Understanding ‘The Wonder that is India’
During the 1950s, Professor A. L. Basham of the Australian National University wrote a book, “The wonder that was India”. In this book, he called India a wonder due to its capacity to outlast all vicissitudes of time, in contrast to no more civilizations like Egypt and Mesopotamia. Furthermore, he argued that the Indian civilization is everlasting because it is a continuing educational process (or projects).
Presently, there is a zeitgeist underway that has re-ignited the educational process differently and is making India a wonder again.
The cornerstone of the education process is a contemplative process, which is finding increasing support from the emerging “science of mind”. To generate knowledge, a large number of trained people dedicated their whole lives to fathom the subtlest aspects of the mind through direct experience, leading to the accumulation of experiential findings over centuries. In other words, an exhaustive investigation of the mind over centuries led to the expansion of knowledge in India.
The education process understood that the real world is harsh, confusing, and unfair, therefore, the main purpose was to give comfort, explanation, and predictability to life. For this, the educational process generated two main kinds of products, (1) esoteric philosophical treatises (e.g. Upanishads) for individual liberation, and (2) communication forms like oral/written stories (e.g. Ramayana, Mahabharata) for pursuit of worldly activities.
The advent of the British disrupted the education process. Colonialism itself was an educational project in which Western socio-cultural ideas and assumptions were inserted between Indians and their lived experiences to direct how the colonized should experience their social and cultural world. As alien explanations were actively inserted between one’s own experience and oneself, Indians were disallowed to access their lived experiences.
This produced a “colonial consciousness”. As the French-Tunisian writer Albert Memmi says, the colonial consciousness was kept in place by a set of attitudes and feelings, such as shame about their own culture, the conviction that they are backward, and the desire to learn from the British.
In the past 15 years or so, social media has reshaped the spirit of times, including the general trends of thoughts and feelings. Widespread access to social media has enabled Indians to obtain information and viewpoints on demand as well as broadcast how they make sense of what is happening around them. One outcome of this has been an increase in the number of choices of being and doing.
Arshia Sattar who has been working with the Valmiki Ramayana for the past 35 years dwells on the nature of choices in her book, “Maryada: searching for dharma in the Ramayana”. Let us look at the way Ramayana talks about the process of selecting among alternatives.
In life, we are faced with several options. When we choose one way of being and doing over another, we will as often be wrong as right because we are presented with more than one equal and legitimate choice. Thus, there is a never-ending search for the right choice and social media is facilitating this everlasting search. Individuals continue their search for the right choice in which they can believe, a choice that is vulnerable but all the more precious because it has been sought and found by them rather than given and received by colonial frameworks.
Now, people can place native Indian products side-by-side with colonial frameworks and opt for the option that helps them to make more sense of their lived experiences. The education process has restarted, although, in an entirely different way. India's civilization continues to live on and be a “Wonder” again.
