THE COLONIAL HANGOVER - Whatever successful expatriates say is worth its weight in gold

Ashok Mitra
The Telegraph, 1 January

Football, the native variety of it, is a deadly serious business in the United States of America. The good Americans spend their weekend either thronging the stadium or staying glued to the television screen. On Monday morning, as bleary-eyed employees gather in their offices, it is still the spell of the gridiron: through coffee break till lunch hour, animated discussion continues around what dodge the quarterback should have used to break out of the scrimmage, run like mad and score a touchdown, or how the same quarterback could have tackled better the forward line of the opponents and thereby prevented a conversion. This Monday-morning-quarterbacking is, everyone agrees, a useless asinine religiosity; it is nonetheless an integral part of the American way of life.

A phenomenon, belonging more or less to the same genre of fatuity, is of late emerging in our neighbourhood. Expatriate Indians, who have done exceedingly well in academia or public administration or in business overseas, have made a habit of visiting their native land — that is, the land they emigrated from — for a fortnight or thereabouts during December and January each year. It is then beastly cold in both North America and Europe; their choice of the period of the year for the brief homecoming is therefore understandable. Their presence in this season excites the establishment circle, particularly in the metropolitan cities. Invitations crowd in on the glamorous visitors to address meetings and conferences as for closed-door sessions with the power-that-be. The advice of the expatriate eminence is eagerly sought on issues of crucial national or regional importance, for instance, special economic zones, acquisition of farmland for industry, or prevention of school drop-outs. The NRI dignitaries lap it up. At their own workplace in foreign countries, they have competition from other equal eminences; here, in the backwater they had once escaped from, they are taken to be repositories of all knowledge and wisdom.

The dignitaries do not hesitate to be generous with their advice. Not surprisingly, extempore counselling in this harum-scarum season often assumes the form of either generalities or obiter dicta. The expatriates, rushing in and rushing out, are not always familiar with the ground reality. Their approaches to economic and social issues are also by and large coloured by ideas currently dominant in the Western countries where they have lived for long years. Fortuitously or otherwise, this suits well the local hosts who are at the moment desperately anxious to accept, lock, stock and barrel, the ideology of globalization. There is, therefore, an amiable convergence of a sort. The visiting celebrities do not mind putting in a few words of endorsement of what establishment quarters over here are batting for: their Christmassy advice, it is no wonder, has the same flavour as Monday-morning-quarterbacking happens to have in the US.

It will be unfair to castigate the distinguished expatriates. Demand creates its own supply, they cave in to pressure. Much of the advice they render lacks perhaps empirical basis and sometimes even the logic of their rushed statements leans on a wobbly frame. Encounters of this nature still continue to proliferate because of the never-say-die colonial hangover. The country has been independent for more than 60 years. To no avail; the colonial mindset is still strongly entrenched. Whatever foreigners say continue to be worth its weight in gold; whatever expatriates who have excelled overseas say is also worth its weight in gold. There is a hankering after the imprimatur from international celebrities. There is a similar hankering to be seen in the company of such celebrities; to shine in reflected glory is an out-and-out colonial inheritance.

Amusing consequences follow. For theologians subscribing to the so-called post-colonial discourse, suddenly it is now high noon. Aged professors, worn out by the burden of learning, and their bright young acolytes crowd university campuses and coffee shops, flaunting their post-colonial credentials. The nationalists of yore, they were all along convinced, were overly prejudiced against foreign rulers: external domination did not necessarily lead to de-industrialization and cultural degradation; foreign rule actually contributed to heightening native intellectual capability and marked development of social and economic infrastructure.

They now feel vindicated. In an astounding turnaround, former devout nationalists and even veteran, once-the-very-definition-of-rigidity socialists, wizened by the spate of advice from expatriate big shots, are discovering points of agreement between their current thoughts and propositions aired by the post-colonialists. The globalization era has evened out many of the earlier differences on the role of the market and the virtues of private, including foreign, capital. Some amongst those who were radically opposed to the capitalist class, particularly of the foreign ilk, are now keen to invite back foreigners so as to enable the latter to resume the good work they did during their imperial tenure. In a sense it is all pure logic. Imperialism, did not the third great guru suggest, was the highest stage of capitalism? For those who have come to love capitalist growth, reaching the state of admiring empire-builders obviously cannot be far behind.

Barring a few crackpots, the entire constituency, so to say, has gone over and joined the camp of the post-colonialists, who can now proceed further. They can reiterate, with much greater confidence, their long-held notion: the concepts of nationalism and socialism are themselves imperial gifts; the subjugated people learnt about these antiquated ideas from books imported from the imperialist countries of Europe.

What a wondrous conflation has been arrived at: erstwhile nationalists, socialists of yore, those reclining on the post-colonial couch, all think, feel, and act alike. Liberalization has been the great leveller. The only jarring note is struck by the stragglers parading themselves as paragons of post-modernism. They utter smart-sounding expressions such as bricolage and pastiche, they have set their mind on wholesale deconstruction; all institutions are, they assure one another, unmitigated evil, it is their sacred obligation to be against whatever the establishment says or does. They are, it follows, votaries of chaos for the sake of chaos; they are against the government simply because it is there.

This is where the dilemma descends. The grand coalition of once-upon-a-time nationalists, former socialists and post-colonial grandmasters has a formidable look about it. But it leaves the world’s poor in the lurch. The post-modernist snooties too, while great destroyers, have seemingly not a notion what edifice to build on the ruins of the structure they are determined to demolish. The dispossessed and disadvantaged billions will perhaps be tempted to go along with them for a while. But once the ghoulish party of making a bonfire of everything is over, it is bound to be a stark stretch of undefinable wilderness. That apart, let us face it, is not post-modernism too sustained by the shipment of literature from Paris or New York?

Should then one cross over, at least for inspiration if not for immediate praxis, to Latin America? Events are perhaps taking shape in Cuba and Venezuela which bear not a trace of the colonial hangover, or, for the matter, of any other legacy of the past. The brash young band of amateurs who brought off the January 1959 revolution in Cuba had kept their distance from the official communist party; the latter thought it prudent, to merge, ex post, its identity with that of the successful revolutionaries. As for Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, it is thought to be even more of a sui generis. But who will tell whether distance is not lending enchantment to the view?