The white woman and India

May 20, 2004

Francois Gautier

The spectacle on the night of May 18, of all these Congress leaders,
many of them intelligent men and women, debasing themselves in front
of Sonia Gandhi, pleading with her to lead the country, made me feel
sick. If Sonia had any dignity, she would have stopped it, but she
just listened, with a slightly bored _expression, right till the last
Congressman and woman had wallowed in dirt before her.

And again I asked myself the question which has baffled me for 35
years, although I am myself a white man and a born Christian: why do
Indians have such an attraction towards the white skin?

After reading the newspapers on Wednesday morning and seeing how
newspapers such as The Times of India still root for Sonia Gandhi,
with columnists such as Dileep Padgaonkar saying that her becoming
prime minister would be in tune 'with the highest Vedantic ideals,' I
wonder: does India, one of the most ancient civilizations on the
planet, need a white woman to govern her?

I am sure Sonia has great qualities, but are Indians so dumb, stupid
and backward, that they cannot find among themselves someone
intelligent enough, non-corrupt enough, to lead them? And what about
this craze for Mother Teresa? She may have been a saint, but nobody
has harmed India's image in the 20th century so much: when you say
India in the West, their eyes light up and they answer: 'Mother
Teresa/ Kolkata/ poor people/ dumb people/ starving people/ who do
not know how to care after their own underprivileged/ who need a
white woman to show them how to pick up the dying from the streets/
to look after orphans'!

Is this the image Indians want today? An image that is harming them,
which is stopping Western investors from investing in India? Yet,
Mother Teresa is worshipped here, from Kolkata to Chennai, from Delhi
to Bangalore, and when she will be made a saint by the Vatican,
perpetuating this colonial, superior-minded, Christian symbol of
white superiority over the brown/black man, all the Indian media will
rejoice in its own mental slavery and the Indian government will
probably declare a national holiday!

Why don't Indians understand that brown is beautiful? White people
spend hours on the beach and put on a hundred creams to get tanned.
And in winter they even artificially lie under infrared lamps in
beauty parlors to get brown! Why this obsession for the Indian woman
to have white skin?

How come the two most popular actors in India have fair skin and
nearly blue eyes? Why this craze for 'fair' brides? If you find the
answers to these, you will understand why the fatal attraction for
Sonia Gandhi and Mother Teresa.

Obviously, colonisation has frozen the Indian mind in certain
patterns and the British made sure, through Macaulay's policies, of
leaving behind an enduring inferiority complex among Indians, by
constantly harping on the flaws of Indian culture and inflating them.
That is why today Indian intellectuals repeat like parrots what their
masters had said before them: 'Hindus are fundamentalists/Brahmins
are exploiters/Gowalkar was a Nazi/Indians are corrupt and no good.'

But that does not explain everything: most colonised countries have
aped their masters after having hated them. No, in my mind the
greatest factor behind India's love for the white is the absurd
theory of Aryan invasion

According to this theory, which was actually devised in the 18th and
19th centuries by British linguists and archaeologists, the first
inhabitants of India were good-natured, peaceful, dark-skinned
shepherds called the Dravidians, who had founded what is called the
Harappan or the Indus Valley civilisation. They were supposedly
remarkable builders, witness the city of Mohenjo Daro in Pakistani
Sind, but had no culture to speak of, no literature, no proper script
even. Then, around 1500 BC, India is said to have been invaded by
tribes called the Aryans: white-skinned, nomadic people, who
originated somewhere in western Russia and imposed upon the
Dravidians the hateful caste system. To Aryans is attributed
Sanskrit, the Vedic or Hindu religion, India's greatest spiritual
texts, the Vedas, as well as a host of subsequent writings, the
Upanishads, the Mahabharat, the Ramayan, etc.

This was indeed a masterstroke on the part of the British: thanks to
the Aryan theory, they showed on the one hand that Indian
civilisation was not that ancient and that it was posterior to the
cultures which influenced the Western world -- Mesopotamia, Sumeria,
and Babylon -- and that whatever good things India had developed --
Sanskrit, literature, or even its architecture -- had been influenced
by the West.

Thus, Sanskrit, instead of being the mother of all Indo-European
languages, became just a branch of their huge family; thus, the
religion of Zarathustra is said to have influenced Hinduism, and not
vice versa. On the other hand, it divided India and pitted against
each other the low caste, dark-skinned Dravidians and the high caste,
light-skinned Aryans, a rift which is still enduring. Yet, most
recent archaeological and linguistic discoveries point out that there
never was an Aryan invasion and many historians, including the
malevolent Romila Thapar, are distancing themselves from it. Yet,
most Indians still believe in this absurd theory.

Wake up O Indians: you are as great, if not greater than the white
man. You can do as well, if not better than the white man. Not only
did your forefathers devise some of the basic principles of
mathematics, astrology, and surgical medicine, not only are your
people among the most brilliant in the world today -- half of Silicon
Valley is of Indian origin, 30 percent of the United Kingdom's
doctors are Indians -- but you still hold within yourselves a unique
spiritual knowledge, which once roamed the world but which has now
disappeared, replaced by the intolerant creed of the two major
monotheistic religions which say: 'if you don't believe in my true
God, I will either kill you or convert you'.

Wake up India, brown is beautiful, smart and it is the future. Dr
Manmohan Singh, whatever has to be said about the Congress, you have
partly redeemed India's pride, and our good wishes are with you.

The author is the correspondent in South Asia for Ouest-France, the
largest circulation French daily (1 million copies)