Victor Anant
THE HYPNOTIZED PEOPLE
It is characteristic of people born, historically speaking,
on a borderline and reared in a no-man's land of values to live
lazily; and lazy living, in plainer words, means living by op–
portunism, treachery, cowardice, hypocrisy and wit. There is no
effort implied
in
such a way of life, no awareness of a need to
make a deliberate choice. It is a fact of nature-just as, in
politics, the notorious unreliability of border areas may primarily
be
a result of their geographical situation.
I know this from direct reflection on my own situation. I am
one of these people. My generation of urban Indians was born
when the movement for independence was just gathering momen–
tum, between 1925 and 1935. We were bred through an inter–
regnum of frustration, dissension, prolonged suspense and struggle.
We finally saw freedom arrive not with an ideological bang but
with a whimper of political expediency. And we have lived
through more than a decade of self-government.
The generic term for us is "Macaulay's bastards." Though the
introduction of English as the medium of education
in
India is
attributed to Lord Macaulay,
*
we were, in terms of the assembly
*
"The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our
power to teach English, we shall teach languages in which, by universal
confession, there are no books in any subject which deserve to be com–
pared to our own; whether, when he can teach European science, we
shall teach systems which, by universal confession, whenever they differ
from those of Europe differ for the worse; and whether, when we can
patronise sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance at the
public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier
-astronomy which would move laughter in the girls at an English board–
ing school-history abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns
thirty thousand years long-and geography, made up of seas of treacle
and seas of butter."
