The White Man’s Gaze / When in Rome, The Indians will do as they do back home / The New Delhi Dinner Party: a spectacle of immodesty & dance on the demise of another / “Oobie do, I wanna be like you” …
… I try very hard to not preach, or for that matter even practice what I think and write as the gospel, by which I mean to say with the same zeal, urgency or peculiarly infectious hysteria as those setting out to convince and convert others of and to their ‘way, shape and form’, having at last learnt to detect the sheer chicanery of my own thoughts and opinions, (besides which, I have failed miserably in each of my attempts to cultivate many of the principal qualities of a good writer, with particular emphasis on the figurative and sensory that might serve to make my voice far more compelling), and therefore at once concede that this piece of many titles, in itself both an involuntary admission of indecisiveness and demonstration of a lack of self-assurance, however artfully and eloquently I manage to pen it down, is likely to appear as no more than a sweeping rant against my own people, but is in reality a voluble expression of ongoing stupefaction, periodically laced with jaw dropping awe, at the virtually surgical precision in the perfectly opposing characteristics and habits of the urban, well-to-do, English speaking, salon going Indian – in other words ‘Polite’ society, which in the capital New Delhi is today far from courteous, the prevailing atmosphere of the aforementioned salon mirroring that of a military training ground for Fabian war tactics – who will solicit and wear with pride the very same thing that he or she otherwise decries, without an ounce of contrition, never mind embarrassment or shame; many conveniently call on some of the more obscure tenets of Hinduism in justifying their dismissal, even contempt of the notions of shame and guilt, seen as little more than the malodorous refuse of a weak character …
… Indeed, the Bhagavad Gita (a Russian translation of which was recently gifted by our Prime Minister to President Putin, inviting a certain amount of scrutiny over its reputedly ‘morally upstanding’ contents), advises against wallowing in regret of one’s past actions, characterising it as a wholly fruitless preoccupation and even going so far as to liken it to a sin, but this of course is only one part of the sermon it delivers, the part that we Indians, never missing an opportunity to vigorously exercise our innate talent for circumventing ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’, choose to embrace …
… Even whilst prolific author, politician and former diplomat Pavan Verma dedicated two entire books to ‘Being’ and ‘Becoming Indian‘ (as if anybody not born with that burden would choose to shoulder it : pun intended, and yet according to eminent historian William Dalrymple in his recent masterpiece, ‘The Golden Road’, St. Thomas was in fact positively horrified at the very idea of being sent to India, never mind becoming Indian) with much pomp and ceremony almost two decades ago, audaciously predicting that the 21st century would belong to India, which we alone seem to believe it does, but mostly with respect to our having succeeded in garnering the attention (often mistaken for, or misinterpreted as respect) of western nations, the very phenomenon Verma hoped would not endure i.e. the quintessential former colony cliché.
Moreover, from between the lines of Verma’s discourse, emanates a faint yet unmistakable aroma of apology, albeit both meticulously and elegantly veiled by a triumphalist defence of the Indian way, which is nonetheless a defence and ultimately serves to sabotage our somewhat exaggerated show of confidence and perpetuate our complex. i.e. “the white man’s gaze”, (to quote writer and journalist Aatish Taseer from an interview pertaining to Zohran Mamdani’s election victory in New York, and funnily enough, even if not wholly relevant to this particular context, also used by author Zadie Smith in her book of essays titled ‘Dead and Alive’ i.e. “that pesky white male gaze”, with reference to a Eurocentric view of the world), which is singularly the non-white man’s hang-up, eliciting an ugliness of form and manner in the prosperous Indian that is unprecedented …
… India modern is the new mantra, habitually manifesting in either an outright aping of western styles, methods and practices with token Indian embellishments, or else an anglicisation of local craft and culture that mostly announces itself at such a high and dissonant pitch, it betrays a deep insecurity underpinned by the fear of being ignored, and while we congratulate ourselves for having arrived in the sanctum sanctorum of the ‘white man’s gaze’, he continues to cleverly, and with practised humility exploit us, just as we enjoy each and every opportunity to ‘do unto him what we have felt done unto us’, deepening our own crisis of identity in the bargain, for what we nonetheless appear to desire most is … well, best said by way of quoting the lyrics of the Monkey Song from The Jungle Book:
“oobie do, I wanna be like you, walk like you, talk like you too”
I was especially dumbfounded by an article written a little over a month ago by a prominent Indian female media personality for a distinguished glossy magazine, in which an ode to the Indian National dress was crudely transformed into a political statement reeking of the stale combination of a colonial hangover and textbook minority passive-aggressive fulminations, only for her to proceed to don a gown, (even if it was conceived by an Indian designer) in lieu of a Sari, a week later at a Diwali celebration in London …
… But alas, ‘when in Rome’, the Indians feel it is their God given right to do just as they do back home, where the air we breathe is foul, the roads are full of potholes and a huge chunk of the largest population of the world lives in abject poverty, rendering our bombastic self-congratulation on the world stage something of a caricature.
After all, there must exist a statute of limitations on how long we can permit ourselves to hold responsible the legacy of our former colonizers, who at the very least may be credited with having both recognised and availed of the immense assets and attributes of India, the most captivating of them all perhaps, upon which I suspect the White Man’s gaze will settle for a very long time and that we, the privileged Indians not only appear to have lost sight of, but also persistently undermine with our boorish behaviour, is its capacity to confer on both citizen and seeker the most enchanting and elusive sound in the world … the one of inner silence.