. This is not something that happened to one or two colonized nations: Every European imperial power engaged in the construction of the colonized in every country as barbarian and uncivilized. Memmi and Fanon point out that the colonizer puts himself in a dialectical relationship with the colonized where the colonizer, as he posits himself as civilized, (mis)represents the colonized as savage in as many ways as possible. This misrepresentation is essentially racist, and the intellectuals of the colonizing nations were more than complicit in the generation of such kinds of myths, which, over a period due to the sociological and institutional control over the colonized, have become facts. The complicit intellectuals also provided the rationale for the continued colonization.

‘The above two concentric circles give rise to further concentric circles. If Chaps. 1 and 2 make universal contentions as to how the colonized were characterized and described by the colonizers, Chaps. 3 and 4—the next concentric circle—go into specifics as to how James Mill treated the Hindu people and Hinduism (and by extension Ancient India) in his writings. Chapter 3 discusses in considerable detail how James Mill characterized the Hindu people as savage, barbarians, uncouth, and uncivilized, among many other choicest epithets. One of his chief refrains in showing the Hindus as primitive and savage was that they are hierarchical and oppressive: their social structure is hierarchical and oppressive; their governance structure since antiquity has been hierarchical and oppressive; their taxation structure is hierarchical and oppressive; their laws, culture, and mores are hierarchical and oppressive; the Hindu males are oppressive towards Hindu women; Hindu teachers are oppressive towards their students, etc. He concludes the discussion by describing the Hindus

Preface xi as inhuman, villainous, timid, weak, cowardly, lazy, pernicious, greedy, filthy, superstitious, and fatalistic. Similarly, he castigates Hinduism as irrational, incoherent, immoral, childlike, and pagan.

Chapter 4 shows that Mill’s contentions are sheer projections and fabrications—myths that colonials were prone to creating. We have demonstrated this by putting side by side Mill’s writings on Hindus, Hinduism, and India in the History with the writings that he did for transforming the British society, in particular the writings that he produced for the Supplement to Encyclopedia Britannica at the invitation of Macvey Napier. Given that Mill had never visited India, he imagined the Hindu society, its governance and taxation structure, and its laws, manners, and customs in the light of the British society he was experiencing. To be sure, he constructed the image of Hindu society and Hinduism in light of those practices and structures of the British society that he wanted to transform under the aegis of the Utilitarian reform movement. The correspondences are stark, and we have conclusively exposed the “hierarchy and oppression” framework in which he curated the picture of Hindus and Hinduism as the structure that Mill wanted to expel from British society.

Chapter 5, the fourth concentric circle, exposes how the narrative of Mill, in which he did not hold back in calling the Hindus primitive and uncivilized—it would not be a misnomer to call it a piece of hate literature—is getting mirrored in the middle-school discourse in the United States, although in politically correct and sanitized ways. The narrative on Hindus and Hinduism is pegged on and revolves around hierarchy and oppression—in explicit and implicit ways. Even the sequence that Mill followed in unfolding his discourse is reflected in the middle-school narrative. The Hindu society is described on the parameters of caste, hierarchy, and oppression; the Hindu kings are described as authoritarian and oppressive; Hinduism as a religion is defined as hierarchical and oppressive against which the image of Buddhism as emancipatory and liberatory is constructed; Hindu epics such as Ramayana and Mahabharata are described along caste lines so that the students unconsciously begin to conflate them with hierarchy and oppression. Minus the vitriol of Mill against the Hindus, that the middle-school textbook discourse is a regurgitated version of the colonial discourse is the subject matter of this xii Preface chapter. We expose the underbelly of the middle-school discourse in that it is nothing but a cleaned-up version of the colonial and racist rant of Mill.

There is an academic consensus now that racism and racist discourse negatively impact the psyche of the children who are at the receiving end. A racist discourse produces inferiority, shame, and embarrassment vis-avis one’s own “race” and ethnicity and the culture and tradition of one’s ancestors. It produces self-hatred, self-rejection, and lack of self-worth, leading to marginalization and withdrawal on one hand and assimilation and racelessness on the other hand. The colonial-racist discourse on Hinduism, Hindus, and India, which the Indian American children encounter in their school textbooks, impacts them in the ways above in varying measures. We gain this insight from their testimonies delivered at the California State Board of Education hearing that undergoes a syllabus revision for the History and Social Science curriculum in public schools every ten years. Chapter 6, the fifth concentric circle, analyzes the impacted students’ testimonies and reports the damaging psychological consequences of the school textbook’s racist portrayal. We qualitatively analyzed these testimonies by dividing the student population into four categories: pre-sixth graders, sixth graders, seventh and eighth graders, and high schoolers. In terms of consequences, their statements reveal specific themes which we enumerate in the chapter by classifying them into four sections: pre-sixth graders report fear of bullying based on the experiences that they have seen their elder siblings and older friends undergo; sixth graders report negative portrayal of the Hindu tradition; seventh and eighth graders report contempt and bias against Hinduism; and high school students report racism and Hindu-hatred against Hinduism. We conclude our work by arguing how the current school textbook discourse on Hinduism and India needs to change so that Indian American children do not become victims of overt and covert racism. And that for the change to occur, the first step is to recognize the overarching and pervasive influence of the colonial-racist discourse of James Mill on the textbooks. For the reconstruction of the discourse to occur, the first step is to engage in a thorough deconstruction, which is what our work attempts.

Palo Alto, CA, USA Kundan Singh Cupertino, CA, USA Krishna Maheshwari