Andrew on India

Are speaking, of course about India, a sub concern from which I draw a good portion of my heritage, and when I boasts over nine thousand years of recorded history and roughly fifty years of knowing human settlement, India is an incredibly diverised country ethnically, linguistically, religiously and otherwise. But unfortunately it has suffered much of the same fate that the rest the world has fallen free to the rapacious

appetite of British clunialism. Well, historically, the Indian local economy was dependent upon the most productive and sustainable agriculture and horticulture, and of course pottery and food and Jamaican jewelry was very well known for jewelry, and in fact Indian jewelry makers ended up starting some very successful jewelry businesses when they were freed from indentionship in Trinidad Um. They also got involved in leather work and a lot of other

economic activities in India. Um, but the basis of India has traditionally, historically, you know, for thousands of years been textiles, different types of tex styles. Each village had its spinners and carters and dyers and weavers who were of course

at the hearts of that village's economy. But an interesting outcome of British cleanism in India has been the flooding of India with the machine made, inexpensive, mass produced textiles from Lancashire during you know, in brit terms Industrial Revolution. The local textile artists were very quickly put out to business and village economies suffered very terribly. So I mean, you know, well, I think we're familiar with this sort

of general story. Smaller cottage industries became overrun by you know, mass production. And of course I don't mean to sound like I'm entirely demonizing mass production, just describing what has happened. Of course, mass production has had its many benefits in providing access to resources and two products many different people. But of course it's also had its many drawbacks, including you know, the share environmental impact as well as the

impact on people, um. You know, as Mark spoke about, of um, their alienation from the process of production, as the industrial system basically separated each step in the process of production two different workers, and so no one had a hand in the production of a product and start to finish. And of course that that had significant social and I would also assume mental impact on the people with you know, that whole era of British economic imperialism

happening India. The changes that took place within a generation was so rapid, you know, your headwards spin, that evolution of you know, the India home economy. It was really a site to behold. And another element of British economic imperialist on British imperialism more broadly was the introduction of

British education under colonial rule in the eighteenth century. UM. When Lord McCaulay introduced the Indian Education Act in the British Parliament, UM, he said, and I quote, a single shelf of a good European library was with the whole native literature of India. Neither as a language of the law, nor as a language of religion, has a sand script

any particular claim to our engagement. We must do our best to former class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. So the typical racism, typical white pants, burt and typical you know. Um, of course this phrase was used in a North American Indigenous American context, but I believe the phrase is taking the Indian out of the man. Yeah, kill the Indians, save the man, right. Um, So it's

kind of interesting. It's a different type of Indian talking about there, but that sort of idea still applies. And really that sort of sentiment is something that has existed throughout the history of communism, something that you know, is seen in all of Britain's former colonies. Because Monster's Aim was put into Parliament and pushed forward, it was pursued with the mine to the British Raj. All the traditional schools that took place in different village communities were gradually

replaced by colonial schools and universities. Of course, take advantage of the cast and class system that was in place in India prior to their arrival. The British would have selected wealth year Indians to be sensed the public schools such as Eton and Harew and universities like Oxford and Cambridge, and those Indians that you know, they learned English poetry, English law, English customs, to the neglect of their own culture. You know, it's like why read the classics of the

Vedas when you have Shakespeare and the London Times. And so having been raised in that environment, having grown up, having basically their minds colonized from the crib, they began to see their own cultures as backward, uncivilized, old fashioned, regressive and again and something you see all over the world. You sort in the residential schools, you see it in the schools in the Caribbean, and you see it in

schools in Africa. Basically everywhere they colonized went Um. They would take a generation, they were take generations of young people, and they would develop that self hatred um not the stained for their own culture by you know, positioning um, their education, British education, as you know, superior. In fact, during the process of decolonization could and quote um of

you know, formal political independence. So many of the former colonies of Britain, particularly in the Caribbeans, that's way most familiar Um. A lot of the people who became you know, the fullest prime ministers of the country, the one that would establish the trajectory of the country for years of decades to come. UM thinking of people like Bustamante and Jamaica, Eric Williams, Dr Ric Williams, in Trance people, UM, among others.

Basically all of the fullest prime ministers basically every single Caribbean country. They had all been educated UM in English schools, in English universities, in well in the prestige schools of their countries. Didn't end up being flown out to writain itself and they basically became the rulers, became the leaders. Um were handed power over by the British to basically

rule in their stead. Of course, with all the talk of finally independence, UM people got caught up in that energy of political independence and freedom from the control of the British after all the decades and centuries of struggle. But unfortunately it proved I believe to be a rules as very little changed for the average person in the

years post political independence. Yeah, this is something that Phnan talks about UM in in the sort of Francophone context of like even even in countries you have like Atward, you know that the colonizers are thrown up actual revolutions. You get this class of like like lawyers and intellectuals who are like have been educated like in imperialist powers or in sort of their schools, who wind up as

like the first generation of of post independence leaders. And those people, like you know what, whether they want to or not, end up sort of like reflecting the sort of values and political positions of like of the form of colonial powers. And there's this whole sort of dynamic that like, I feel like, I feel like this is the part of Penon that people don't read very much.

But that's about how these leaders sort of like lose touch with it with the sort of like anti colonial masses, and how they sort of like wind up reincorporating their country back into sort of colonialism. Yeah. Yeah, that's really how you see that new clonal dynamic developing UM. And it's really it's hard to tell retrospectively whether these leaders thought they were actually you know, anti colonial, or if they knew that they were you know, carrying on a

particular legacy. But I find that because is only UM only recently celebrated just last year sixty years of independence.

There of course people who were alive prior to independence, and so you find a lot of the older generation how they how some of them speak, particularly the more educated ones, how they carry themselves, or they dress, the attitudes their spouses very much like to get any kind of respect in their time, you had to behave to me, had to present yourself to me, and to present yourself in a as approximate to Britishness as possible, the whole

you know, conversation of respectability, politics and stuff. So I have understanding of what they had to go through and where they're coming from when they hold onto these perspectives still because that's what they grew up in. But there really is a shame that they've been holding back progress for so long now because they still hold onto these deeply conservative, deeply religious, deeply reactionary ideas that were just you know, they just inplicated within the education system and

in the cultural pygeist of their time. I was just when May was talking about Fan, I was thinking as well about like, have you read a book called Beyond the Boundary by seller James Andrew. I haven't because it's about cricket and I'm not too integrated cricket. But I've been. Um. I know it's an iconic and that's I think he explains a lot of it very well. I think people

could read it even if they don't. Like I'm not a big cricket person, but it's certainly one of the best sports books I've read, maybe one of the best books. And he doesn't he put a lot of bangers in his time. Yeah, he did have some bangs, highly recommended. Yeah, if you don't want to read about cricket. He also talks about this in The Crewmen and the Ghana Revolution. Yeah, but it's not about cricket. It's more of an autobiography, like seen through the lens of his his cricket, I think.

But yeah, it's cool because I know he spent a lot of time he grew up of course born readers and stuff. I'm truing that, so be interested to see um sort of if he talks about his political development, how battery was in his time in Ta, yeah, I

think he does. It's been a while since I've read it, but I think he talks about like how he sort of saw himself constituted a colonial subject, like through his experiences interacting with British people on one of the places where the terrains where he did encountered them, I guess was playing cricket because great, yes, of course, and you know, thankfully we've come to decimate them at their own game

as usual. It's true. Yeah, yeah, And even like English cricket at a certain point, like getting really into cricket, which I know it's a diversion, but like they had rules where you could only have a certain number of

international players playing for each English county. It's extremely like if you look at how the Empire constituted White Us through sport, and like who was allowed to play rugby, which is a touching sport, and who was allowed to play cricket, which which isn't normally a touching sport like it did. It's racist as fun. Yeah, I mean, of course it's hilarious in sports history. Sorry for the cricket diversion. Sorry,

please continue. It's entirely fine. I see, it's all Greek to me because I don't know what any of those points or numbers or anything means um to many different types of cricket. I mean, I've had trying to explain to me be for it's just the fine thing. Um, I know, people who play it though, so you know,

good for them at all. But back to India, right, If there's one particular person in India's history that really represented to this type of Western educated, colonized subject trying to be something bigger than that kind of mentality, it was Jawaharlal Never who became the first Prime minister after independence.

Nu of course sought to promote the industrialization of India, not be a capitalist route, but by more of a centralized plane and route, which is why if you look at the India India's constitution, you will see that it's refers to itself as a socialist country. Yeah. Actually, really, if I'm remembering right, neighbor was like he was like a Fabian socialist or something. Yeah, yeah, be his inspiration. His inspiration came from the intellectuals of the London School

of Economics and the Phobian society. So yeah, he's quite the character. You see the sort of direction that he ends up putting the country. And I mean even today, India in many ways continues to be ruled in the English way without English rulers. Um, just like in the Caribbean continues to be ruled in the English way. Without English rulers in Africa, you know, the various countries have been ruling their various colonize and powers way rather than

in their own way without the colonizes rulers. The other colonizing rulers. UM. The industrialists, the intellectuals, the entrepreneurs, all of them are working with the government to see the salvation of India taking place in a subordination to the world. Back can the I M F from the G A T T. You know, they see India as part of this global economy, meant to submit into sue to moultinary no corporations. UM. But of course the people of India UH not to please in the people of India suffering

under the brunt of that um. After seeing the failures of of course the Congress Party under Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv Gandhi. Um, the poor continues to be poor than ever the middle classes and tuning towards uh just say certain directions. UM. And of course, as we've seen in the past few years,

the farmers have been agitating against various pressures. They've been placed under things kind of stuff and it was pretty much how Mahatma Gandhi predicted that it would because, unlike Nehru and unlike other western that he here to think of his time, UM, Gandhi thought differently about what India's potential could be, what it looked like. And that's part of the reason they killed him. And I must preface this discussion of Gandhi's vision of a free India by noting,

of course that Gandhi himself was a very flawed person. Um, you know, racist, sexist, Um, pretty sure he assaulted somebody, He did some very um fucked up stuff to his knees. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just well, we leave it at that. But I mean that's not something you can put aside, so something

to be cognizant of. But one of the aspects of UM his time on this planet UM had been his development of a sort of a vision of a free India, not as a nation state, but as a confederation of self governance, self reliance, self employed people living in village communities deriving their right livelihood from the products of their homesteads.

It would have been a sort of bottom up system where the power to decide what could be important into or expert from the village where economic and political power all I mean in the hands of village assemblies, where people in these village assemblies, in these communities would continue to live in relative how many with their surroundings with They would continue to weave their homespun clothes, eat their home and grown food, use their home made goods, care

for their animals, their forests and their lands, take care of the fertility of the soil, enjoy the home grown stories and epics of India, and continue to build their temples and appreciate their various regional distinctive cultures. This were is meant to be the system, the practice the idea of the philosophy of Swedeshi, which is a conjunction of two Sanskrit words Swa which meeting self or own and desh meaning country, Swadeshi as an adjective meaning of one's

own country. According to the principle of Swadeshi, the idea is that whatever has made or produced in a village must be used first and foremost by the members of that village. So I mean there could be traded and collaboration between villages and communities, but Gandhi thought it should be minimal, like sort of an ice and on the cake um goods and services to him was something that

should have been generated within the community. The things that needed to be used by the community should be created in that community. Another influential, perhaps the most influential aspect of Swadeshi and Swadeshi philosophy, took place in the early twenty tieth century as a direct fallout the decision of

the British India governments to partition Bengal. The use of Swedeshi goods or the goods that are produced and made in India buy and he here for Indians and the boycott of foreign made goods were among the two main objectives of the Swadeshi movement, and so the boycott resolution ended up being passed in the City Hall in August seven nine four UM boycott in the use of Manchester cloth and sold from Liverpool in the district to barrisl The masses adopted the message of boycotts of formad goods

and the value of the British cloth sool. They have fell very rapidly. Various songs and cultural works ended up being produced in the time UM to sort of bolster the movement. At one point, one English cloths were burned as part of the boycott, and the symbol of caddies spinners, the sort of tool that was used to weave cloth to we've fibers to create theon, became a major force

in the movement and the representation of the movement. I think I get what you're saying, like, we can all benefit from a little specialization and the like improvements that that brings, while still sort of acknowledging that autonomy is desirable. Yeah, I think there needs to be some some balance between you know, autonomy and seft reliance and that kind of thing,

and also collaboration. I think he goes a bit too much in that autonomy direction, But in the context of when these ideas being developed, it's sort of understandable because, um, in this time, you know, the self reliance of the people as being vastly eroded, people being forced into you know, cities, they've lost their livelihoods, um, and they were there was

a sort of developing reliance and the global economy. Whereas as she proposes a you know, India avoids economic dependence on external market forces that create these vulnerabilities and communities that end up um, you know, really harming the members of that community, so that she's meant to avoid the unhealthy and wasteful environmental destructive transportation of goods um between communities, avoiding the excessive emissions that would cause UM, and promoting,

of course, the development of a strong economic base to satisfy the needs of the community, to satisfy the uh local production consumption, so that she is kind of about both creating a self reliant India and also creating self reliant villages within India, so that each village is a microcosum of the greater in a web of sort of

a distributed, decentralized web of loosely interconnected communities. In a time where the British were promoting the centralized, industrialized and mechanized mode of production, Gandhy was turning to the principle of decentralized, home, crowd and handcrafted modes of production h

rather than mass production production by the masses. I think there was also a spiritual component of the idea of Sweeshi, because at the time Gandhy was not a fan of the idea that people were not using their hands to produce. The idea that you know, everyone should be involved in some kind of um trade or skill of some kind that utilizes their hands because of you know, the whole spiritual component of using the body that you have fully

and another aspect of the spirituality. So that she was of course, the idea of this locally based community enhancing a community spirit, community relationships, and community well being, an economy that actively encourages mutual aid, that encourages the principle of care between families, neighbors, animals, lands, forestry, natural resources

for present and future generations. It's, uh, there confrontation of the driving force between mass production which Gandhi so has this cult of the individual, where there must be to expandsion of the economy of global scale uh and expand the consumption production of the sake of economic growth out of a desire for the individual's personal whims, for the

desire for you know, personal and corporate profit. Another reason, of course, that Gandhi rallied against this idea of mass production and promoting into the production for the masses by the masses. It's because mass production leads people leave in their villages, they land their crafts and their homesteads to go work in factories where they became cogs in a machine standing in a conveyor belt, living in enchanty towns,

and dependence upon the movies see the bosses. And of course, as those bosses gained access to more efficient technologies because they were constant in pursuit of greater productivity in this creative profit, the masters of this economy, you know, they want more efficient machines working faster, and so they want

less people. We can those machines as so the result was that the people who had to move to these cities to working these factories we eventually thrown out when they were no longer considered useful and became and joined the millions of unemployed, you know, rootless, job less people

in uh Indian society. Sweeter, she instead encourages the idea that the machine should be something that subordinates the worker, but instead something that is subordinated to the worker, that it doesn't become the master, but instead it is mastered and allows us to orchestrate our own pace of you know,

human activity. It's not that Sweeter, Sweaters, she is necessarily against automation, against technological development, but it's more so that it aims to circumvent the harms that could be caused by such technology as being out of the control of the people themselves and in the control of the select private few. I think swear that she has a sort of an element of glorification of the past. Um. They

weren't doing my research for this episode. I ended up looking into um of course, the writings of proponentsswether she um and people discussing Andy's thoughts on the subject. And I'll just quote one particular passage. So what as she is the way to comprehensive peace, peace with oneself, peace between peoples, and peace with nature. The global economy drives people toward high performance, high achievement, and high ambition from

materialistic success. This results in stress, loss of mening, loss of in a peace, loss of space for personal and family relationships, and loss of spiritual life. Gandhi realized in the past life in India was not only prosperous but also conducive to philosophical and spiritual development, so that she,

for Gandhi, was a spiritual imperative. I think it's understandable that a de colonial project would attempt to develop a pride in the history of the people who have gone through so much UM and you know their legacy and their traditions and their ideas. But I think it's a bit of a stretch to um glorify h India's past and and precluling your past in such a respect. I don't think any people's freakling your past should be excessively

glory glorified or um like mythologiized. Mythologized, Yeah, romanticized, because I feel as though one that clouds our judgments UM and a critical eye for the aspects of past societies that do do it need to be challenged, do need to be changed? Um? I think that's part of my issue is with A. She is this idea that you know, if things just go back to uh, these sorts of villages and village community, is that everything else that would

just be okay. But of course there were other issues that Inky was teeing with, even priortic colonization, you know, in terms of sexism, in terms of the control of the cast system and the higher casts, UM, and the other aspects of Indian society that of course we made um more surveyor by British communism. Colorism, I think is one of those issues that of course existed practical colonization but was made worse by the British and their presence

in the subcontinent. But I think striking that balance of uh cleaning, learning from respecting that um, that prequeling the past, but also in art equal in our projects, not excessively romanticizing the past in an effort to progress towards the future. These days, I believe sweet actually is most known for its focus on protect protectionism. It's the staining you foreign important investment. But it was of course a very wide spanning philosophy. It was a vision um and a philosophy

of life that Gandhi held his entire life. That's i It's not something that I was familiar with prior to looking into it and my continued pursuit of decluding your perspectives and explorations of various post cludon projects and philosophies. But it's something that I've appreciated, despite my criticisms or some aspects of it. Asked about all I have FIOL today.

You can find me on YouTube at andrewism on Twitter dot com, slash and It's Saying True, and you could support me on Patreon dot com, slash State, Drew Ill m M. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media or more podcasts from cool Zone Media. Visit our website, cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could happen here, updated monthly at cool zone

media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.