BHARAT or INDIA – The Big Question by Anubhav Bhatt

Bharat recently celebrated its 76th Independence Day, where every Bharatiya celebrated the day of freedom with devotion in their hearts. It was 1947 when we finally became free from the influence of the West. But I want to ask you, did we REALLY lose the Western influence?

Look around you. We’re still colonized as far as our way of life is concerned. From clothing to morals to even language, we’re all Western. Don’t get me wrong, your life is a 100% your choice, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of killing thousands of years of Bharatiya heritage and culture. Its a responsibility.

What we’re witnessing today is Bharat’s disinterest in everything Bharatiya and the obsession with everything Western.

But how did this happen?

Let’s go back a little.

Remember when the British were here? They aimed to introduce an education system that was to paint them as the “superior race.” In other words, the White men and women were superior, and the Brown Indians were inferior.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, the man who brought English education to Bharat, famously said

“The purpose of English education is to create a class of people, Indian in blood, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”

The British education system hailed the European thought as superior in all aspects of life, be it science, arts, or even morals. British were the only ones we could learn from.

And this is not it. The British repeatedly called our thousands of years of education ” worthless ” because they feared us turning against them. They wanted to create servants, not masters. Clerks, not managers.

Macaulay, in his Minute On Education dated 2nd of February 1835, famously declared that

“A single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

After this, he kept pushing the idea of the West being “aspirational” for Bharatiyas.

Do you think he was successful?

I think he was.

Many educated Bharatiyas are very English in their taste. Some have become very indifferent to their culture. The culture of Bharat is now seen as “irrelevant” in the modern landscape.

Even I’m writing this article in “English” because I’m pretty sure many people may not understand Shuddh Hindi, and it’s not their fault. Its our education system that has repeatedly glorified invaders and put down the Bharatiya culture.

Anything said in English is valuable, but Hindi is not. Even teachers today “punish” their students for speaking in their native languages as if anything that is “not English” is of no value at all, or in their words, “gawaar”.

Whenever any foreign celebrity performs in Bharat, the tickets are sold out in minutes, but when it’s a Classical Dancer, you’ll see empty halls. If it’s a foreign museum, it’s a wow factor, but can we name even three museums in Bharat without googling first?

Unfortunately, for a Bharatiya, the West has become synonymous with “Modern living and advancement,” but is it true?

Was ancient Bharat not advanced enough? Let’s do a quick recap.

· Baudhayana, an ancient sage, calculated what came to be known as the “Pythagoras Theorem” back in 800 BCE. Pythagoras lived in 570 BCE and most likely picked this theorem from the Hindu sages he studied under.

· Mathematicians, including Hemachandra, Gopala, and Virahanka, discovered the famous Fibonacci sequence back in 1150 but today, it is known by the Italian Mathematician Fibonacci’s name. Acharya Pingala developed the Binary System in the 2nd century.

· The number Zero was defined by Brahmagupta in 628. Ancient philosopher Kanāda proposed the concept of an “Atom” as the building block of all matter and named it anu.

· Sage Aryabhatta calculated the value of Pi up to four digits after the decimal and invented the decimal system. He also proposed the Heliocentric theory about our Solar System, and that the Earth is round and rotates on its axis. Finally, he calculated the diameter of the Earth and the Moon.

· Hanuman Chalisa gave the accurate distance between the Earth and the Sun. Scholar Sayana in Rigveda calculated the near-perfect speed of light at 187,670 miles/second.

· Sage Sushruta invented plastic surgery. He developed Rhinoplasty and proposed 300+ operations and 121 surgical tools like we have today. His book, the Sushruta Samhita, contains descriptions of 1,120 illnesses, 700 medicinal plants, 64 preparations from mineral sources, and 57 preparations based on animal sources.

And there are many more achievements like these, but the Euro-centric textbooks would never tell you this.

Over the history of Bharat, we’ve been repeatedly told by invaders that “we’re insignificant. From our language to our culture and way of life, we’re backward.”

Pick up any history book from any board and count how many battles we lost. Our wins will rarely be mentioned. There are multiple paragraphs on tyrants like Aurangzeb but single, very short paragraphs on great personalities such as Shri Maharana Pratap, Shri Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, or Shri Chandragupta Maurya.

This indicates a pattern where European mentality is being repeatedly pushed as the “advanced mentality” while everything coming out of Bharat is worthless.

The purpose of writing this article isn’t to mock the West or harm their feelings in any way; this is just a request to my dear Bharatiyas to rise above the colonial mindset imposed upon you and seize what is yours with pride.