KC Bhattacharya - Philosopher

In his 1931 Sir Ashutosh Memorial Lecture titled "Swaraj in Ideas," Indian philosopher KC Bhattacharya lamented the impact of colonialism on India.

He was extremely worried about two outcomes; 

The first was the enslavement of the mind, which he considered worse than political subjection, which merely restricted the "outer life of the people," whereas in the case of mind, "slavery begins when one ceases to feel the evil, & it deepens when the evil is accepted as good."

The second harmful consequence for him was the replacement of the real mind with the shadow mind, "that functions like a real mind except in the manner of genuine creativeness."

~ KC Bhattacharya, Swaraj in Ideas, published in Visvabharati Quarterly (1954).

Some excerpts from KC Bhattacharya's 1928(!!) essay, "Swaraj in Ideas." Mandatory reading.

"There is no gainsaying the fact that this Western culture-- which means an entire system of ideas and systems-- has simply been imposed on us.I do not mean that it has imposed on unwilling minds..."

"we ourselves asked for this education, and we feel, perhaps rightly, that it has been a blessing in certain ways. I mean only that it has not generally been assimilated by us in an open-eyed way with our old-world Indian mind."

"That Indian mind has simply lapsed in most cases for our educated men, and has subsided below the conscious level of culture. "

It operates still in the persisting routine of their family life and in some of their social and religious practices which have no longer, however, any vital meaning for them."

"It neither welcomes nor resists ideas deceived through the new education. It dares not exert itself in the cultural sphere."

"There can be no vital assimilation, in such a case, of the imposed culture. And yet the new ideas are assimilated in a fashion. They are understood and imaginatively realized; they are fixed in language and in certain imposed institutions."

"A drill in this language and in those institutions induces certain habits of soulless thinking which appear like real thinking."

"Springing as these ideas do from a rich and strong life-- the life of the West-- they induce in us a shadow mind that functions like a real mind except in the matter of genuine creativeness."

"One would have expected after a century of contact with the vivifying ideas of the West that there should be a vigorous output of Indian contribution in a distinctive Indian style to the culture and thought of the modern world,"

"contribution specially to the human subjects like history, philosophy, or literature, a contribution such as may be enjoyed by our countrymen who still happen to retain their vernacular mind and which might be recognized by others as reflecting the distinctive soul of India"

"Barring the contribution of a few men of genius,-- and genius is largely independent of the times,-- there is not much evidence of such creative work done by our educated men."

"In the field of politics, for example, we are only today beginning to realize that we have for long wrongly counted on principles that have application only to countries that are already free and already established and have not had sufficient perception of  the dark thing they call 'power' which is more real than any logic or political scholarship."

"In the field of social reform, we have never cared to understand the inwardness of our traditional social structure and to examine how far the sociological principles of the West are universal in their application."

"We have contented ourselves either with an unthinking conservatism or with an imaginary progressiveness merely imitative of the West"

~ A Shukla × V Ganesan ~