Kenyan lawyer and activist, PLO Lumumba, noted that people from East Africa and former African colonies who make it known that their children are going to Sorbonne, or an Ivy League School, would not care to even mention the alma matter of their wards if they were studying in a local university. Attributing this to an instinctive assumption that Sorbonne was superior to the African university, Mr. Lumumba, declared with barely suppressed scorn that we must “decolonise our minds”.

Mr Lumumba’s memorable speech was more than just a fine exposition of oratory. It pointed to the fact that despite the end of the colonial era some seventy-odd years ago, examples of the colonies bearing the psychological hang over of colonial times abound. Indeed, it is commonly known that people imbibe the culture and attitudes of their forefathers. And if anything, we Indians are an example of how deep rooted such colonial mind-sets can be and how these manifests in strange ways in our thinking (instinctive as Mr Lumumba pointed out), and attitudes. Perhaps the most visible sign of the colonial hangover is the unabashed demand for “fair-skinned” brides which must surely become apparent to anyone scanning the matrimonial pages. Small wonder then that cosmetic companies make millions out of skin-whitening creams or lotions (if ever there is any such thing). However, other colonial attitudes and mind-sets are not as immediately apparent as the mindless yearning for a fair-skinned bride.

While history is a great teacher, it also infamously leaves a mark on our psyche about aspects which it does not care to mention. For instance, General Dyer is widely known as the Butcher of Amritsar. What is not specified is that the troops which fired into the crowd, (known euphemistically as “colonial troops”) were themselves Indian. Indian soldiers were also the largest contingent from the British colonies to fight for Britain in the First Great War. While these brave men probably helped stamp out a larger evil, the question which needs to be asked is why they chose to risk their lives at a young age fighting someone else’s war. Clearly, what we now know as the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ (where hostages sympathise with and even admire their captors) manifested itself in some strange manner where many Indians in everyday life began to identify with and admire the English way of life. We know them today as Macaulay’s brown sahibs.

Not that the English way of life has anything to scoff at. The English introduced us to the most wonderous lifestyle, not the least being high tea and cricket. The author sees nothing wrong in dressing in tuxedos and smoking a pipe – a delightful pastime – and enjoying a good game of cricket, it being God’s own game. The difficulty, however, is that the brown sahibs along with their attire, diet and habits, grew so fascinated by the British that apart from partaking the best they had to offer, the brown sahibs secretly yearned to belong and to be accepted by them as one of their own. In the process, men and women from urban centres – the Presidency towns – who not just relished the good things which the British introduced, but also attempted to distance themselves from their own cultural roots. These then were who we may refer to to-day as the collaborators. And I daresay who the British considered to be the useful idiots who can be relied upon to pull the trigger on their own countrymen and go to battle for the ‘home country’.

It is not any great leap of faith therefore to understand that the brown sahibs, in their hast to gain acceptance by absorbing and replicating the culture, habits and even the mind set of the British, ended up renouncing their own culture and religion. I am not a fan of Sadhguru, but I know exactly what he meant when, in a recent dialogue with Kiran Bedi, he said that our rulers managed to imbibe in us a sense of shame in our roots.

Although the history books may not state this with any degree of specificity, it is no secret that the British and the Christian missionaries considered Hinduism to be a pagan religion. With its half-naked, saffron clad sadhus with matted hair, carrying trishuls and worshipping several deities, some with many limbs and even elephant and monkey heads would almost certainly be seen as a pre-historic belief system, sufficient to get the English nannies wetting their petticoats. And with the brown sahibs, keen to look at the world through their master’s eyes it is little wonder that these attitudes were keenly absorbed and imbibed into their collective psyche.

At independence, under a Prime Minister who was himself, by all accounts, a brown sahib, India preferred to not have a truth and reconciliation commission – an error which South Africa did not make at the end of apartheid, for it is important to understand what happened and then forgive and forget. Instead, the same brown sahibs now became ‘at the stroke of midnight’ the urban elite. It should not therefore come as any great surprise that the urban elite (impolitely – the Khan Market crowd!) despise Mr Modi and his Government for they mistakenly identify him as a “Hindu nationalist” Prime Minister - a label conferred on him by the BBC. It would not strike the urban elite to ask what is wrong being either – Hindu or nationalist. Small wonder also, that they presume that all guests at every cocktail party would detest the BJP and recoil in horror when I tell them to go and boil their heads.

Of course, in a decade at the helm of affairs, Mr Modi has made his fair share of mistakes. The redeeming feature though is the fact that this is a government which puts India and Indian interests first. The Khan Market crowd is entitled to its own opinion. What is hard to countenance however is this instinctive reaction that all things Modi is necessarily “fascist”. A strongman is not a ‘dictator’ yet the urban elite will not tire of repeatedly mouthing the charge which does not sit well with rational political thought. The root of the problem is a deep-seated condescending attitude and superiority complex, if not hatred, to all things which identify with Hinduism and Hindus. How else does one explain the revulsion to Adiyanath Yogi just because he wears saffron!

Many educated urban elite consider themselves to be intellectuals and bemoan what they perceive as a loss of democratic values, calling an assertive Prime Minister a ‘dictator’. Mr. Nani Palkhivala, who reputedly saved democracy single-handedly was once so frustrated with Indian lawmakers and the bureaucracy, that he exclaimed that it would probably be better to have a Lee Kuan Yew than a bunch of fools who don’t understand how to run a country. Clearly as Mr. Lomumba said in his address, we have to first unlearn a lot of what we were brought up to think.

- Sr. Adv. Percival Billimoria practices at the Supreme Court of India, Delhi High Court and is also an international arbitrator. He is also a qualified C.A.