My mother used to tell me many things, but the most curious was: ‘before the British came there were diamonds under our trees, they looted everything’. This was the beginning of what I imagined Pre-colonial India to be. Rich, conflict-less and immensely fertile. I was angry at the colonials for stealing our diamonds (and literally placing it on their crown) and I believed that the best parts of our country had been taken away. But then I grew up and slowly started to grasp what one meant by ‘colonisation’ and the life I was living was an immediate product of that; if I were to antagonise colonialism I would have to give up my life. My late teens, therefore, became a project: if not for colonialism.
If not for colonialism, then there would not be an imagination of India at all. I would not belong to a ‘nation’ I would probably be a civilian of a province. That sounds a little heartbreaking— to not belong to a country, but perhaps it would have been better off. The constant need for integration and secularism would not be central and its failure so apparent.
If not for colonialism, globalisation would be, perhaps not as potent. That means I will never have known what the food from halfway across the world tasted like (from what I gather, India has done too well with her food to bother about that). My education would be entirely different, in a different language based on different axioms and I would know different truths. But there is also the scary possibility of not being educated at all, because of factors like gender and caste. Globalisation is the irreversible aftereffect of the interaction of countries on two hemispheres of the world. The aftermath of two hundred years of living, on the same ground and breathing the same air, independence could never be absolute.
If not for colonialism, there would be no railways. That is really the flagship contribution of the British empire, the railroads. Today the Indian Railways are a non-negotiable way for every citizen of the country to move around within it. I could not get to campus without it really. But when I take a step back I think about what the railways symbolise. They symbolise the start of industrialisation, the advent of transportation and the beginnings of urbanisation. They represent conglomeration and obvious divisions all at the same time. We depend on its function and accept its consequences or to some, rewards.
I think deeply about myself, and I am a product of colonisation. The truth is, I am not dissatisfied with my life. My education, my access to different food and different clothes are things I do not even consider different. I resent colonialism, for an altogether different reason, it being that it reduces the flow of life of an entire subcontinent and many countries, to a poor mimicry of its own. Colonisation knew no other way of living and developing, and therefore stopped the possiblibity and imagination of an altogether new working of the world. For that I am angry, even resentful, because that means it stopped the possibility of my own self of being so entirely different. I cannot predict if that difference would be better or worse, but it would no longer be a meek imitation of the first-world, its culture and its people.