prasad1
Active member
Are Britain and India changing places in social and cultural terms? When i first visited Britain 43 years ago it was a patently monocultural — a euphemism for racist — society, meant primarily for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Though the British economy needed cheap labour from its erstwhile ‘native’ colonies — largely doing menial jobs like cleaning lavatories in Heathrow airport — dark-skinned immigrants were looked on with dire suspicion.
Enoch Powell had made his infamous ‘Rivers of blood’ speech, evoking a Britain locked in violent inter-community conflict. If you were a ‘Paki’ — a generic term for all sub-continentals, irrespective of nationality — you risked being bashed.
Forty-odd years down the line this has totally changed. Today’s Britain — or ‘Cool Britannia’ as it calls itself — is overtly proud of its multiculturism, which includes people of all colours and creeds. In the higher echelons of the political and corporate worlds there are indeed ‘glass ceilings’ which restrict membership to an all-white elite. But racism as an everyday fact of life has been eliminated from British society.
The reverse might be said to hold true of India. Post-independence India joyously celebrated its cultural and social pluralism with the national mantra ‘In our diversity is our unity’. Today that slogan has become a cruel mockery of itself.
India’s once much-vaunted diversity is being demolished under the seemingly irresistible advance of the Hindi-Hindu steamroller of ‘cultural nationalism’, which seeks to impose a cookie-cutter homogeneity on what took pride in calling itself a ‘rainbow republic’ of many cultures and creeds.
The physical attacks on people from the northeast that have taken place in several parts of the country are just one instance of Indian society’s increasing intolerance of any difference or deviation from an alleged ‘norm’ of Indianness. To be ‘different’ in any way — in dress, appearance, customs or food habits — is to be in danger of being deemed an undesirable alien who, given half a chance, will subvert ‘Indian culture’ as seen through saffron-tinted spectacles.
This is nothing but a form of cultural racism which Britain abolished many years ago. And which India appears to have imported through the back door of post-colonial bigotry.
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatime...&utm_campaign=TOInewHP&utm_medium=Widget_Stry
Enoch Powell had made his infamous ‘Rivers of blood’ speech, evoking a Britain locked in violent inter-community conflict. If you were a ‘Paki’ — a generic term for all sub-continentals, irrespective of nationality — you risked being bashed.
Forty-odd years down the line this has totally changed. Today’s Britain — or ‘Cool Britannia’ as it calls itself — is overtly proud of its multiculturism, which includes people of all colours and creeds. In the higher echelons of the political and corporate worlds there are indeed ‘glass ceilings’ which restrict membership to an all-white elite. But racism as an everyday fact of life has been eliminated from British society.
The reverse might be said to hold true of India. Post-independence India joyously celebrated its cultural and social pluralism with the national mantra ‘In our diversity is our unity’. Today that slogan has become a cruel mockery of itself.
India’s once much-vaunted diversity is being demolished under the seemingly irresistible advance of the Hindi-Hindu steamroller of ‘cultural nationalism’, which seeks to impose a cookie-cutter homogeneity on what took pride in calling itself a ‘rainbow republic’ of many cultures and creeds.
The physical attacks on people from the northeast that have taken place in several parts of the country are just one instance of Indian society’s increasing intolerance of any difference or deviation from an alleged ‘norm’ of Indianness. To be ‘different’ in any way — in dress, appearance, customs or food habits — is to be in danger of being deemed an undesirable alien who, given half a chance, will subvert ‘Indian culture’ as seen through saffron-tinted spectacles.
This is nothing but a form of cultural racism which Britain abolished many years ago. And which India appears to have imported through the back door of post-colonial bigotry.
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatime...&utm_campaign=TOInewHP&utm_medium=Widget_Stry
